9 Essential Social News and Bookmarking Sites for Designers

I was the aforementioned article on Mashable and had not heard of most of these sites. I’ll pass it along in case any of them catch your interest.

“With so much content on the web, it’s nice to be able to rely on the wisdom of the crowds to help us discover noteworthy links and weed through all the stuff (and fluff) out there.”

Adobe scraps work to bring Flash apps to iPhone

A great article MB pointed out: Adobe scraps work to bring Flash apps to iPhone:

Mike Chambers, Adobe's principal product manager for the Flash platform, let loose a tirade that indicates the battle between the two companies isn't over yet.

 "As developers for the iPhone have learned, if you want to develop for the iPhone you have to be prepared for Apple to reject or restrict your development at any time, and for seemingly any reason," Chambers said. "The primary goal of Flash has always been to enable cross browser, platform and device development. The cool Web game that you build can easily be targeted and deployed to multiple platforms and devices. However, this is the exact opposite of what Apple wants. They want to tie developers down to their platform, and restrict their options to make it difficult for developers to target other platforms."

You can read the whole story here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20003006-264.html

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I read Mike Chamber’s blog post, too. Some interesting remarks by him in the comments section, too. This one caught my eye:

> Is Adobe planning to develop a significant Flash-to-HTML5 conversion suite?

We showed some prototype work on this at Max last year.

Another HTML5 Embed Technique - Video for Everybody

Another cool example of using HTML5, degrading to Flash.

http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody#video-code

 

dev.twitter

Seems like a fun/useful library?

http://dev.twitter.com/anywhere

 

Designing for the iPad

Great stuff courtesy of MB:

http://www.8164.org/designing-for-the-ipad/

“I’m sure a lot of this stuff is mentioned in Apple’s tech notes, but it highlights some of the top things to watch out for.  One cool thing I didn’t know is that you can load different CSS files depending on if the user is holding the iPad in portrait or landscape modes, allowing you to make better use of the screen space.”

 

Ultra Cool: HTML5 Video Tag With a Flash Fallback

I came across an outstanding and elegant example by Henrik Sjökvist of using the HTML5 <video> tag, and degrading gracefully to SWF Object to use Flash if the browser does not support HTML5. (Additionally, I was just reading that SWFObject 2.2 [and beyond] should be compatible with HTML5.)

Here is the article:

Using The HTML5 Video Tag With a Flash Fallback

Also, be sure to check out the source code of his functioning example. I tried it on a few browsers and my iPhone:

HTML5 <video> Example

Random ActionScript 3 Tips

All of these are certainly available on the Adobe site and elsewhere, but since I  had to look them up I am repeating them here for easy reference.

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Change the alpha value of all (except for text fields…which will only work if the font is embedded) objects in a Flash file.

root.alpha = .5;

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Adding a dropshadow to the list portion of the combo box.

var dropShadowCombo:DropShadowFilter;

dropShadowCombo = new DropShadowFilter(5,45,0x000000,1,4,4,1,BitmapFilterQuality.HIGH,false,false,false);

var myComboBox = new ComboBox();

myComboBox.dropdown.filters = [dropShadowCombo];

New iPhone Developer Agreement Bans the Use of Adobe's Flash-to-iPhone Compiler

This is, if true, soooo disappointing.

http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/iphone_agreement_bans_flash_compiler

 

SharePoint Designer and Grouping on Name Fields

A surprisingly vexing bug in SharePoint Designer 2007 is grouping by a name field, such as “created by” or “modified by.” Frequently, you will observe multiple groups occuring for a single user. Reason: each name field has a link that contains a distinct numerical value. This causes SharePoint Designer to treat each name as a separate value to group by. In the code view, look for the highlighted item below.

<nobr><span><A HREF="/yoursite/_layouts/userdisp.aspx?ID=92">User Name</A><img border="0" height="1" width="3" src="/_layouts/images/blank.gif"/><a href='javascript:' onclick='IMNImageOnClick();return false;' class='ms-imnlink'><img name='imnmark' title='' border='0' height='12' width='12' src='/_layouts/images/blank.gif' alt='No presence information' sip='uname@yourdomain.com' id='imn_4799,type=sip'/></a></span></nobr>

The solution is to modify the XSL to look only at the value of the name field, and pull out the value of the hyperlink that points to the user's details. Dipesh's Blog offers this nice XSL example:

<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test=”not ($dvt_groupfield)”><xsl:value-of select=”ddwrt:NameChanged(string(@Name), 0)” /></xsl:when>
 <xsl:otherwise></xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>

Change this value to:

<xsl:choose>
 <xsl:when test=”not ($dvt_groupfield)”><xsl:value-of select=”ddwrt:NameChanged(string(substring-before(@Name,’&lt;/A&gt;’)), 0)” /></xsl:when>
 <xsl:otherwise></xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>

There is also a nice example on social.msdn.microsoft.com. Hopefully Microsoft will fix this in SharePoint Designer 2010?

Web Content for iPad

I was just reading a technical note on Apple’s site that lists several useful HTML considerations for iPad (such as the iPad’s user-agent, CSS  considerations and so on).

“You can ensure that your website looks and works great on iPad, and even create new touch-enabled web experiences for your customers, by considering a few specific differences between iPad and other platforms.”

Request.QueryString in .NET

A very useful bit of nomenclature courtesy of the forums.asp.net site. In classic ASP I always liked using query strings. Well, in .NET (at least using C#) square brackets when accessing properties such as QueryString. Their example:

Change:

string userId = Request.QueryString("userId");

to:

string userId = Request.QueryString["userId"];