Alasdair Mackenzie

Yahoo! Lvz Developers

I don’t know about you, but when I discovered the Yahoo! developers section on their web site I was in a state of disbelief at how much stuff it had on it.  It takes ages to realise the depth that Yahoo have covered. 

The main areas they cover are JavaScript, Flash, .NET, PHP, Python and Ruby.

I particularly like the design patterns section of the site where Yahoo provide “optimal solutions to common problems within a specific context”.  Brilliant! 

By far the most useful section is YUI that provide utilities and controls for building rich interactive web applications… And its all open source!

In fact, the stimulation for this article has come from watching a video from Joe Hewitt (the co-founder of Firefox) demonstrating his iUi for the iPhone.  It basically uses similar principles to the Yahoo User Interface kit, but optimized for the iPhone (note: the iPhone, despite having a very good browser, has limitation, especially with mouse events).   it inspired my to take another look at Yahoo!s dev stuff. [Just as a side note: is anyone else excited about Facebook’s acquisition of parakey.]

Anyway, I better get back to re-exploring the Yahoo! developers site.

Quake Wars Player Card for PHPBB and Forums

This is the first player card (version 2, already!) for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

There are a heap of stats that can be included, so I’ve only selected a few.

The difference between this and the last version is that the last version produced an HTML output whereas this one produces an image output by using PHP to dynamically create the image.

This solves the biggest problem of using html, it can’t be used for forums.

There are many different themes and sizes, but here is an example of one:

I’ve included the code needed to use it as your sig in PHPBB, if anyone wants to comment and show how to do it in other forums then please do.

You can find the ZIP and tutorial here.

And if anyone wants to host this on their site so others can link to it then that’s cool too, but please link back to me

Hopefully this will help folk get started.

Enemy Territory Quake Wars Player Card

Yesterday ID released the beta 2 of Enemy Territory Quake Wars along with the stats page, which is out of this world good!  They made the stats available in XML format, which will come in very useful for clans and sites for displaying member profiles. 

Anyway, I thought I’d give making a quick player card for ETQW a go. So, without further ado, you can find it in my projects section. I’ve included the PHP source files too. Happy days.

To be honest the code isn’t brilliant, but it was thrown together quickly and… it’s a start

Blade Runner The Movie

It all starts in Pretoria, a city located in the northern part of Gauteng Province, South Africa, 1986 - a young man by the name of Oscar Pistorius [wikipedia entry] was born.  As an 11 month old baby he has his legs amputated, but that doesn’t mean he can’t compete in the Olympics.  It is a story of determination and triumph, a story that even Tom Hanks has been rumored to be bidding for the rights to put on the big screen!

Read More »

Don’t Be Evil. Be Google.

Google was born September 1998 as a small privately held company co-founded by two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in Menlo Park, California… in a garage. It had around $1,000,000 investments.

In 2004 Google turned a Revenue of $961 Million, which produced a net of $106 million and, if you consider Ebay produced $447 million that year, isn’t much. Now, with a market value of market value in excess of $125 billion (Sept 2006 - BBC News), is generating over $10 billion in revenue.

How did Google get this good? Well, advertising alone turns over most of the profit, despite Google branding itself as more than a search company, but it couldn’t have done it without the audience.

Google got very lucky in it’s timing. It came about just as the Internet exploded into our homes.  You might argue that there were other companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Netscape long before there was Google, and that’s a very good point.

Since Google was founded it has had a very positive public image. Playful; fun; friendly; caring; simple are all common words that people would associate with Google.  This is very important because, as I said, they need an audience to generate revenue.

In order for Google to maintain the level of trust and make people come to use Google first, it’s important to have a wide range of products that the ’searcher’ can use.  Google has chosen to do this by investing and acquiring small companies.  Why does this work? Well, small companies tend to focus on being better and more passionate than the big guys.

See Google acquisitions on Wikipedia.

Productivity within Google is good because they treat their staff well.  I’ve always felt that this is one of the most important principles in business.  Google allows it’s employees to spend 20% of their time on non work-related projects.  This is a unique and clever way of increasing productivity. People work harder because it’s going to be something they enjoy.  And, in fact, some of Google’s leading products like Gmail, Adsense and News have come from this 1 day a week ‘personal project’ time.

The Googleplex has a very good reputation for a relaxed and fun working environment and that is where, I think, Google has an advantage. A company that is seen to care is a company that people want to work (and work hard) for.  Google provide free food, gym, and childcare on site for it’s employees.

Google is a very well managed company that seems to have a firm grasp of what it takes to grow and I think they will for some time to come.

Yahoo Messenger for Vista

Announced January 2007… now it’s July 2007. Where is it and what’s taking so long?

When I saw it in January it looked feature-compete, but, after having a look on the Yahoo developers page, they are looking for programmers with WPF skills - and that was in June.

So, after seven months with no beta, it doesn’t look likely that we are going to see it released any time soon. Shame

For the latest updates and notifications visit Yahoo’s Vista Messenger page.

Opera Mini 4 Beta

This week Apple has dominated the headlines with it’s iPhone.  It’s an MP3 player; a phone and a mobile web device and, for as long as I can remember,  I’ve wanted one. Not because of the phone (I have one) or even the MP3 player (who needs one when you’ve got one already), but because it can browse the web!

Since the release I’ve heard nothing but good about Safari on the iPhone, but I have heard that Edge is terrible and it takes up to 3 minutes for some sites to load.

What’s the solution? A mobile-platform independent browser than can be run across any type of wireless network. In steps Opera Mini.

The problem I’ve had with Opera Mini is the lack of a mouse for scrolling and the so so rendering, but that seems to be a thing of the past.  The new Opera Mini 4 Beta is a huge step forward in platform-independent browsing.

New features include:

1. Rendering of web pages in full. Not some silly optimized mobile version
2. Zooming into text
3. Dynamically changing font-size
4. A mouse
5. Scrolling
6. Quick loading

Okay, so Opera Mini has always been quick, but it is still quicker than any other mobile browser I’ve tried, probably because it’s not a stripped down version of some bigger browser.

My phone is touch screen with no keypad, but that doesn’t stop me using Opera Mini, in fact, it makes it ten times better. I can drag my finger up and down to navigate through the page; touch to zoom in; and whole heap of other stuff that made me want an iPhone.

It’s important to note that Opera Mini is still in development and there may be new features coming and improved stability - even though I’ve had few problems.

LG Prada Phone MP3 Player : Update

The other day I made a post about the LG Prada Phone having a bug in the MP3 player that means that you can’t play music from you phone using the MP3 player unless its inside the MP3 folder. 

This also means that you can’t play MP3s that are in, say, MP3/<artistname>/file.mp3

So, if you had (like me) a 4Gb memory card for music then you would have to have over 1000 files in one folder with no method of sorting.

Anyway, I emailed LG to ask if this would be fixed and also to ask where the support or this phone on their web site is.

They emailed me back with this (and this this the entire email):

“This is not a bug, it is only a specification

Kr ”

No Hi, no explanation and no indication of where I can obtain support via their web site.

Last week I was excited, now I am extremely disappointed. My advice is to either wait for a better version of this handset or not to buy it.

I wish I didn’t have to post this, but this phone with it’s current specification, does not come close to an iPhone rival.

Features: Safari 3 vs Internet Explorer 7 Vs Firefox 2

This is just a quick comparison of the three main browsers. Click to make them bigger:
Text Rendering

Left to right: Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer

Navigation Bars

Top to bottom : Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer

Feed Rendering

Top to bottom : Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer

Flash vs Silverlight

As well as having a nice logo, Silverlight is “cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications”. Basically, it’s an easy to use plug-in that allows developers to easily create full-blown applications / media inside a browser.

The reason for this post?

Jesse Ezell, a long-time Flash enthusiast (who has even written an SDK for Flash in the past), has a very interesting and well structured post claiming that Flash is dead on his blog - and I believe him.  I don’t want to go through the details because Jesse does it very well and I’m not a Flash expert like he is, but here’s a summary illustrating which one is stronger in certain areas:

Silverlight doesn’t run on Linux, but it does run on Mac OS. I don’t think that will put anyone off though.  It might take years to happen, but if Adobe don’t get their act together, Microsoft are going to steal the show - and I’m glad.

Perhaps this is all a bit one-sided? But that doesn’t really matter. What matters most is the speed and cost of development along with the number of developers. Silverlight wins again.