Thoughts on application development and web development en-uk CC http://www.khaitu.com/articles/view/74 Apple's implementation of Push Notifications in the latest release of the iPhone OS 3.0 is pretty awesome. Beta testing of the AIM chat client was very positive with notifications arriving almost instantly. One little caveat however is that should you turn on these notifications, you will see the battery life of your iPhone decrease noticeably more quickly. This is not a surprise and was mentioned by Apple when they announced Push Notification technology, though it is still annoying especially given the short charge life of an iPhone. http://www.khaitu.com/articles/view/73 This is something that has been really bugging me recently. Adobe released their latest version of Creative Suite a while ago and I finally got it installed on my Macbook Pro at work. Now, my line of thinking was that this version surely had to be better than the previous one, especially regarding performance thanks to Adobe's leveraging of the GPU to perform a lot of the operations previously delegated to the CPU. Wrong! Not only is Photoshop CS4 extremely buggy but I can't even make use of the GPU because for some reason Photoshop decides to render a load of very strange artifacts. But, not content with rendering GPU acceleration absolutely useless, Adobe decided to break the non-accelerated rendering engine as well. This make Photoshop CS4 maddeningly frustrating to use. To the point where I'm willing to live with the visual artifacts rather than have a screen that doesn't update when I apply changes. Yes - one has to force a screen refresh in order to see every change you make! http://www.khaitu.com/articles/view/72 Is is just me? Am I going mad? I have read one or two articles about the shuffle algorithm Apple uses in its iTunes software, but I think the conclusion was that it was actually random. I beg to differ. In my experience to date, iTunes definitely has a preference for some artists over others. What is more, it also decides to play these tracks quite close to one another. Now I don't know if this arose out of their attempt to allow finer control for the user over how often iTunes should play but basically their algorithm is fundamentally flawed. iPods and iPhones http://www.khaitu.com/articles/view/71 It's the year 2009 and it's now been about 4 years since I started with this whole Web Development business again. The Web has come a really really long way since those days when I sat in front of a copy of Dreamweaver building out table based layouts. Though I rode the wave of new (or better implemented) technologies such as CSS and AJAX, trying to find applications for the coolest new implementation I find myself at a strange waypoint. Is the Web all I want to focus on or indeed will it be the only thing in the future, what with everything from applications to communications moving online inexorably? The Web Today http://www.khaitu.com/articles/view/70 This is more of a note to self than anything else and I do not intend to steal credit for this tip on how to get a custom PHP 5 working on Leopard with the GD library installed. Credit is due to Sheldon who posted this gold nugget of information as a comment at http://macoshelp.blogspot.com . http://www.khaitu.com/articles/view/69 Mapache was released last week to the general public as an alpha version. While development is still ongoing, it is possible to try out the functionality that Mapache will provide though without bells and whistles. From the Mapache page: http://www.khaitu.com/articles/view/68 Microsoft has announced support for a new idea called WebSlices in the new version of its Internet Explorer web browser. From its site: WebSlices are a new feature in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Developers for Web sites to connect with users by allowing users to subscribe to content directly within a Web page. WebSlices behave just as feeds do, where clients can subscribe to get updates and notification of changes. http://www.khaitu.com/articles/view/67 Just 12 hours after enjoying some drinks in a boat on a sunny afternoon on the Thames, here I am, injected into the Summer heat that engulfs Gurgaon, the hi-tech satellite city outside Delhi wondering just how much of an insanity trip this 6 day stay will be. For it is, like so many other things over here, that work is generally taken to the extreme. http://www.khaitu.com/articles/view/66 With the advent of Safari 3.1 and the proclaimed support for new DOM methods (among which is getElementsByTagName ) comes of course the let-down. http://www.khaitu.com/articles/view/65 Apple have just released the latest version of their web browser, Safari in their latest update to OS X Tiger. Having used the beta for some time now, I didn't think this would be a big deal. Happily, there is more than meets the eye in 3.0.4. Apple has updated the somewhat toned down DOM Inspector available in previous versions to a really nice and polished tool more like Firebug, the web developer's ultimate extension to Firefox. http://www.khaitu.com/articles/view/64 With the latest beta of Safari 3 - Apple's latest incarnation of their browser - Apple has made out that the world should be ready to receive a brand new cross-platform browser with superior capabilities, ready to take on the Internet Explorers and Firefoxes out there already. And from the hype on the website you might believe that Safari was indeed "the World's best browser" but judging from the past offerings, you would probably think differently. Safari has been around for a while now, and has attracted quite a bit of criticism for its quirkiness both in rendering HTML and executing Javascript. In fact, Safari 1.3 is really quite a pain to support, though it has to be said that the browser has come quite far since those early days. In fact, Safari deserves credit for having pioneered/invented some technologies which are only now becoming widely known and used by the site development community, such as the CANVAS object. In fact, it was the first browser to meet the Acid2 browser test for Standards Compliance. Apple it seems has focussed on bringing its browser up to the standards we have come to expect from mature browsers such as Firefox for this release, bringing its reliability up on a par at least with Opera and close to Firefox. http://www.khaitu.com/articles/view/63 I deployed a new khaitu today. It follows a few months of design and coding in my spare time but I'm glad it has made it to fruition. For the backend I went with Ruby on Rails because I feel that I have outgrown PHP - not that its a bad language, its just that it feels like its all over the place. In contrast Ruby on Rails makes development intuitive and I have to say that it is great for agile development - just as it says on the tin! After trying it out, I don't think I can go back. Having said this though, there are aspects of RoR http://www.khaitu.com/articles/view/62 It appears that two Spanish blogs have posted articles on Ubikuo in the past two days. The sites are: Applesfera http://www.khaitu.com/articles/view/55 Ubikuo w2.0 was released this week at last. It has gone through a complete redesign and now includes web 2.0 features such as RSS and a concept known as Message Boards. Ubikuo is still free and is now based on a new API which ultimately means that third party developers can write applications that plug into Ubikuo much the same as the Mac OS X Tiger Dashboard Widget does. http://www.khaitu.com/articles/view/54