Joe Dynamite

When I work with lists in my HTML I usually will use a combination of padding/margin-right (if stacked horizontally) and padding/margin-bottom (if stacked vertically). In many cases I will then have to go and set up li:last-child in my CSS to remove the padding/margin from the last item in the list. When testing in IE7/8 I realized that they did not support the :last-child pseudo selector. To fix this I went and threw a class=”last” to all the last elements of a set to fix the issue, hoping that IE would eventually implement the selector and I could remove the classes.

Recently I found that IE7/8 does support the :first-child selector, so I’ve now started using padding/margin-top and padding/margin-left instead. This prevents me from having to bloat my code with needless classes, and in the end I still get the same final result. It forces me to think about things a little differently while I’m coding because I feel like I’m styling them backwards (:last-child always felt more natural to me), but it works across more browsers which is always a plus. I’m not entirely sure why Microsoft chose to support one and not the other, seems like a pretty bizarre choice. I could make a joke about fictitious monsters demanding the first child, but that wouldn’t be very professional of me, so I won’t.

Hopefully I’m not the only bonehead who didn’t realize this sooner, and maybe this post could help some others.

I’ve played games like this before on Facebook (FarmVille, CafeWorld, FishVille), and I’ve always stopped playing them in fairly short order. FarmVille is the one I stuck with the longest as I had a lot of friends who played it and we were pretty competitive about it. We Rule is the complete opposite – I do not have one single friend playing it – yet every 12 hours or so I spend a couple minutes harvesting and replanting my kingdom. It doesn’t take any significant amount of my time, and there really is no gratification, so I’m not entirely sure why I do it. My only guess is that it’s a few minutes of quiet before I leave for work and when I get home, and it probably helps me relax and clear my mind. It’s almost become a habit at this point and I reach for my iPad without even thinking about it when it’s harvest time.

Engadget Hands-On with Acer Iconia Dual-Screen Laptop ↗︎

Interesting product, not sure how well it will do in the marketplace. I think the dual-screen idea worked great in a smaller form factor with the Microsoft Courier (RIP), not sure if one this size is going to work out well for Acer. Perhaps a little too ambitious.

Update 12/10/10: They’ve announced a price of €1499. That is almost $2000 USD! Not a chance this thing is going to sell well. If you’re ready to spend that much on a computer, get a MacBook Pro or something.

After HTC’s announcement of the Hero handset this week, Adobe dropped a nice video onto their site showing off Flash in the Hero’s web browser. Mobile Flash has been the holy grail of the industry, and it looks like now might just be the time that it will become commonplace. In the video it loads Flash content a little slow, but once it’s loaded it seems to run pretty well. There is a link to a video at the bottom of the post.

The HTC Hero is going to ship with Flash support when it launches. It is an Android device, but they have made a couple of statements regarding Flash and how it won’t be available on all Android devices yet. Flash will not be available as a download for any Google devices such as the T-Mobile G1, or T-Mobile myTouch 3G here in the States. Due to some licensing issues, they cannot offer it. They are working to get it running on most other Android devices and hope to launch it sometime in the future, I think I read somewhere that it could possibly be in October.

What really bothers me about this is how lax Apple seems to be about getting Flash on the iPhone while Adobe is developing it for almost every other smartphone OS out there. With the launch of the iPhone 3GS, Apple has one of the most powerful handsets out there which should be able to handle Flash content no problem as long as Apple would work with Adobe to get it working. The iPhone has been out in one form or another for 2 years now and there is still absolutely no Flash support at all. Don’t they see that this is what the consumers want?

Here is the link to Adobe’s video demonstration of Flash running on the device, HTC Hero: The First Android Device with Flash.

Update 06/27/09: I mixed up my stories, Flash will eventually be on all Android devices, it is the HTC Hero’s Sense UI that won’t be allowed on any Google-branded devices because of licensing restrictions.

I missed the boat on these technologies, but thankfully I just found out about them. Cappuccino is a rapid web development framework for building online applications. It is built with Objective-J, a JavaScript superset based on Objective-C. 280 North, the creators of Cappuccino then used Cappuccino to build Atlas, a development environment for building Cappuccino apps which looks heavily based on Apple’s Xcode, and Interface Builder tools. Having built a few small iPhone apps I can say for sure that Objective-J and Atlas borrow copiously from Apple. But this is a good thing. Objective-C and Apple’s toolsets made programming more accessible to everyone and especially with the iPhone, it seemed like everyone learned enough to make at least one app. Their promise here is that you will never have to write a line of HTML or CSS, this is great for people who just want to build applications. They don’t have to worry about coding out the design and browser compatibility and whatnot. With these tools you build web apps to function more reminiscent of desktop application development and they want your web apps to function more like desktop apps. I am a big fan of web technologies and was amazed when I saw their tech videos. This is something to keep an eye on if you are in the industry, this could be the next big breakthrough.

In what would seem to be the complete opposite of a good business decision, Amazon has come out and decided that they are going to help Kindle competitors… kind of. They are considering their Kindle hardware and Kindle bookstore as two separate businesses entirely. For the Kindle bookstore division to do well they need to make the books readable on a larger quantity of devices which would increase their sales. This also means they are creating competition for the hardware division, but it could force them to make better devices at more competitive prices. Apple stuck to the complete opposite mindset with the iPod, they had a completely closed system and it’s worked wonders for them. They are now the largest music retailer in the US and they have the best selling device as well. Amazon has already taken the first steps by releasing the Kindle source code including drivers and such. I can’t wait to see how this works out for Amazon. I probably would have eventually bought a Kindle, but now I just might buy another company’s e-reader that can read Kindle books.

I have to thank Gizmodo for this one, I wouldn’t have known about this had I not checked their site. AT&T is a sponsored link on Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine. On certain partners, Bing is offering cashback deals if you search through them and purchase something. AT&T and Bing are offering 35% cashback for orders. I can’t make a guarantee that this will work, but I ordered one last night so I will keep you updated. You need to search Bing for something like “ATT”, “ATT Wireless”, or “iPhone 3GS”. You will see the sponsored links at the top, and the AT&T one has the gold coin icon next to it indicating that there is a cashback deal. You need to create a Bing cashback account, and all your purchases should get listed on your Bing account page within 48 hours. I made my purchase about 18 hours ago and it isn’t listed yet. You get your money back after a waiting period via check or PayPal. If you had plans of buying an iPhone anyway, this is a great deal, or if like me you weren’t eligible for an upgrade this significantly lessens the blow of AT&T’s $200 early upgrade fee. Let me know if it’s worked for you.

Update 6/27/09: According to an email I just got from a Bing representative this offer is only good for new accounts, no upgrades.

Apparently Activision Blizzard’s CEO Bobby Kotick has gone on record talking trash about how Sony is handling their video game division. I know a lot of consumers have been unhappy with Sony this console generation but this is the first time I know of where a big name in the industry has spoken out about it. Activision Blizzard is the largest third-party developer out there and I’m sure their actions can affect the industry quite a bit. Kotick says that sales numbers are slowing on the PlayStation 3 and PSP and they are costing more to develop for so they aren’t seeing a great enough return on investment for development. If Sony doesn’t drop prices and do something to increase sales Activision might consider dropping the systems in the next few years. This probably won’t have any immediate ramifications but I hope Sony is listening. I am an owner of both the PS3 and PSP and I don’t even feel like Sony wants to support them any longer. I use my Xbox 360 so many times more often than I even turn on my PS3. Hopefully, things change in the years to come, and this might just be the start of it.

A post over at TechCrunch makes mention of Quicktime X’s ability to play Flash .flv files. Quicktime X is built into Snow Leopard which will be released in September. It is quite possible that some of these features can be built into a future build of the iPhone OS. Even now, 2 years after the launch of the iPhone and with the additional features in the 3.0 software, one of the glaring holes is its lack of Flash support.

This probably doesn’t mean the iPhone is going to be able to display Flash websites anytime soon, but it sure is a step in the right direction. This might allow them to at least play Flash encoded videos off of other sites like YouTube that use Flash video players. I’m sure almost every iPhone owner, myself included, would love to see a proper Flash implementation on the iPhone, so let’s hope this means Apple is at the very least thinking about it and maybe one day them and Adobe can get it working with decent performance.

Palm’s webOS source code made its way on the Internet last week and since then hackers have been feverishly working to get custom code running on the Pre. It seems like the first things everyone tries on new devices are Doom and NES Emulators. I’m not sure how easy it is to get them running on a Pre, since I don’t have one and cannot try it, but there are directions online for both.

The Doom that is running on the Pre is an open-source Linux clone of the popular first-person shooter. It seems to run pretty well, and there is a video below in case you wanted to check it out yourself. The creator has a very technical write up on his blog, and there is also a Pre Dev Wiki page for it if you want to try it out yourself.

The Nintendo emulator seemed to be a little less optimized, it ran a little slow, see the video below and judge for yourself. Also, I’m not sure about the screen being in portrait mode, all those old games were made for 4:3 television sets, so they’re either squished or cut off on the Pre. There is also a Pre Dev Wiki page for this if you’d like a go at it.

If you have the technical skills this could be a very fun project. You could be the coolest kid on the block with a Pre until they make the Pre as easy to hack as the iPhone. If you try it out I’d love to hear about it.