Hi Developers!
Today about portable apps. These are the applications that can be installed on removable memory sources like memory cards or pendrives.
Why are they useful? What's the benefits of using them? How can they aid in web design?
They are useful because on most of occasions they are lightweight and self contained. These are usually very useful simple editors, but also antivirus software, browsers, mail clients, etc.
Benefits of using them are: first of all they leaves no marks in system's register so they surely won't affect the functionality of the existing configuration and therefore they will probably work without problems (everything however depends on the system hardware requirements); second: they allow to bring whatever you do to the environment where some of the functionality required is not available, for example when you are given a new computer with nothing on it you still can have your toolkit with you. Third: you can take it anywhere and use it anywhere.
Aid for web design is therefore simple: you can always have your office, your e-mails, messages, pages, servers, editors, code, websites always with you.
So is it fully bulletproof?
Of course not. You can always forget your memory key (although it is your fault and not the portable apps nor your pendrive!).
And sometimes applications tends to freeze and generally are working slower due to limited transfer posed by USB itself.
Two great pages with portable apps are:
PortableApps.com
and
PendriveApss.com
See you soon Developers!
Showing posts with label web design midlands. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web design midlands. Show all posts
Tuesday, 23 October 2012
Friday, 5 October 2012
Browsers
Hi Developers!
As originally promissed, here's about the browsers.
The most popular browsers in use today are: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari. Almost all of them supports latest inventions of current web desing World like html5 or css3 (with all their fancy functionality). They are easy to use, mostly portable and even have mobile versions for handheld devices like phones or tablets.
If you ask me which to use, for the starter I can say each one of them... except... the Internet Explorer.
Why?
Internet Explorer is made without consistency. I would love to ask Microsoft engineers why almost every page looks very weird on different version of their browser (while in other browsers changes are minimal if not none). It's a little awkward to see page looking reasonably fine in IE8 or 7, but things can quickly go from bad to worse with 6 and 5. More to that - if we include in our page nicely rotated images made in css3 they will be straight (not rotated) in Internet Explorer. Now that is a major disadvantage and Microsoft seems to be a step back to it's rivals. Ask any web development man and he will tell you - there's no other browser for which you have to specify different style sheet (for each version)! There's even a handy tag to do so.
You know why there's no such tag for Chrome, Firefox or Safari?
Answer: because these browsers are better and they don't need them.
In fact the changes required to the styles to make it - in browser language - "cross-platform" are limiting to slight changes which at the end of the day do not affect functionality nor appearance in a vital way.
But which is the best?
They all have good and bad sides and too be honest I'm using both Chrome and Firefox. Chrome for browsing, Firefox for development. I praise that you can get both in portable versions.
I think that Firefox is slightly better for web development because of it's extensibility (easy to install collorzilla, webdeveloper toolbar, firebug - I will write about those later on), speed (these addons work slower on my Chrome) and overall I generally like it.
The worse thing about this is that some people still use "old bad" Internet Explorer and make developers work hard for they money. Web Development People throughout the World would have easier life if not for Internet Explorer. Thank you Mr. Gates!
As originally promissed, here's about the browsers.
The most popular browsers in use today are: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari. Almost all of them supports latest inventions of current web desing World like html5 or css3 (with all their fancy functionality). They are easy to use, mostly portable and even have mobile versions for handheld devices like phones or tablets.
If you ask me which to use, for the starter I can say each one of them... except... the Internet Explorer.
Why?
Internet Explorer is made without consistency. I would love to ask Microsoft engineers why almost every page looks very weird on different version of their browser (while in other browsers changes are minimal if not none). It's a little awkward to see page looking reasonably fine in IE8 or 7, but things can quickly go from bad to worse with 6 and 5. More to that - if we include in our page nicely rotated images made in css3 they will be straight (not rotated) in Internet Explorer. Now that is a major disadvantage and Microsoft seems to be a step back to it's rivals. Ask any web development man and he will tell you - there's no other browser for which you have to specify different style sheet (for each version)! There's even a handy tag to do so.
You know why there's no such tag for Chrome, Firefox or Safari?
Answer: because these browsers are better and they don't need them.
In fact the changes required to the styles to make it - in browser language - "cross-platform" are limiting to slight changes which at the end of the day do not affect functionality nor appearance in a vital way.
But which is the best?
They all have good and bad sides and too be honest I'm using both Chrome and Firefox. Chrome for browsing, Firefox for development. I praise that you can get both in portable versions.
I think that Firefox is slightly better for web development because of it's extensibility (easy to install collorzilla, webdeveloper toolbar, firebug - I will write about those later on), speed (these addons work slower on my Chrome) and overall I generally like it.
The worse thing about this is that some people still use "old bad" Internet Explorer and make developers work hard for they money. Web Development People throughout the World would have easier life if not for Internet Explorer. Thank you Mr. Gates!
Thursday, 4 October 2012
Code Editor
Hi Developers!
In my first article I wanted to discuss about most down-to-the-ground aspect of web design which is choice of text editor.
It is not a news that you can use such simple tools as Windows-provided Notepad (on top of MS Office – their best piece of software
). However, Notepad has many limitations. The most obvious is the lack
of formatting. When you create the html tags in it, it does not help you
to align them so it is your job to make sure every tag is properly
closed and aligned/formatted according to the web design best practices. I use Notepad only when I have nothing better at my disposal.
A way better tool is an editor I found many years ago which is called Notepad++. As the name suggests, it is an enhanced text editor. The advantage of Notepad++ is that it somewhat knows what you’re doing – it colors the tags with different schemes and by doing so it makes the code more understandable to the Web Developer. It also aligns the tags according to the good convention – all tags are properly aligned and little vertical dots appears in each block of code so it is easy to follow divs, lists, etc. Another advantage is that you can get fully portable version (I will write about portable tools on other occasion).
Recently I have found Sublime to be also very advanced tool. It doesn’t vary significantly from Notepad++ apart from it’s neat darkish interface (which I praise to be honest, but that’s just me), having basically the same cool functionality but it has one more function that I have never witnessed else. It can do a group rename to the similar tags. For example if you are referring to a css class used three times in your project but you’ve misspelled the class name and copied it three times, you can just double click on one of the misspelled tags and you can rename all three tags in just one go. Cool, isn’t it? And it is also portable!
But I guess the editor that impressed me the most was one suggested to me by our Senior Developer at DigitalEire. I would never expected it but it’s my “old college friend” NetBeans. On top of solid functionality it offers a very good tool to browse in appearance of a specific keyword throughout the project files. Also it holds ftp client sort of “built-in”. Every time you save a file in the project, given that the project structure is the same on your machine as it is on the server – it can be overwritten straight on, or you can decide when you want to upload it. I guess Eclipse for php offers similar functionality but I had no chance to check that as yet.
I have to admit that I like the free NetBeans more than expensive DreamWeaver…
Ah, DreamWeaver. Many say that it’s the best web design package. Many would question it. It definitely has many exciting functions, couple interesting ones (like image-map generator built-in) but other than that it hadn’t impressed me that much as other programs of the Adobe Creative Suite which is being used by our guys from DigitalEire. Maybe I simply don’t know it that much…
Next time I will tell about browsers… See you then!
In my first article I wanted to discuss about most down-to-the-ground aspect of web design which is choice of text editor.
It is not a news that you can use such simple tools as Windows-provided Notepad (on top of MS Office – their best piece of software
). However, Notepad has many limitations. The most obvious is the lack
of formatting. When you create the html tags in it, it does not help you
to align them so it is your job to make sure every tag is properly
closed and aligned/formatted according to the web design best practices. I use Notepad only when I have nothing better at my disposal.A way better tool is an editor I found many years ago which is called Notepad++. As the name suggests, it is an enhanced text editor. The advantage of Notepad++ is that it somewhat knows what you’re doing – it colors the tags with different schemes and by doing so it makes the code more understandable to the Web Developer. It also aligns the tags according to the good convention – all tags are properly aligned and little vertical dots appears in each block of code so it is easy to follow divs, lists, etc. Another advantage is that you can get fully portable version (I will write about portable tools on other occasion).
Recently I have found Sublime to be also very advanced tool. It doesn’t vary significantly from Notepad++ apart from it’s neat darkish interface (which I praise to be honest, but that’s just me), having basically the same cool functionality but it has one more function that I have never witnessed else. It can do a group rename to the similar tags. For example if you are referring to a css class used three times in your project but you’ve misspelled the class name and copied it three times, you can just double click on one of the misspelled tags and you can rename all three tags in just one go. Cool, isn’t it? And it is also portable!
But I guess the editor that impressed me the most was one suggested to me by our Senior Developer at DigitalEire. I would never expected it but it’s my “old college friend” NetBeans. On top of solid functionality it offers a very good tool to browse in appearance of a specific keyword throughout the project files. Also it holds ftp client sort of “built-in”. Every time you save a file in the project, given that the project structure is the same on your machine as it is on the server – it can be overwritten straight on, or you can decide when you want to upload it. I guess Eclipse for php offers similar functionality but I had no chance to check that as yet.
I have to admit that I like the free NetBeans more than expensive DreamWeaver…
Ah, DreamWeaver. Many say that it’s the best web design package. Many would question it. It definitely has many exciting functions, couple interesting ones (like image-map generator built-in) but other than that it hadn’t impressed me that much as other programs of the Adobe Creative Suite which is being used by our guys from DigitalEire. Maybe I simply don’t know it that much…
Next time I will tell about browsers… See you then!
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