Here is a nice presentation form NetTuts as they try to build a iPhone App, of a service called Appcelerator which allows developers to build native desktop and mobile (iPhone in my case) apps using the web technologies that we already know, like JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby and PHP! This is a alternative to Abobe AIR but it’s also supports mobile platforms. I recommend this platform for anyone who doesn’t have Objective-C experience.

Learn More.

Clive Howard, has a interesting post where he talk as his personal experience with a project without a plan and wireframes.

Wireframing is one of the first steps in your planning process and arguably it’s one of the most important ones. This is when the idea starts to take shape as an application, becoming boxes and buttons that users will interact with. This article will take you through a wireframing process; who should be involved, the tools to use and tips to enable you to make better wireframes.

Here are 20 short tips that you should take in consideration:

1. Be Clear About Your Objective
2. Make it Functional, Not Pretty
3. Draw on Your Experience
4. Decide Who’s in Charge?
5. Involve Everyone
6. Set a Deadline for Completing the Wireframe
7. Keep it clean
8. Avoid Designing Your Wireframe Too Much
9. Remember that UI is not UX
10. Think About the User
11. Don’t Get Lazy
12. Organise Your Wireframe into Sections
13. Number Your Pages
14. Look for Repetition
15. Check it all Makes Sense
16. Ads are Functional
17. It’s Not Just the Public Site
18. Know When to Stop
19. Choose the Right Tools
20. Consider Dependencies

Do you have any other tips to add to the list?
What do you think about wireframing?

It’s a Javscript library developed by Debuggable, Felix Geisendörfer which tries to provide its users with a standard of organizing and writing their JS code for complex web applications. The alpha version should be ready in less than 2 week after Felix promises.

You can take a look at Word Dominatoion presentation using jayDom, jQuery and CakePHP. Also you have below the main features of this great masterpiece.

Features

• Microformat-like definitions of your markup
• Simplification of business logic: $(‘.task:first’).field(‘progress’, 50);
• Semantic jQuery selectors like $(‘:field(Person,name=Felix)’)
• Easy ajax: $(‘:type(Person)’).save()
• Dead-simple creation of new elements: $.create(‘Task’, {name: ‘New Task’}).appendTo(‘#tasklist’);
• CakePHP-like $.url(), $.underscore(), $.camelize(), etc. functionality
• and more things to make your life easier …

Here is a great tutorial for WP developers on “How to create a custon write panel“.

This is a very good solution not to work with meta_tags, and teach the user or client how to use them things that I’ve been doing, is function called add_meta_box, that WP has it.

They are showing how to combine the jQuery Javascript library and a PHP feed aggregator to create a iPhone/mobile interface for any RSS feed.

They work through the process – five simple steps:

• Create the iPhone Environment
• Pull in the RSS Feed
• Creating the Front Page: Headlines Only
• Creating the Article Pages: jQuery Slider Style
• Adding Some Flair

All code and images needed are included (as well as a demo if you’d like to try it out).

The old IEPNGFix script fixes the support for alpha transparency in IE 5.5 / 6.0 is now update to a new version, that has the ability to use CSS1 compatible background position and repeat.

To make it work properly you have to set the background to repeat, and the PNG will stretch to fill the element, and if you set to ‘no-repeat’, the PNG will display once (untiled) pixel-for-pixel.

Download the script

What can __autoload() do for you?
Did you know that PHP will call __autoload() if you try to call a function which is not yet defined? You simply have to define it and let it know where to find the class file. Let’s use my example of placing all class definitions inside a models directory with the filename being the same as the class name. Your __autoload() function may look something like this.

function __autoload($className)
{
  require_once "./models/{$className}.php";
}

// Instantiate class with __autoload()
$order = new Order();

Make your code less ugly
If you can’t spare an extra function call here or there then __autoload() may not be for you. Though I would begin to question your reasoning. The upside is that your code could become significantly cleaner and more maintainable. The upside of easy to read code often trumps everything else.

CampaignMonitor has put together this CSS support in email clients guide to save you the time and trouble of figuring it out for yourself. With 21 different sets of results, all the major email systems are covered, both desktop applications and webmail. It comes with the PDF and Excel version for download.

Read more

Lisa Wess, Director of Community Services at ExpressionEngine has started a series of tutorials to How to build a Bug Tracker using the power of Expression Engine.

As some of us may know, ExpressionEngine is a very good blog platform and strong alternative to WordPress. EE is an incredibly flexible system, capable of handling many different types of data. The reason for this is the underlying power and flexibility of the Weblog Module, its Custom Field Sets, Category Groups, and Statuses. The tutorial is showing how to create the Bug Tracker using the power of the Weblog Module.

This series does assume that you have gone through the Quick Start Tutorial and have a basic understanding of how to create and assign custom field, category, and status groups. Here are all her posts and the list will continue as the Bug Tracker is not finished.

• Setting up the Infrastructure
• Setting up the Templates
• Template Groundwork
• Diagnostics
• Creating a List of Reported Bugs
• Structuring the Navigation
• Bug Submissions
• Bug List Layout
• My Bugs Section
• Filtering by Severity
• Filtering by Status
• Filtering by Assignment

This is a affirmation that Jon Sykes sought out data for after he read the work of Jim Barraud.

His conclusion?

The skinny is that child selectors are a major performance issue.

This seemed to make sense, but to me I needed some sort of proof rather than just being told it’s that way by someone, so over the last two days I’ve tried two approaches to see if I can replicate the issue.

The first one was rather a half-assed idea that afterwards seems fundamentally flawed as a benchmark.

So I took a new approach which does seem to return some valid and rather interesting findings, particularly regarding Safari and Firefox 3 and how they react to child selectors and performance.

The tests show that there is slow down using child selectors over direct class name declarations in IE6, IE7 and Safari 3. Safari 3 being the most

impacted by child selectors. Firefox 2 has some impact, and Firefox 3 doesn’t seem to be impacted at all.

That said, this is a very extreme test, it is not often you’d have 20,000 class definitions in a single page or that all of them would use 4 levels of child selector.

Some developers said that .className may not render correctly compared to table tr td.className if you have 2 different rule sets. Since the second is more specific, it will take precedence.

What do you think? If this is true and I will have use more css classes.

As well as sharing tips from her design experience, Denise discusses the important role that copy plays in building a credible, web app too. She delivers some advice on making your web app seem more human, confident.

So what’s an honest web designer to do? Here are few practical suggestions:

• Try to use Flash only where it is needed. Many rich media sites such as Google’s YouTube use Flash for rich media but rely on HTML for content and navigation. You can too, by limiting Flash to on-page accents and rich media, not content and navigation. In addition to making your site bot-friendly, this makes you site accessible to a larger audience, including, for example, blind people using screen readers, users of old or non-standard browsers, and those on limited low-bandwidth connections such as on a cell phone or PDA. As a bonus, your visitors can use bookmarks effectively, and can email links to your pages to their friends.
• sIFR: Some websites use Flash to force the browser to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements in a font that the user may not have installed on their computer. A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML — it’s just displayed by an embedded Flash object.
• Non-Flash Versions: A common way that we see Flash used is as a front page “splash screen” where the root URL of a website has a Flash intro that links to HTML content deeper into the site. In this case, make sure there is a regular HTML link on that front page to a non-Flash page where a user can navigate throughout your site without the need for Flash.

In part one, he runs tests such as:

$('td.first').addClass('marked'); // jQuery

$$('td.first').each(function(cell){
  cell.addClassName('marked');
});

// or 

$$('td.first').invoke('addClassName', 'marked');

and concludes:

Executed tests show that Prototype seems to be faster then jQuery, with the exception of the new insertion method, which performance should be improved. Although I like jQuery syntax more then Prototype, the performance is way more important then saving few lines of code. Of course tests that I made don’t show how these libraries act in a real application, which is my task for the next part(s) of this article. Despite the results I must admit that I’m very excited about jQuery, my general impression is that this library is more mature then Prototype.

In part two, Piotr uses a custom JavaScript-based testing environment instead of running tests using Firebug profiler. This allows the test suite to run in many browsers, and this time concludes:

Prototype was at least 2 times faster then jQuery in 15 cases, and jQuery was faster then Prototype in 8 cases. What library should I choose? In my case I will stick with Prototype, because it offers the same functionality as jQuery does + more and it’s faster. jQuery is probably better for projects where there’s a need for some fancy UI effects and that’s it, but it’s just an assumption, correct me if I’m wrong…

• Separate script dependencies from HTML markup (let the script framework figure out the dependencies it needs, not the designer)
• Make script referencing as simple and easy as possible (no need to manage the HTML files)
• Lazy load the scripts and not load them until and unless they are actually needed at runtime.

To use the script you simply:

// potential scripts are pre-registered first
using.register("jquery", "/scripts/jquery-1.2.3.js");

// later, when actually needed
using("jquery"); // loads jQuery and de-registers jQuery from using

$("a").css("text-decoration", "none");

// or asynchronously

using("jquery", function() {
$("a").css("text-decoration", "none");
});

As we see more and more tactics for getting performance by doing tricks with when scripts are loaded, I expect to see more of libraries like this. The key is working out exactly what script needs to be loaded right away, after the DOM is around, and what can wait for later. How do you want to load the script? Dynamic script element? Via iframe? XHR + eval? They all have pros and cons.

Part One: The Foundation

This first article will briefly discuss the importance of producing visually rich interfaces with semantic, accessible, and portable markup underneath. We’ll then dive into code with a reset stylesheet and structure for a resolution-dependent layout.

Part Two: CSS Selectors & jQuery

Shifting to a more intermediate discussion of code, this second article will present examples that demonstrate how to take advantage of the now-supported CSS2 and CSS3 properties previously ignored by Internet Explorer, such as min/max-width, child and adjacent sibling selectors, and others. We’ll also take a look at jQuery, a lightweight scripting library for enhancing UI elements.

Part Three: Adding Ajax Interactivity

The third article will lightly cover Ajax implementation and its role within the interface. This won’t be a highly technical discussion that covers such things as XMLHttpRequest, but rather a demonstration of a few ways to leverage Ajax judiciously.

Part Four: Testing for Extensibility

Lastly, the final article will look back at the chunks of code presented in the three previous articles to assess how they combine to produce a completed interface. We’ll then subject the interface to a series of “extensibility tests” such as translation, text resizing and browser width resizing, the addition of new content, and so forth.

The final article also provides the full demo, as well as a bookmarkable site that gives you quick access to all resources mentioned throughout the series.

If you don’t know how to upgrade you blog read the Upgrading instructions or contact me and I will help you.

But!!!! Writing the previous post I found one big problem or bug. I do not know exactly in my case if this was a bug. I could not upload images to the post, and I wasn’t very happy about this. After a long research I found a list of solutions to the problem, Things to try. In my case the #7 worked, it was the only one that I tried because the other I excluded:

1. Make sure you uploaded all the WordPress files correctly. Really, this is probably the most common upgrade problem.

2. Clear your browser cache, restart your browser. Do it twice. Browser caches can be persistent little things.

3. Update your Adobe Flash to the latest version (esp you Linux users!): Flash

4. IE has specific known issues. Download these two files, replace them in your WordPress installation: IE-Fix

5. Another known issue is where the media buttons don’t appear at all. This happens when you have an older plugin interfering with the JavaScript. I encountered this problem with an older version of WP-Amazon, but any plugin loading its own jQuery can cause the issue. Disable your plugins and see if the buttons appear. If so, reactivate one by one until they don’t appear any more. Upgrade all your plugins as well.

6. Bad Behavior breaks the uploader. Disable it. There have been reports that editing the “blacklist.inc.php” file to remove the line containing “Shockwave Flash” also works.

7. mod_security might be causing problems. Disable it to see if that is the problem. To do this, make an .htaccess file in your wp-admin directory. Add this to it:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</IfModule>

That will disable it for the entire wp-admin directory. It’s possible to be more specific about it, this is just a quick and easy test to see if mod_security is causing your issues.

8. Worst case… Disable the flash uploader for now, using this plugin: No-Flash-Uploader

But most importantly, stay tuned. If any new developments or fixes come to light, we’ll update this post. For now, not all problems can be solved. Patience.

If you have more troubles with WP 2.5 you can find some answers here.

For those that don’t have a blog you can download the new WP 2.5 and if you need a design don’t hesitate to contact me.

Additional features in Zend Framework 1.5 include support for several new services and enhancements to already popular features that make building modern web sites easier and faster than ever:

• Forms – Zend Framework now supports forms, including Ajax usage patterns that make building and using web-based forms much easier.
• Layout and view – Layout support and view enhancements make it easier than ever to implement a consistent look and feel throughout PHP applications and save developers time by keeping web application views componentized.
• LDAP authentication – Zend Framework now comes with enterprise-ready authentication through support for LDAP technology.
• Lucene search engine – Now it is possible to implement advanced queries using wildcards, date ranges, and fuzzy searches from within a ZP application.
• Extended Ajax support – Zend Framework’s server-side support for Ajax with action helpers to automate Ajax detection and responses now make programming using JavaScript & PHP much easier.
• UTF-8 character sets in Adobe PDF creation – Zend Framework’s PDF support has been enhanced to enable non-Latin character sets such as Kanji, Cyrillic, and many others.
• Google GData web services – Significant enhancements to Google Data services now make it easier than ever to build web applications that leverage the Google application network. New in Zend Framework 1.5 is support for upload and write capabilities to Google YouTube.

What else to say … start download!

This QuickStart will guide you through the implementation of a simple blog application with a common page layout to demonstrate some of the advanced features of Zend Framework along with the Zend_Controller, Zend_View, Zend_Layout, Zend_Form, and Zend_Db components.

In my opinion I think that ZF it’s good, it has a lot of advanced features but I’m still a CakePHP fan, for its simplicity and rapid development.

Open the ZF Quickstart 1.5

For beginners to WordPress design, it can feel like a daunting task trying to compete with other, more-experienced, designers. To help, here’s 5 quick ways which I’ve found invaluable in creating a more complete theme.

http://blog.themeforest.net/wordpress/5-ways-enhance-your-wordpress-theme/