Blackberry development

So my blackberry 8330 died a sad death at the best of times, while traveling. It is amazing how much I had come to rely on that device. I use it for online access, tether mode for my laptop, calendar, etc... I went directly to the Verizon store on returning home, and was told the device was hosed, so time to upgrade. The new device is the 9630 World Edition and so far, I am impressed and pleased. That said, I feel a strange need to play with the SDK, or at least get started with the Plazmic CDK.

A quick internet search led me to the blackberry site and their sdk. The link required registration to download but you can find it here. Once you install the base application, you need to run the update as well.

Once I get the install finished and see how it works, I will update with a new post. In the meantime, keep your fingers crossed on the install since I am running Windows 7 and it is not listed as supported - probably due in part to the fact that Windows 7 has not been generally released yet.

cross posted from my digital vision site as well.

UI Mockup

Recently, a friend of mine showed me a great UI mockup tool he has been using for application development with his team. The tool is called Balsamiq Mockups and it allows for simple UI design and discussion in a line drawing manner without all the line drawing. The added benefit is that the client is not led to believe there is working code behind a prototype mockup as is often the case with a simple forms construct.

Plethora of web links

Another good find: http://www.alvit.de/handbook/

This is a page with links to all sorts of web content and developer tools and widgets. Enjoy

Dev Links

I have a few links to some good blogs and resources that I got from MS Devs or from my own research so I figured I would post them here to share and keep as a reference.

• Sijin Joseph's blog - Dev Resources


• Scott Guthries blog - an MS Dev


• MSDN Blogs


• Brian Goldfarb's Blog


• JrzyShr Dev Guy
  Peter Laudati's bits + bytes from exit 117...


• .net DEvHammer
  Just what IS a Developer Evangelist, anyway?

Microsofts open source projects

While attending the HLS Devcon today, I heard one of the sweetest sounds I have yet heard from a Microsoft conference... In a session on Ajax, the presenter spoke about the technology, what it could do and how it worked. Then came the punchline... by the way, it works with PHP, Java, on Apache, whatever you want. Not the party line about the language of your choice being available in the VS IDE, rather this was talking about using a Microsoft technology to help devs build their php sites. Well done Microsoft.

Also a topic of conversation was the codeplex resource. This is a Microsoft repository for open source projects. In their own words, "CodePlex is Microsoft's open source project hosting web site. You can use CodePlex to create new projects to share with the world, join others who have already started their own projects, or use the applications on this site and provide feedback."

Firefox Extensions for Web Developers (and blog hackers)

The days of looking at an area on a web page and guessing the pixel dimensions or color are over! Well, at least if you have a few tools and use Firefox. I like IE, but Firefox has largely replaced it for my day to day usage primarily due to the customization and tools available for Firefox.

Here are a few add-ins that I find to be very helpful for web development and hacking my blogs or other web properties I use.

1. The eye dropper utility.
   
   • This is a great little widget that gives you an eye dropper in the bottom of your status bar. If you click the eye dropper, you can identify the color of any area on your page in RGB or Hex.
   
   
   • Get it at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/271
   
   
   
   



2. The measure it utility.
   
   • This add-in gives you a little ruler in the status bar that you can click to get a measurement overlay giving you precise pixel dimensions of any screen area. Great for measuring that new page element location or footer area and so on.
   
   
   • Get it at https://https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/539/
   
   
   
   



3. Web Developer
   
   • As described by CW: "Web Developer is another virtual Swiss Army Knife for coding. There's some overlap with Firebug, but where Firebug concerns itself almost exclusively with the content of a Web page, Web Developer offers tools to tweak how you're interacting with the page." I like this integration with the tool bar and the ability to work with CSS in particular.
   
   
   • Get it at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60/
   
   
   
   

Random Quotes / Messages

Random quotes are a nice addition to a site to add a little fun content so I am including directions here to put them on your own blog.

1. Select a list of quotes to put on your blog.


2. Go to the templates tab on your blog customization and select add a new page element.


3. Select the HTML / JavaScript element


4. Paste the following code into the block




<i><center><script language="JavaScript">
//store the quotations in arrays
//change this number to reflect the number of quotes
quotes = new Array(2);
//just follow this pattern to add more quotes
quotes[0] = "Shave your head, get a wet sponge, and flip the switch, 'cause you're about to get a Truthocution!<br/>Stephen Colbert";
quotes[1] = "I believe all God's creatures have a soul... except bears, bears are Godless killing machines!<br/>Stephen Colbert";
//calculate a random index
index = Math.floor(Math.random() * quotes.length);
//display the quotation
document.write("\n");
document.write(quotes[index]);
</script></center></i>
</pre></li>



5. You can give the element a title if you want, but it is not needed


6. Save the element and drop in in your page where you want it.


7. Viola, you have random quotes...

Ok.... thanks for the applause, no really, thank you... Ok. So there are variations of this script all over the net. You can find a version you like better or hack this one up. Follow the links to check out sites with great little scripts and widgets for your blog, or watch here for more.

Hack your blog

While working on one of my other blogs, I have been playing around with blog hacks and tools. Basically what I've found is that blogspot is very similar to my favorite photo host (smugmug) in that is it highly customizable and uses standard naming conventions, styles and variables for templates.

Taking this into account, there is a growing community of "blog hackers" that have ready made widgets to drop into the blogs and it is fairly straight forward to make your own. I'm going to build a list of these hacks and make a link list as a starting point. Look for more content over time on this subject.