Adobe developers Piotr Walczyszyzn and Filip Lysyzyn have released a beta of their Responsive Inspector extension for Chrome.
This cool tool allows you to view the media queries on a responsive web page and see them in action as you resize the page. It shows the media query currently applied, the name of the stylesheet it's on, and lets you view the stylsheet. Plus it allows pixel-perfect resizing and allows you to take screen shots.
There's demo video on Piotrs blog. http://outof.me/responsive-inspector-beta-released/
I mentioned a while back the excellent 'Succinctly' series of free eBooks by Syncfusion. Well there's a new one, 'iOS Succinctly' written as a companion to 'Objectice-C Succinctly'. Both excellent resources for a fast way to get started with iOS development.
Details and download from http://www.syncfusion.com/resources/techportal/ebooks/ios
To quote from an article on the UK PC Pro site:
Julie Larson-Green, corporate vice-president for Windows, revealed that Windows Blue will arrive as a "public preview" at Microsoft's Build conference, which starts 26 June. While Build is targeted at developers, the public preview will be available to anyone with Windows 8, according to ZDNet.
She also revealed Microsoft was having "meaningful discussions" about whether to bring back the Start button, but said the company remained fully behind the Start screen with live tiles.
"The Start menu was never built for a lot of applications," Larson-Green said, according to CNet. "The Start menu is not the be-all end-all. But a button might be useful for some people to have on the screen."
The full article at http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/380713/windows-blue-8-1-release-date-screenshots-features
So, the Start Button was never built for a lot of applications!
Well, if the MS Windows Team haven't noticed, it works far better for a lot of applications that the 'Modern' tiled start screen.
With buyers returning PCs to change them for Windows 7 models, and PC builders installing one of the start menu add-ons on machines as standard, you'd think Microsoft would have got the message, but no.
From information leaking out it appears that Windows Blue (the next version/update to Windows 8) will only have a 'start' button that launches the 'modern' start screen.
This isn't going to make any difference to desktop users. They are still going to want a proper 'start menu'. I'm not a luddite but really do find the 'modern' UI impractical on a desktop machine. Tablets, yes, desktops, definitely no. Yes, searching for applications does work, but it takes more keystrokes and time.
Windows 8 can work sucessfully as a tablet OS and desktop but will need external add-ons to do so for the foreseeable future. Sad.
Despite the release of Windows Phone 8, the previous 7.8 phones are still very capable devices. They are still available to buy, are affordable, and have sold several million units.
The 7.8 update was welcome when it finally arrived BUT the phone is stuck with the IE9 browser. Unlike iOS and Android phones, there isn't the option of Opera, Chrome or Dolphin, so we're stuck with a browser that doesn't fully support either HTML5 or CSS3. OK, yes there is the 'UC Browser' but that seems to be a clone of IE9 and is no better.
A suggestion to include IE10 on Windows Phone UserVoice was declined, so we clearly need a much bigger 'shout' to get this decision overruled. So if you have a 7.8 phone, get over to UserVoice and vote for IE10!
Responsive Design is the hottest topic on the web and without doubt the most important one for many years.
There are countless articles on the subject but if you want an overview or something to refer customers to, this recent article , 'A Measured Response', on the Intel Software Adrenalin site is worth looking at.
If you need to keep up with what's happening in the world of RWD the 'Responsive Design Weekly' email newsletter is well worth signing up for. The site also has back issues and is worth digging into for tips and inspiration.
Syncfusion, one of the major software component vendors, recently started a series of free e-Books called the 'Succinctly' series. The premise is that established developers have enough background knowledge to rapidly pick up new information without having to wade through acres of basic or peripheral content. As they state, 'The essentials in about 100 pages'. Judging by the 'Succinctly' books I've read so far, this approach works well and they've recruited some great authors.
'ASP.NET MVC 4 Mobile Websites' by Lyle Luppes is a good example. It takes you through the reasons behind needing to address the mobile space and then dives straight into building an MVC mobile site with ample code examples and explanation where necessary. Even if you don't work with ASP.Net MVC it contains a lot of useful background on jQuery Mobile and cross-device design.
Two other books in the 'Succinctly' series that I'm looking at are 'JavaScript Succinctly' and 'jQuery Succinctly' both by Cody Lindley (a member of the jQuery team), both excellent.
As I writing this an email from Syncfusion came in about the latest edition to the series, 'Windows Store Apps Succinctly' by John Garland. Just about to download this one....
It's definitely worth taking a look at these books http://www.syncfusion.com/resources/techportal/ebooks
Whilst Windows 8 is great on a tablet, the desktop experience leaves a lot to be desired and power users find themselves primarily using the desktop.
Having created the excellent Start8 utility to give Windows 8 a proper 'start menu', StarDock have gone one further with 'ModernMix', which allows you to run Windows 8 'Modern' apps in desktop windows.
This allows you to display and pin the apps to the desktop taskbar, gives you the normal minimise, expand and close buttons, and remembers the window size the next time you launch the app.
In other words the Windows experience we know and love and so much easier for desktop users.
See ModernMix at Stardock
There are issues with displaying phone numbers on web pages. You may want them to display as clickable links on a mobile phone but not on the tablet or desktop view of the page.
HTML5 gives us the href="tel:+44 xxx yyyyyyyy" ability to have a clickable link which works on a phone but if clicked on a desktop normally does nothing except give a warning dialog unless you have the browser's Skype add-in.
Two options commonly used are:
1) Remove the underlining and link colour on the desktop view. It remains a link but isn't obvious.
This is really avoiding the issue and may still confuse the user if a link is accidently hovered over.
2) Don't convert it to a link at all and let the phone's OS automatically recognise it as a phone number.
Unfortunately this isn't fully supported or reliable. Windows Phone 7/7.5 doesn't support it at all. iOS and Android vary in the number formats they support and vary between OS version too.
Note that you can disable automatic phone number detection by using the following meta tag:
<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no" />
Coming across this recently where I had a table containing contact phone numbers, the 'responsive table' method mentioned in the last post enabled me to use a better solution. I used two table columns, one with a clickable link for the phone number and the other with the number as text. The text column is hidden on the mobile view and the link column is hidden on the tablet view upwards, using the responsive breakpoints. Unless it's a huge table the impact on page size isn't significant.
Many of the sites I work with have pages displaying tables of data; insurance claims, medical data, membership lists, sports results etc. When I started moving to responsive layouts to give cross-device compatibility, some of these tables didn't fit on mobile portrait screen sizes.
My initial solution was to hide them on the portrait screen and display a note 'Please view this page in landscape'. This wasn't very elegant and fell down immediately when a table was too wide for landscape view as well.
After some head scratching I realised I could selectively hide table columns and the solution was simple. Having decided which columns of the particular table were most significant I could hide several of them in mobile portrait view, hide fewer in landscape view and display them all for tablets upwards.
For example, two basic classes can be used for portrait (.hiddenCol1) and landscape (.hiddenCol2), using the responsive breakpoints:
/* mobile portrait is my default (mobile first) */
.hiddenCol1, .hiddenCol2 {
display:none;
}
/* mobile landscape*/
.hiddenCol1 {
display:table-column;
}
/*tablet and upwards/*
.hiddenCol1, .hiddenCol2 {
display:table-column;
}
Apply these styles to the complete column, (header and column cells). If using a GridView, apply the CssClass to the HeaderStyle, ItemStyle and FooterStyle (if needed).
Note: Having arrived at this solution independently, I see that others have done the same thing. Necessity is clearly the mother of invention.........