plebeosaur.us

Welcome back friends. This is the third season of You Are Here (with Safari on iPhone) and this series doesn’t look like it’s letting up any time soon. :)

Since our last installment in February 2010, it seems that the Google Maps API has shifted yet again and bricked our demo. No worries. Thanks to some great detective work by @Chris, we can get the old code up-and-running again by adding “optimized:false” to our Maps API Marker options. This will prevent Google from optimizing (encoding) the Marker image and allow the Marker to be rendered as an image tag as it did in our first demo. Therefore we can revert to our original CSS selector and call it a day.

But why leave it at that? Let’s take this to the next level and tweak that pulsating marker so it looks even more realistic.

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This plugin was a quick response to a need to add multi-language capability to a module that I didn’t have time nor desire to hack into.

My client’s site was already using Mark Huot’s Simple Translator extension to provide multi-language capability so, for every weblog entry, we needed to create a custom field for each language (with the language’s suffix appended—e.g., body, body_es, body_pg). All was fine until I came across an interesting bugaboo presented by the LG Polls module (another beautiful piece of work from Leevi Graham). The module handled multiple custom fields for the poll question just fine, but for the poll details (the answers) there was to be none of that.

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(original post: You Are Here (with Safari on iPhone))

When Google updated their Maps JavaScript API V3 last summer, they apparently did a bit more than change the way our iPhone map marker image was displayed (now as a background image rather than an image element). When I noticed the API change, I modified the CSS selector to hunt down the new marker: #map_canvas div[style*="blue_dot_circle.png"]. This allowed us to apply the CSS animation to the marker easily enough but it created another problem.

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Over the holiday break I finally got around to creating a little something I’ve been wanting for awhile: a calendar of the web community events in Austin. Check it out at austin.geeknite.info (and then come back for the rest of story if you wish).

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Since Apple announced the iPhone OS 3.0 update at WWDC a few weeks ago, I’ve been eagerly anticipating the addition of location services to Safari (Webkit).

Until now, providing an iPhone 3G user with a map and an indicator of their current position required building a native iPhone application in Objective-C and getting approval from Apple to distribute said app via the App Store. Not fun.

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After taking a peek beneath the covers of the beautiful WordPress 2.7 admin interface and reading John Allsopp’s Shiny Happy Buttons article on 24ways.org, it’s become abundantly clear that the next great web design era isn’t going to wait around for Internet Explorer. The future is going to be a bit more rounded and IE will be, well, square.

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It’s been a couple weeks since I traded in Firefox 2 for Firefox 3 and I’ve rarely glanced back. Most of my critical extensions have been ported and work fabulously. And what few annoyances that did arise were quickly cleared up with a few hacks to trick FF3 into accepting older extensions. Muzzling the AwesomeBar with oldbar also made things more tolerable.

One irritation defied all my attempts to resolve: disabling CSS via the Web Developer Extension’s long-standing keyboard shortcut CMD-SHIFT-S. Apparently the Mozilla team decided to Shanghai that shortcut for their History Sidebar. Why?

No matter. Today I found my solution in Keyconfig for Firefox 3. Now I can create, edit, or disable existing any FF3 shortcut I wish. Buhbye, History Sidebar!

Web development on a Mac is pure joy. There are so many tools that just that make building websites simple and even fun. From the dead-simple MAMP web server setup to the deceptively powerful TextMate editor to the game-changing Firefox browser-cum-editor/tester (with the essential Web Developer, FireBug, and ySlow extensions), it’s all good in Mac land.

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