IE 9 HTML5 Testing: “Works on My Machine”

One of my esteemed colleagues on an internal forum posted about how great IE 9’s HTML5 support was, based on the result of Microsoft’s test pages.  MS’s tests are sadly self-selective however: meaning they only seem to test for elements that IE9 supports: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/

“Cross-browser Test Results Summary:

W3C Web Standards	Number of Submitted Tests	Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview	Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3	Opera 10.52	Apple Safari 4.05	Google Chrome 4.1
HTML5	40	78%	63%	48%	43%	43%
...”

Compare that to my own results running html5test.com on the 6(!) browsers I have installed:

Html5 is the first time in a decade that the browser vendors have had a new major standard to fight over; I’m just grateful that this time around we’ll have an army of frameworks such as jQuery that can level the development playing field for us.

Uh Huh - iPad Ad Coordination FAIL

There’s a new iPad print ad campaign out, obviously (?) as a reaction to the whole Flash controversy.  It shows a hip (?) young(?) female (I hope) watching a Juliette Lewis video on vimeo.  Too bad the rest of us can’t….

PS! Interesting to see the lag between the ad creation and the release date

PPS! vimeo uses a mainframe?

Oops - “spellcheck any multiligual texts…”

So I was responding to an internal developer forum request for recommendations for a WYSIWYG html editor with spell check.  I was going to recommend Telerik’s Editor and related RadSpell component.  Not so sure any more…

Cobbler. Children.  All that.

This is Business Productivity?

Really, Microsoft?  This is the appropriate stock-photo for business productivity?

Are they productive because they are wearing suits?

Are they watching other people work productively?

Is the business being productive without them?

Did they just finish being productive and are now basking in the glow of their success?

(from http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9690494)

5 simple steps for getting rid of Live Messenger Ads

A coworker of mine was just complaining about the annoying ads in Live Messenger – here’s how to fix it

1. Close Live Messenger and all IE instances
2. Open your hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts) with Notepad
3. Add the following line (this redirects requests for the MSN ad server to your local computer)
   127.0.0.1     rad.msn.com     #Live messenger ads
4. Save your hosts file
5. Restart Messenger

That’s it – no more ads

Should you ever want the ads back, or need access to rad.msn.com for some reason, simply remove the line (or comment out the line with a leading #)

I like Balsamiq

I’ve been using the free version of Balsamiq Mockups to create some application page mockups.  It’s not quite as fast as pen and paper, but sure as hell beats doing it in something like Visio.  I really like it*. 

The application is available both online and in an Adobe Air version that can be downloaded and run from the desktop – I’ve used both and probably will continue to use both, the differences between the two versions are marginal. 

Balsamiq Mockups comes in a free trial version as well as a paid for version ($79).  As far as I have experienced, also the only differences between the free version and the paid version ($79) are that 1) the free version nags you every 5 minutes, and 2) you can actually save your files with the paid version, and also 3) print the mockup.  To make the free version useful, Balsamiq does allow you to export the markup as XML (and re-import the xml to re-create the drawing.)

Below is a screenshot of a markup I did of mo.notono.us – took all of 10 minutes:

*… in the interest of full disclosure I fully intend to email Mariah to see if I can get myself a free license….

TypeMock offers Unit Testing Framework for SharePoint

First a disclosure:  This is a blatantly self-serving post: I want to be one of 50 recipients of a free copy of “Isolator for SharePoint”.

Mandatory statement:

Typemock are offering their new product for unit testing SharePoint called Isolator For SharePoint, for a special introduction price. it is the only tool that allows you to unit test SharePoint without a SharePoint server. To learn more click here.

The first 50 bloggers who blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Full Isolator license, Free. for rules and info click here.

But that said, I am intrigued by two things:  Roy Osherove is now doing SharePoint development?  That can’t hurt the community.  Second, I heard rumors this will work on a non-SharePoint server.  Could my VPC days be coming to an end?  (Couldn’t come fast enough…)

iPhone Business Card Scanner Software

Ok, this is partly an experiment to see if putting a sexy title on the blog will result in additional hits, and partly stating yet another pre-stolen idea (not necessarily restricted to an iPhone):  Use a client-server model mobile app that lets you take a picture of a business card, email/MMS it to the server and have the server respond with a contact file.

Turns out scanR already does exactly this, but I think their monetization scheme is all wrong - they have a free trial that allows 1 - ONE - upload, and then they jump straight to 2.50 quid ($5) per month or 15 quid per year.  Seems this could be monetized quite easily through targeted ads accompanying the business card.

Mistake number two is that they haven't taken advantage of the hype and made an iPhone app that does the picture taking, server log in, image and contact file transport (and ad display)...

AdSense Experiment Update

Hmmm. Yeah. I'm not gonna get rich off of this:

Page impressions	Clicks	Page CTR	Page eCPM [?]	Earnings
AdSense for content	75	2	2.67%	$37.54	$2.82
view all AdSense for content channels »
Firefox plus Google Toolbar	0	0.00%	0	0	$0.00
view all Referral products »
Total Earnings					$2.82

Experimenting with AdSense

I finally decided to try out AdSense, more out of curiosity than of any hope of actually making anything from it. That said - if you should be interested in any ad posted over there on the right, feel free to click and make me a few cents...