For Redditors With Style: 3 Great Reddit Tools for Mac OS X
I think it's not unreasonable to say that Reddit fulfills the true purpose of the Internet - as an addictive time suck that can fill your mind with anything from obscure and probably illegal NSFW to pictures of squirrels eating unusual things (yep, that one I'll link to). But it's also fair to say the interface of the Reddit website itself is atrocious. So, here's a few apps - free and paid, good and bad.
jQuery Tutorial (Part 5): AJAX Them All!
As we near the end of our jQuery mini-tutorial series, it's about time we took a more in-depth look at one of the most used features of jQuery. AJAX allows a website to communicate with a server in the background without require the entire page to reload. From Facebook-style infinite status streams to submitting form data, there's a million different real life situations in which this technique can be useful.
jQuery Tutorial (Part 4) - Event Listeners
Today we're going to kick it up a notch and really show where jQuery shines - events. If you followed the past tutorials, you should now have a fairly good understanding of the basic code structure of jQuery (and all the horrible curly braces that go with it), as well as how find elements of the DOM and some of things you can do to manipulate them. I also showed you how to access the developer console in Chrome and how you might use it to debug your jQuery code.
Figure Out Website Problems With Chrome Developer Tools Or Firebug
If you've been following my jQuery tutorials so far, you may have already run into some code problems and not known how to fix them. When faced with a non-functional bit of code, it's very difficult to actually pinpoint the offending line of code - and that's where debugging and developer tools come in. So before continuing with some more complex jQuery code, I thought we'd examine the tools available in the world's most popular browser - Chrome.
Introduction To jQuery (Part 3): Waiting For The Page To Load & Anonymous Functions
jQuery is arguably an essential skill for the modern web developer, and in this short mini-series I hope to give you the knowledge to start making use of it in your own web projects. In the first part of our jQuery tutorial, we looked at some language fundamentals, and how to use selectors; in part 2, we moved on to methods of manipulating the DOM. In part 3, we'll tackle the problem of how to delay jQuery until the page has loaded.
Has Gaming Innovation Stopped Completely? [Opinion]
The last major innovation to be seen in the world of gaming was the WiiMote motion controller, first available in 2006. It set the scene for the current generation, but has since been overshadowed by the technically superior Xbox Kinect. But 6 years on I have to ask - is that it? Are we done with innovation now?
Introduction To jQuery (Part 2): Methods & Functions
This is part of an on-going beginners introduction to jQuery web programming series. Part 1 covered the jQuery basics of how to include it in your project, and selectors. In part 2, we'll continue with basic usage as we look at some methods you can perform on those DOM elements, and some more language fundamentals.
jQuery Tutorial - Getting Started: Basics & Selectors
Last week, I talked about how important jQuery is to any modern web developer and why it's awesome. This week, I think it's time we got our hands dirty with some code and learnt how to actually make use of jQuery in our projects. I'll say this now - you don't need to learn Javascript in order to use jQuery. It's probably best if you think of jQuery as an evolution of Javascript.
Accessing An Old Hard Drive Without Taking Apart Your Computer: Here Are Your Options
If your old computer breaks and it's just not worth repairing, the problem arises of how to access your data. Getting the drive out of the old PC is usually pretty easy, even on a laptop, but trying to then transplant that drive into a new machine presents a whole new realm of problems.
Make Siri Do What You Want With SiriProxy On Mac OS X And iPad 3
I've been wanting to try out SiriProxy for some Arduino home automation projects, but I refuse to buy a new phone when my iPhone 4 is still working just fine. But then I realized; I have Siri already, on my iPad 3. Surely I could use that? Indeed you can. So in this tutorial I'll walk you through getting SiriProxy working with your iPad 3 and Mac OSX.
Control Appliances From An Arduino: The Start Of Home Automation
Last time, I showed you a few ways of making your Arduino projects speech controlled via SiriProxy, OS X's built-in speakable items, and some Automator scripting, or even a dedicated voice recognition hardware chip. I left you with a quick demo of me turning on my lights, but didn't explain how I achieved that on the hardware side. Let's look today at how you can control high power devices - like your kettle, or some floor lamps.
3 Ways To Add Speech Control To Arduino Projects
I'm really starting to love my Arduino lately; having gone through the basic tutorials and even made an LED cube, I was ready to tackle something far more complex. Fortunately, speech controlling an Arduino project really isn't as complex as I'd thought - so here are 3 distinctly different approaches you can take.
Making The Web Interactive: An Introduction To jQuery
jQuery is a client-side scripting library that nearly every modern website uses - it makes websites interactive. It's not the only Javascript library, but it is the most developed, most supported, and most widely used. It's one of the building blocks of any modern website. But what exactly is jQuery, what makes it so popular, and why should you care about it if you're starting out as a web developer?
Moves For iPhone - Activity Tracking Done Right [iOS]
Moves is a new iPhone app designed to track your activity - running, walking, and cycling - over the course of a full day. It's free, and requires no additional devices. The only requirement is that it remains running in the background. You can download Moves from the iTunes store. When the app is running (either in the background or foreground), it uses the accelerometer to measure steps taken during walking or running movements, and GPS to track routes.
How To Master Your Dream Potential With Dream:ON [iPhone]
Last week, I looked at apps that genuinely help you sleep better by waking up at a moment when you'll feel most refreshed. This week, I found an app that does all of that, and goes one step further - it actually claims to influence your dreams. Dream:ON is a freemium app, and available now in the iTunes App Store.
How To Build a Custom Barcode Application With Pic2Shop Pro & Wordpress
If you’ve got a company database full of product data, connecting that data to a barcode system can be incredibly useful. Perhaps your warehouse workers need a quick way of looking up the product location, or maybe they need to quickly find out the purchase price for a full box and not by unit. Whatever the situation, integrating barcode reading facilities can be an expensive and arduous task, but it doesn't have to be.
Can An App Really Help You Sleep Better?
I've always been a bit of a sleep experimenter, having for much of my life kept a meticulous dream diary and studied as much as I could about sleeping in the process. There are a number of apps now on both iOS and Android that claim to help you sleep better by waking you up at a good time. Let me explain how these apps can make such bold claims, and examine if they actually work. You might be surprised.
Tried And Tested: 3 Gamification Tools That Try To Make Your Life Better
I'm a big fan of gamification, truth be told. I'd even go so far as to say our entire society should be gamified, with pleasures in life reserved as rewards those who actually contribute. Apparently that makes me a communist or something. But I digress; I've tried a variety of gamified systems for fitness and generally "getting things done", and here's how it worked out.
How To Unlock, Root & Install a Custom ROM On Your HTC One X
I can't say I've been entirely happy with having switched to Android - poor battery life, lack of system updates and general bugginess of my HTC One X being my main issues - but I heard a custom ROM could go some way to making me a happier Android owner. I therefore spent the afternoon trawling through forums, learning how to do the complete installation process from a stock phone, and I'm compiling that here.