Five suggestions for Dreamwaver
I'm a regular user of Dreamweaver, and while CS4 has demonstrated some excellent new features and enhancements, there are still several areas of the product I would like to see improved. While it may be too late for CS4, here's my top five areas I'd like to see addressed in the future (in no particular order)
1. Code hinting - JS and PHP
CS4 has massively improved the way it deals with custom JS coding - in
terms of smart introspection of functions, classes and objects, and how
it code hints and colours them. Brilliant! I take it as an indication
that Adobe is catering not just for the WYSIWYG audience, but for the
professional developer who hand codes, rather than relying on
out-of-the-box widgets.
However, these currently assume that everything is done through one
static HTML document, with scripts linked off it.
Trying out MS Photosynth
Microsoft Labs' Photosynth software wowed many people last year with its ability to automatically matching sets photos into a 3D space. There was a great demo showing Notre Dame, based on photos pulled in from Flickr.
Last week they released a browser plugin on Photosynth.net which allows you to try it out with your own sets of photos.
I've got plenty of sets of source panorama photos which nicely line up because they were taken with a panoramic tripod head, but I wanted to try it out with something a bit more challenging - a set of shots taken handheld from a few different spots with a compact camera.
everything.sucks - a TLD for complaints
I wrote an article on my work blog yesterday about the new rules for top level domains (TLDs) that were approved by ICANN this week. In it, I gave a list of a few examples of the new TLDs that we are likely to see - one of them was .sucks
It's almost an internet convention that if you want to build a complaint website about a company, it has the name "xxxxx sucks". For example www.microsoftsucks.org, www.googlesearchsucks.com, www.mac-sucks.com, etc -- you get the idea.
Receive a donation, pass it on
I've had a Paypal donation box on my Alien Language site since it was created in 2002. It's discretely hidden away, and was intended almost as a "tip box", an optional contribution to the inevitable costs of running a "free" website.
And despite nearly 4.2 million page views since 2003, over half a terabyte of data transfer, and hundreds of appreciative e-mails, perhaps unsurprisingly, I've never ever had anyone give a penny.
Until today.
I got an e-mail this morning from Paypal to say I'd been sent some money. I've not sold anything on eBay, so I assumed it was some kind of phishing e-mail. On closer inspection, I noticed it mentioned Alien Language in the transaction details, so I logged into Paypal, and sure enough, I'd been sent a small contribution by a satisfied user!
OK, 1 in 4 million is not a great conversion rate; although it's nice to get the complimentary e-mails, it's doubly touching that someone (quite possibly from somewhere else in the world) has appreciated the time and effort enough to dip into their pockets.
EyeTV + Squeezebox
In the spirit on Mashed, as I wrote yesterday I've spent a few hours over the weekend putting together a bit of a technology mashup of my own.
The end result was using my Squeezebox as a nice external display and remote control for browsing and watching Freeview programmes recorded on EyeTV.
The best way of explaining it is probably to watch a demo: