June 18, 2009 by J.P.
After messing around with my Hackintosh today I needed to remove some of my kext files in /System/Library/Extentions (S/L/E). I wasn’t in the mood to find an early build of a hackers app I just wanted Terinal su/root access.
Here is an easy method to activate root access in Terminal for Mac OS X 10.5 or later.
1. From the Finder’s Go menu, choose Utilities.
2. Open Directory Utility.
3. Click the lock in the Directory Utility window.
4. Enter an administrator account name and password, then click OK.
5. Choose Enable Root User from the Edit menu.
6. Enter the root password you wish to use in both the Password and Verify fields, then click OK.
Related Links:
A better terminal app
June 16, 2009 by J.P.
With some of the latest browsers supporting HTML 5 I thought I go ahead and take a stab at trying to create a very basic video player using some of the new tags. What’s interesting is many times when flash would be needed for video and audio HTML 5 will be able to support such media types with just a little JS.
Here is a sample player using HTML 5 (Note this is at a very early stage and only has play/pause functionality).
<div id="myVideoContainer">
<video id="myVideo" src="../videos/WheretheWildThingsAre.mov" autoplay="autoplay">
<p>Sorry Your Browser Doesn't Support HTML 5. Safari 4 will support this video player, download it here</p>
</video>
</div>
Related information:
April 27, 2009 by J.P.
Last week I completed a email campaign that I was only brought into only to code. I felt that the process followed was generally flawed that the team took. I started with a finalized approved design which I was suppose to code into a mailer. From the beginning I started noticing flaws in the designs and how the design would be translated into many of the the popular web clients of today like Gmail for example.
Often I think people and small teams rush the designs of the mailers and don’t fully understand what it takes to develop and what will be rendered by each client. Most web based email applications won’t properly read divs, background images, or even external style sheets. With these short comings and designers unaware of these limitations or bad and unexpected things can happen.
When creating a mailer its important to first and foremost take your audience into consideration. Are they main using web based clients like gmail, yahoo, etc.? Are the checking there mail on the mobile devices? Or they simple just using a desktop client like Mail (OSX), ThunderBird, or Outlook? All of these and a combination should it most cases be assumed.
Rules of thumb to help achieve the audiences viewing of the mailer
At the of the top of the design provide a link for the subscribers to see a web version. Most mailers these days are filter and end up in junk mail boxes or the software is smart enough to hide the images. Leaving your pain stacking work looking like a blob of random text bits. Having this link at the top will give the user and easy way to view the mailer as it was ment to be presented.
Keep it simple. Since most clients ignore CSS including background images your going to have to get old school with some tables. By keeping the design simple you will be able to get you message across to the widest audience. I good example of this is UrbanDaddy.com’s mailer(seen below).
Allow the users to easily forward and print the mailer.
April 12, 2009 by J.P.
Here are a few good links for getting down with SVN. Including one to a free online book that will get you up and running in no time at all.
April 7, 2009 by J.P.
I’ll be perfectly honest.. I didn’t know much about Adobe Flex. I knew that it was more or less an all coding method for Flash developers and the early adopters using JS/AJAX really enjoyed working with it. Flex based sites had always impressed me but the idea on how to make them seemed to complex. Since Flash MX had been released I had little experience writing any sort of AS other then animating banners or updating AS for already running sites.
Over the past couple of days I have been messing around with it and am truly having fun writing the code. My main focus for the last few years now has been XHTML/CSS as well as design and with basic understandings of Flash. Moving forward to improve my skill set Flex seems to be a fun tool to learn and a good next step for someone with a similar skill set.
If your interested in playing around with Flex here is a link that really helped me get started Setting up a AS3 Project in Textmate.
