After deploying my project on Android Devices I found out about some annoying bug in Sencha Touch. It causes flickering on Android when using Animations like cardSwitchAnimation: ‘slide.’ All available solutions didn’t seem to fix this issue on my setup completely. I was using a tabBar at the bottom of my application and the icons of it didn’t get rendered when the app loaded for the first time.
A couple days ago I began to develop my first mobile web app with the Sencha Touch Framework which is a HTML5 Mobile Web App Framework. Before I began with the development process I tried to find the most useful articles, tutorials, screencasts, etc. about Sencha Touch. Here I wanna share the result of my research.
New Facebook Chat introduction as sidebar
Today the new Facebook web chat was rolled out for my account. I guess they already began a couple days ago to roll out the new “feature”.
For me it doesn’t make sense at all to show offline contacts who I have interacted most with. I’d like to see who is online! Another downside of this new “feature” is that you can’t see a list of online users anymore. You have to use the searchbox to find someone.
If you’re using Maven to build a Web App with the latest version of Hibernate you only need to add the hibernate-core dependency to your pom.xml (Project Object Model). The Hibernate project added their own pom.xml which will download all other library dependencies from the Maven repository for you automatically.
I saw that many blogs still refer that you have to add many dependencies to use Hibernate which confused me a lot. Also JBoss recently started to sync their repository with the Maven repository. So there is no need to add another JBoss repository to your pom.xml.
As I use some Google Apps to boost my productivity I was quite annoyed by the Google+ notifications in the top bar. I wrote a user script to get rid of the notifications for all Google Apps except Google+.
Tested with Greasemonkey for Firefox and Chrome.
Packt Publishing asked me to review their latest book about TYPO3 Templates by Jeremy Greenawalt.
This book covers everything you should know about TYPO3 Template Engine TemplaVoila. You’ll learn everything from install of the extension to mapping a template from scratch. This method more easy than the classic marker method or the makeautotemplate extension.
The book also has a whole chapter about different kinds of menus TYPO3 brings with it and shows how to use them with TemplaVoila. Another interesting chapter is about customization of the backend for backend users and groups.
Last but not least they even cover BusyNoggin’s TemplaVoila Framework in a whole chapter. This is quite interesting and you should definitely read it.
In my opinion this book gives a good overview about TemplaVoila template building and even gives some outlook to the Framework. I think this book is good for beginners and intermediate users who would like to learn using from scratch or learn some more advanced techniques. Designers should be familiar with HTML/CSS. Experts may not find anything new.
I just stumbled upon the Jolicloud 1.1 operating system which has been developed especially for Netbooks. It is based on the Ubuntu Netbook Remix Linux distribution and shows lots of HTML5 capabilities. There is a Windows installer but you can also install it as your primary operating system. To gain a better impression of Jolicloud I installed it as virtual instance with Oracle’s VirtualBox. Of course you could also install it on your USB drive.
For my recent experimental gaming project I wanted to measure the overall elapsed time since the beginning of a game.
In my main class I added a startup variable of type long which contains the current time in milliseconds. At the end of a game call the function stopWatch(startup); to get the elapsed time in seconds.
Today, there have been rumors that Yahoo!’s bookmarking service Delicious will be shut down soon. If you’re scared about losing all your bookmarks there are two ways how to save all of your Delicious bookmarks.
First option would be to use their export option. This way you will get a HTML file.
Second more advanced option would be to use curl+Delicious API and grab all of your bookmarks including tags to an XML file.
Recently I’ve been invited to a couple small groups on Facebook. I noticed that I received all of the new group posts straight forward by email without ever accepting the invitation!