Photo-sharing website Flickr has re-launched with a new-look and new pricing plans, including a much-improved offering for free users.
The website has been under sustained criticism for its old-fashioned user interface and the apparent lack of interest that its owners Yahoo have taken in the once-mighty website. Today’s changes may signal the start of something better for Flickr.
The Android operating system has a notification bar displayed at the top of the screen. This space is used to notify users of the device’s connectivity status or advise the user of incoming messages, emails or updates.
The following acronyms are used to indicate signal type:
The following is a tabular guide to status and notification icons that enables their meanings to be understood.
Microsoft have today released Microsoft Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 users.
The browser has been available to Windows 8 users since the release of that operating system, but developmental delays have prevented a release for users of the older operating system. Windows Vista users will not be able to upgrade beyond IE9 and Windows XP users cannot upgrade beyond IE8.
Rival Google released Chrome 25 just last week, so comparisons are already being made.
Microsoft claims that IE10 on Windows 7 improves performance 20% with faster “real world” page loading, faster interactivity and faster JavaScript performance, while reducing CPU usage and improving battery life on mobile PCs. Microsoft also boast of automatic spell-checking, which has been a feature of most other browsers for quite some time.
For developers, Microsoft list the following improvements:
Microsoft Internet Explorer will be pushed out to all Windows 7 users via Windows Update, or can be installed manually from the official website.
In releasing the Firefox 19 browser yesterday, Mozilla has launched a new in-built PDF viewer that negates the requirement for the Adobe Reader XI plug-in.
Many will see this as good news, given recent discoveries about its vulnerability.
The new reader is JavaScript-based and like the browser that supports it, the viewer is open source.
There are a number of smaller changes that come with Firefox 19, including support for several new CSS features, including @page, full-width text transforms and the new viewport percentage units like vh, vw, vmax and vmin that can be used for sizing elements or adjusting type based on viewport size. This will enable Responsive Web Designs to function a little better.
Microsoft Office’s Excel package contains a number of data-analysis tools for professionals who require an ability to perform sophisticated mathematical analyses of data.
This feature is not enabled by default. Here are instructions for enabling Data Analysis in Excel 2010.
In the menu, go to File > Options and then click on “Add Ins” on the left-hand menu.
In the “Manage” drop-down box at the bottom, select “Excel Add-ins” and press “Go…”
A dialogue box will appear. Choose “Analysis ToolPak” and “Analysis ToolPak – VBA”
If Analysis ToolPak is not listed, click “Browse” to locate it. If a prompt says that the Analysis ToolPak is not currently installed on your computer, click Yes to install it.
Click “OK” and the selected data packs will be installed. You will be returned to the spreadsheet that you were working on.
Now when the “Data” manu item is selected, there should be an option called “Data Analysis” on the far-right-hand side of the ribbon.
Statistical analysis is now possible in Excel.
Tags: data analysis, excel, howto, office
Microsoft has announced that Expression Web – the company’s web design and HTML application- will be discontinued. The latest release was Expression Web 4, Service Pack 2 which was released in July 2011.
An unsupported version of Expression Web 4 is now available as a free download. Customers who previously purchased Expression Web will receive support through the established support lifecycle.
Microsoft Expression Web was part of the greater Expression suite which included Expression Encoder, Expression Design and Expression Blend.
Expression is a fairly recent software brand for Microsoft, having been first announced in 2005 with the first product, Microsoft Expression Studio, released in 2007. Expression Web grew out of Microsoft Front Page, which was launched in 1997.
Expression Web 4 will be replaced with Visual Studio 2012, which is considerably more expensive. Visual Studio 2012 Professional sells for AU$724 (US$760, €571, £479, ¥68,527).
Adobe’s Dreamweaver application now remains as the sole professional HTML and web design application for semi-professionals and hobbyists. Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 sells for AU$380 (US$400) which is considerably more than the price Microsoft charged for Expression Web 4. Microsoft also offers the minimalist WebMatrix programme as a free download.
Microsoft has clearly decided to focus solely on professional web designers which was a pity. Expression Web 4 was a good programme, although a few small bugs remained. Unfortunately the programme failed to gain market share, despite Microsoft’s best efforts.
Tags: expression, expression web, microsoft, software
Most operating systems and DNS clients will automatically cache IP addresses and other DNS results in order to speed up subsequent requests to the same hostname. Your DNS cache stores the locations (IP addresses) of web pages you have recently viewed. If the location of the page changes before the entry in your DNS cache is updated, you will be unable to access the page.
If you are encountering a high number of HTML Error 404 codes, you may need to flush your DNS cache. Once you clear your DNS cache, your computer will query nameservers for the new DNS information rather than relying on old information stored on your computer.
Here is how to flush your DNS resolver cache. You may need administrator rights to perform this action.
In Windows Vista/7/8, go to the start button and type “cmd” in the Search panel, then press Enter. Otherwise navigate via Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt.
In Windows 98/NT/2000/XP, navigate via Start > Run, press “cmd.exe” and press OK.
In the command prompt, type “ipconfig /flushdns”
You will receive a message confirming that the DNS cache has been flushed:
The resolver cache has been cleared.
Close the command prompt.
Instructions for completing the same procedure on Macintosh and Linux systems can be found here.
For various reasons, it is sometimes difficult to download and install important pieces of Adobe software that are essential for a modern internet experience because the installers (or installation) fails.
To get around this problem, the software can be directly downloaded from the Adobe website, but the links are somewhat concealed. To make this easier, I have published the download links below so that the programme files may be accessed for direct installation.
The free Adobe Flash Player permits users to view Adobe Flash components in websites. Portals such as YouTube rely on this programme to operate properly. Users can check which version of Flash is currently installed on their machines via this website.
Two versions of Adobe Flash Player are available:
Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that supports the building of applications using HTML, JavaScript, Flex and Flash.
The latest version can be downloaded here:
Adobe Shockwave Player permits the viewing of 3D games and entertainment, interactive product demonstrations and online learning applications. Shockwave Player displays web content that has been created by Adobe Director.
The latest version can be downloaded here:
Sometimes you may want to perform a specific function with a YouTube video that isn’t the default. For instance, you may want to start the video at a certain time point or default to a specific resolution or quality.
Here are some tricks you can use to enable extra functionality by altering the video URL and/or embed code.
We’ll use my YouTube clip of the ABC1 Rage opener as an example. The URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozQ4dE5ha38
If I wanted to start my sample YouTube clip at the interview (and skip the opener), I need to start the sample video at 17 seconds. To do this, I need to add #t=XXmYYs (for XX mins and YY seconds) to the URL. Thus:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozQ4dE5ha38#t=00m17s
The embed code is a little different. In this instance, you will need to add &start=YY where YY is the number of seconds. If you want to start more than 60 seconds in, you will need to convert your time from minutes and seconds to just seconds.
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ozQ4dE5ha38?feature=player_detailpage&start=17" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen> </iframe> |
(Note: This code and the following examples as YouTube create them aren’t valid HTML5 or XHTML. See below for a remedy for this).
You can’t specify the specific resolution with this hack, but you can specify whether a HD version (if available) of the video is shown or not.
Low definition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozQ4dE5ha38&hd=0
High definition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozQ4dE5ha38&hd=1
This technique doesn’t appear to work for embedded videos.
At the end of YouTube videos, the player will suggest other related videos that may be of interest. To prevent this from happening in embedded videos, simply add &rel=0 to the URL, as per this example:
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ozQ4dE5ha38?feature=player_detailpage&rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen> </iframe> |
This does not work for non-embedded videos.
To get YouTube videos to autoplay add &autoplay=1 to the URL of the embedding code, as per this example:
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ozQ4dE5ha38?feature=player_detailpage&autoplay=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen> </iframe> |
Non-embedded videos autoplay by default.
Unfortunately the embed code that YouTube provides is not valid XHTML or HTML5. There is no attribute called “allowfullscreen” whilst “width” and “height” are not valid iframe attributes in HTML5.
The simplest tool for remedying this situation is the awesome YouTube Embed Code Generator. This facility will produce valid XHTML and HTML5, albeit with inline CSS styling as per the following example:
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" style="width:640px; height:360px;" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/ozQ4dE5ha38?version=3"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ozQ4dE5ha38?version=3" /> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /> </object> |
As one would expect from a free service, the site adds some link code at the end, but this part can easily be removed:
<div style="font-size: 0.8em"><a href="http://www.tools4noobs.com/online_tools/youtube_xhtml/">Get your own valid XHTML YouTube embed code</a></div> |
If you wish to create valid iframe code, then that will require some manual changes.
Here’s an example of the invalid iframe code:
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ozQ4dE5ha38?feature=player_detailpage&rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> |
Here’s how I have made it valid:
<iframe style="width:640px; height:360px; border-style: none;" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ozQ4dE5ha38?feature=player_detailpage&rel=0"> </iframe> |
To do this: I completed the following two key steps:
If you want to use the custom URL tricks on this page in a valid iframe, it is critical that the above two steps are adhered-to.
Of course, various customisations can be piggybacked, as shown in the following example:
<iframe style="width:640px; height:360px; border-style: none;" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ozQ4dE5ha38?feature=player_detailpage&rel=0&start=17"> </iframe> |
With these hacks, you can link-to or embed YouTube videos that will behave as you wish them to.
Tags: code, embed, HTML5, tutorial, url, valid, video, XHTML, youtube
