Mac Archives - Page 5 of 8

Useful Links: Snow Leopard and AT, HTML5 and RDFa, Flash accessibility, and writing tips

Snow Leopard Assistive Technology Compatibility List is a very helpful compilation of what works and what doesn’t work on Snow Leopard. From ATMac.

There are so many posts about HTML 5 and RDFa flying around these days that it’s hard to keep up with them all. But here’s one that takes a different approach, Burningbird’s Maxwell’s Silver Hammer: RDFa and HTML5’s Microdata.

Wendy Chisholm chimes in with What I’m Watching about HTML 5.

Adobe Flash Accessiblity: Best Practices is must reading for anyone teaching or using Flash. From Erik Johnson at Six Revisions.

FatDUX has 20 tips for writing for the web that are a great lesson for beginners and a good reminder for the folks who’ve been at it a while.

Summary of eHow articles for June

Summer is here. A mini-vacation for my family was a fast trip to Sea World San Antonio. My kids and grandkids and myself took in the heat, the shows, and the water. We wore ourselves out having fun.

I also got a few things written for eHow in June:

Summary of eHow Articles for March

The bulbs stretched their heads above the ground, the trees bloomed, the grass took on a new green hue, and web geeks from around the world gathered in Austin for SXSW Interactive. Amid all those distractions, here’s what I wrote on eHow in March. More . . .

The bulbs stretched their heads above the ground, the trees bloomed, the grass took on a fresh green hue, and web geeks from around the world gathered in Austin for SXSW Interactive. Registration numbers were up by 25% at SXSWi, as the registration line pictured above suggests.

Amid all those distractions, here’s what I wrote on eHow in March.

iPhone questions

Every once in a while I get infected with the desire–the urgent NEED–for an iPhone. So far, I haven’t succumed to the urge because it will be so expensive to get out of the contract I have with my current phone company. I need your advice.

Every once in a while I get infected with the desire–no the urgent NEED–for an iPhone. So far, I haven’t given in to the urge because it will be so expensive to get out of the contract I have with my current phone company.

But the other day I was using a friend’s iPod touch. Good grief, she could use a browser, get her mail, log in at Pay Pal, write a blog post, Tweet, and heaven knows what else. It struck me that traveling with one of those would be a whole lot easier than lugging a computer and a camera around.

But if I use it to photograph and blog an event like Web Directions North or SXSWi, will I be happy with the photos? And would I find the blogging tedious with one finger typing? I’m particularly concerned about the photos. I have a nice camera with a 12X zoom, which is wonderful at events where I may be sitting 30 rows back. And live blogging with one finger–can I keep up?

Have you used an iPhone or Blackberry Storm or other similar phone instead of a computer when traveling? What are the advantages and disadvantages? Do you save enough in hassle to justify the cost (especially when you have to buy out of an existing contract first)?

Can you show me photos on Flickr or some easily accessible place that were taken with an iPhone?

I’d really appreciate hearing about your experiences using one in the way I’m thinking about.

Useful Links: Being Thankful, Fireworks CS4, protect your Mac

15 Things Every Web Developer Should Be Thankful For lists some great things to be thankful for. You can suggest more objects of your gratitude if the list isn’t inclusive enough for you.

Way back in 2005 I published a rant here called Why colleges should stop teaching Fireworks as a primary web design tool. Three years and a lot of Fireworks version releases since then, it appears that Fireworks CS4 is capable of creating web standards based designs. Matt Stow wrote Creating standards-compliant web designs with Fireworks CS4 at the Adobe Developer Center to walk you through the new CSS export feature. If you don’t own Fireworks CS4, you can download the trial copy to see if this new feature is a must-have for you.

In the times they are a-changin’ department, Apple recommends that you install anti-virus software on your Mac. It isn’t the computer security so much as iTunes, QuickTime, and the Safari Web browser. The recommended products are Intego VirusBarrier X5, McAfee VirusScan for Mac, and Symantec Norton Anti-Virus 11 for Macintosh.

Women in Tech: Shelley Powers

This is the first of several interviews with women in technology. Today you’ll learn about Shelley Powers. Shelley is perhaps best known as a writer. Her most recent books are Learning JavaScript and Painting the Web. She’s also a programmer and web developer, and she applies a powerful and logical mind to everything she does.

Q: I looked you up on Amazon and found a list of books you’ve written that includes Learning JavaScript, Painting the Web, Adding Ajax, Learning JavaScript: Add Sparkle and Life to Your Web Pages, Unix Power Tools, Practical RDF, Powerbuilder 5 How-To, Developing Asp Components, Dynamic HTML, Dynamic Web Publishing Unleashed, Javascript How-To: The Definitive Javascript Problem-Solver, and Using Perl For Web Programming.

Wow!

How did you get started on a career as a writer? What was your education and background?

A: I’m a late bloomer educationally. I quit high school when I was 15 and joined a religious cult, Children of God. When I came to my senses and left the group, I went from the frying pan to the fire by marrying, at 16, a man who had learning disabilities and resented the fact that I liked to read. We lived in a house in the country and if it weren’t for the fact that the local library would send books out, and allow you to return them in pre-paid envelopes, I would have had very little to read for two years.

. . . Read the full post at BlogHer.

Follow the bouncing icon

Those of you familiar with Mac OS X know that you can set preferences so that icons in the dock bounce up into your line of vision to alert you to incoming mail and such.

I finally realized that I was spending all my time checking on the bouncing icons in my dock at the expense of finishing what I was doing. It wasn’t multi-tasking; it was more like serial distraction. I shut off the damnable bouncing, and all I can say is, “What took me so long?”

Now I can look at mail, or Twitter, or blog posts when I am ready. No more interrupting what I’m doing just to check a piece of mail that I may delete unread anyway.

A lot of very fine articles have been written about how to categorize your work day and only devote set times to certain tasks like email. I’m not trying to recreate that body of advice. I’m just saying, enough already with the bouncing icons.