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Responsive Design and Mobility Tools

September 26th, 2012

Recently while viewing the Pluralsight course Single Page Apps with HTML5, Web API, Knockout and jQuery I came across three handy tools for testing web sites in different mobile browsers.  Each tool works slightly differently but all serve the same general purpose, helping web developers (like me) quickly get an indication of how their responsive site will look on the most popular devices.

What is responsive design?

It means designing your website to adapt to the user’s viewing environment (mobile, tablet, laptop etc.). It does this through the use of media queries, and other clever technology.Ethan Marcotte wrote the original article about it, and a pretty handy book.

The tools

The Responsinator

A free web based tool made by Tama Pugsley and Andy Hovey.  You can use it from their site directly or via a bookmarklet they provide.  Provides simulations for the following devices:

Electric Plum

These guys offer various commercial Windows-friendly iOS simulation tools.  Their products are available for a 7 day free trial and are $39.99 for the full suite, which is very fair if you ask me. The Mobile Studio 2012 features Visual Studio 2012 integration, Multi Instance iPhone and iPad simulation, integrated debugging tools, HTML5 feature control and more.  Definitely work checking out the free trial if you want to focus on iOS testing of your mobile apps!

Responsive Design Bookmarklet

This is a simply yet handy tool for responsive design testing.  You drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar and then you get a handy toolbar at the top of the target page providing you with the ability to choose between various mobile resolutions, toggle on/off a fake keyboard and more.  This is definitely the most basic of the three utilities but is definitely a good addition for quickly doing spot checking of a page at a certain resolution.

Summary

These three tools will definitely be in my toolbox for any mobile sites I work on in the future.  Given that 69% percent access the internet daily from a mobile device, you really should be considering these tools with public facing site you build these days!  What tools do you use to test your websites for different mobile devices?

 

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Posted in Android, iPad, iPhone, mobile, programming, web

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Juice UI: Open source ASP.NET Web Forms components for jQuery UI widgets

February 29th, 2012

Here’s a helpful resource for anybody using ASP.NET Web Forms and jQuery UI.  In this blog post, Jon Galloway highlights JuiceUI, a new open source project from the folks over at appendTo which brings easy server side support for jQuery UI controls to your ASP.NET Webforms applications.

I definitely plan on checking out Juice UI the next time I have a need!

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Posted in .net, jQuery, programming

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Web applications are now helping you ditch your mouse!

February 2nd, 2012

Being a heavy keyboard only user in many instances and having written desktop applications that focus heavily on keyboard tab order, hot keys, etc., I really enjoyed reading Scott Hansleman’s latest blog post about the web being the new terminal and how many web applications now are building in support for keyboard shortcuts and hot keys.  I definitely see this being a trend that will continue to gain popularity, enabling people to be much more efficient while using web applications that are part of their daily lives (like Gmail).

Take for example all of the keyboard shortcuts that you could be using today in Gmail while reading your mail.

I’ve known about a few of these and have tinkered with them in the past.  Seeing just how much you can do with it and having spent a little more time on it recently, I am definitely going to make an effort to use the keyboard as much as possible from now on in Gmail.

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Posted in programming, software

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Using HTML5 Web Storage in ASP.NET

January 25th, 2012

This article does a great job at showing you a simple example of how to use local browser web storage in conjunction with ASP.NET web methods to save and retrieve the data from a server side database.  Even if you aren’t interested in using this functionality in an application you have now, it’s worth reading to know what HTML5 brings to the table as far as storing your data down at the client.

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Posted in .net, HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, programming, sql server, WCF

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Get the root part of a domain in .NET

September 16th, 2011

Need to get the .com, .us, .biz, etc. part of the domain name in .NET?

Here’s how:

Dim root As String
root = Right(Request.Url.Host, (Request.Url.Host.Length) - InStrRev(Request.Url.Host, "."))

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Posted in .net, programming

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Visual Studio 2010 Code Metrics Viewer

June 29th, 2011

What is Code Metrics Viewer? – Matthias Friedrich highlights his Visual Studio 2010 Code Metrics Viewer extension which plugs into VS 2010 Professional and uses the Code Metrics Power Tool to provide code metrics information to the IDE. Matthias is blogging a number of posts on this project blog which look at the various features of the viewer and I encourage you to check those other posts out too.

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Posted in .net, programming, software

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Ajax-based data loading using jQuery in ASP.NET

June 28th, 2011

Great article to check out!

Ajax-based data loading using jQuery.load() function in ASP.NET – Hajan Selmani takes a back to basics look at using jQuery to load partial chunks of HTML from a page using Ajax and insert them into the current page, providing a nice way of lighting up a web application with an ‘Ajax’ feel whilst easily maintaining non-ajax support.

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Posted in .net, jQuery, programming

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The Microsoft Kinect SDK has arrived!

June 17th, 2011

The official Microsoft Kinect SDK beta is now out and available for download! Covered by Channel Nine Live Media, Microsoft Scientist Anoop Gupta made the announcement himself that after the long wait, users may now go to the official SDK website to download the latest software development kit for the Kinect camera.

Here are the features that will come with the Kinect SDK (taken from Microsoft SDK website):

“The Kinect for Windows SDK beta is a programming toolkit for application developers. It enables the academic and enthusiast communities easy access to the capabilities offered by the Microsoft Kinect device connected to computers running the Windows 7 operating system.

The Kinect for Windows SDK beta includes drivers, rich APIs for raw sensor streams and human motion tracking, installation documents, and resource materials. It provides Kinect capabilities to developers who build applications with C++, C#, or Visual Basic by using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

Raw sensor streams

Access to raw data streams from the depth sensor, color camera sensor, and four-element microphone array enables developers to build upon the low-level streams that are generated by the Kinect sensor.

Skeletal tracking

The capability to track the skeleton image of one or two people moving within the Kinect field of view make it easy to create gesture-driven applications.

Advanced audio capabilities

Audio processing capabilities include sophisticated acoustic noise suppression and echo cancellation, beam formation to identify the current sound source, and integration with the Windows speech recognition API.

Sample code and documentation

The SDK includes more than 100 pages of technical documentation. In addition to built-in help files, the documentation includes detailed walkthroughs for most samples provided with the SDK.

Easy installation

The SDK installs quickly, requires no complex configuration, and the complete installer size is less than 100 MB. Developers can get up and running in just a few minutes with a standard standalone Kinect sensor unit (widely available at retail outlets).

This SDK is designed for non-commercial purposes only; a commercial version is expected to be available at a later date.”

Additional details about the SDK is that it is currently in beta, meaning it is not yet the actual finished product. Rather, Microsoft wants the opinion of the Kinect hackers/developers in finalizing the product. By keeping it in beta, Microsoft will then ask users to give their feedback concerning the SDK with the eventual hope of releaseing a Kinect SDK built for and with Kinect hackers.

There is also a commercial version coming out. Details are not yet final as to what the difference would be between the two versions of the Kinect.

Source: kinecthacks.com

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Posted in .net, gadgets, programming

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Visual Studio 2010 Web Standards Update adds HTML5 and CSS3 support

June 16th, 2011

Yay!! Microsoft has released a Web Standards Update for Visual Studio 2010 that adds full support for HTML5, CSS3 and new Javascript features like Geolocation and local storage.  Scott Hanselman has a good write-up on this update in this blog post.  There you can see some more detail about what exactly it brings to the VS.NET IDE, etc.  Or, if you want to skip all that and go right to the download, you can get it here.  At this point in time the HTML5 standard is still evolving. Taking that into consideration, Microsoft plans to provide additional updates every quarter or so to keep up with new features, changes to the draft, etc.

By the way, if you still aren’t familiar with all of the cool things that HTML5 brings to the table you should definitely check out this free online book, Dive Into HTML5, by Mark Pilgrim.

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Posted in HTML, JavaScript, programming, software

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Tutorial for getting started with ASP.NET, WCF and jQuery

June 15th, 2011

I have been doing some work lately with jQuery, WCF, HTML5 and ASP.NET and it’s been actually pretty fun challenging and fun. I’ve gotten to tinker with quite a few new technologies that I hadn’t used before and really got to sink my teeth into jQuery and some of the cool new features that HTML5 has to offer (like local storage and offline capabilities).

When starting out with my recent project I had to pull from various resources to learn what these tools were capable of and how I could fit them all together. And while it doesn’t get into the HTML5 aspects of my project this article on creating a simple task list with ASP.NET, WCF and jQuery would have been very helpful to me in the beginning.

While the article is only Part 1 in a series, I think it will get you going in the right direction and will show you some of the power that you have on the client with the new jQuery data templates.  I must say that with the introduction of these templates you can truly offload a large amount of your logic down to the client which will provide for a much better (and faster) user experience.

Anyway, check out the article.  It’s short, to the point and offers the source code as a download too!

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Posted in .net, JavaScript, jQuery, programming, sql server, WCF

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