In a new patent filed in the US, Apple has recognised one of the biggest flaws with touchscreen devices: the lack of any tactile feedback. The fact that a user cannot “feel” the keys or icons on a touch-sensitive screen leads to a lot of one-handed users – especially ones who travel or drive a lot – opting for non-touch handsets.
So Apple is finally exploring an idea that a lot of people hoped it would have done sooner: haptic feedback. The idea is to let the user operate the screen purely by feel, without once looking at it.
To do this, the Cupertino-based electronics giant is planning to include a grid of piezoelectric actuators that can be activated on command.
Here’s an example to illustrate what they mean by this: Suppose you want to use the iPod functionality of the iPhone. You go over to the application, and you find yourself with a virtual representation of the familiar click-wheel.
But the moment you touch the wheel, the centre button and the wheel around it feel distinctly different. You touch the ‘back’ button at the top of the screen and you get another feeling of touching a button – all on a touchscreen!
The eventual applications for a technology like this are limitless. Apple is just looking at the tip of the iceberg when they say they want this for commuters. The device would be perfect for gamers, office users and such other crowds who depend on physical keyboards because they never had anything close to such tactile feedback on a machine.
And just when you thought that the iPhone 3GS was Apple hitting a ceiling in innovation regarding the world’s favourite phone.
You will see that many sites add a digg button within their post content. Some new users simply open single.php and add the digg script which will cause a digg button to show on all blog posts. But what if you want to display digg button on only specific posts? You can add it manually on each post when writing a post, but that is not the most efficient way. In this article we will show you, how you can add a digg button on specific posts by simply using Custom fields.
First open your single.php and find a code that looks like this: Read more…
By default, WordPress allows certain HTML tags within the comments such as <a> <em> <strong> etc. If you notice a lot of SPAM comments also contain these tags. Most SPAM comments are made by bots and scripts, which are using HTML tags. If you simply disable HTML from your WordPress comments, it can prevent a lot of SPAM. In this tutorial we will show you how you can disable HTML tags in your WordPress comments.
This tutorial will only disable active HTML tags. So someone can still post something like: Read more…
In this collection, you’ll find 10 excellent, high-quality, free beautiful WordPress themes. These themes range from being elaborate and colorful to being clean and simple so that you may find one that suits your design tastes.
Note: Be sure to check out the license of the theme for restrictions in usage (if any) and it’s always good (and very much appreciated) to attribute the designer even if they don’t explicitly ask you to. Read more…
Within the code in the previous section, I mainly created a simple text box and a button. The textbox is named “txtContent” and the button is named “ButtonShowMsg.” The button is defined with an “onclick” event which calls a JavaScript function “ButtonShowMsg_onclick,” which is defined as follows: Read more…
Recently i created JavaScript application which tests user connection speed, in fact it measures connection speed between user and my server, but that aside, i decided to share with you mechanics and technology i used to create this tool, maybe some of you guys will find this helpful. Also i want to promote interesting small AJAX framework 
.
Before we start, you need to have basic idea of what AJAX is, if you need to you can read my Introduction to AJAX post. Also, this time instead of creating all functions by myself i used advAJAX, it is lite (only 15kB) and very easy to use AJAX framework, created by Polish web developer who goes by the name Anakin. You can download it here. Full english documentation can be found here. Read more…
Let me explain why i selected such title. When writing AJAX scripts there is a part of code that always have to be included, it is pretty much like DOCTYPE in html, you do not have to understand it, just copy and paste, more over our code will be a function which takes no parameters and only returns one as XMLHttpRequest. If you do not know what this object is suggest you reading my introduction to AJAX web development.
Creating AJAX Object
Like i said you do not need to know what this function will do but anyway i will explain it shortly. This function is needed because Microsof Internet Explorer has it’s own idea of how AJAX in browsers should be initialized, in fact other browsers do not require to initialize AJAX XMLHttpRequest class at all, while IE want it to be initialized as ActiveX object. Fortunately this is the only difference between AJAX scripts for Internet Explorer and any other web browser which supports JavaScript. Read more…
Ajax is quite new web development technology, it became quickly very popular, but still a lot of people do not know what it is and how to make a use of it. In this short article i want to present you my views on it, especially when to use Ajax, because often people use this powerful technology in wrong way which may hurt your SERP rankings.
Are you one of this people? Read on to find out.
To understand when to use Ajax, obviously first we need to know what it is and what it does. Ajax is acronym of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, this name may be confusing because we can use Ajax without XML, so i guess XML means here only some kind of markup language to describe processed data by JavaScript, not necessary XML data that we know it can be HTML code as well. Read more…
Few days ago Mozilla launched special site where you can find special FireFox addons. Special because they were written in JetPack. It’s a new technology that allows to write FireFox extensions not only in XUL, but in HTML, CSS and AJAX.
What is more important is that JetPack allows to use third party JavaScript libraries in your project, so developers can get full advantage of jQuery, Dojo, Google Maps and many other great JavaScript libraries.
Next grat future that developers will find very useful is that new JetPack addons can be debugged using FireBug, without restartin web browser, that is not the case for XUL based extension. Read more…
Wordpress blogs are getting more popular then ever, there are literally hundreds of new weblogs popping up everyday. However WordPress is not a new software, so I think it is about time to learn how to create decent plugins for it, and once you learn how to write plugins you will discover that this is not only fun but can be very profitable as well.
I want to show you how to write very simple WordPress (WP) plugin. General purpose behind every plugin is to enhance WP possibilities in some way or another, so I started to think: what kind of plugin will contain no more then 100 lines of code, (so someone who is new to WordPress API won’t get lost in tons of code) and will be somewhat useful at the same time. Read more…
