I upgraded to Tweetdeck 0.3.0 and I was almost immediately looking for an alternative. There are a few reasons for that (the disappearing columns bug, watching it auto-shorten an already short url) but the biggest issue was the change they made to the behavior of the close button. What did they do? Well, with almost every other application on my machine (and all of the trivial ones*), when I click that red X, the application closes. Exits. Stops doing what it’s doing. The ones that don’t (my antivirus software springs to mind) actually need to run all the time. I don’t need Tweetdeck running 24/7. I often need it to just go away (using Fiddler with Tweetdeck running is maddening.) But yet, in Tweetdeck, if you click close, it actually minimizes to the systray.
Continue reading “Why I Dumped Tweetdeck For Brizzly”
HTML5 Demo: Tracking Video Progress With Google Analytics
There’s a back story to this one. I once failed to get video progress tracking working with a Flash video player and Big Expensive Analytics Company™ code. It was a real pain in the ass. We missed the deadline, wasted about 8 hours and eventually just dropped the feature. A frustrating experience for all involved.
With that in mind, then, it should come to no surprise that I returned to the problem when exploring the <video> element and related APIs. What was a fruitless 8 hours of hoping the Big Expensive Analytics Company™ code would “just work,” turned out to be about 30 minutes of light hacking to get it up and running with Google Analytics and HTML5.
By the way, between you and me the Big Expensive Analytics Company™ code never “just works,” even though that kind of feature is one of the reasons they get the big bucks for their product. I don’t really like working with Big Expensive Analytics Company™. I’m much happier with GA. It behaves as expected and is a lot easier to “get” right out of the box.
Anyway, here’s what I did. It’s hack-y, but works:
Continue reading “HTML5 Demo: Tracking Video Progress With Google Analytics”
File Under Cool Tools: Record Page Load Video With WebPageTest
As you could probably guess since Performance is one of the six site categories around here, I’m a fan of WebPageTest. You can imagine my reaction to the news that page load videos are now available from the service.
From Recording video with WebPagetest:
One of the things we like to look at is what a page looks like when it is loading, particularly if you are comparing a before and after or multiple sites to each other. This is particularly helpful when talking to the business about performance and sometimes the raw load times don’t adequately represent the user experience.
Up until now this has been a pretty manual process where we screen record a video while loading a site then load it up into Premiere and stitch it together.
Starting today, you can have WebPagetest record a video of a page load directly. It’s still in a pretty rough form and it’s going to be a while before it’ll be ready for the masses but what is there is already pretty powerful and extremely flexible.
Very cool. I can think of two or three presentations where video of page load would have been super useful and will definitely find a use for the feature in the near future.
HTML5 Notes: My First Time Using the Canvas Element
Quick verdict? It’s fun.
The long verdict (albeit one not base on the work I did here?) The accessibility concerns are valid and will need to be addressed before we end up with a replay of Flash circa 2000. And no one wants that.
Anyway, the example I did do for the demo is actually one of the use cases imagined when the Canvas element was introduced. I took a simple data table and turned it into a simple chart. This is obviously not the most complicated, impressive example of the technology, but it’s an easy one to digest so it’s a perfect way to highlight the technology as part of a 45 minute presentation. Especially since I’ve got to run through another five or six features of the spec.
Anyway, here’s the example.
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As If URL Shorteners Alone Weren’t Bad Enough, Now They’ve Mated With URL Hijacking Frames
The Digg Bar is the most obvious (and noxious) example, but the new trend of URL shorteners coupled with a URL hijacking frame is spreading alarmingly. More and more I’m seeing this odious technique. These things break bookmarks, wreck navigation cues from the URL and are generally sleazy and rude.
And there’s how to beat them. Insert this code in the head of your document and frames will disappear: