I'm off on holiday with my Mrs to Tunisia for a week on Sunday. Have been looking forward to it for a good 2 months so it will be nice to have a break by the pool.

I got my Nexus One back from being repaired and it is well stocked up with audio books and music for the trip. Will be interesting to see how the battery fares when listening to audio books through earphones for a prolonged amount of time, good job I got a spare really haha. By the way, sny Nexus One users who would find a spare battery useful can still buy them over at the HTC accessories store. That's the one I have and it had come in handy on many occasions.

Whilst we're on the subject of Android, download the VR Tunnel live wallpaper. It is awesome, make sure you keep the accelerometer option on for 3D craziness. Also, the new Google Voice Actions for Android 2.2 are pretty cool, though the sending emails/texts, setting alarms, music and 'note to self' functionality seems to be missing from the UK version at the moment :(. Is it that hard to add our accents in??

Get Extended Controls too, should be a native app in my opinion.

Squarespace released an update for HTML Snippets which means I now have Twitter and Facebook share links at the top of each post on this blog - yey! :) If you're reading and you want to share it, give em a click!

Things will probably be pretty quiet on my Twitter whilst I'm away because roaming charges are a wopping £6 a megabyte... so unless the hotel has decent wifi, see you on the other side ;)

Happy Friday,

-Ben

Evening all, some stuff for thee.

Astdroid

Astdroid, the Kickstarter project I posted about before, got its funding together and is going ahead. Danny and I emailed the TWiT network and got it mentioned on This Week in Google which was awesome. You can follow his progress here.

Nexus One

My Nexus One broke :( The power button became really unresponsive to the point where I could barely use it so its off getting repaired at the moment. Kudos to HTC's repair people, was a 5 minute phone call and they picked it up the next day. Getting major withdrawal now though, this sucks.

Android App Inventor

I got access to Android App Inventor today, but alas I have no phone to try it out with... can't wait though. Shouldn't think it will replace real Android development though.

Inception

Go and see Inception. One of the best films I have ever seen, Children of Men is still number one though ;)

That's all I can think of for now, I leave you with some funnies.

-Ben

So I’ve been working as a web programmer full time for 9 months now and I thought I’d do a post on some tips I’ve picked up along the way, you never know, they might come in handy.

1. Markup first, CSS later

I can’t stress this enough, go through your design and code the markup first. Think about the structure as you code and get all your content and images in the HTML document. Then you have the fun part going through and bringing it to life with your CSS. Doing this instead of doing a bit of markup, then styling, then back to markup etc is much, much quicker and it also improves how you think about structuring your layout.

2. Rounded corners

Rounded corners for all browsers takes up far too much time, it is ludicrous. But here’s the thing, in most cases your site really doesn’t look that bad with square corners if a user happens to be viewing it in IE. Most people that appreciate design are using up to date browsers anyway, which is why I use CSS3’s ‘border-radius’ property. Or rather, I use this handy little tool - http://border-radius.com/. Job done.

3. Start with a template

I have a template stylesheet.css and index.html to help me hit the ground running whenever I code a new page, and a tip I picked up from blog.SpoonGraphics.co.uk. In the stylesheet I use a ‘reset’ which overrides any defaults varying browsers may have and lets you start a fresh, getting rid of most of the little “what the hell is causing that!?!?” incidents. Here’s what my template style looks like:

body, div, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, img, img a, a img, form, fieldset, input, blockquote {
    margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0;
}

.container {
    width: 980px;
    margin: 0 auto;
}

4. Think in classes

Whenever you’re coding jQuery, make it into a class with an init function on document load. You never know when you’ll want to reuse code or have more than one instance running on a page, and that little bit of extra time is always so worth it when you come to reuse it.

5. Think inheritance

Inheritance in CSS is one of the biggest time savers there is. Always code top down and think about making flexible classes that promote reuse.

6. Tidy up that code!

When coding HTML, CSS and Java it is so easy to loose structure in your code and wind up with a huge mess. This is fine the first time you code it, but when you come back days later to make changed it will take thrice as long. Tabs are your friend, the deeper you go into parenthesis the further you should tab. Choose a style and stick with it, if you put the leading ‘{‘ on the same line as the class name in CSS then do it every time, as you code more and more the muscle memory will build up and you’ll get quicker and quicker at writing and editing. Also, its ok to put a simple and unimportant CSS style on one line, it will save space and make your code much easier to read.

Well that’s it for now, it may seem like nit-picking but when you’re writing code all day long the seconds you shave off really do add up.

Happy coding!

-Ben

Hi all,

I've decided I'm going to post more short posts about noteworthy things I find online rather than save them up for a big post that I don't find time to write and that I forget eventually.

Danny Pier came up with an idea to send an Android phone into space with a helium balloon, which will then take photos and come back to earth. Sounds awesome right? Right, so lets help him out! I've pledged $10, I hope you will pledge at least $5 too, click here to do so :D

More info:

• An Android smarthphone will be attached to a weather balloon filled with helium and set free


• An App running will be taking pictures and video and sending back location information, enabling tracking of the craft


• The balloon will burst at its maximum altitude and a recovery parachute will bring it safely back to earth


• Using the tracking information, we will recover the phone and retrieve pictures and video from its flight

-Ben

Hi guys, I am writing a much longer Blog post that I'll put up soon, I realise its been far too long.

However...

Resolution Test just got mentioned on the Google Code Blog!!! :D

Sorry, just had to write something about it, I'm ecstatic!

It has 21,659 users at time of writing, its got way bigger than I could have imagined, and now this! Wow.

Will post again soon,

-Ben