August 27, 2009
Seven iPhone Development Rules of Thumb
I've been an Apple developer since it was called NeXT and found the following rules of thumb helpful when introducing new people to Apple development. 1. Read the introductory documentation. Build a simple application. Read the documentation again. The Apple development environment is very different from other application development environments. There is going to be some ramp up time. This isn't like learning .NET after you learned Java. Expect to throw away your first couple of applications. 2. Don't buck the system. This is a general theme in the Apple world. If you do things the Apple way, life is pretty easy. If you try to do things the MFC/.NET/Java way... it will be very hard. Apple heavily uses the...read more
Categories: Web/Tech
July 6, 2009
Beyond Pathauto
The Pathauto module is the Drupal supplied solution to automatically create URL aliases based on the title of a node. You can adjust this in the Pathauto configuration following some basic patterns, but sometimes this is not enough. Drupal has another mechanism with which you can create custom URL’s for each node. One just has to edit the node, find the “URL path settings” fieldset, and add an alias to that node. If you have a website that publishes a lot of content, doing this manually will become tedious, error prone, and even impractical. We had a requirement on a recent project where there were Drupal nodes that had to be accessible from a URL that was not possible to...read more
Categories: Web/Tech
June 17, 2009
Drupal: Easing Content Type Proliferation
In this blog post we will show you how to allow content editors to edit similar but different "pages" in Drupal, all based on a shared content type without confusion, by hiding the unnecessary form elements. There can be times when you wish to create several similar content types that only differ slightly from one another (perhaps by a field or two). Let’s take a website that posts environmental warnings on different types of pollution as an example. The site could report air pollution, water pollution and ground pollution warnings. One option is to create 3 separate content types, one for each type of pollution. Air pollution may have an air quality index field, while ground pollution may have a...read more
Categories: Web/Tech
June 4, 2009
Canada 3.0 - Defining Canada's Digital Future
A few months ago at Communitech's Techworking breakfast, I had the opportunity to see Tom Jenkins, Executive Chairman, and CSO of Open Text share a little about Open Text's Enterprise Content Management Solutions, and how they are working with clients to manage their digital assets. Jenkins also discussed the Canada 3.0 Forum that will be held in Stratford, Ontario on June 8th & 9th. My initial reaction was "3.0? Really?". Many are still trying to figure out 2.0 as others have moved on and begun to argue 3.0... Is 3.0 the semantic web, a mobile web, or digital media? While others argue that technology is moving so quickly right now it is impossible to wrap up in a tidy little...read more
Categories: Conferences, Events and Associations , Film , Games , Music , Sports , Web/Tech
May 28, 2009
A Wrap on Communitech's Tech Leadership Conference
This past Thursday, Pat and I attended Communitech's Tech Leadership Conference, where we were a Silver Sponsor, and came away with a lot of great ideas. Jeremy Gutsche, founder of Trendhunter started the day with a very entertaining talk on innovation. Some key points were have a methodology on how you innovate - break out your steps. I would add that not only is it important to do this, but ensure that your team can talk about your methodology with people outside your company. Seth Godin focused on the concept of ideas that spread win. It makes me wonder if too many companies and individuals are complicating things by trying to be all things to all people. This idea was...read more
Categories: Conferences, Events and Associations