This is a very interesting read on why Apple's M1 chip is so powerful.
Today is a major leap in the history of Apple Silicon! Microsoft Office apps are now fully optimised for the Apple M1 based Macs!
Running them is a breeze and they start instantly - even shorter a wait than I had before. This native support will not only improve performance but also improve battery life whilst they are being used.
This is a monumental step forward for Apple Silicon.
Visual Voicemail is now available on the Vodafone phone network on iPhones. Yesterday when I was about to press the Phone Voicemail button I have grown used to I realised I had something different. This is the first time I have had Visual Voicemail since my original iPhone back in 2009 with the O2 network.
After a long time of a very square/rectangular look to my website, I have brought back subtle curves here and there across the website. These curves are designed to make things like buttons more obvious as well as add to separation. There has been a lot of exploration around what suits it and what doesn't but I think the changes I have made are very clean and follow design techniques of today.
For example, input boxes and windows now have curves. You may have also noticed that I have introduced a new quick alert to the site as well as the newest version of BalfPick.
I'm aiming to make my design a combination of curved buttons and elements built on a flat design and think I've done it well so far.
I have finally redesigned BalfPick from the ground up for the second iteration. This version is completely different and relies on much less JavaScript and does more using CSS. It's much higher performance, better on mobile devices with touch and much lighter in weight too.
Part of the new design focuses on streamlining the manner in which it is used and instead of providing a custom dropdown list it simply uses the original dropdown list built-in to the browser or operating system.
Below is how these new dropdowns look on my website in dark mode.
As someone who loves computer hardware, I found this article a very interesting reminder of the benefits of RISC over CISC and the benefits of CISC over RISC architectures.
https://medium.com/swlh/what-does-risc-and-cisc-mean-in-2020-7b4d42c9a9de
It is at long last that Apple has announced its own silicon will be used in the next range of Macs. The Apple M1 was announced today as Apple's first in the line of successor CPUs to the Intel range they've used since 2006 (I still remember the day back then and I wrote a little article in Microsoft Word so I could remember the day).
As a result, I of course had to be one of the first owners of these new machines so I ordered it straight away. This new MacBook I've ordered comes in the form of a MacBook Pro (though I was very tempted by the Mini as well) to replace my 2013 MacBook Pro 15". I wanted a 13" again this time since I wanted the portability again.
I am really looking forward to reviewing this machine and hope that it is everything I had hoped for!
He was the first James Bond and an amazing actor. Sean Connery set the standard for what James Bond was and is. As Bond, he was tough, brutal and yet a hit with the ladies - everything Bond should be.
Much like Roger Moore who passed away a few years back, Connery had his own style that brought something amazing to Bond. I cannot actually believe he's no longer with us. I will certainly miss him.
ZPE 1.8.11 is now available and is another small update in terms of the number of features but big in what the new features bring.
The first big new feature is support for infinite parameters. This is done within the definition with the double dot notation such as function x($y, $z ..). There is more in the documentation.
Reference functions have been completely redesigned, as have objects. With objects, there is a 2x performance increase whilst with reference functions, there is a much larger performance increase as well as a stability improvement. Reference functions can now be chained to each other much easier and this change requires much less code to do it.
Long, long ago (maybe some 8 or 9 years ago) I was still a desktop software developer and a totally newbie to web development. I then came across a little something called clearfix. I saw how overly used clearfix was back then - almost every website used an absurd abundance of these little divs with the clearfix class on them.
But what was it and why is it so important that a mammoth number of websites out there featured it and is it still a thing?
First off I'll answer the latter question first, yes it's still a thing.
Secondly, clearfix is designed to stop elements with a float property floating over a block element:
In this case, the footer is a block element and the picture of the motherboard is a floating element. Notice how it overlaps the footer.
To fix this, the footer is given the clear: both property.
Clearfix
So then you ask, what is clearfix?
Clearfix is, in a nutshell, a simple fix that stops things flowing without having to add clear: both to the following element. By taking advantage of CSS's pseudoselector :after, we can easily force any floating elements to be followed by an element with the clear property set correctly, we can stop the floating element floating over the element that follows it.
Do we still need it?
The answer to this is actually yes, for the most part. You see, backward compatibility will always be an issue that needs attention but also because the replacement isn't even all that great as of yet.
Normally, frameworks such as Girder, Bootstrap or Foundation will deal with the annoyingness of clearfix for you by adding it to classes such as the row (in Girder/Bootstrap) for you. So when you create two columns with the float property you wrap them in a row which features clearfix properties and stops the next content flying over the floating columns.
So clearfix is here to stay.
