Mac OS X has featured a dashboard for a long time. It was introduced in Mac OS X 'Tiger' (version 10.4) and since Mac OS X Lion (10.7) it has received barely any attention from the developers.
Dashboard still has yet to change
But now since Lion it has had absolutely no updates. It still looks like something from pre-Yosemite with it's skeuomorphic icons and it just doesn't fit into OS X. I love the dashboard in OS X, but it looks close to it's end.
I don't often post now about updating my website but as this is the first real change to my website since I designed the HTML structure of the page in November 2012 in version 2.0 of my website I am putting it up so I can remember this day.
You may know that my website is built with a structure that keeps the content and sidebar separate. This structure has followed the following pattern (each of these are IDs to divs on the page):
html > body > #container > #page > #main_content > #textZone > article > *
Where the * represents all of the content of the page. Now I have decided to drop #textZone and #main_content is now just #content:
html > body > #container > #page > #content > article > *
This shorter name reduces the size of the CSS file by ~120 bytes and reduces the JavaScript file by ~100 bytes. It also reduces the number of elements on the display.
After serving power (and heat) for 46 years, Cockenzie power station came to the end of it's service life as coal fired power station on the 15th of March 2013 at 8.30am. Since then, the people of East Lothian have been awaiting it's demolition and today on Saturday the 26th of September 2015, the landmark chimney stacks finally came down.
But it was not to everyone's liking. I personally miss it already. It was someone's architectural idea and some team's work in building it.
In my eyes though, because of my concern for the environment, the closure was a wonderful thing.
I'd have liked the towers to have remained as a monument but that was never going to happen.
It's also sad that I really wanted to tour the power station before it went but it is long too late now!
Below is my YouTube video of the chimney stacks and turbine hall coming down:
Today my tutorials have finally become recognised! An online company known as Udemy sent me this email:
Hi Jamie,
I was doing some research for our students here at Udemy on people using PHP resources and when I came across your site, saw you were using the tutorial from w3schools.
We really like your resource, and actually created our own that we think is a perfect supplement! This PHP tutorial is text-and image-based, easy to search for quick answers, and super helpful for anyone: as a base for learning or as a reference guide.
Do you think this would be a helpful resource? If so, please use it on your site. I'd love to see more people learning PHP!
Thanks so much,
Tiffany
This makes me feel so proud of what I have achieved with my website and will go on my list of recommendations!
I am just reposting this article.
In this post I am going to talk very quickly about what is new to JBBar and what it offers. Bear in mind JBBar was designed with my own requirements at the forefront which include a dark mode, floating 'orb' icon, a search box and the ability to flip between fixed mode and non-fixed mode (and of course to be responsive, essential of any menu these days).
JBBar has at the very core the intention of being a lightweight, easy to use menu that is open for future development and expansion. The aim of the menu is to create a flexible menu that takes little or no real room on the host server and takes no time to download to the client's computer.
Although in appearance this menu is identical to the menu used before (jQuery SmartMenus), it is an entirely new menu. The menu I had before appeared the same way due to make a lot of modifications to the design, most of which inspired JBBar. These core design concepts paved the way to the creation of this menu - too much modification of another menu is counter productive when an update comes out that fixes vulnerabilities or core flaws.
One of the key things missing from the other menu used was the search box. JBBar does not include a search box but provides a wrapper so that you may choose your own search box.
The next core concept that I have kept is my floating orb idea. I have integrated this much more deeply into the menu which should help improve compatibility with older browsers as well.
I also mentioned dark mode. This was a key feature I wanted in JBBar. Now it is deeply integrated as a core feature.
There are plans to bring div dropdowns as well as the possibility of a right-hand side menu and I am considering options such as instead of using the dropdown menu in mobile using a slide out menu (there will be a quick option to toggle between left hand slide out menu and top drop down).
As you may already know, I have been working on a new project which is known (currently, maybe not forever) as JBBar. JBBar is a lightweight menu for websites that you will find across my website (look up at the top of the page). It is designed to be flexible in that it will work on a mobile device as well as on a desktop device. A lot of time went into this menu before I officially released it to my own personal website as a non-development stage menu.
A lot of time was spent getting round a major flaw in devices of today. I talk specifically about interaction. It is of course somewhat obvious that touch devices work differently to those which include pointer devices, and currently JavaScript is not quite ready enough to detect these differences. The resolution is somewhat annoyingly fiddled together.
The issue arises because touch devices register a hover event as an event despite tablets not really featuring hover. Thankfully, they also register click events. Of course, on a desktop browser, you want to hover over items to show them when in the full-sized menu but when it scales down you really want to have to click on items (if you are on a desktop browser, take a look and see what I mean by scaling the page).
Here's the issue: click and touch register at the same time (sometimes even twice each) on touch devices. To fix this, there is a very slight delay then a variable is set to say the event has been fired and not to fire again. This then causes problems on desktop (a viable 'hack' would not be to use user agent sniffing - it's ugly). The issue resolves itself however, I do not need to register hover events on screen sizes that use the mobile menu (900 pixels or less) and only want to see click events.
There you go. Done.
If you interested in a free, open source, very lightweight menu for your own projects or websites, feel free to read more about it from here.
I am very happy to say that as of today I have released to DevNet my new JBBar, a lightweight and flexible menu that is responsive and flexible. It works on all tested devices currently including touch and click devices.
It is now available as a jQuery plugin too, so feel free to download and try it yourself. Instructions can be found on DevNet as to how to do this.
I am very, very happy to announce a new menu on my website! This is the fifth new menu on my website and this one is absolutely here to stay!
The reason I know this one is staying is because I made it - meet JBBar.
As part of my Neutral Web controls I decided to create a menu that is responsive and looks similar to my previous one.
I previously used jQuery SmartMenus, which gave me inspiration for my own menu. The theme is designed to look suitable for BootStrap but also to give maximum flexibility.
The source is written in JavaScript and SCSS, so it's easy to modify. In comparison to SmartMenus, my menu is so lightweight that it barely makes a difference including it - just 272 lines of code in the SCSS file at the time of writing this post.
In order for me to get SmartMenus to work on my website the way I wanted, I had to do a lot of alteration to the code. I also had to use the BootStrap theme and cut it down as much as possible to make it work as I needed it to. My menu is so simple that it just gives the basic JavaScript functionalities and the core of what is needed. It's also miles easier to update and tailored to how I want it.
You probably will not notice any difference in the design. The differences are so subtle that perhaps the change was only necessary for back-end reasons and not for front-end aesthetics.
There is still a lot needing done on the menu, but the general front-end functionality is done. You will notice it is now available across the whole website.
I also have added a new section to my menu called Projects. This section currently redirects you to the appropriate pages on my website but soon will be a dedicated section again, specifically for projects that are current or completed.
The SmartMenus menu I used before
The new menu called JBBar that I have created myself
This year, Apple's September event was, in a word, mediocre.
For those that did not see the event or know much about it, you can read more in the previous post on my blog.
The majority of the event focus on iPad. The new iPad Pro that Apple launched is 'the biggest thing to happen to iPad', literally. The iPad Pro is a 12.9 inch iPad (as predicted) which also has a new Smart Connector to connect a specific external keyboard. It also comes with a digitizer known as the Apple Pencil. The Pro is designed with business folks in mind.
The other major announcement was the iPhone 6s. Again, this was pretty much predicted down to the last feature. As expected, it supports 4K video recording and has a 12MP camera. The other new feature that was added was Live Photos, which are basically small video recordings take with photos and attached to them. This will work with El Capitan and iOS 9 and hopefully other devices in the future so that we can relive those photographic moments. As someone who takes a lot of photographs and loves to make memories, I really like this idea. The 6s also features faster Touch ID and more, but these features were pretty minor in the grand scale.
Apple also announced the next generation of Apple TV. This model brings solid state storage to the device and a remote control with both motion sensors and a microphone. Personally, this was the biggest announcement of the day. The storage is included so that app from a new dedicated Apple TV App Store can be installed.
There was no mention of Macs, but there you go.
