15th January 2014
Every day we spend time, most of the time I do something useful, but I spend hours doing “nothing” in school and on the bus. This blog looks pretty ugly right now, I it is not prioritized. I have tons of projects and I’m working on several open source projects… Today during the art class we were introduced to our next task, an image or something else that could represent you…
This blog represents me, and it’s in need of a redesign, so I did ask my teacher if I was allowed to work with vector graphic, typefaces and pictures. It took a minute to convince him but now I have one hour in three weeks to create my new landing page… It won’t take all that time so will have time to add some features to(or do some homeworks). So if this blog looks the same in three weeks it will hurt my grades ;-)
On friday I’m free from school so the tools for Facile will be available then and I will probably push App Ground 1.3.0 to the developer branch.
11th January 2014
When I took the development of facile Framework public, I was using it as a component when building websites and apps. I did never use the entire framework for a site or more than one color swatch. The major difference between Facile and other front end frameworks such as Twitter Bootstrap or Foundation was that Facile was no front end framework, it was a CSS framework and nothing more…
Before I go into the changes I have made to Facile, think if Bootstrap would have ten color swatches by default for every component? No there is no need for it.
Facile have many plugins for things like Google Maps, Youtube… they all have support for the color swatches.
Nowadays Facile framework is no longer a CSS framework it’s a CSS prototyping framework. Tons of components, ten color swatches and a couple of plugins. I can easily create a nice looking website in ten minutes with with Facile it won’t have great browser support but still…
In the coming week I will and the sub folder “Tools” to the master repo there you will see a tool that allows you to create custom color swatches, more tools will follow. The source written in LESS will be published when I have the time to write the documentation for it. The major addons will be available through the repo in the coming weeks.
For now I have replaced the existing grid system and dropped Normalize in favor of a custom solution.
I got a week of in about five weeks from now, maybe a stable version is meant to be available then? :-)
30th December 2013
Just some days ago a friend wrote to me about a 404 request in Internet Explorer 11 when he was pinning a app to the start screen on Windows 8.1. The app was built with App Ground…
In IE 10 on Windows 8 App Ground did handle pinning using the “msapplication” meta tags. See this.
That was how I dealt with it in App Ground until I looked into this 404 request, When clicking “pin site” in Windows 8.1 the meta tags was used, but at the same time IE sent a request after browserconfig.xml. I search for it and found a issue over at HTML5boilerplates repo. The browserconfig.xml is a replacement for the meta tags, it’s not backwards compatible… The browserconfig.xml would save bandwidth for the user, because no meta tags is required(if browserconfig.xml is not located in your root you will still need a metatag) and its only loaded when a user actually pins a site.
For best result you would need four different images, that means four meta tags in IE 10(App Ground was just having one) but still none in IE 11. I decided to drop support for pinned sites in IE 10 and only support IE 11. Now App Ground is using all four images and saves some bandwidth.
Example use of browserconfig.xml can be seen in App Ground 1.2.1.
All my sources:
PS App Ground is not meant to have great browser support… DS
28th December 2013
I have many projects going on, some open source some not, some active some inactive, but I would like to share them with you. Have your thoughts on them and write about my workflow.
I have always something to achieve when I start a project, most of the time it’s about creating something I will use, App Ground I use all the time, parts of Facile Framework I use in nearly all my projects. But more often it’s about learning something new, at least two off my current ones is about just that. Trying to learn PHP(again, we didn’t end up as friends first time) my workflow has changed, before I wrote the tasks on my weekly to do list together with stuff like “English homework” and “cleaning my bike”, I dropped that system for bugs and features…
Now when I started a big backend/frontend project, came up with another list system, It’s based on one thing. I get all the good ideas about features and solutions when I’m away from a computer, so I write it down is some random document on my phone, until now. Now I give every project a folder in Evernote and a note, then I list all bugs and new features by priority. So the first things on the list is bugs, then there are features, and at the bottom on the list there’s things that I think ”This I may do this year or the next one” about… Now using this system I ended up having projects with nearly no bugs if any and the projects was finished in the way that I could use them early on. For bigger tasks I create a new note and split it up into smaller tasks.
To the projects then…
App Ground
App Ground is the project I have written most about, it’s not because it’s my biggest one(it’s quite small) it’s because it’s a project that I use and it does not take time from me. It saves time. I will probably release a update tomorrow(damm today it seems like now). Some reports of a 404 request on IE11 when pinning a site in Windows 8.1.
Facile Framework
This has been inactive time to time but still I hopes that I will be available to deliver a stable version. My own CSS framework, not a frontend framework as Bootstrap or Foundation. Did just earlier designed a new grid system that’s will be a bit more flexible than the existing ones.
Abbes Board
This is a project that many of you have seen live, my startpage for web browsing, as the development on version one ended a while ago I’m planning to release it as open source when I have time to do some “code cleaning”. Version one did only had sync if the extension was installed(it was only available of Opera 15+). I have never meant to make Board a stable application, somethings works in only Firefox, some things only in Chrome and so on. It’s just my starting point when I using a web browser. In version two I did some work with the Dropbox datastore API it was still in beta back then. The project died because the API was still buggy and I did lots of mailing to the developers, they fixed the bugs but I felt it wasn’t worth it.
Workout diary
This got no name yet. This is the big project that changed the way I listed my tasks. From the beginning it was all about replace my old C# workout log and learn more PHP, but now it’s not only logging my workouts it also produces statics from the data and it can handle tons of users. I have also done some work frontend I’m proud of. This isn’t open source and it won’t be, but parts of it will! I would like to make this app available to some users later on. To learn how to run a service and see what it takes and what I can improve. For now I need to spend my money carefully so look into the feature for this project(and in any case it will only be for swedish users)…
Then of course I have this blog and some other projects. Overall this christmas holidays is going to an end and I will spend the last days of it in southern Sweden with friends…