Firefox 3.6 Extension Updates

Sunday 03/28/2010  –  Category: Uncategorized  –  No Comments

Sorry for the delay! I've finally gotten around to updating iPhoneSender, Prowler, and Flickr Original to Firefox 3.6.

• iPhoneSender 1.0.4
• Prowler 1.0.2
• Flickr Original 1.0.5

Haml Autocompiler

Wednesday 03/24/2010  –  Category: Uncategorized  –  2 Comments

On a project at work I've been using Compass, a nice stylesheet authoring tool that uses Sass. It has a nice feature that autocompiles all your Sass files to CSS whenever they change.

Since I was using Haml in conjunction with Compass, I thought it would be nice to be able to do the same for my Haml files instead of having to do haml test.haml > test.html every time.

So, here's a simple shell script you can use that will do just that. Just place it in a bin directory in your $PATH and run it in the directory you want to watch.

Good Word – now with definitions!

Friday 03/5/2010  –  Category: Uncategorized  –  2 Comments

Some folks have mentioned that Word With Friends already checks words, so why make Good Word? I created Good Word to scratch an itch: I wanted to quickly make sure a word was valid if it wasn't my turn to play, and if it was my turn to make sure a word was valid before committing. The latest update (available now!) scratches another itch: so I know a word is valid--but what does it mean?

So, I've added a quick definition view to Good Word. It's perfect for those times when you're playing someone who puts down an obscure word and you're asking yourself "what does it mean?!"

I wanted to keep the app clean and simple while fast and functional. After you search for a valid word, the keyboard disappears to reveal the word's definition, keeping everything on one screen. If you prefer not to see the definitions upon checking, there is a toggle in the application settings to turn them off.

As I mentioned before, I'm planning on expanding Good Word to be a more full-featured word training tool by adding features like "save word" so you can quickly review words you want to learn or remember. Stay tuned for more updates! I'm a proponent of the "release early and often" philosophy, so if you guys have any features you'd like to see, let me know.

Last thing: I have more promo codes to give away, so if you're interested please let me know!

Good Word – Words With Friends Word Checker

Thursday 02/25/2010  –  Category: Uncategorized  –  34 Comments

Update: Version 1.1 available, now with definitions!

I'm excited to announce my first personal app in the App Store! Good Word is a quick and simple app to check if a word is valid in Words With Friends.

Good Word uses the Words With Friends dictionary, a modified version of the ENABLE (Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon) word list. I'll be keeping Good Word up to date whenever Word With Friends modifies their dictionary.

I'm planning on making Good Word a more robust word training tool by adding definitions, saved words, etc. Any other suggestions are welcome!

Thanks to Clement for helping design a great icon and UI!

Also...I have a limited number of promo codes to give away...let me know if you'd like one!

Facebook App Development gotchas

Friday 02/19/2010  –  Category: Uncategorized  –  No Comments

While developing a Facebook app earlier this week, I ran into a number of gotchas that make developing for Facebook just a bit more painful:

• If you're developing within an FBML canvas page, you have to adjust your javascript to conform to FBJS. FBJS does a number of things--itwill prepend all your variables and function names with your appid, setting/getting object properties are done through custom methods, you can't create new elements in the DOM, etc. If you need to use heavy javascript, it would be easier to use an iframe-based application.
• If you're developing a tab-based application, it will start in "passive mode" , which means your Flash and javascript won't run until the user interacts with your page. This means you can't use onload javascript methods until a user clicks something. This was very frustrating because some javascript I adapted to FBJS (to create pretty checkboxes) didn't end up working at all.
• Also on a tab-based application, your image assets will be cached by Facebook's image proxy cache. For some reason, the proxy cache was really flaky earlier in the week; it would randomly show some assets but fail to load others and would vary on computer to computer and browser to browser.