I recently got into the beta of BumpTop – You may have heard about it: it’s a replacement for your Windows desktop. BumpTop lets you use “real” actions such as tossing items around the desk, creating piles of items and such. Their site claims that BumpTop is “a fresh and engaging new way to interact with your computer desktop”… So …
Browser as an OS
It seems as if the browser is becoming easier to understand than other applications for people who don’t know much about computers in general. For example, if an application has a settings dialog and you ask the user to go back or close the dialog, they aren’t always sure what to do – should they press Cancel, OK or the …
Windows 7
I got a chance to play with Windows 7 earlier this week. In case you haven’t heard, Windows 7 is the next OS from Microsoft, following in Vista’s footsteps quite literally – it’s based on Vista, and it looks almost exactly like it. I’ve skipped Vista myself. I’ve heard so many bad stories about it, and never got around to …
Mix PHP and namespaces, get weirdness
In an interesting decision, the PHP devs have decided to use a backslash, \, as the namespace separator. This is a bit… curious.. choice of a character. They apparently had a long discussion about their choices, but really, couldn’t they just have used ::, as the manual showed for a while? It’s starting to feel like the fact that PHP …
Handling different page types in a CMS
I’ve often been asked whether my CMS is public, whether the code is available, etc. – the answer at the moment is no, but information about it is public… so for your reading pleasure, here’s some information on how I’ve handled the issue of different page types. All pages share some details, such as name, id, location in the page …
Cross-device Opera Widgets challenge
Opera has launched another widget competition: The x-widget challenge. The goal is to make the best cross-device widget – this means the widget has to work on mobile phones running Opera Mobile 9.5, which supports widgets, and in Opera on your computer.
Complex custom elements in Zend_Form
I’ve sometimes needed custom elements in forms – say two fields for inputting two numbers. For something simple like that, adding two separate elements usually suffice, but when one of my clients wanted a field with multiple checkboxes, but only specific pairs could be selected, it started getting too complex. Until then, I had kind of avoided making those custom …
ModelForm developments
I’ve been reworking the ModelForm class for ZF a bit. Earlier this year, I discussed porting it to use Zend_Db_Table with Matthew Weier O’Phinney, for using it with Zend Framework. I initially had done some checking on Zend_Db_Table, and some small code changes to modify the class to use it instead of Doctrine, but I ran into some issues. Now, …
“Multi-touch” with your webcam
There’s an interesting project from Microsoft’s OfficeLabs: Touchless, a project which allows you to utilize a webcam to do multitouch style input on your PC. The basic idea is something I’ve thought about as well – have a webcam track a colored object, and use that as a “cursor”. The touchless demo is very promising, although at this time it …
How to CSRF protect all your forms
CSRF, or Cross-Site Request Forgery, is a vulnerability very common in websites. In short, it means that if you have your site at foo.com, and an attacker at badguy.com can display a form similar to one of your site’s, and make users on his site submit the forms on your site, possibly without their knowledge. This can be dangerous, especially …