Why the next iPhone won't be called 'iPhone 5'...
I've been getting more and more bugged by people referring to the next iPhone as being the "iPhone 5", so I thought I'd make this simple graphic to explain why numerically it makes no sense for the next iPhone to be referred to as number 5!
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Preparing audio podcast files using Shedworx Smart Converter
This free app from the guys at Shedworx has worked out pretty handily for me just recently as it's got one capability that I've needed just recently. I needed to convert downloaded FLV files from archived UStream recordings and extract the audio out of it in order to make a podcast file.
UStream FLV file conversion is definitely a really handy feature, dealing with FLV files can be a bit problematic at times as not many apps will let you open them and do much with them. Quicktime on Mac doesn't handle them by default so unless you install something like Perian you can't really play them back without using a third party app like VLC.
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How to install an SSL certificate on Plesk 9.5.4 (without going completely nuts)
I just had to set up an SSL certificate for a client site and encountered really poor documentation trying to get it up and running. Whether the documentation was just presuming some other prior knowledge that I didn’t have I’m not sure, but I thought I’d document what I did to resolve it. If nothing else I can come back to this myself in future to remind myself but perhaps it will be of use to someone else.
Server configuration & SSL Certificate:
My server is a VPS running Plesk 9.5.4, the SSL certificate I was installing in this case was a GeoTrust QuickSSL Premium certificate. I don’t think there will be too much difference with other certificate providers, however the installation process in Plesk is quite specific so these instructions won’t necessarily be that helpful if you’re not using Plesk.
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Rise of the Machines
As we move further into a post-Flash(1) web there’s a lot of excitement and hype about HTML5 and CSS3. These new technologies combined with the power of JavaScript frameworks like jQuery offer the potential to create much more dynamic, animated, interactive user experiences on the web.
Many tools are now being developed to make the creation of these experiences much easier (Edge, Sencha, Hype, MotionComposer, Animatable(2) etc). However, there’s a potential danger lurking under the surface with these apps and the many demos and samples showing off these new shiny features: Machine Generated Code.
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My thoughts on Adobe Edge
Today Adobe published on their Adobe Labs website a public preview of a new application called Edge, which is described in their own words as:
"Adobe® Edge Preview is a new web motion and interaction design tool that allows designers to bring animated content to websites, using web standards like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3."
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My favourite new feature in OSX 10.7 Lion
This has got to be one of my favourite new 'features' in OSX Lion, it's found inside the iCal app:
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The Highland Fling 2011 Web Conference - Back to Basics
The Highland Fling 2011 Web Conference takes place on Friday 8th July at Symposium Hall, part of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh:
It's great to have an event like this in Scotland for once so don't miss out on the opportunity to go along!
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Why Apple won't make 'Reading List' a digital locker for web content
Apple have added a new "Reading List" feature to the next version of Mac OSX which is currently under development, 10.7 Lion. Reading List allows you to collect web pages and links for later reading, as such obvious but slightly inaccurate comparisons have been made to services like Instapaper and Readability, however, Reading List is different from those services as it doesn't seem to actually cache, modify or strip back the content of the pages added to it. I was a bit surprised by this seeing as Apple added the 'Reader' function to Safari a while ago which basically adds the same kind of stripping back of content for easy reading that these other services offer. It seems like an obvious marriage of the two features.
Reading List + Reader = A step too far?
In light of this disconnect between these two features in Safari I've been wondering if there is a deeper motivation for not blending the two together. If users had the capability to use a version of Reading List which automatically used the Reader function to strip content back then I wonder if publishers would complain that Apple was robbing them of page views / ad revenue or manipulating their content without consent?
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WordPress Answers StackExchange site out of beta
A quick short and sweet post as I just realised that I never blogged about the fact that WordPress Answers Stack Exchange site is out of beta and has become a fully fledged StackExchange site! It actually came out of Beta back in February so this post is quite overdue!
It's a really useful site if you are into WordPress theme or plugin development, I posted about the beta a while ago and I've found it useful on quite a few occasions when I've struggled to figure out how to make something work, especially for the WOS Media Categories Plugin that I was working on a while back as well as quite a few other code issues I've had with recent client projects.
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Apple previews Final Cut Pro X at NAB in Las Vegas
Apple made their presence felt at the NAB show in Las Vegas with a preview of the next version of their Final Cut Pro video editing app, Final Cut Pro X.
In what is no doubt a long overdue update Final Cut Pro X brings what a lot of Pro video users have been waiting for: a totally redesigned interface, 64-bit memory addressing, multi-processor support, background rendering (no more render window), GPU rendering, use of more than 4GB RAM, video sizes from standard def up to 4k, real-time native format video processing - that's quite a list!
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Music Converter Pro
Quick music conversions to all popular formats. iTunes and Ringtone savvy.