WiredWorx || Web design || SEO || Bournemouth

Use CSS to stop iPhone / iPad from enlarging text

After doing some site updates for a client the other day and all was well except for a report that when rendering the site on an iPad / iPhone some of the text in some areas was a great deal larger than it should be. This lead to hours of investigations as to why this may be, trawling through the CSS which was blatantly correct (as it was very simple) all of which came to a dead end. It turns out in the end that it was these devices being 'helpful' and rendering the font size to be larger, I assume for ease of reading. Anyhow we didn't want this functionality and so implemented the following css against the body:

body
{
-webkit-text-size-adjust: none;
}

This did the trick and the site behaved as expected!

How to structure TFS folders - MSDN

Starting out on a new project is daunting especially when working as a team and having so much to set up. If you are using TFS (Team Foundation Server) for source control, to make life a little easier follow these instructions from Microsoft on how best to get your folders set up.

Aside from making the structure easy to navigate there are also huge benefits in that continuous integration and automated builds and branching and merging will be much easier.

Differences between Scrum and XP

I have never been a stickler to stick to rules and this is also true of agile adoption. A lot of people who think they know a lot about agile practices like to get SCRUM certified and then follow a SCRUM methodology down to the most minute detail. One thing that I have always learned though is that no two organisations are the same and when trying to apply a generic pattern to multiple organisations it doesn't always work - think of it as the same as off the shelf software... It's kind of what you want, but to get the most out of it it will have to be customised to some extent.

I was very happy when I read Allan's blog regarding the matter which hinted that the best way to go was SCRUM for governance but to incorporate XP technical aspects to be the most productive (pair programming, TDD, BDD, continuous integration etc)... Which it just so happens is what we've been doing for the last few years!

Round corners in internet explorer

Ever wondered how you can make internet explorer display rounded divs and look as good as Firefox and Chrome? Well we did and found a very neat way of doing it.

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How to get a facebook messaging invite

Heard all about the new facebook messaging?? Want to see if it really is a gmail killer?

If you want to see what all the fuss is about check out the new facebook messaging application.

That is all :)

Twitter app update to URLs and authorization rules

All keen tweeters out there may be interested in the following Twitter update:

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No Google Android MiCoach app ??

Here at WW we sometimes get 5 seconds to watch the TV when we're not delving about and generally creating goodness. We noticed an application that looked very good for the health concious out there - Adidas' MiCoach app. Reportedly on advert the application is free and goes far beyond the run (no pun intended) of the mill applications that use a simple GPS hook up to show where you have run from and to. This application actually monitors your training and acts as a real time personal trainer / coach!

Fantastic we thought! Always on the look out for some new technology and especially pro health tech a quick search on google of 'adidas micoach' soon revealed that the application was for IPhone and Blackberry users only. This is a real kick in the goolies, as any self respecting techie shuns the huge corporate goliath that is Apple for the (ok, ok just as horribly corporate) Google.. At least they try and pretend to be on the consumers side!

The obvious first reaction that they feel that all Android users are geeks who lock themselves away in a darkened room to write code soon gave way to the stark reality... The reason Adidas (and a lot of other application developers) don't embrace Android as quickly as Iphone or BB apps is because of the variety of handsets there are out there, all with varying functionality and abilities. In effect there is a choice for developers - develop for one platform which is a guaranteed environment, or *attempt* to cover all handset bases with Android and create an app that is tried and tested on all models.

Looking at the Android app store it's easy to view lots of comments and laugh at the 'amateur' developers where 'breakout free edition crashes my nexus one' but looking into it we actually quite sympathise with them...

It works on my machine!

Here is a very funny (in a geeky sort of way) tongue in cheek new standard that developers should use to mark their software with...

It works on my machine

Believe it or not there are many development teams out there who will unknowingly employ this tactic, WW of course has stringent testing procedures! ;o)

Kanban vs Scrum pt 1

There are a million and one architectures on which to base a development project, but since we are an agile lot here at WW we lean towards agile methodologies. We have previous experience of using both Kanban as well as SCRUM but are finally putting together an in depth evaluation of both frameworks to see which suits us best.

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Using J Query to create a word count for HTMLEditor

Being really lazy here, but here's the link.. Jquery word count for HTML Editor

Google's SEO report card

Hmmmm this makes for some disturbing reading!

It seems that Google the kings of the interweb are having some issues, following their own guidelines!

There is a report which was posted on their blog which highlights areas of where they need to improve and what they are doing well. It must be said that I wouldn't want to keep tabs on every single Google owned web page, but then that's their job isn't it!?

You can read the full report.

Asynchronous file upload with .NET AJAX toolkit - in an updatepanel

This is interesting - after spending days researching the best method of uploading files whilst still using our beloved updatepanels I eventually came to the conclusion that without the use of iframes and other such horrible methods there really isn't a way to do it.

I then went about coding the pages manually with javascript whenever nice effects were needed as opposed to sticking the whole lot in an updatepanel. Low and behold though - just as I finished the page and was happy with the result I noticed a link on the AJAX toolkit website for a component which uploads files whilst being inside an updatepanel.

I have yet to fully test it as I have a working solution for my project now but it will be my first port of call next time I need to have a file upload bang in the middle of an updatepanel. Looking at the example on the asp.net website it seems very user friendly as well!

HTML 5 - what's new?

I was browsing the web earlier to see what the buzz around HTML5 was all about, as I know that it is incorporated into the latest versions of most (if not all) of the major browsers.

I was going to do my own tutorial, but I'm pushed for time and am lazily going to just link to a great one instead! :)

HTML 5 tutorial

Web safe fonts in website design

Often by clients the discussion regarding which fonts to use comes up in the inital stages of the website design.

Unfortunately, there are only a certain amount of fonts which are actually 'web safe' as the font is rendered on client side (on the browser) this means that whichever font you wish to display the user must have installed on their machine. That matched to the hundreds of browser versions / operating system combinations means there are only a handful of fonts that are actually safe to use on the web.

Here is a good resource I use to demonstrate which fonts are *generally* web safe.

Integrate your google buzz feed with your website

Well almost as fast as Buzz was launched some bright spark has come up with a way to integrate your feeds into your website.

This is the same principle as the many twitter feed consumers there are, such as twiterizer.