So today I'm playing with Google Chrome at work.  From my first look at it, it has promise. There's some beautiful things about it like when one tab freezes for one reason or another (something that would likely shut down Firefox / IE), only that tab freezes and not the entire application - allowing you to continue to work rather than stare at an un-responsive browser.

The one major beef I have is when fully maximized, there is a 10 pixel gap at the bottom of the screen where you can click on windows behind Chrome – this does annoy me because I have a habit of clicking there – and now that I know it’s there… it will annoy me… …

There are some cool features thought:

• Ability to resize any textarea control
• Screen realastate is huge!
• Google keeps a record of previous and most visited sites. So when you open chrome, you can see them all right there.
• 
• The: Right Click –>Page Info is quite amusing
• 
• But what do you expect from a Beta… oh wait… isn’t everything from Google in Beta?

JavaScript

First off I try it against my Vehicle Tracking application I wrote for police agencies in the states. Heck, it's quick. It does everything great! I then started to play with overlaying ESRI data on top of my maps, and working with my playback and history functions and again it amazed me with how quick it is.  The only hiccups I got was when I played around with running 50 simultaneous functions at the same time, each one doing a lot of trig. math. The browser finally gave up and crashed.  I'm not surprised, IE and Firefox did the same.

So as far as I'm concerned - it works great.

CSS

There is a bit of issues with CSS styling - mainly I believe it's being too pedantic.  Chrome has a feature that highlights <input /> elements with an orange glow. I can see how this is nice, however to those of us that sometimes spend too much time making our application visual appealing, it’s annoying.

INcogNITO!

IE8 has one, why not Chrome! HIDE EVERYTHING! No Cookies (sorry cookie monster), no traces… can we turn this off? I am personally not putting this browser on my computer at home because I do like to see what goes on with the history – and I don’t want to give anyone using my computer (<cough> kids) the ability to view bad (<wheeze> Sites with Barny the Dinosaur on them) sites without me knowing… stupid dinosaur…

Developer Tools

Google Chrome comes with a few developer tools built in.   The JavaScript debugger failed to impress me. I've used Firebug for the past few years and It's the only one that I will recommend. The JavaScript consol caused Chrome to freeze on me fully.

JavaScript Consol

Javascript Debugger (Command line? What is this COBOL?)

Having the Document Source open in a tab is... ok... and I can see the uses however I do like to move source around while I look at WebPages - why else would you use multiple monitors!?

The task manager is quite... "nifty", easy way of telling what applications are running under chrome. I especially appreciate the "Stats for Nerds" option which loads up the memory usage of the browsers (Firefox, IE, Chrome) opened and the processes (tabs) used.

Task manager

Memory Usage

All in All, it’s better than the beta of IE8 (Sorry MS), but I don’t think It’s going to be the next best thing to hit the Internet. Ninjas did that a long time ago.

I love watching people. I like to sit back, and watch peoples expressions, their body movements, their reactions to certain things. I don't really consider it eavesdropping, as I am not paying attention to the conversation, and I don't usually hear what's going on.  The other day I was watching a few developers from a larger company here in town bicker about something.. A friend of mine joined their group and saw I was drinking some coffee and invited me over.  The conversation soon turned towards working conditions, job satisfaction, salary, management etc... really whatever a group of developers talk about at a coffee shop. Now many would think we'd talk about games, however as "Geeks" we must maintain the persona that we have lives (note Geeks, not nerds... Geeks).

One person then mentioned the well coined phrase "Well the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence". At that point I had to but in and tell him to give his head a shake. The grass is greener where you water it!

As a working individual it is your duty, heck it's your God given duty to put 100% into your career / job. It doesn't matter if it's full time, part time, a "stepping stone", or whatever. If you are getting paid for a job, put your all into it because that's really what you're getting paid for. If you think the grass is greener on the other side, look at where you're at. Think of what makes the grass greener on the other side and bring it up with your manager / boss. Now there are some cases where the grass you're currently on was laid on a bed of concrete, in those rare occasions even the dirt looks greener (And you might want to either talk to your manager about buying an excavator if you're in this boat).

Yes this is a bit of a rant, and it might be because I'm a new dad and my career is very important to my family. But wherever you are in your career, make it the best it can be. Put your all into it. Yes, the company across the street might have the newest computers, or the company across the way has lunch time gaming time... whatever it is, if you put your all into where you are, whenever you decide to move on you'll do it with integrity.

 I'm going to change my babies poopy diaper now.
 

Yes the Acid 3 test has been released. The official announcement is here, and because I loath copy/paste blog posts you will need to go there to read all the nitty/gritty about it. Pretty much Acid3 tests specifications for "web 2.0" (What the heck is web 2.0 anyways? When did the web get an update... I'm still waiting for my CD!). Too see exactly what's tested, check this out.

The cool this about this is that It shows the "Percent" on how good your browser is. Believe it or not, IE7 gets like 13%. FireFox 2.0 gets around 52%.

 I'm not even going to attempt to do this in IE8 beta.
 

Holy Cow! I know this isn't new news.  IE8 and FireFox 3.. Acid 2 tests, heck Acid 3 tests. When is it going to stop?!?

 As some know, I'm writing a very complicated vehicle tracking system that is all web based. It can track up to 200 vehicles at once (in one browser instance), draw them on the map, and give you all the nice tid-bits of information about them. This application is very heavy CSS and JavaScript. I pretty much took most of .NET out of the application except for 3 web service calls.

 However, To make applications like the one I'm developing work in a real world environment, they need to be efficient. That means that if I'm going to be doing collision detection on vehicle labels (so they don't overlap) I would rather use a few extra bits of memory to remember the answers from complicated math (storing the values that are returned by using COS / SIN calculations) than to have to calculate them each time. If you didn't know anything done using COS, SIN, TAN etc.  are extremely expensive.

 So back on topic, I have my application, It's as efficient as I can make it, and now I have to test the efficiency in not 4, but SIX browsers. And to top it off, those browsers have tweaked Javascript engines. WHY WHY WHY! I already tried my app in these 2 new browsers, and they "do" work, but not as well as I would've hoped.  Come on, when can a Guy run a simple <div> collision detection script that checks over 100 divs and repositions them in a self expanding circle every second? Why does it need to take 3.2 seconds?
 
I know... to better humanity and all other species on this earth, new web browsers are pertinent in order to form an electronic self sustaining ecosystem. Anyways, WHY! I already have 4 browsers to test (IE7, FireFox 2.0, Opera, safari... stupid Safari), and now I need to test on 2 more? You know, the day when those 2 browsers (or days) get released I'll forget to test on them and I'll get over 100 emails in my inbox stating that my website broke the internet (if that were true then I'd really have something to blog about).

Can we invest more money in holograms like on Star Trek so I can get a duplicate to do the testing? I know testing is the bestest most funnestest thing ever and that programmers everywhere are running at the opportunity to test... but I'll sacrifice my ego and let my hologram clone do it for me.

 
Ok I'll stop whining now.
 

I've been working with javascript rather heavily for the past few... many months. Years ago when I started working with ASP.NET I was naive and thought everything should be done server side. I thought that the server should do all the work so the clients computers would be able to work fast.  It took only 1 year for me to turn that thinking around.  JavaScript rocks! 

ASP.NET AJAX works great with JavaScript.  You can point to a web service (in your current domain), get the data you need,  and do all the XHTML/HTML Markup changes necessary without a postback to the server. (yes some postbacks are evil)

So why do I love JavaScript? Aside from the Asynchronous nature of it (which can really screw with your mine sometimes), it makes the client computers do the work, and takes the load of your servers. It might be easy for your server to render a DataList of 100 rows. However, if you need that list updated every 10 seconds with the newest data, your server will start complaining when 1000-10,000 people are viewing that page.  You could cache the data, but you'll still be rendering the DataList in your presentation layer.  With JavaScript, you can create a simple object (note JavaScript is not an object based language, you use prototypes... but for the simple eye they look like objects) that can do this for you:

DataItem = function(data)
{
    this.UserID = data.UserID;
    this.UserName = data.UserName;
    this.FullName = data.FullName;
}

DataItem.prototype = {
    toString = function()
    {
        return '<div class="detail">UserID: ' + this.UserID = ', UserName: ' + this.UserName = ', FullName: ' + this.FullName = '</div>';
    },
    test = function()
    {
        var d = "test";
        return d;
    },
}

When you get the results back from your webservice, you can loop through them, creating this object (yea yea) from the data returned, and easily output the data you need.  Very simple, and you have full control. You don't need to rebuild your application if you want to change how a simple list works.

This is where I left off last night with some script I was working on. I get to the office and I began testing it again, pulling my hair out.  FireFox was working fine, however IE7 was blowing up. I kept getting "<custom object> is Undefined".  After creating a few test prototypes I found the culprit... the trailing "," in the last function of my prototype. IE is expecting there to be a new function, FireFox ignores it.

JavaScript is strict, and I love it!

Web Designers are always trying to find new and innovative (read:easier and better) ways of creating web sites. Today I stumbled across two sites that really push this.

Remember back in the VB 6 days, or even the C and C++ days where you used Sprites? If any of you ever looked at old NES, SNES emulated games, you would see the graphics were all sprites.

Now you can do this with CSS... well you've always been able to do it, but now it's been shown to really work.  Take a roll-over button for example. Instead of creating 2-3 images for this roll-over, why not have 1 image and you just use a bit of CSS (pseudo classes)  and you're done. This is explained on WellStyled.com very well.

Another great example of this was found on A List Apart.

Gone are the days of creating massive images for everything. Aren't the old ways always best?

For the past bit now I've been getting this when starting VS 2008:

This happens whenever I start VS 2008 from a shortcut / main application.  Even If I quickly close the start screen and load my project this happens. The only way to actually get into a project is to open in VS 2008 is to open it from the .SLN file. This will not crash VS 2008 and it will work fine.

I'm not sure why this is happening - I'll probably re-install it... when I have time...

As many web developers know, Internet Explorer has always been behind the times for Web Standards.  Just last week IE8 (Which is still in development) passed the Acid2 test. The Acid2 Test's main website is here, and you can view the actual test here.  The Acid2 test has correct CSS and incorrect CSS. The test is to determine how a browser handles CSS(correct and incorrect). The long list of standards that web browsers has to support (W3C is only one body of standards), you can imagine how great the IE team must feel.

The ironic thing was as I was reading about this, I was told my new application needs to be supported by IE6 now... 10,000 lines of JS Script... 100+ images (alpha-transparent PNG...) oh the joy.

Here's a link to the IEBlog that talks more about this.

Yesterday I downloaded and installed VS 2008 Professional (MSDN License). The process was mild and pretty easy... uninstall all the beta software, install the new software etc. The only problem I had was when I launched a 2005 application (under TFS Source control). VS 2008 (And Team Explorer 2008 by extension) didn't really like this. I got a lot of errors, so I went back to VS 2005, manually checked out the entire solution, then loaded it up in VS 2008.  This worked like a charm.

Once my app was loaded in VS 2008 I was eager to try the new JavaScript Intelisence.  This is actually the main reason for me installing this new release as my application is 80% JavaScript (approx 10,000 lines).  One thing I noticed is the Intelisence only worked for the JS file I was working on. It wouldn't map to the other 30 or so JS files I have in my folder (I'm not sure If I need to do anything special for this).  This really was a bit of a disapointment, but I understand why... the compiler doesn't know I'm using the other JS files... I wonder if there's an "include" command or something that would work...

If anyone knows any ways of telling the complier to link JS files (without manually copying the script) let me know.

So far I'm impressed. Good job Microsoft & the VS Team. 

It's been a long week. But I am very proud to announce that I have become a Dad and joined the elite.  Thursday 15 November 2007 at 9:38pm PST the little ninja on the left was born.  He was born at 7lb 10 ounces, 50cm long and was the most beautiful thing in the world.

My wife and I agree on this: I never believed in true love at first site until I saw Aidan. Oh, my sons name?  Aidan George Alexander Ternier.  It's been an amazing week. He's kept us up at night, he's made us laugh with all of his facial expressions, and has made me appreciate my parents way more. He's also helped all the local coffee companies out there because I'm drinking more than usual now. 

My blogging will slow down a bit as I now have almost 0 time. I'm still alive... but just barely... need... coffee... green tea... pii...zza?