While there will still be further tweaks and polishing on the UI and features finalization, Firefox 4 Beta 1  is close to it’s first release.

Although the emphasis for this major version update is on the newly redesigned UI for better user experience, the underlying core features are equally significant too.

Here’s a quick list of new features worth attention:

• redesigned sleeker and easier to use user interface
• supports WebM format for open HD quality video playback
• introduces WebSockets to allow developers building real-time online interactions
• indexed DB for developers to store application data locally, specifically for cloud applications
• and of course, support of CSS3 and HTML5

For more detailed Beta Features, click here

I personally feel that the changes may not be visible for day to day web browsing experience.

However, by having more and more browsers officially supporting CSS3 and HTML5 means the web revolution is near. Cloud applications, faster to load and easier to develop interactive websites are now foreseeable in near future.

What do you think?

Note! Do not install Firefox 4 Beta 1 if you depend your  life on add-ons as most of FireFox 3 add-ons are not compatible yet.

Note! The add-ons you installed on previous version of Firefox is not entirely not able to use, but you’ll have to install Add-on Compatibility Reporter and follow this steps.

WordPress 3.0, code name “Thelonious”, was released on 17 June 2010 after half a year of hard work by 218 contributors.

I personally don’t find any significant updates in this version (expected much significant updates e.g. platform overhaul or so since its goes from version 2.x to 3.x). The only feature that caught my attention is the merge of WordPress MU and WordPress. Now that we can set up multiple blogs from the same installation.

Among other new (and somewhat notable features according to them) are:

• - sexy new default theme called Twenty Ten
• - new APIs for theme that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies (Twenty Ten theme shows all of that off.)
• - new lighter interface
• - the contextual help on every screen
• - 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements
• - bulk updates with a single click

Meanwhile, you may watch the WordPress 3.0 video tour below.

I’ve just done my update from WordPress 2.8 to WordPress 3.0 through auto update and it (really) takes only seconds! Kudos to WordPress

To those who wonders, you will have to add the following line in your wp-config.php before you can add more sites

define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);

You shall now see a new admin page Tools > Network

Ever since the iPhone 4 prototype was lost in a bar (or stolen) by an Apple Engineer Gray Powell, iPhone 4 has become the most talked-about upcoming smart phone.

Be it coincident or done intentionally, another lost iPhone 4 shows new details and it looked almost identical to the prototype reavealed previously.

1GHz A4 chip (same chip used by iPad), slimmer design, front-facing camera, LED flash light, 720p video are among those features that most existing iPhone users hungered for. And it finally seems to be coming to us soon!

(more…)

People have been asking me about how to make a footer stick to the bottom of the screen regardless of which vertical position the browser screen is at. In other words, how to create a footer just like how Facebook does it.

First of all, there are two different types of footer which I’d like to classify them as Floating Header Footer and Sticky Header Footer.

(more…)

With Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, Google’s Android smartphones and other portable devices gradually dominating the market, it is getting more important to optimize websites to look better in these relatively-smaller-screen portable devices.

If you have been in CSS game for quite a while, you may think that defining media=handheld will do the trick

@media handheld {
  .navigation {
    display: none;
  }
}

Unfortunately Apple defined it in such that iPhones will look for “screen” media type instead of the limited “handheld” media which deem to be outdated.

The solution to this is to specify CSS rule that looks at the device screen resolution.

There are some sayings that Internet Explorer has issues ignoring the CSS rule, but that can be easily fixed with Internet Explorer’s “conditional comments” feature.

Conceptually, you can define a separate set of CSS for iPhone (or devices with width less than 480px) as follow:

<!--[if !IE]>-->
<link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="iphone.css"/>
<!--<![endif]-->

And the iphone.css can be any CSS definitions that will overwrites the original CSS definitions.

Hopefully this basic and simple trick can help you to kick start your website revamp to cater for different sizes of portable devices.