After having tried Curvycorners, jQuery Corners without any success (it was completely breaking the design under IE) I finally came to DD_roundies, which use Microsoft VML.

DD_roundies

DD_roundies is a really lightweight piece of code that will allows you to add rounded borders to nearly every element of you page by executing

DD_roundies.addRule('.roundify', '10px');

It’s smart enough to only apply if the Browser doesn’t support CSS border-radius styles, so you can just continue to work on your CSS for a proper implementation in other browser than IE.

Because it’s not a dream world

So this implementation is working perfectly in IE7 but doesn’t work in IE8, so if you don’t need IE8 specific functionalities I would recommend you to just add a meta in your head section to for IE7 compatibility mode in IE8.

<meta content='IE=EmulateIE7' http-equiv='X-UA-Compatible' />

or if you use HAML

%meta{:content => "IE=EmulateIE7", "http-equiv" => "X-UA-Compatible'"}

And off you go, now you can easily round everything like the cool kids

Nice features on it

Press the command touch (Windows touch on the keyboard) to display Superswitcher.

To switch from a desktop to another press Command + arrow left or right

To switch from available windows in a desktop press Command + arrow up or down

To move a window into another desktop press Command + shift + arrow left or right

To search within all windows name Command + [any text]

Screencast

I’ve just recorded a quick screencast to show all these functionalities

So?

For me it’s now a must have on every computer I use, because it make organizing my desktops really easily.

You can read it on Smartlogic blog, it’s well explained so I’n not going to copy but I just would like to add some ideas:

You don’t need to boot on a live CD

Where Nick ask to boot on a live CD and mount your partitions, you don’t really need this part.

First open your /etc/fstab file and spot your active partitions.

For example on my development machine, I use /dev/sda1 for my / and /dev/sda6 for my /home

Close the file and run

sudo tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sdXY

on each partitions you’ll need to tweak.

Apply noatime and data=writeback to all your working partitions

As you’ve done tune2fs on each partitions, you’ll need to change the mounting options (noatime and data=writeback) in each partitions line inside your fstab.

Do not do it on your server!

Because these modifications make the file system more fragile if crashing, please do not consider doing these tweaks on your production servers.

Enjoy the boost

Where Nick claim a 30% speed gain on his machine, I can claim a gain of more that 55% as I went down from 55 minutes to 25 minutes for the same test suites on one of the biggest application I work on!

Was it useful?

Thanks a lot to Nick Gauthier for his initial blog post, I hope it will be useful to some of you.
Let me know in the comments if you know other tweak that can make my little machine works faster.

2009 was a really busy and exciting year

While I was looking back on what happened in 2009 I found that:

• I moved 2 times.
• I had 1 bike accident. 2009 was a cycling year for me. I started to cycle everytime, everywhere to ditch the car. In mid year I had an accident with a broken colar bone in results. I spent nearly 3 weeks out of work. It was a really bad time.
• I’m now engaged. This is a result of the bike accident .
• I launched 3 web app. In the beginning of the year I launched Serialcooking, which is now closed but the blog is still alive. Then in September I launched Tweetcetera, an easy web twitter client. Finally in December I launched Howgoodismyfood.
• I moved to full time freelance. This is the big change this year, and a big challenge as well as my network, in England, is not as big as it was in France.

So basically 2009 was a really good year, and I’ll work on make 2010 even better.

Make 2010 better and more exciting than 2009

• My first decision in 2010 is to discontinue the Serialcooking web application (we’ll keep the blog alive). It was supposed to be redo from scratch (because I made a lot of UI mistakes), but finally it’s going to take a lot of time and effort, and in 2010 I really want to concentrate myself on my freelance activity.
• I’ll blog more as well. This is going to be result of the previous decision. I’ll have more time to update this blog and to create tutorials and smaller apps.
• Embrace this f*** social media: I’ll try to be proactive on Linkedin, facebook and Twitter.
• I’ll do my best to attend at a minimum of 1 network/conference event a month.
• Run the Bath half marathon
• Release at least 3 plugins/gems: I’ve got some code in the cardboard that I need to clean up before releasing, but I’ll do it

The most important one

Find some interesting work!

As some might know I’m a workaholic, I just love coding, crafting websites, applications. So if you have any project in preparation, do not hesitate to contact me for a chat.

Appart for some little bug correction, here are the major update that have been done this week

Realtime update in title and tab bar

When Tweetcetera refresh your tweets, it display a little notification on your page displaying the number of new tweets.

Now it also display this number in your title bar and in you tab bar if you’re using a tabbed browser. That’s really convenient as you don’t need to go back to the page to view is their are updates in your network.

Real time count down

Tweetcetera now display a count down before the next auto update of your timeline, user timeline or search results.

So you now exactly when it’s going to be refreshed.

Follow cost

Tweetcetera is now using the Followcost api to display the number of average tweets/day and the number of tweets replied on a user page.

These indications, combined to the “mentioning” sidebar section, give you all the informations you need to decide if you’ll follow a user or not.

What’s next?

Next week I’ll be working on list implementation, and usernames auto completion. Please if you want to see any features, just drop me a message or comment on the getsatisfaction page or on this blog post.

\o/ \o/ Tweetcetera is now live! After several development weeks, it’s finally out!.

What’s Tweetcetera …

Tweetcetera is meant to look similar to Twitter web interface, so that you don’t need to learn how to use a new website. But we have added some nice features, which we felt were missing from the original product.
You won’t find any big revolutionary feature but we believe that big changes can come from small differences. To see what we mean by ’small differences’, have a look at the details below. And if you’re still not convinced, try it and we promise you’ll never go back to using Twitter web interface (or so we hope!).

.. In 3 words?

Twitter stupidly easy!

Give it a try

To really release Tweetcetera power, you have to use it, for 1 hour, and you’ll be convince. Please feel free to add any comment or feedbacks to develop it on the right direction.

Why is it use for?

Caffeine stop your computer for going to sleep, or just to switch your back light off.
Really useful when watching a video, or during a meting.

You can also add process, that will automaticaly enable Caffeine. (Like VLC, OpenOffice, what ever ..).

How to get it?

On the Caffeine developer blog, you can find a good introduction to the software.

To install it, just follow the instructions for the Caffeine Wiki.

Shutter is the Skitch Linux alternative:

Then I found Shutter. Shutter is the Skitch Linux alternative.
To install it on Ubuntu, just download the last version or add the Shutter PPA repository to your sources.

Features:

As far as I’ve tested, Shutter is full of goodness. It makes screenshots on Linux easy.

You’ll be able to capture a entire window, or a portion of you desktop. Multiple capture history is supported.
Then you be able to basically edit this image with the built in image editor.
And finally you’ll be able save or upload your screenshot to image sharing website.

I you want to upload your image from Shutter to Flickr, you’ll need to install Postr. Just read Shutter upload to flickr about page to see how easy it is.

I really like when developers come with good solutions for every day problem like this. And definitely Shutter is one of them.

What is tweetcetera?

Tweetcetera is a web application I’m working on the spare time. Basically, you login in with you Twitter account, and it reproduce the Twitter web interface with smarter options.

Once the beta out, I want the development to be user centred, so a uservoice will be open and everyone will be welcome to ask for new features.

What is the problem?

I had a conversation with Matt Aimonetii where I asked him to test the current version of tweetcetera.

Even if I use Twitter Oauth for the authentication (ie: I don’t store you password, you login on twitter and then are redirected to the application), there was a confidentiality problem.

His first thoughts were:

How do I know that you’re not going to use my personal informations?
How do I know that you’re not going to post analyse informations like DM or protected statuses?

I must admit that, as a fair developer, I wasn’t expecting these kind of questions. I didn’t even think about it when using another third party application to connect to Twitter.

But the question is legitimate. You don’t want to be spammed, or analyse without your contentment right?

What can I do?

As a lot of developer, I’m fair. And so are my applications. I’m not going to use informations for post analyse. But how can I transmit the message?

I don’t want to write a big warning on the landing page saying “Trust us, we are not evil!”, that would scare more people than reassure the others.

If you are using web third party app (like Seesmic for example), what makes you trust a this application? (Brand reputation? Website design? … )

Hardware

As described in a previous post I now use a netbook as main development machine until September this year.

Machine1: Medion E1312,11.6″,Athlon 1.6 Ghz single core, 2 Gig Ram . For all task, it’s really responsive, but when you run tests, the single core is as slow as a dead cow unfortunately. The screen can sometime be a bit small, but it’s ok most of the time.

Machine2: At home, an old P4 is used to backup everything on 1,5 TB hard drive. (Ubuntu server)

Screen: At home I’ve got a second monitor, 19″ from HP.

Headphones: Sennheiser HD215

External mini western digital HD: 360 Gig in a small pocket size.

Software

Ubuntu, because it’s efficient and easy. If you want to learn more about my setup you can see my Rubyists guide to Linux development environment.

Gedit combined with Gmate makes my editor of choice under Linux. One day, I’ll learn to master Vim …

Gnome-do, a Quicksilver like.

Banshee media player, really good at managing music collection and screencast/podcast feeds.

Firefox 3.5, with web developer extension, bugzilla, Yslow, Delicious.

Tweetcetera is now my twitter client of choice. Normal you would as I’m the developer . Should be released in beta soon.

Liferea is my main RSS reader. Needed to do some tricks to make it quick in Ubuntu.

Gnome-evolution for all my different emails accounts.

Gnome terminal.

Gitg, a git desktop app, better than the old gitk.

The Gimp, I’m not a designer, so, that fit my needs.

Inkscape, same as The Gimp. Fits my needs.

Other

Bike: I use an old Raleigh racer bike, transformed into a single speed after an accident.

Bag: Targus messenger bag that can all my life, and carrying it around the city.