I am annoyed by the complexity of tumblr. themes, especially those that remind me of furniture stores and take ages to load. I want to browse, not to get lost, go back to the front page each time and read stuff stuck to the right side of the screen, written in a tiny wee so-2002 font. Is there a way to make them all look super-simple, e.g. with a title, a simple column and pagination? Not as simple as in the mobile app (I hate endless scrolling), but somewhat close.
Thanks for any possible idea!
Related
I am receiving iPhone photos from the Sendblue messaging service and need to determine if they’re vertical or horizontal. This seems like it should be really easy but is giving me trouble. They’re in a CDN (link to example photo).
Any solution would be good, ideally it's something simple and doesn't require another app. Seems like this should be much easier than it is not sure what I'm missing.
So far I’ve tried this post and the CLI that resulted from it, but when I try to add it doesn’t show up in my apps.
I also tried the “mallabe” Zapier app, but it’s saying the photo isn't “publicly accessible”. This confuses me as the photo seems accessible to anybody I send it to.
AirEXIF is another solution I am looking into, I just applied to use their app so waiting to hear back on that front (not much activity from them recently so hoping they're still around).
Twitter has an awesome new way to enter "#" and "#" in the latest iPhone app.
http://blog.twitter.com/2011/03/twitter-for-iphone-ipad-even-better.html
When you type "#" or "#" and then type characters it instantly starts to autocomplete in a table below. How are they doing this? It feels native, but is it?
If it's native, how did they do it? UITextView with an active UITableView? It's really fast and smooth, so I'm guessing they load the phone with trending #'s and your #'s and it's fast because the data is local (it goes to just typing if it's not there).
But I'm wondering if there was a way to achieve this affect with data that is remote on a webserver using async calls.
Any thoughts on how to do this / get started?
If by 'native' you mean, build into the SDK, then I have to disappoint you, this is not a build-in SDK feature (there is something similar with the UISearchController/UISearchBar classes, but that's not what Twitter is leveraging).
This however, does not mean that you cannot build it yourself. I believe it would be quite simple. All you would have to do is monitor every time the user inputs text into the UITextView (this can easily be done using the UITextView delegate methods). You do a check on all the text, and if the user enters an '#' or a '#', or any other symbol you want to watch for, you create/show a UITableView beneath the text view (or wherever you want it).
As for the table view's datasource, it would have to be based on information you gather through search. When Twitter shows you a list of trending tags, etc. I would think it is something they have pulled down when you synced your feed, and then cached somewhere. If you were using a web server, you could do the same. When the user starts entering specific text, you could do a search on the server. If you do the network requests asynchronously, you can display a UIActivityIndicator in the table view, until you've gotten a response from the server. If the user enters more text before the server has 'replied' to you, simply cancel the old server request, and start a new one.
I haven't implemented something like this myself, and I have no knowledge of how it would perform in real-life, but if I was to implement something similar off the top of my head, this would be the aproach I would pursue. It might not suit your case perfectly, but hopefully, it will have given you some inspiration :)
We we wondering what are some ways developers have added a help function to their apps. What are some techniques people have used?
One way we were thinking of is to us UIWebView to display a HTML file with help instructions.
Thoughts appreciated.
I'm using UIWebView right now which pretty much contains all the help in a single page, along with some JQuery things to display popups, etc. But I like the way iCab Mobile (et al.) are doing things which is a sectioned UITableView with each row a separate topic or section within their overall help information (complete with icons...) then in their bundle they have each section in its own html file, organized by localization.
Another thing in my queue for the next release is to provide a dynamic "News" view. The rough idea is as follows... I have on my server a file or CGI where I can place small bits of news I'd like to push out to users. On startup, my app checks for network availability and if present, start a thread to see if anything has changed on the server since last updating the News data. If changes present, post an alert letting user know, and asking if they'd like to read it now. At that point, the latest news is already downloaded and cached, so they can simply read it later if they want, and I won't post anymore alerts until the server file changes again. (And one could add a preference/setting to disable these alerts.)
I'm thinking this would be a good way to let people know that some nasty bug is known and fixed and an update is sitting in the queue, solicit beta testers, promote upcoming features or other apps, etc. I can see where constant alerts everytime I've got something new to promote would get annoying, so having a setting to disable them means the user never has to read them unless they want to. Although some kind of override to warn of recently discovered/fixed bugs seems sensible.
FWIW, the author of Mover+/Mover has just started doing a similar thing, though I think Emanuele is perhaps only showing one Notelet at a time, whereas I envision a bit more of a history (shown in UIWebView) until I decide to age stuff off the bottom of the stack.
I'm using a scroll/page view to show several images containing small notes. Each image then tells the user about the more advanced functions on a specific part of the app.
In my opinion the help should only contain information that isn't a 100% relevant for the use of the application. It should be things the advanced user should use to make more use of the app. It should contain gold for the power users. The "basics" should be so obvious that no help would ever be needed. If that's not the case, I think, you've failed as a developer on the iPhone platform.
(Here's a screen shot from my demo app)
I'm currently creating a fairly complicated app. I'm thinking of doing help as a semi-transparent overlay - help in text form is hard to swallow for users; it's much more helpful to just point at stuff and say "this does that".
I understand that no matter what I do, someone will be able to copy it. However I can still make them work hard for it. What are some good ways of making data not easily copied using php compatible coding.
--- Added ----
The data is a listing of results for certain local sports events. We send people out to collect the information, post the information, make corrections and such. However a competing website takes our results (I know they are directly copying them) and never updates them which causes people to call our office and complain.
---- Answer for my Use ----
I picked one of them, however I am going to use multiple of your answers. I am going to add my link in a using the copy pasta trick. I am going to put fake hidden text into it. I am also going to do the fake hidden text trick with different versions of the div tag that are fake (making it even harder to scrape or to do something like copy to textpad and replace it real easily), and I am going to talk to a lawyer as well about legal recourse and what I can do to make it illegal for them to copy the data (such as creative bios or something cool like that). Thanks for your help.
Joe, you can't really make them work really hard to get your data. It's essentially just a single request to any of your pages. Your best option is to explicitly state that you own the rights to all of your content, and that any infringement on that ownership will lead to legal ramifications*.
* Not a lawyer
Your data will be copied to every computer that requests the page and it will stay there until the person clears their cache. To answer your question, you can't.
What you can do is create a CSS style such as:
.copy-pasta { display: none; }
And then throughout your content, add something like this:
<p class="copy-pasta">Content provided via [your website here]</p>
This will increase your page rank when copy-pasters blatantly steal your content, meaning you will show up first in search results.
Place some <div style="display: inline; position: absolute; overflow: hidden; width: 0px">useless words</div> in the text. It won't display for reading, but if someone copy and paste... "WOW where it came from WTF!! *CRY*"
How about putting links to your site in with the displayed data? No big fanfare, but just suggest that the for the most up to date figures, they can go to the real website that publishes them.
Most of what you try will only work for a time. Until you exceed their laziness factor. (What they're doing suggests a high laziness factor.)
Laws don't protect publicly available data, but you may be able to protect the packaging and presentation.
Programs used to copy out data look for the data using pattern-matching. You could 'decorate' your data with randomly-chosen tags (like one row would have a span tag surrounding it, the next row a div, etc...). Just a thought.
Clarification:
With screen-scraper at least, the user of the program specifies what HTML comes before the data they want, and what HTML comes after it. You can make it more difficult for them to automatically retrieve the data.
Why are people calling your office to complain if the data is on a competing website? If they have a domain name that is similar enough to yours that people are confusing the two of you or if they've put something on their site that makes it look like you've endorsed them, then you've got them for trademark infringement.
Disable the context menu is a start.
$(document).bind('contextmenu', function(e)
{
return false;
});
Or
<body oncontextmenu="return false;">
Forbidding people to get data is almost impossible. You can mess up your tags and make the code really dirty and hard to parse... but it's not really enough. You could also generate a big image with the data in it, this would be painful to parse! ... but you don't want to do that.
Because you said...
However a competing website takes our
results (I know they are directly
copying them) and never updates them
which causes people to call our office
and complain.
... my call would be to take this the other way and create an API allowing people to get your content in a way that YOU designed.
Also if they are just shamelessly stealing your data and they don't have the right to do it, consider a legal option.
Another option is to use PHP code to generate images from the site's HTML. You would use the images to display the content, instead of HTML which can be easily copied out. Example code is here, and I bet you could find more code to do this by Googling:
http://www.acasystems.com/en/web-thumb-activex/faq-php-convert-html-to-image.htm
Try Copyscape it wont prevent your content from being copied, but it will make finding the copies very easy.
You may encrypt the data on the page, and have javascript obfuscated decoding routine that will decode it for you viewers. You may switch keys and encryption algorithms from time to time. Same javascript should disable ability to select text and/or copy it to prevent manual copy-pasting.
They won't be able to copy manually and their scraper would have to be able to run javascript to get the data.
Caveat is that the data won't be visible for Google, but if data is rather numeric it might not be such a big harm.
If they scrape automatically and very often you may also try to pinpoint their IP by observing most active IP-s on your site and serve them fake data.
Please don't use lawyers, that's hitting below the belt.
use swf to display your data, just like other online books
Has anyone had experience with MySource Matrix as a content management system? If so, thoughts/opinions/comments?
Thanks in advance.
Absolutely excellent. It takes little while to get used to how it does things with its asset structure, but it is really flexible and powerful. Simple edit interfaces are great too.
Make sure you give it enough hardware. If you want dynamic content without caching you need heaps of grunt to make it hum.
Hands down the best CMS I have ever used. We use it on the Pacific Union College website, as well as many side projects. I am still amazed at all it has to offer compared to other products that are not free.
Give it a good look, and take some time to get past the learning curve, but once you do, it will be more than worth it. :)
I've recently been trying to use it in an organization where many non power users are generating content. - it has many interface bugs and odd behavior, so that many simple tasks (i.e. loading images) often have to be done by an power user (i.e. me).
When you are editing the HTML of page content white space is not preserved. If you where to format the HTML in the WYSIWYG editor, save you changes, and then come back the whitespace you've added will be removed - actually when you switch the WYSIWYG editor into HTML mode it doesn't show you the exact HTML, and does some silly things - like pressing enter inserts non breaking spaces - but doesn't show them until you save and re-enter HTML mode.
it is a number of little details like this which make it generally frustrating to use and disliked by everyone here.