It was announced earlier today that Google Chrome Frame can now be installed without having admin rights to the computer. This is (or can be) huge for people in corporations that don’t have admin rights to their workstations. Anyone can now install Google Chrome Frame and view sites in IE rendered with Chrome. Pretty neat.
Not exactly sure how Google was able to do this, but rumor is they have pretty smart people over there.
To trigger GCF you just set a flag
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge,chrome=1">;
or add an HTTP header.
X-UA-Compatible: chrome=1
That’s it. If GCF is installed and enabled by the user, the page will get rendered as in Chrome.
Links:
More information on WebMonkey
Google Chrome Frame
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Another canvas experiment.
Download the script
Play with it on JSDO.it
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Experimenting with particles. Mousing over the canvas will huddle the particles together, moving off it will explode the particles out again. Click to add more particles. Double click to remove a few.
Download the script
Play with it on JSDO.it
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Here’s a quick how-to on creating permanent aliases, in OS X. I wanted/needed it for the Zend Framework to create the shortcut zf.
Open terminal.app
open ~/.bash_profile. I usually use pico editor, so the command would be
Type in the name of the alias and path to the thing you want to create an alias for. In my case:
alias zf=/usr/local/zend/share/ZendFramework/bin/zf.sh
^X to quit, save the buffer and restart the terminal.
To see if the zf alias worked you can type in
It should display the Zend Framework version number.
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Back in May 2010 Chromium (including Google Chrome) introduced a new API for speech recognition, via the speech attribute. By adding it to form elements you can capture audio (well, speech), as if someone had typed it into the form element. This can be a very useful accessibility feature – if it gets added to the official HTML5 specs.
I created a simple demo here (a twitter search):
http://k-create.com/lab/js/speech/
Only works in Chrome/Chromium, obviously.
You can read the full proposed specs here.
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I spend a couple of hours playing around with the canvas element and JavaScript to create this simple drawing tool (requires canvas). If you view this on iOS enabled device you can use multi-touch events.
It’s a pretty simple script, but I think it shows what you can do with multitouch events and canvas. I’ll definitely keep experimenting.
touch-draw.js
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I take a lot of screenshots, and while Os X makes it easy to capture the screen – Cmd + Shift + 3 to capture entire desktop, Cmd + Shift +4 to capture a portion, or Cmd + Shift + 4 and then hit the spacebar to screen grab an entire application window – it saves all the shots to the desktop. I don’t like to clutter up my desktop so I usually change the default folder for screen shots. Here’s how, open Terminal and type in:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /<yourpath>/
Replace with the full path to the directory where you want to store you screen shots (the directory has to exist). Example: /Users/Kris/Desktop/screengrabs.
Log out and back in again and your all set.
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Photoshop CS4 has built in support for Macbook Pro’s multigesture trackpad. The problem is that I keep accidentally rotating the canvas, which is incredibly annoying. Luckily Adobe has released a plugin to disable this feature/annoyance. Download it here.
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The host file is used to by an operating system to map hostnames to IP addresses. It’s useful for testing local files as remote domains. On Windows systems is typically located at
c:/windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts
On a Mac you can edit the host file by opening up the Terminal app and typing in:
$ sudo nano /private/etc/hosts
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