Vote for Me!

CFUnited held an open call for speakers this year, and I submitted some topics. If you'd like to hear me talk about application design or Javascript, please cast a vote for my topics.

The Septernary Rules of Super Awesome Applications

Loosely based on the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, this presentation explores the process of design, and offers tips as to how to create effective programs. The talk will focus most on how these rules create better use experience, and how keeping focused on that end can save time and increase the profitability of sites and applications.

Javascript for ColdFusion Developers

A crash course on Javascript, what it offers basics, best practices, and focus on CF's integrations of JS and the Javascript libraries and resources that come with ColdFusion: Spry, YUI, ExtJS, and FCKEditor.

 

Microsoft Virtual PC for IE6 Testing

Windows Vista Logo

Just in case you didn't know already, testing websites in Internet Explorer is annoying, especially given that you can't have IE6 and IE7 installed simultaneously. Enter a free tool from Microsoft: Microsoft Virtual PC. This program is a decent VMWare like setup, but it gets better because Microsoft has actually released images for you to use with them. You can find images with IE6, IE7, and even IE8 beta all on their download page.

I know, a free tool from Microsoft that makes your life a little easier. It's weird!

 

Shortcut to My Hosts File

I don't know how often you need to edit your hosts file, but it seems like something I have to do on a daily basis, and its a pain. First the file is buried in Windows subdirectories, so you have to find the thing, and then when you do, it doesn't have an extension, so you constantly have to tell Windows what to open it with. Today, I finally managed to make a shortcut to launch it in Notepad.

  1. Create a new shortcut.
  2. Paste the following into the location:
    %windir%\notepad.exe %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
  3. Use the wizard to name it, and be happy.

That should work for almost everyone, unless your host file is located somewhere else.

 

Vote!

Go out and vote. I don't care who you vote for, I just want you to vote.

 

Google Chrome Themes

Just a week or two back I was bemoaning the fact that Google's Chrome browser clashed with my shiny black Zune desktop theme, and now I can fix that too:

http://www.itsalee.com/download-google-chrome-themes-skins-fre

Has several skins and instructions on their installation. Look at the links off that post too, as there are 4 or more posts with skins. Right now I'm rocking a nice dark grey theme that looks just pretty with Zune.

 

Another program I can't live without

And I just installed it today! Taskbar Shuffle is probably something that only a software developer or someone that works at the computer all day would want to use. It might be my OCD, but I always end up opening the programs that I use all day first, and have them to the left in my task bar, while the things I open and close all day long like text files and web browsers tend to be center to right. It always annoyed me to no end if one of my long running programs crashed, because when I restarted t the app, it would end up on the right hand of the stack. Now with Taskbar Shuffle, I can just drag and drop it back where I want. I can also rearrange the running service icons, if I needed to do such a thing.

Now if I could just figure out how to make the CTRL + T command to launch Chrome from the desk top I'd be very happy indeed.

Well, I can launch Chrome with CTRL + ALT + T, but that isn't exactly what I want either. Good enough for now though.

 

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Jon Hartmann, July 2011

I'm Jon Hartmann and I'm a Javascript fanatic, UX/UI evangelist and former ColdFusion master. I blog about mysterious error messages, user interface design questions, and all things baffling and irksome about programming for the web.

Learn more about me on LinkedIn.