Categories
WordPress

WordPress Twenty Ten 1.2 to 1.3 – What’s Changed?

Twenty Ten was the default visual theme for WordPress 3, until it was replaced by the Twenty Eleven theme. About the same time of the release of WordPress 3.3 in December 2011, the Twenty Ten 1.3 upgrade became available. WordPress offers to update TwentyTen in the Updates section of the Dashboard.

If your WordPress site runs on Twenty Ten, you may want to know what’s changed in the theme before applying the update. If, like me, you’ve built a child theme customizing Twenty Ten, you’ll probably be quite anxious to know what’s changed, because some parts of a child theme are made from copying the parent theme’s code and modifying it, so some updates to the parent theme would not automatically flow through.

The ticket for the release of Twenty Ten 1.3 doesn’t really give much info about the changes. Unfortunately there’s no README file or release notes included with the Twenty Ten update, nor could I find any on the Net.

The good news is that the updates to TwentyTen, from version 1.2 to 1.3 are quite minimal. The stylesheet has a line added, there’s simple changes to three PHP files (functions.php, loop-single.php, loop-attachment.php), and a 17 images (mostly header images) are marked as updated. You can see the differences detailed here. There’s a forum thread asking about the 2010 update at WordPress.org.

If you wanted to see the differences for Twenty Eleven, they’re here. A very similar list of files has changed.

Categories
Chrome

Chrome vs Chromium – What’s the Difference?

What’s the difference between Chrome and Chromium? Well, Chromium is the open source part of Chrome, released to open source by Google in 2008. Chromium is available as a standalone browser.

Google’s Chrome browser uses the code from Chromium, and adds some proprietary features:

  • a built-in Flash player (yes, that’s right – Flash is built-in to Chrome)
  • a built-in PDF viewer
  • AAC and MP3 audio support
  • an auto-updater
  • option to report crashes to Google
  • option to report usage stats to Google
  • Google branding
  • RLZ reporting, telling Google from where Chrome was downloaded

You can see a table of differences here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsGoogleChrome.

Categories
HTML

HTML for the Euro (€) – Best Practices

What is the HTML for the Euro? What’s the best way to write the Euro in HTML? Here’s the best HTML for the Euro symbol, tested with all major web browsers.

This HTML code works in both HTML and XHTML. Note that the Euro symbol is also sometimes referred to it’s ISO currency abbreviationEUR”.

Euro in HTML – Common Searches

There’s a lot of ways people look for the HTML for the Euro symbol or Euro sign. Here are the common ways people search. This list is to help people find this webpage. You can skip over the list and go straight to the HTML for the Euro sign.

  • euro html escape
  • euro html special character
  • euro html tag
  • euro in html code
  • euro in html encoding
  • euro in html entities
  • euro sign html code
  • euro sign html entity
  • euro sign html unicode
  • euro symbol html entity
  • euro symbol html format
  • euro symbol html page
  • html code for euro
  • html euro code
  • html euro currency symbol
  • html euro symbol
  • html for €
  • html for euro sign
  • html for euro character
  • € html
  • € in html

HTML for the Euro Sign

The best practice for putting the Euro sign in HTML to use the HTML character entity:

€

The Euro HTML entity above gives this output in a webpage:

This HTML code will give you a European currency symbol in a webpage whether your web browser or webserver is on Linux, Mac or Windows.

In the compatibility table later in this article, you can see all major browsers and operating systems are supported (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE, iPhone, iPad).

Note the semicolon at the end of the HTML entity. It won’t work without it.

If this article has answered your question, please consider clicking the +1, Like or Tweet buttons at the top and bottom of this article.

Just to check: Did you know the Euro symbol sometimes goes before the price, sometimes after? If you didn’t know, read on.

Euro Symbol HTML Best Practice

Why is using the named HTML character entity€” the best practice for putting a Euro sign in HTML? To see why, consider the failings of the alternate ways:

  1. Inserting the Unicode character for the Euro directly: Works great, as long as: (1) all editing software used on the web page understands it is in Unicode, and preserves its Unicode encoding, and (2) the character set for your webpages is reliably and consistently set in the HTTP headers and/or HTML head. If condition 1 or 2 fail, you’re likely to lose your Euro symbols from your webpage.
  2. Use the Euro Unicode character via a numeric HTML character entity (#8364): This works quite well. It is broadly compatible. It will survive you’re HTML editor treating your HTML file as ASCII. It will probably survive your page being served in different character sets, e.g. ISO 8859-1. This only reason it’s not the best practice is that using it will make your HTML code harder to read, understand and maintain.
  3. Use an image of the Euro sign: This is a very old school method, used before the Euro character became widely supported. It uses more bandwidth. It causes accessibility issues. For example, screen readers for the blind can’t read it. It slows down your page load time. Avoid.

Euro HTML Tag

Some people are searching for a Euro HTML tag. There’s no HTML tag for the Euro symbol, e.g. <euro>. It does not exist. Just use the HTML entity above.

Euro Symbol HTML Entity Browser Compatibility

The table below shows the compatibility of using the Euro HTML character entity&euro” on different web browsers. I’ve personally tested the Euro sign shows from this HTML code on these browsers.

Web Browser Host &Euro HTML
Chrome 14 Mac, Ubuntu, Windows 7
Firefox 7 Mac, Ubuntu, Windows 7
Internet Explorer 6 Windows XP
Internet Explorer 7 Windows XP
Internet Explorer 8 Windows 7
Internet Explorer 9 Windows 7
Safari iPhone iOS 5.0
iPad iOS 4.3
iPod Touch iOS 5.0
Safari 5.1 Mac
Opera 11 Mac

Type the Euro Key on Windows and Mac

In case you do want enter the Euro symbol directly on a Mac or PC, here’s how.

To type the Euro key on a Mac, press Option-Shift-2. I’ve tested this on Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Lion on U.S. keyboard layouts.

To type the Euro key on Windows, press Ctrl-Alt-E. I’ve tested this on Windows XP and Windows 7.

Does the Euro Symbol Go Before or After the Amount?

If you are a native English speaker, you’re most probably used to money symbols going before the amount, with a dot for the decimal place, like this:

€169.50

In some countries in the European Union, the Euro symbol is written after the amount. Sometimes the decimal separator is a comma.

If you’re building a web page mainly for people from a specific country, you’d best use that country’s convention for writing prices in Euro.

Here’s how prices in Euro are written in some countries. If you’d like to add a country, let me know in a comment below.

Country Euro Price Format
France 169,50 €
Germany 169,50 €
Holland € 169,50
Italy € 169,50
Spain 169,50 €
Portugal 169,50 €

If you’d like to see how I worked this out, look at the video at the bottom of the iPhone 4S Prices article at Mac Crazy.

Enter the Euro Symbol in WordPress

Since WordPress is extremely popular CMS for publishing websites, here are several ways to input the Euro sign into a WordPress page or blog post:

  1. If your keyboard has a Euro key, you can just type it in the blog post editor.
  2. You can copy the Euro character from right here: €. Then just paste it into WordPress.
  3. In the WordPress editor’s HTML tab, you can enter the HTML entity directly: &euro;.

The first two methods work because WordPress uses Unicode for all web pages. You can check by for your website by loading a blog page in a web browser, and choosing View Source. Check that the character set is set to UTF-8 in the head of the webpage’s HTML, like this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
      charset=UTF-8" />

Note that WordPress automatically replaces Euro HTML entities with the actual Unicode character. That’s why, if you view this webpage’s HTML, which is generated by WordPress, you’ll see Euro signs directly in the HTML code (i.e. Unicode characters), rather than the Euro HTML character entity.

Conclusion

Thanks for visiting Smart Web Developer! I hope this article answered your question. If it didn’t, let me know.

Comments or questions? Use the comment box below.

If this article helped you, please click +1, Like or Tweet buttons below to share it – it’s quick to do, and helps this page bubble up ahead of older, outdated articles in search results.

Categories
SEO

Link Building & Paid Links – Can Google Detect Them?

Backlinks – the links to your site from other sites – are regarded as the most important factor in how well a site ranks in Google. There are many paid link building services, as well as services to rent links. Can Google detect these artificial links?

Google states that sites buying or selling links may be penalised:

“Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

(Source: Paid links page in Google Webmaster Tools Help)

Link Building & Paid Links – The Short Answer

In the short term, you may get a reward from paid links or paid link building. In the medium to long term, Google will continue to improve its detection of artificial links statistically or your competitors may report you. These links may be devalued. You may attract a paid links penalty.

Consider attracting links organically with great content, features or value, rather than buying links. When building links, ask yourself “Does this link add value?”.

Paid Links – The Long Answer

I’ve seen sites dominate rankings using paid links. I’ve also seen low quality sites using a high volume of links from comment hit the first page for very competitive terms. So paid links and, surprisingly, even comment spam links can work.

Building Many Links from the Same Sites – Certain Death?

The first time I compared link profiles of sites statistically using MajesticSEO I got a shock. For each site, I compared the ratio of the number of backlinks, to the number of unique websites linking to the site. I also compared the number of backlinks to how many of those linking websites are on webservers housed together (i.e. more accurately, on the same IP C-class network).

One very well regarded site had almost as many websites linking as it had links – i.e. it typically only had one link from each website. Almost all of the websites were on different networks. Its link profile was very clean.

Other sites had many links per site, and many links from servers in the same place. They clearly had many links from the same sites, and many of these sites were probably commonly owned, since they were housed together. It was completely transparent that these sites had huge numbers of artificial backlinks.

Why wasn’t the clean site at number one? When this artificial link building was so easily detected, why hadn’t Google delisted them from search engine results? These sites were clearly trying to game Google, it’s easy to detect that, and yet there they were on the first page. How did they stay there? I don’t know.

I do know that I’d rather be the clean site. Having all those artificial links is a liability.

Link Profiles

Tom Anthony released a spreadsheet to generate link distribution graphs using SEOmoz’s API that gave me a similar shock. These graphs show number of links versus the authority of links.

These graphs show that unusual backlink profiles are easily detectable. For example, a site showed a spike, relative to other similar domains, for links around an SEOmoz domain authority of 30:

You can see there is a spike where all of a sudden a whole bunch more root domains in the DA 30 bin (relating to a DA of 25-34) are linking in; domains in that range are common candidates for the positioning of paid or spammy links.

If we can spot this so easily, then it’s plausible that Google can too.

(Source: Tom Anthony in “Link Profile Tool to Discover Paid Links or Other Anomalous Linking Activity”)

An “unusual” link profile doesn’t necessarily mean “artificial”. Still, if Tom could develop this tool on his own, what could a large engineering team at Google achieve over a number of years in detecting artificial backlinks? Consider the statistics on backlinks available to Google: they have available tens of thousands of examples of clean sites of many different sizes, industries, and growth patterns that could be modelled.

Don’t Game Google, Google is Smart

Rand Fishkin’s SEOmoz article showing LDA correlates well with rankings suggests that in-page SEO factors may count more than we think. It pointed to the possibility that Google may use topic modelling. What I’ve seen matches Rand’s assertion: I’ve seen pages ranking very well on content alone, against sites with millions of backlinks. I checked a few pages that do very well – they score highly on LDA. I checked a page not fairing so well, and seemingly very topical for the target keyword. A low LDA. Conclusion: Google may be more advanced in determining topic than we think.

I would not bet against Google having detection of artificial backlinks by statistical profiles. The links to your site are public. If you choose artificial methods for link building, it might not be detected now, but may be in the future. Is it worth risking the rankings of your site?

Don’t Back the Blackhat

Go for link building that builds value on the net. Don’t engage a Blackhat SEO, build or generate lots of low quality links, lest you become enmeshed in the cycle of BlackHat SEO life:

  • Blackhat SEOs use manipulative techniques.
  • Google works out how to detect the technique.
  • Google devalues the backlinks, penalizes the site’s rankings or delists the site.
  • If they’re lucky, the blackhat survives off Bing & Yahoo traffic, living to fight another day.
  • Backhat SEOs get more sophisticated.
  • Repeat.

Good blackhat SEOs are brilliant and creative. They are great at generating ideas for SEO, some of which can be totally whitehat, and safe to execute. They love being tricky – “Can I keep outwitting Google?” They’re typically addicted to short term results, regardless of sustainability.

Draw the line at ideas. Under no circumstances use Blackhat SEOs for managing or executing your link building. In my experience, Blackhats are impulsive, with an unwillingness to consider consequences. They can get amazing results quickly, which can fall apart just as quickly.

I’ve seen a company site crash from five million visitors a month to no traffic in three days. Google discovered extensive cross-linking between the company’s network of sites, intended to inflate rankings. Google delisted the sites. The company went into administration shortly afterwards. Please don’t let this be you.

Your Competitors Are Watching You

If you are ranking well for commercially attractive keywords, at some stage a SEO for a competing site will examine your backlink profile. If they see paid links or paid linkbuilding campaigns, they could report you to Google, and you may get a paid links penalty.

Go Whitehat!

Rules of thumb to building links that will stand the test of time:

  1. Does your link add value to the context of the webpage it’s in?
    (e.g. A pool supplies link on a Mac website – no.)
  2. Does your link create real value for people?
    (e.g. Person on Twitter looking for an online pet food store. You Tweet the link to your petfood store, disclosing you work there, with a coupon code for 15% off their first purchase.)
  3. That is all.

Conclusion

Paid links, rented links and paid link building may cause you problems. Artificial link building can leave statistical signatures, which can be detected by software. Artificial link building is even harder to hide from a trained eye. Google’s capacity to detect artificial links will continue to improve. Your competitors will watch you too.

Consider other natural ways to get links – provide value for people, like great content, beautiful design, irresistible offers, entertainment, infographics or unique features.

If you found this article valuable, please share it – it just takes a moment. Tweet and +1 buttons below. SmartWebDeveloper.com is young, with few backlinks. If you have a site where you can meaningfully, usefully link to Smart Web Developer’s homepage or this article, that would be really helpful. Thank you!

One final tip for long term success. In search results, is your site above clearly better sites? If so, people can see it doesn’t really belong there. Tick tock … To keep your rankings long-term, deserve your rankings.

Categories
Google Analytics

Google Analytics Real-Time: Features, Uses, Get Access

In this article, read about Real-Time Google Analytics’ features, uses, and find out how to get access. See video of Real Time Analytics at work. “Real-Time” is a new feature of Google Analytics launched September 29, 2011.

If you haven’t seen Google Analytics before, Analytics is free software for capturing and analyzing traffic to your website.

Screenshot of realtime analytics from Google
Real Time Google Analytics Screenshot (Credit: Google Analytics Blog)

Real-Time Google Analytics Features

Analytics RT provides statistics about the visitors on your website right now. The features of realtime analytics are:

  1. The Right Now area shows the number of people visting your website right now. This figure is updated every second.
  2. Top Referrals, showing the top referring websites for the users on your site right now. For example, you might see the referrer t.co with 10 active visitors, meaning ten visitors on your site right now came from Twitter.
  3. Top Active Pages, showing the currently busiest webpages on your site, with the number of visitors on each webpage.
  4. Top Keywords, showing the keywords that brought the visitors on your site right now.
  5. Top Locations, showing where your users are on a map. Very cool. You can see this feature in the video below.
  6. The Pageviews area shows page views by minute for the last thirty minutes and pageviews by second for the last 30 seconds. These are updated live, with the views scrolling to the left as they update.
  7. There are specific pages for Traffic Sources, Locations and Content. (I’m currently waiting for access to test these.)

Note that the real-time feature doesn’t mean that all features of analytics are real-time. It can still take some time for data to show up in the other parts of analytics.

Real Time Analytics Video

Here’s a YouTube video of Google Analytics Real-Time in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiHEs6lAQ0c

(Source: Thanks to LunaMetrics.com)

Applying Real Time Analytics

Two people at Webmaster World’s forums have said “yawn” to real time Analytics. For their sites, watching traffic in real time may have little value. For me, Google Analytics Realtime will likely prove invaluable. Here are some useful applications for real-time analytics:

  1. Site operations: Have you ever had your site’s traffic jump up by 100 times? This does happen. It happened to me this year. Real-Time Analytics will show if you have a large jump or drop in traffic straight away, so you can take action, if needed. Do you need to add more servers? Do you need to put a new offer in place to capitalize on a sudden influx of visitors to an unexpected area of your site? Have you lost your number one ranking for a keyword which brought in a lot of visitors? Do you need to call your advertising network because your ads have stopped running and your traffic is down 50%? Do you need to pull a new ad because its pulling enormous traffic (click-throughs), but not making any money (conversions). For these sorts of problems and opportunities, I’d much see and respond immediately, rather than the next day.
  2. Monitoring the effect of your site being mentioned on broadcast media, for example in a TV interview or TV ad: If your site is advertised on TV, how does the traffic surge. Do these vistors go where you expect?
  3. Watching the curve of traffic from social media: Tweets, Facebook posts, Diggs – How does your social traffic build and tail off? Where do the social vistors go? How long does the traffic last? The Google Analytics blog suggests using realtime analytics can be used to see when traffic from a social post tails off, so you can see when to post again.
  4. Tracking campaigns on tight timescales: Some websites, like Living Social,  have offers that expire in 24 hours. Another example is Avaaz, who might be trying to get a petition signed before a meeting of the G8 in 3 days. Imagine if not many people are buying the offer or signing the petition (i.e. the number of conversions is low). Is that because traffic to the offer is low, or because people aren’t responding to the way the offer is presented? With Real Time Analytics, we can see how the traffic is. If the traffic is low, we can work on getting traffic up quickly! For example, getting coverage in media, or buying more online advertising. If the traffic volume is good, we can tune the offer. Maybe it needs a different headline, a different photo, or a video. Analytics’ real-time feature could make the difference between success & failure of a campaign with short time scales.
  5. Ensuring campaign measurement is working: Say you’re tracking links from an email newsletter you’re planning to send out. With Real Time Analytics can click the link in the draft newsletter, and quickly see if the campaign tracking works correctly.
  6. Testing changes to a site: You’ve just deployed your site’s new look. Are visitors staying or clicking away? You’ve added a new “resources box” to every page on the site. Is it driving people to the pages it mentions, or is it proving almost invisible to users. If a change isn’t working as expected, you could see it straight away with the real-time feature, and back it out while you redesign. You could even measure and adapt in real time: Does a thick green border work for the resource box instead of a thin black line?

To enjoy the fullness of the realtime feature, you need visitors to look at! You’ll need reasonable traffic to your site, or for your site to be exceptionally sticky (visitors staying a long time).

For example, say you have a site with 90,000 visits a month and the average visitor stays ten minutes. Ninety thousand visits a month is a visitor arriving on your site about every 30 seconds, on average. If the average visitor stays 10 minutes, that would give you an average of 20 concurrent vistors to watch. Of course visitors numbers will vary by time of day and day of week, even for sites with global audiences.

Even if you have a lower traffic site, the real time feature can still be useful, e.g. for testing campaign tracking, or watching at times when you are expecting a burst of traffic.

Google Analytics Real-Time Features Wishlist

I’d expect the Google Analytics realtime features will be expanded over time. One of the features that would be great to see is the ability to replay the traffic at a particular point in time. (Say there was a burst in traffic while you were asleep.)

Note that the realtime feature does not apply profile filters, even if you have them applied to your profile. The data shown by real-time analytics is unfiltered.

How to Access Real-Time Analytics

Realtime Analytics is being progressively rolled out to Analytics users.

Real-time Analytics is only available in the new version of Analytics. Click “New Version” at the top-right of the Analytics screen to switch to the new version. (Don’t worry, you can switch back to the old version for now.)

If you have access, real-time analytics is available in the Dashboards tab. Soon – around 5 October, 2011 – the real time feature will move to the Home tab.

If you find you don’t have access to real-time analytics yet, you can request access to realtime analytics.

How Will You Use Google Analytics Real-Time?

How do you plan to use realtime Google Analytics? Is it relevant to you? Let us know with a comment below.

If you found this article useful, please click +1 or Tweet to help share it. Thanks!

Categories
Web Hosting

How I Host My Websites for 9 Cents per Month Each

My website hosting costs an average of 9 cents per month for each of my websites. Over time, this rather affordable web hosting has really proven itself. One of my sites, MacCrazy.com, had over 40,000 visits in the last month. MacCrazy.com’s web pages load quickly and the site is always up.

This site, SmartWebDeveloper.com, is also on the same web hosting plan. How does Smart Web Developer website work for you? Does it seem pretty responsive?

For my monthly nine cents per site, I also get 24 hour, 7 day a week telephone support from very helpful, knowledgable people in the U.S.

My Web Hosting Experiences

Over my time as a professional web developer, I’ve had both good and bad experiences with web hosting.

I’ve worked on websites on web servers running at fifteen different web hosting companies. The monthly hosting fees ran from tens of dollars a month to tens of thousands of dollars a month.

The team at my workplace provides business class web hosting in Australia to substantial businesses, such as online insurance and brands you’d recognise. I buy my own web hosting still to keep my personal websites separate from my work, and because web servers in the U.S. are better for my needs.

From this experience, I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting the best web hosting. I’ve found a good deal with a solid hosting provider that’s very good value.

Web Hosting Review – Questions

It takes quite a bit of time to write a web hosting review. There’s a lot of questions to answer to give people a real review, warts and all:

  • How are the website host’s facilities?
  • How has the uptime been?
  • What’s the quality of support?
  • What’s the security like?
  • Have there been any glitches with the web hosting?
  • How does this shared hosting compare with a virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated hosting?

Some people change web hosting five times before they find one that works for them. Moving a website can be painful – often there’s technical work to get the site working on its new webserver. It’s best to research your potential web host upfront to get the best chance of a good match, so you can avoid time, cost and hassle of moving to another web hosting provider later.

I want to write a complete article to give you the information to discern whether they’re a good company for your needs.

At this stage, I’m measuring interest in a review. Are you interested to learn more about my web hosting experiences? If so, leave a quick comment below. Your interest gives me energy to write the review!

Categories
Mac

2011 MacBook Air – Web Developer’s Dream Rig?

Apple has released new 2011 MacBook Air models, sporting zippy Intel Core i5 or i7 processors, fast flash storage instead hard disks, and the capacity to drive large external displays. Are these ultra thin and light a web developer’s dream machine?

Photo of a MacBook 2011 from above-front.
MacBook Air 2011 - Dream Machine?

The short answer is yes!

Being light and small, the MacBook Air is very easy to move around. It’s almost no effort to bring along to a meeting. Or if you’re working long hours, and need a change of scene, it’s so easy to shift to another desk, a couch, or a bench by a river.

They make the Air so small and thin by going wireless and cutting out the Ethernet port, chopping the hard disk for flash storage chips, as well as really clever design. It’s the sexiest laptop I’ve ever handled. Apple still manages to squeeze on two USB 2.0 ports, and – only on the 13 inch model – an SD card slot. And you can get an Ethernet port via USB or Thunderbolt if you need it.

The screen is bright and clear. The MBA can drive big screens: I tested the MacBook Air driving a 27 inch Apple LED Cinema Display with above HD 1080p resolution – see “Can a MacBook Air 2011 run a large external display?” for videos.

The graphics processor is integrated onto the same chip as the CPU. It’s fine for most 2D work: web development, Photoshop and amateur video editing. For Final Cut Motion, Adobe After Effects, 3D modelling or games, you’d want a 15 or 17 inch MacBook Pro with their strong graphics processors.

Battery life is five hours of web browsing for the 11 inch model and seven hours for the 13 inch. Push it harder, for example by encoding video, or turn up the display brightness and the MacBook Air will live less long.

Flash on websites can take a third off the MacBook Air’s battery, which is probably why Apple doesn’t ship the Air with Flash installed. If you want to prolong your battery life, and keep your Air cool and quiet (not hot and with fan noise) there’s a click-to-run Flash solution. There’s other tricks that can double your battery life; see MacBook Air battery life for more info.

The new Core i5 or i7 processors replace the late 2010 MacBook Air’s Core 2 Duo processors. The Core 2 Duos were power efficient, but a bit slow by modern standards. These new CPUs are fast, on par with last year’s MacBook Pro, but drinking much less battery. Which one to get? See MacBook Air i5 vs i7.

The solid state disk (SSD) is fast. It makes the Air really responsive. No waiting for the whir & grind of a hard disk. Apple used Toshiba and Samsung to supply the flash memory chips. The Samsung is faster, but there’s no knowing which you’ll get.

The MacBook Air sports a Thunderbolt port. It’s the same as the Mini Display Port on previous Macs, but adds the facility for one gigabyte per second of data transfer with peripherals – each way (i.e. 2GBps). Plug it into Apple’s new Thunderbolt Display, and the display works like a docking station. The Thunderbolt Display provides a Gigabit Ethernet port, a Firewire 800 port, three USB 2.0 ports, and another Thunderbolt plot to add more high speed peripherals, like disk arrays.

The new MacBook Air comes preloaded with Mac OS X Lion. Lion is fast, responsive & good looking. The emphasis on full screen apps and fading-away scrollbars makes as much of the screen as possible available for work. Lion includes Apache and the latest PHP version available at the time (5.3.6). OS X is Unix underneath, so there’s all the useful shell commands ready to go, and it’s much closer software-environment-wise to the Linux servers many of us deploy to than that other very popular operating system.

So picture this: You have a fast, thin laptop. Take anywhere. Weighs almost nothing. It’s capable – you can do serious work on it. Bring it to work, plug in a tiny Thunderbolt connector. Your tiny Mac is suddenly driving giant display, office gigabit Ethernet and a big disk arrayA full workstation. Later, going home, unplug and your super portable again.

Sound good? I think the 2011 MacBook Air is a web developer’s dream machine. Now the only decision is MacBook Air 11 vs 13 inch.

Categories
Mac

Mac Moves to PHP 5.3.6 With Release of OS X Lion

With Apple‘s release of OS X Lion, the bundled version of PHP has been updated to PHP 5.3.6, the very latest production version of PHP.

PHP 5.3 includes features like:

  • namespaces,
  • lambda funtions,
  • late static binding, and
  • a native mysql driver, mysqlnd.

This is good news for web developers using Mac. If we want to work the latest PHP release, we don’t have to resort to installing a separate version of PHP, using a tool like MacPorts.

Probably the fact that Lion is only available as a download through the Apple App Store has helped Apple ship with the latest PHP version.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard currently uses PHP 5.3.4, even with the latest 10.6.8 update.

A PHP 5.4 Alpha has just been released, with useful features like traits. I wonder whether Apple will update to PHP 5.4 during Lion’s lifetime? I can only hope.

Categories
Mac

Mac OS X Lion: Useful Features, Compatibility, Upgrade Requirements, Install Time

Mac OS X 10.7, codenamed Lion was released on 20 July 2011. I’ve just upgraded my MacBook Air to Lion. Lion is … quite a lot of awesomeness bundled together.

On OS X Lion, even "About This Mac" is better
On OS X Lion, even "About This Mac" is better

Useful Features of Lion

Here’s some I love about Lion and am using all the time:

New cool stuff everywhere: There’s just great little touches everywhere. Even About This Mac is better, showing how much space different types of files are using on your hard disk, just like for an iPod when it’s plugged in for syncing to iTunes (see screenshot). I accidentally quit the Preview app without saving a screenshot. When I next started Preview, there it was waiting for me. All the Apple Apps now just pickup where I last left them. After getting really used to “the usual”, it’s quite exciting stumbling over all these useful improvements.

Full screen apps: Just click a two headed arrow in the top-right corner of a window, and it expands to take the whole screen, with the menu bar shrinking away. The major Mac apps have been upgraded to support full screen mode, like Safari, iPhone, iTunes, Mail, iCal, Preview and it works with some third party apps like Chrome. To sweep between full screen apps, just slide three fingers horizontally across the trackpad. Ahhhh – iPad like simplicity, just focus on one task at a time. And get the whole screen for useful work.

Scrolling reinvented: Scroll bars tend to disappear in Lion. In Safari and the Finder they’re not there until I scroll with the trackpad or arrow keys. The scroll bars fade in while I’m scrolling and quickly disappear. This gives more visible area for content, be it a web page or picture thumbnails in the Finder. So you don’t panic at the lack of scroll bars, the Lion welcome app makes sure it tells you how to scroll with two fingers on the trackpad. Two finger scrolling is in the opposite direction to Snow Leopard, matching the iPhone and iPad. (This can be reversed.) When you scroll past the end, there’s a bouncing effect also a la iPad. While there is an adjustment, it feels more tactile & intuitive. Basically Lion takes the best elements of the iPhone experience (focus on one thing, get the interface out of the way) and starts to bring this to the Mac.

Mission Control: Swipe up with three fingers and I can clearly see all my windows, full screen apps and the dock, with windows from the same app stacked together, and the app icon on the bottom edge of the stacked windows. Just click to pick which window you want. Quick, clear, easy, awesome.

Eye Candy: Lion improves the Mac’s graphical interface. It feels lighter & cleaner, more refined, yet more friendly. It not obvious. I can’t quite put my finger on the changes – the progress bar pulses and it lighter, window corners seem different sometimes, the shadows are better perhaps, Finder icons have been revised, elements slide, move, contract and expand… The elements aren’t obvious, but collectively Lion feels quite different to previous OS X releases.

Lion looks and feels different. It’s got more life in it. It’s simpler, lighter, more effective more fun.

Lion Application Compatibility

Application compatibility has been good so far. I’ve tested Firefox, Opera, Chrome & Outlook. I still need to test Word, Excel, Photoshop and the like. An app I use to stream music throughout my house – Airfoil – falls over after suspend, but I’ve got no doubt that will be fixed very soon. My PHP configuration got broken by the Lion upgrade, taking down a WordPress site I working on, but that’s fixed now.

How to Get Lion

Mac OS X Lion is available only through the Mac App Store. Go the the Apple menu, choose the third item down “App Store…“.

Requirements to Upgrade to Lion

You need to be running Mac OS Snow Leopard 10.6.6 or higher, and have 4GB of free disk space to upgrade to Lion.

Lion Download

Lion downloaded ridiculously quickly for me, at almost 10 megabytes per seconds. Apple’s obviously done the work so if you’ve got a fast Internet connection, they’ll use every bit of it.

Time to Install Lion

It took about 40 minutes to install on my MacBook Air 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo.

Lion Pricing

Pricing is $29.99 in the U.S. and AUD$31.99 in Australia.

Performance

All the new Lion features respond smoothly & quickly on my late-2010 MacBook Air. My Air runs Core 2 Duo 1.6 GHz., which is a slow processor compared to current Macs like the mid-2011 MacBook Air with a i5 or i7. Macs made in the last couple of years should run Lion well.

Conclusion

I highly recommend upgrading to Lion! It’s a big upgrade to OS X with lots of useful improvements you’ll use daily. I’m meant to keep my MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard so I can test on Snow Leopard, but to be honest, I don’t think I can resist upgrading.

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PHP

PHP 5.4 Alpha Released

An alpha version of PHP 5.4 has been released to the public on php.net. PHP 5.4 alpha 2 is available for download from qa.php.net.

The PHP 5.4 alpha was first released 26 June 2011. The proposed release date for PHP 5.4 is 26 July 2011. (Source: “PHP” on  Wikipedia.)

PHP 5.4’s features include:

  • better performance
  • lower memory usage
  • array dereferencing – you don’t need to store an array before access, so code like get_person_by_id(5)[‘address’] is now possible; Razvan Tudorica gives a straightforward example of array dereferencing
  • traits, essentially a mechanism for two classes with a common parent class to still share some common methods – very useful – Simias Toleikis explains traits very well
  • support for DTrace for real time tracing of PHP processes

There’s also been some cleanup to improve the security and code quality of PHP:

  • syntax for continue/break $var removed
  • register_long_arrays, allow_call_time_pass_by_reference and register_globals configuration parameters have been removed
  • session_registered(), session_is_registered(), session_unregister() have been removed
  • support for old sqlite databases has been moved to PECL; sqlite3 support is still built in

Big features like Unicode in the core and performance acceleration from having APC built in looks like they’ll wait until PHP 6 is released.