Feature request: geolocation so I don’t have to scan the QR code.  Am I lazy? Maybe, but I always feel weird scanning QR codes in public.  It’s probably a personal problem.

Hats off though to Cap Metro here in Austin for the work you have done on this so far as it is a huge improvement over what I had to formerly access on your web site which is not mobile friendly.

What is the process for validating input on a form before submitting?

What methods can you use to improve front-end performance?

What is the hasLayout-model and what are the advantages/disadvantages of using it?

What are some differences with regards to CSS in IE7 and IE8?

What is the difference between “==” and “===” in Javascript?

What are the advantages of not declaring JS event handlers explicitly?

What is the difference between bubble and capture?

What are advantages of using a CSS reset file? Disadvantages?

What are the CSS considerations for min-width and max-width in IE7? IE8?

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This should have been on my list of products/services that I am thankful for. Because I am.

That being said I like to live a semi-private life, and am posting about the things that I bought or used this year that worked or didn’t work.

Awesome

• Sparkletts – You deliver delicious and clean water every 2 weeks for a price that is cheaper than buying the 2.5 gallon containers at the grocery store.
• Virgin Mobile – I don’t talk much on the phone, but text and use tons of data so at $28 a month after taxes for Sprint service and an Android powered phone I can’t complain. Do I want a better phone? Yes. Do I need it and want to pay $70-80 a month? Not really.
• Car2Go – Austin’s car-sharing program gets me around downtown for less than the price of a cab. They have great customer service as well as they followed up with a call and comped me 90 free minutes after an incorrect towing charge was added to my account. Their mobile app is the most useful app on my phone allowing me to locate and reserve cars easily.
• Cap Metro Rail – The commuter rail line that everyone thinks nobody rides is actually packed to the brim. I will admit the reverse commute direction always has about half the seats empty, but also has 10-15 bikers standing per car as opposed to the normal commute direction which has standing room only. There are rumors flying that they may get the budget approved to provide weekend service in 2012.
• Southwest/Chase – Yes, I realize supporting Chase is not a popular thing to do right now, but the Southwest credit card through Chase is by far the greatest rewards program for those who fly Southwest frequently. Just by signing up it payed for 2 round free trips, converted another 2 round trips from the previous rewards structure, and I have earned another 2 round trips in just 6 months. Even with the annual fee I am saving tons, and flying an airline that has never F’d me.
• Lynda.com – I may not have went to college if this existed as it does now. Best $38 I spend every month. This year, I’ve expanded my knowledge of Ruby on Rails, Drupal, HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery as well as picked up some design tips as well.
• Public Libraries, Amazon marketplace, and Half Priced Books – I would love to have a Kindle but without the ability to buy or trade copies of books at discounted prices I’ll stick with the undying, cheaper, and heavier print versions.
• Spotify – I am one of the 2.5 million premium subscribers (as of today), and love exploring music for $9.99 a month. When I find an album I like I usually go and purchase the downloadable or physical album as Spotify and all of the other large streaming music providers don’t pay the artists an amount that is even close to fair. They seem to forget that the music is created by artists who need to be paid in order to continue creating new products.

Definitely Not Awesome

• Sprint – We were using the mobile 4G hotspot as our primary internet source, and without any direct notification they axed unlimited data on hotspots capping us at 5G. Granted, it’s in the contract that they can do this, but it’s wrong. Contract law should be changed when it comes to bandwidth as it’s a major reason we went with their product, and as a large deciding factor for many it should be unchanged during the contract period. Also, when we had to cancel and switch to Time Warner I was trying to negotiate a deal to waive the cancellation fee, and start a new 2 year contract with a new mobile purchase and plan – a deal that would have netted them way more than the cancellation fee for the hotspot and kept me as a customer. No dice, so I walked.
• Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, etc – I don’t know if I have passed the social media peak where I prefer to be an observer rather than a contributor, but I’m more annoyed and use these services less frequently. I still see the power from a business perspective, but from a personal perspective have less of a desire to share personal details and updates. Productive debate, educational, and opinion pieces, cool stuff you’re working on, and the like are still appreciated and belong in the public domain, but pictures and status updates should be broadcast to your family and friends only rather than to your “friends”.

I threw together a quick sample for him that we will integrate with MailChimp eventually, and you can see it just contains sample text and images and still needs a 2.0-esque submit button. I’ve added in a web font from TypeKit, and used the jQuery plugin, jCycle, to cycle through 3 sample images and descriptions. I changed the interval to 8 seconds though as 5 seconds seemed to quick for such a big image to be cycling, and made the experience feel a bit too accelerated.

You can check it out here: http://bieberich.us/test/bigbackgroundsignuppage/

I will say that, yes, this type of signup/pre-launch page is trendy looking, but just integrating with MailChimp and sending updates is not enough from a technology and strategy perspective. I did some searching to try and find out what others viral pages are doing beyond just capturing an email, and came across this WordPress Theme with plugins, LaunchEffect. This generates a unique url for each person that signs up so that you can track referrals and other stats, and reward those users possibly reaching out to them for more input during beta testing if they were more interested or active in promoting the site. It would be simple to add in jQuery and jCycle in the WP theme editor to have the same cycling of images and descriptions behind the signup box. Just another option with a little more business sense. Just a scotch.

I haven’t tried it out yet, so I can’t say how good or useful it will be to me as I am currently more developer than designer. If this works as well as it looks like it does in the demo I could see myself using it for prototyping and turning out some high-fi examples that don’t take a lot of time and can be iterated quickly. I also liked the point that was made in the video about the program behaving much more like a browser, so that this is a much more accurate WYSIWYG example. I don’t agree with the point made near the end that “in 5 – 10 years most websites will be built without coding”. There will definitely be a shift to developing and coding tools that will be used by programs like this, but there were still be many advances and changes as well as projects that require higher levels of customization where those who can code will survive.

Anyways, I look forward to testing this out.

2009 – Ben Stein – Building Cross Platform Mobile Apps with Ruby and PhoneGap from Gotham Ruby Conference on Vimeo.

1. The JavaScript validation function was not explicitly returning true if all was gravy, which caused the additional GA function in the onsubmit event not to function properly. So, if you have an onsubmit JS validation function be sure to “return true” otherwise there will be no GA dice.

2. The cross-domain tracking data which is passed in the URL to the php file was being lost in the php redirect to the confirmation page. This is because it was not being included in the php header() function. To pass the cross-domain tracking data, and any other url parameters, in your php redirect you just need to do something similar to this:

$redirect = “http://www.designaroundus.com/ga2.html”;
header(“Location: ” . $redirect . ‘?’ . $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']);

Feel free to grab the code from the demo above, or recommend changes.

Everything was going amazingly well installing and setting up the development environment on my 2008 white MacBook which was recently upgraded to 10.6 – Snow Leopard (rawwwwr). When I get to the final step after installing everything and creating my first app I went to start the server with the rails server command and ran into the crazy libmysqlclient.18.dylib error. Yea, just do a Google search for “Rails 3 on OSX 10.6 MYSQL2″, and you’ll find many proposed solutions. After picking away at today I found the solution that finally worked. Here it is:

1. Follow these steps and send a Thank You note to Cowboy Coded – Setting Up Rails 3 On Mac OSX Snow Leopard 10.6.4

2. After you create your first app modify the Gemfile in your app’s directory to include the following dependency because Rails 3 does not play nice with any MYSQL2 gem greater than version 0.3:
gem ‘mysql2′, ‘< 0.3'

3. Then to get rid of the libmysqlclient.18.dylib error run the following command (of course updating your versions noted in the paths):
sudo install_name_tool -change libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/mysql-5.5.13-osx10.6-x86_64/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib ~/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180/gems/mysql2-0.2.7/lib/mysql2/mysql2.bundle