I am not really a fanboy of any company (other than Sega), but I do appreciate when a company does something well. For Microsoft, there have been a few bright spots over the last few years (even if they haven’t all been commercially profitable). Among those, I’d include the Zune as the best portable media player (note, I didn’t say “handheld entertainment device”, as the Zune and the ZuneHD were basically designed to do one thing, and do it extremely well); the Xbox 360 as quite possibly the best modern gaming console (though I do love my Wii, the Kinect kind of tipped the playing field slightly in Microsoft’s favor – or so I’ve been told; I don’t own a 360, yet); and Windows Phone 7 has, as much as Android and Apple fanboys would hate to admit, somewhat revolutionized the mobile touch interface.

Do I expect to see whole-hog clones of the WP7 Metro UI, the way we did with iOS? Absolutely not; but I do suspect that we’ll see subtle changes to touch interfaces over the next year or so as a result of the way the Windows Phone OS works.

All of that said, I can’t help but wonder what the Xbox team was thinking when it came up with the pricing structure for Microsoft Points or when they integrated Netflix into the Xbox ecosystem.

Because Opera is not an extremely popular browser, most developers probably aren’t aware of one of its greatest features: Opera Show mode. Opera Show mode is the official name of the full screen mode for Opera (technically, it’s only called Opera Show when a projection media style sheet – discussed below – is present); and it brings with it a great possibility.

More than two years ago, Opera added support for the projection media mode in CSS. Whenever the browser is expanded to full screen mode, it activates the projection media, allowing you to apply a completely different stylesheet to the full screen page than you have in other settings.

Unless you’ve been hiding in a bunker all day today, you’ve probably heard that Yahoo! has updated the terms and conditions for using Yahoo! Mail. Apparently Yahoo! will now systematically scan the contents of your mail messages in order to better target the ads they place in your mail. The update apparently includes the following statement:

The process of adding a new button to the WordPress visual editor is fairly simple; as long as you understand how to develop a new TinyMCE plugin (which is a somewhat involved and laborious process that I will probably cover at another time).

One thing I discovered yesterday, though, is that one line of code makes the difference between the Visual Editor using a custom, static image as the button and the Visual Editor using a span that you can stylize with CSS (to fit better with the native Visual Editor appearance).

As you may or may not know, Filezilla, the extremely popular FTP client, stores all of your FTP passwords in plain text on your hard drive. While I strongly disagree with this practice, I also understand that there are reasons not to do so. It would be really nice to have some sort of option to encrypt the passwords, but I don’t see that happening any time in the near future.

There are actually multiple levels of danger in using Filezilla (and, presumably, many other FTP clients). Unlike a Web browser, where, if you choose not to use the password manager none of your passwords are stored; Filezilla still stores all of the details from your most recent connection in a file called filezilla.xml and all of the details from your 10 most recent connections (at least, the ones you make by typing the information into the Filezilla interface; which is the only way to connect if you are not using the Site Manager) in a file called recentservers.xml, even if you choose not to use the Site Manager. These are plain old XML files with all of the information stored in plain, non-encrypted text. The format of the entries looks similar to the following.

Over the past few months, I have been going round-and-round trying to figure out how to link to individual events in a Google Calendar, allowing visitors to add the event to their own calendars. Google does a nice job of providing functionality to add an event to your own Google calendar, but they don’t seem to offer any functionality to add an event to other calendars.

Google does, however, provide a link to an iCal file for each calendar’s feed; which allows you to add the calendar itself to your own calendar program (Outlook, etc.). The problem with that, obviously, is that, instead of adding a single event (maybe a concert or conference you want to attend, a public meeting, etc.), it adds all of the events from that calendar.

I’ve posted a few articles about working with arrays in PHP over the past few years. I have posted information about adding and replacing elements in arrays; searching for items in arrays; and even a general post about handy array-related functions in PHP. I’m back again with a few more handy functions.

In PHP, you can obviously loop through arrays pretty easily by using a foreach() loop, but did you know you can actually step through arrays manually? PHP offers a handful of functions to do just that. Let’s take a look at those functions, and how you might be able to use them.

For WordPress plugin developers, the metabox API generally proves to be invaluable. Meta boxes allow you to organize various bits of information, groups of options and more into nice, attractive, collapsible boxes rather easily. What’s more, these boxes can be dragged around the screen and reorganized without much hassle. However, one thing that you can’t do with meta boxes is to assign additional CSS classes to them.

However, in WordPress 3.2, you will be able to do just that. WordPress 3.2 will introduce a brand new filter that allows you to modify the list of classes that are applied to a meta box. In order to use it, you’ll need to know the slug of the page on which the meta box is being displayed and the ID of the meta box.

As much as I love WordPress, one of the areas it really lacks is workflow. There are three basic statuses for posts (draft, pending review and published), but there’s very little difference between “draft” status and “pending review.” When a post is saved as “Pending for review”, nothing happens automatically. No email messages are dispatched to any of the site’s editors or administrators, no special, obvious flags fly within the admin area, etc. It might as well just be a “draft” for all intents and purposes. The idea behind creating the “pending review” status was to allow editors and administrators to tell the difference between an in-progress draft and a draft that was ready to be published, but that seems to be about it.

One of my Twitter friends retweeted a link to a post of the “Top 5 Coding Albums Of All Time” earlier (with his own comment that he’s more of an Op Ivy type of guy), and it got me thinking. What would my top 5 coding albums of all time look like? I’m not really sure how to answer that question (I’ve never been very good at creating “top 5″ or “top 10″ lists, because I am never able to shave things down to such a small number), but I do know that none of the five listed on that blog post would be on my list.