Rapid Web News

Version 1.4 is the latest inception of the highly popular lightweight cross browser JavaScript framework. The new version features many new additions and speed improvements over 1.3.

jQuery was developed in 2006 by John Resig and since launch has been adopted by many large companies such as Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Digg and many more. The mantra behind jQuery is “write less, do more” With a wide range of easy DOM manipulation calls and user interface effects jQuery is an attractive option for developers looking to make applications more intuitive, user friendly and feature rich.

So whats new in 1.4?

Aside from all the new additions and improvements one of my favourite new functions is .delay(). Delay provides us with the functionality to delay execution of subsequent items in the queue.

For example we can fade out and fade in an element with a second delay.

jQuery not only allows us to delay on effects we can also apply delays to custom queues.

One of many new updates is the addition to pass event data to the function .live(). This gives developers much more flexibility to capture events. From form submission, focus changes, clicks and custom events.

The example below shows how to smooth scroll on all anchor tag elements using live to capture the click event data.

According to BuiltWith.com’s statistics jQuery is running on one in five websites on the internet. Not surprising considering the adaptability of the framework.

14 days of jQuery is still running and you can find more information via the below links.

http://jquery.com/
http://jquery14.com/

Lo ruok? Bin 2 town 2day 2 meet sum m8s wot u up to?

Nufn much, wru? Wot u doin l8tr?

At home, Nufn till the wknd tbh n e way cu 2moro

Need the above translating? Then I guess you’re not ‘down with the kids’. Experts claim that using this abbreviated texting style can actually help the development of reading and writing skills. Research has shown that children who use ‘textism’ will also have less difficulty regarding spelling skills. A bit of a head scratcher really seeing how none of the above text is anything like the English language. The study was carried out on 8-12 year-olds over the space of a year. Older children appeared to use more abbreviations which require more sophisticated literary skills – again hard to believe.

The research was carried out by Dr Clare Wood of Coventry University on behalf of the British Academy “We were surprised to learn that not only was the association strong, but that textism use was actually driving the development of phonological awareness and reading skill in children,”

So what is this Phonological Awareness; ‘Phonological awareness refers to an individual’s awareness of the sound structure, or phonological structure, of a spoken word. It includes the ability to auditorily distinguish units of speech, such as a word’s syllables and a syllable’s individual phonemes.’ – Phew! Thanks Wiki…

So is BT finally pulling up their antiquated ‘upto 8 meg’ packages to something that’s actually worth paying for? I’ve always considered paying a fixed price for something that often pulls up short is a little cheeky to be honest; I mean what if I quoted customers for a 10 PC user based network and then when only 3 PC’s turned up they read the fine print on the quote and see ‘upto 10 PC’s supplied’ could we get away with it – I think not.

So what is BT going to be offering? Well apparently customers will be able to get speeds of 40Mbps for downloading and an upload speed of 10Mbps from around 20 quid a month. You will however need to be in an area where BT has installed their NGA (Next Generation Access) – info on which seems to be somewhat thin on the ground. All I seem to find is reports on how they will fall short of predicted coverage. I did however find where the new broadband will be initially tested; Muswell Hill, Whitchurch and Glasgow – quite strange choices.

“The internet is essential to our customers’ lives and they are demanding more and more as richer and even more compelling services become available. BT Infinity gives customers the capacity and reliability they need in an instant and at a great value price they can afford. We want to give our customers the best possible online experience and are committed to rolling out super-fast speeds across the UK,” – Gavin Patterson, chief executive officer of BT Retail. Infinity is the service businesses are now being offered. Last time I looked into a BT business connection they wanted to charge £5 a month for a static IP…

As a user of desktop Linux distributions, both at work and at home, I’m often trying to promote the use of Linux-based systems such as Ubuntu.

Systems such as Linux to often seen to be only for the most geeky or technical minded of people, whilst Windows or Mac are heavily promoted as being used for everyday, family orientated purposes. This can be as complex as managing home finances and budgets with a spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Excel or the more simple managing of your family and friend’s photographs with some kind of photo album software.

Linux systems, such as Ubuntu, have plenty of tools available for spreadsheets and budgeting and the more complex home productivity. For budgeting, there are spreadsheet application such as Gnumeric Spreadsheet, KSpread and the more well known OpenOffice.org spreadsheet application, Calc. This is all very well and good, but what about the simpler, nicer and frankly muchc more things in life like grabbing, tweaking and showing off your friends and family photographs. Well, there are certainly quite a variety of Linux photo album applications available out there. In case you are thinking of moving to Linux, or are just curious about the available Linux based photo management applications, I have put a few details about the best of the bunch below.

F-Spot

First up is F-Spot. F-Spot is one of the top open-source Linux photo albums. It allows you to import your photos from anywhere – your camera, your phone, a CD, DVD, USB drive or even images you pull from the Internet. Take a look at the screenshot of F-Spot below.

As you can see from the screenshot, this is an imported picture I took from our office window. Down the left hand side, the view is set to ‘Metadata’ showing all the details which are sneakily embedded in your image files by your camera. As you can see from this information, this photograph was taken with my fantastic Nokia N97 phone’s camera, and even gives advanced photography details such as Exposure Time and ISO Speed Ratings.

But F-Spot is not just about these details, it also lets you perform special effects on all your photos, such as cropping, red-eye reduction, desaturation, sepia toning and much more. It also stores a clever history of all changes made in F-Spot so any accidental mess ups can easily by reverted with only a click or two. Of course, F-Spot is a photo album tool, and does indeed allow to you manage entire albums of photos, give them captions, rate them, tag them as favourites, organise by name, date and much more.

Overall F-Spot is a very comprehensive tool, which is both easy to use and comes with a great set of features. It also ships with the very popular Ubuntu Linux distribution.

digiKam

Next up is digiKam, which is a professional, open-source photo album management tool. It is primarily designed for the KDE Desktop Environment, but works in essentially all Linux systems. A screenshot of digiKam running on my Ubuntu system is shown below.

digiKam is quite a clever photo album management tool, and offers the vast majority of features present in F-Spot. It also allows for filtering by ratings, file types and has a comprehensive pop-out image editor which allows for additional manipulation of photos and the applying of special effects. Renaming of your images in application, searching, adding of captions, ratings and tags and sorting by the physical location photos were taken (via a geolocation service) are also some of the many cleverly supported features.

digiKam is, in my opinion, a more professional photo management suite, but its range of features is of such magnitude that it may daunt the non-professional. However, for those wishing to make perfect albums and manage their photographs with intricate details and changes, it is a perfect choice.

Picasa

Although not open-source, Picasa is an excellent family orientated image editing tool from a big brand name who you might just have heard of – Google. It is very much aimed at being simple to use, whilst still provided a nice range of features.

Along with being user friendly, many of the features have the same aim and are targeting at having fun with your photos. For example, the above screenshot shows Google Picasa 3.0 allowing you to create a collage from an album of photos in many different styles. It is hardly limited to collages however, allowing you to create gift CDs to send to friends, ordering online prints, creating slide-showing and more more in the way of fun and funky features. Picasa is defintely the way to go if you wish be the easily creative and produce stunning creative elements with very little effort.

Although fantastic functionality and feature wise, for those who are dedicated to open-source software, Picasa is proprietary and indeed, not a native Linux application but is instead a custom build of the Windows version running under Wine (a Windows compatibility layer for Linux). Although this works very well in most cases and it very fast in terms of performance, sometimes even outstripped the Windows version of Picasa, some users do report issues running Picasa for Linux. However, these issues do seem to be few, far between and usually quite simple to resolve.

I hope this quick little guide gives you some good advice on the best of the best in Linux photo album software, regardless of whether you are switching to Linux, looking for an alternative to an application you already use or just stumbled upon this article and have had your curiosity spiked.

Tiscali is no more! The brand has been dissolved after being taken over by TalkTalk in July of last year.

“From today, the Tiscali brand is no more and we’re committed to giving all of our customers absolute clarity about who we are, the services we provide and the prices we charge, we’ve reviewed all of the pricing tariffs and can say from today that if you’re with TalkTalk you’re getting the same value as your fellow customers. For many of our customers this will mean a reduction in their monthly bills, others will see no change with the remainder getting a small increase,” said the chief executive officer for TalkTalk, Charles Dunstone.

Quite a rabbit hole of buyouts from TalkTalk, they’ve bought the AOL Brand prior to Tiscali which in turn bought out Pipex and Bulldog but this does mean they now have a customer base of over 4 million.