One of the most visited pages on my site is a very short post on hiding a node title in Drupal 6. With the release of Drupal 7, let me update this post.
Today, Wednesday 29th December 2010, was the first Dublin GTUG hackathon, and we decided to focus on Android. We decided to focus on two apps, one a navigation app for UCD campus and one an app that would notify users when they came near one of the new Garda safety cameras.
To be honest, we didn't get very far in the day we had. What we all found out was how esoteric Android development is. We battled with Git, Eclipse, and the Android SDK for too long at the start of the day.
I do get the feeling that with a little more time and practice I would be at that point where it would start to make sense, but I'm not there yet. We had people in the room who had made apps before and we still couldn't get there!
The next GTUG hackathon will have more advance setup (this one being after Christmas didn't help along with it being the first). Specifically we should send an e-mail regarding setting up the Android environment, i.e. setting up the Android SDK and ADT in Eclipse. The second major change would be setting up basic 'Hello World' apps in github, possibly some basic Maps, Location, and interface elements also - this would have sped things up considerably.
In short, Android development is still far from developer friendly and the developer examples are not very clear.
As a web developer I like all of my sites to work perfectly in any browser that a user chooses to view it with. However there are limits to what can be made cross-browser compatible, and I'm discovering that a number of CSS3 effects completely and absolutely fail miserably in IE6, no nice graceful failure, ah well.
For the last few weeks I transitioned to Google Chrome it was my default browser and my go to browser for any and all interneting. Prior to that I was a hardcore Firefox user for several years, so I am aware that my experiences with Chrome are coloured by that.
First off, I really like almost all of Chrome. What it does well, it does great, but where it fails I despise it. I'll start with the good, first off it is fast compared to Firefox 3, very fast - this is much less of an issue on Firefox 4, but since that is beta it's not really fair to compare. As a techie I really appreciate the separate processes for each tab, while also disliking it for making it hard to tell how much memory Chrome is actually using up. In my experience, the comparisons between the two seem to have been very unfair to Firefox. Yes, Firefox is a memory hog, it's very annoying, however Chrome eats it up too, it's just split amongst loads of different processes.
To make this a quick and easy post to read I've broken it down into a few categories, administration, content, and theme development. There are over 7,000 modules now, so this is hardly scratching the surface, but these are modules that come up in my sites frequently.
Administration
Drush
Drush is a handy command line tool that lets you update modules and Drupal core, download and install modules from the command line, clear all the caches, and a few other things that I haven't looked into yet! This is a particularly handy tool if you need to manage a site and you are on a link with limited bandwidth. You can login to the shell and all the actions take place on the server from then on. I have yet to do this, but with Drush managing Drupal sites from a terminal on a phone is an option - this is an option I intend to take advantage of. Drush is not quite as straightforward to install as the other modules here, but it is worth the effort.
