Category: Videos

Emmet (is Awesome)

Emmet (previously known as Zen Coding) is a web-developer’s toolkit that can greatly improve your HTML & CSS workflow. Basically, most text editors out there allow you to store and re-use commonly used code chunks, called “snippets”. While snippets are a good way to boost your productivity, all implementations have common pitfalls: you have to define the snippet first and you can’t extend them in runtime.

Emmet takes the snippets idea to a whole new level: you can type CSS-like expressions that can be dynamically parsed, and produce output depending on what you type in the abbreviation. Emmet is developed and optimised for web-developers whose workflow depends on HTML/XML and CSS, but can be used with programming languages too.

Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks.com has a great video screencast on how to use Emmet when coding HTML and CSS:

 

Now can you imagine having a tool like this for IBM’s XPages?

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Alan Lepofsky: Purposeful Collaboration

The following is an 18 minute talk given by Alan Lepofsky at the Constellation Connected Enterprise conference on how to move social from being a stand-alone service for sharing, to integrating social features into the business tools that companies rely on to run their businesses.

I have more on this topic coming to this blog soon.

 

A Must Have Mac App for Developers: Structurer

It’s not secret that I do a lot of work lately with HTML/CSS, PHP, JavaScript and MySQL since my career at Clark College began a year ago. For years, make that decades I was spooled by the IBM Notes/Domino database templating feature. In the world of outside of Notes/Domino, you tend to work with a boatload of individual files when coding websites and web apps. A few months ago I came across the “Structurer” app from Nettuts+ which is the perfect tool for file based “templating”.

At the end of 2010, we released an exclusive Mac utility app, called Structurer. This app allows you to rapidly create file/folder structures for your new projects. Less than a month later, the developer, Cesar Tessarin, is back with a much improved version which now provides support for template creation, as well as assigning custom content automatically to newly created files. It’s fantastic, and, even better, 100% free to all of our readers!

Download Structurer for OS X >

There is also a “Structurer Pro” version available for Nettuts+ Premium Members >

Update: Hat tip to Jino Conklin for showing me Structurer in class earlier this quarter.

I want it NOW!

amazonprimeair

We’re excited to share Prime Air — something the team has been working on in our next generation R&D lab.

The goal of this new delivery system is to get packages into customers’ hands in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles.

Putting Prime Air into commercial use will take some number of years as we advance the technology and wait for the necessary FAA rules and regulations.

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