badlyDrawnToy

I recently moved house, and in the process lost my broadband connection for longer than anticipated. Having looked into the various USB Dongle solutions, I decided to opt for a tethered connection form my iPhone. I learned a lot from my week or so working this way – about my productivity, and about how affective tethering is.

Productivity

The thing I noticed the most was how much more productive I was. We all know how easy it is to get distracted by email, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and web surfing. And many of us know we should practice better time management. Well, next time you laugh at friend who tells you that where they work they don’t have internet access, I’ll have to admit, I completely understand why management make such decisions (unless your a web developer of course!).

Here’s my 2 tips to remaining productive:

• I really recommend only checking you mail periodically – it’s so easy to get into a conversation over email these days. I’d rather just fire-and-forget.
• Treat Twitter, Blogs etc. as a break from work, or something to read over breakfast/lunch/midnight feast depending on your working habits. I now read twitter feeds like RSS feeds – scanning for something interesting to pick up on.

Tethering

My experience was pretty good. I must admit, I’ve not used USB Dongles in anger, and form what I’ve seen, results vary widely. I’ve moved to Didsbury which has a strong 3G signal, and tethered over USB. My iPhone is the 3G, not 3GS. Here’s my experiences:

Speed

Connection is really good. I even managed to watch an episode of Dragon’s Den on my Mac with very little buffering. Of course, I couldn’t have done this on the phone itself.

Large File Downloads

Whilst streaming was fine, downloading wasn’t too good. I did try to download the whole episode, but it would have taken hours.

Image Quality

The biggest surprise was the poor quality of graphics. The quality is drastically reduced/pixelated. Hovering over the images reveals a hint that:

Shift+R improves the quality of this image. Shift+A improves the quality of all images on this page.

This intrigued me, so I did some digging and found that in the source of every web page, o2 is adding a call to a Javascript file in the header. This file, bmi.js, appears to replace images with low res versions. Not sure how, but it does seem to try to use iframes. It seems fairly harmless, but I did, on one occasion, find it broke a web page I was developing.

A quick look on Google reveals that thsi same file is used by Vodafone.

Battery Life

Whilst tethering, the phone does stay rather warm. With regards to battery life, as I was connected via USB, the phone remained fully charged. Interestingly, if the laptop is on battery power it still charges the phone, so the laptop loses juice pretty quickly.

Receiving Calls

Making ands Receiving calls whilst connected is fine. However, I did accidentally turn off 3G once. Whilst I could still browse OK, if the phone rings, you are disconnected.

Bugs

There is (or was, as I just downloaded the latest upgrade) a small bug with the address book. Every other letter in the right-hand alpha list became a bullet point. Odd.

Conclusion

Whether you think the £20/month tethering fee is justifiable or not is a different matter. It’s certainly cheaper than buying a USB Dongle if you only plan to use it the odd month or two. Regardless, if you have a good 3G connection I can recommend it – unless you hate low res images!

Tags: Apple, bmi.js, iphone, linkedin, mac

A couple of days ago I released a jQuery plugin that provides a grid overlay when working with the 960.gs css grid framework. The plugin seems to have been quite popular, and as a result I now have a host of new Twitter followers – Hello to everyone in Romania!

I’m glad that others have found the plugin useful. A couple of people have suggested I release the overlay as a bookmarklet, so I spent yesterday learning how to develop one. So here it is: grid960 – a grid overlay bookmarklet for 960.gs

To install the bookmarklet simply drag the link below to your bookmarks toolbar. In Internet Explorer, right click, select ‘Add to favourites’ and then select ‘Links’.

grid960

You can test it on this page.

The bookmarklet works slightly differently to the original jQuery plugin. Firstly, if jQuery is not installed, it will inject it for you. If jQuery is already installed it will use this library – it will dynamically upgrade the library if it is not the latest vesion (1.3.2).

Secondly, the bookmarklet provides a small configuration menu on the page. When the bookmarklet loads, it will defaults to the 12 column grid. Through the menu, you can switch to a 16 column grid, and also alter the opacity of the gridlines.

The bookmarklet does not work in IE6 (yeah, whatever).

Any problems or suggestions, let me know.

Tags: 960.gs, bookmarklet, css grid, JQuery, linkedin

I’ve been using 960.gs on a few sites recently. Without wanting to get into a discussion about the pros/cons of using css grid frameworks, I find them useful for some sites.

The 960.gs framework comes with a handy demo that shows a grid overlay, but the GIF images used have no transparency, so it is difficult to add a nice grid overlay to sites when developing them.

On the 960.gs home page there is a button by the thumbnail examples that dynamically adds a grid to the image. I Googled around for a similar solution, but didn’t find one that quite did what I wanted. So, I decided to build a simple jQuery plugin of my own.

Here’s a demo of the plugin in action.

To use the plugin, simply add the following code to your pages for a 12 column grid:

<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery-1.3.2.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery.960grid-1.0.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
	$(function() {
		$("body").addGrid(12);
	});
</script>

Once the plugin is activated, a small toggle link will be visible in the top left-hand corner of the page. Unsurprisingly, if you change the input parameter from 12 to 16, you get a 16 column grid available!

The plugin relies on a couple of PNGs and by default the image path is set to /images/. You can override this setting, along with several others, by passing in some options as follows:

var options= {
	img_path: 'img/',
	z_index: 999,
	opacity:.6
};
$("body").addGrid(12, options);

As well as the image path, it is possible to override the default z-index used by the overlay, in case there is a conflict. You can also alter the opacity of the PNG if you require.

Please feel free to download the plugin for your own use. Let me know of any problems or suggested enhancements.

Tags: css, grid, JQuery, linkedin

I’ve just been playing with the new, official Skype for iPhone application, which has been a long time coming. I currently use Fring.

I decided to use a SkypeIn number for my business some time ago, I was in temporary accommodation. I get a Manchester (0161) number and voicemail, so it suits my requirements. Receiving calls on my computer is quite nice, as the MacBook’s in-built mike is quite intelligent – no echo. Sadly, on occasion, the calls do drop without warning. I think that this is more an issue with my ISP/router.

Recently, I’ve begun to use Fring for receiving calls. Connected through my wireless network, it works great. So long as the application has been launched, it receives calls to my SkypeIn number and also to my mobile number. And if I wish to make a call out, the application lets me dial through o2 rather than Skype. Of course, I can also use SkypeOut to dial cheap rate calls if required.

The official Skype application is similar, and has a nicer, more responsive interface. It also lets me receive mobile calls when the application is active, and make SkypeOut calls. Like Fring, I can look up contacts in my address book. And like Fring, this is pointless unless you’ve entered international dialling codes for all your freinds!

I don’t use Skype for chats very often, but this feature exists with both. The official application also lets me change my online status, not that I ever do this. I can check my Skype credit and quickly link to the web page to top up credit, but I can’t do this from within the application. I’m sure this will come with time as the next version of the iPhone software introduces micropayments.

There is one thing that Fring does do better. If I put my iPhone to sleep with the application launched, I can still hear when a call comes in. (It’s then a scramble to unlock the phone in time to answer the call). With the official application, I get no notification, and the call goes straight to voicemail. This is quite a big omission in my opinion. It only takes a few days of ownership of an iPhone to learn that the battery drains very quickly when not put to sleep. I could keep the iPhone connected to my laptop to preserve the battery.

For now, I think ‘ll continue to use the trusty application installed on my laptop. Skype on the iPhone is still a bit of a fudge.

Tags: fring, iphone, linkedin, skype