Saturday, December 18, 2010

Auquafold's Aqua Data Studio

Well I have made the decision to start working with mySQL just to learn it and have other options than just Microsoft SQL. With that being said one thing that I disliked when working on my Mac is not having a solution (that I liked) to work with MSSQL and I would normally fire up my VM and do what I have to in Microsoft's SQL Studio. I guess saying dislike is even strong because most of the time I needed my VM up as I was developing on it cause of IIS to match the production servers. Regardless, there were times when I would just need to connect to troubleshoot something on prod and having to bring up my VM would be a pain especially cause I have it in an external drive that sits at my desk in my office.

So what is all this dialog have to do with Aqua Data Studio ... well whether you're on a mac, pc, linux or solaris. This tool allows you to connect to a large number of databases. I tried it a long time ago, when it was free and once they went to a paid model I really didn't consider them again. But time has passed and I've been yearning for a great solution and I have to say this does deliver exactly what I want. There is so much that it offers and I think it is best if you just go to their site and check it out.

http://www.aquafold.com/

Their commercial licensing options start at $399 but if you are a student or work on Open Source Projects they will give you a license which I think it is great. Go ahead and check it out!

Head JS and HTML5 Boilerplate

Today I ran into 2 cool links either from another post or video as I was surfing the web earlier today and thought I would share with those that might read this.

The first one is HTML5 Boilerplate.

This appears to be a base template for HTML/CSS/JS which is fast, robust and future-proof. It is not a framework and I honestly have not tried it myself but will definitely look into later this week as I am taking the weekend for my family .... right after this post :-).

To find out more go to http://html5boilerplate.com/

And the second one is head.js which is a 2.3kb script that claims to speed up, simplify and modernize your site. Again, I have not been able to fully test it or read too much about it but it seems cool from the get go. I use prototype and scriptaculous so I will like to see how this works in loading and executing.

To find out more go to http://headjs.com/

Feel free to comment below especially if you have ever used any of these.

Thursday, December 02, 2010

Are Stock Templates Good or Bad for Web Designers?

This morning I read this great article by Brandon Jones that I would love to share with you ....

For years I though the template design business was like a sore on my side but now I truly accept it for how it can help me in my day to day business.

My first template purchase was for the blog I set up for my wife and I for our baby, http://baby.fusedevelopments.com, which was not only easy to implement but very well designed and the supporting files were very well organized (which I loved).

So go read it .... click on the link below ...

http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/general/are-stock-templates-good-or-bad-for-web-designers/

I purchased my template at : http://themeforest.net/

Monday, November 29, 2010

Friday, November 26, 2010

Prototype 1.7 Released!!!!!!

I can't believe this got by me for so many days. I think it shows how burnt on work I am, regardless, while working on a new project today I went to go check on my favorite js framework Prototype and saw that 1.7 has been released.

There is over 50 improvements since the last stable version, the addition of the Sizzle selector engine by default and the new Element#on method which rocks!

You can read more here: Prototype 1.7 updates

The cool thing is that there is even more planned already for future releases and resuming work on script.aculo.us 2.0!

Read more here: Prototype 1.7

So what are you waiting for? Go get and start playing! http://prototypejs.org/download

CFBuilder Navigator Filters and Starting with -clean parameter on a MAC

So basically today I wanted to add new navigator file filters to my CFBuilder workspace and came up with this great post from Jason Dean.

Jason Dean : Adding more resource navigator filters to ColdFusion Builder Eclipse

In short here are the quick instructions:
  1. Go to the Plugins Directory of your CFBuilder install
  2. Grab the file com.adobe.ide.coldfusion.ui_1.0.0.274293.jar - might be named different due to your install - basically the last numbers is your current CFBuilder build
  3. Move the file somewhere you can work, like your desktop
  4. Unzip the file - remember a jar file is just a zip and you should not have any trouble unzipping on your mac (if windows just change .jar to .zip)
  5. In an editor open up plugin.xml and plugin.properties

plugin.xml

Find the filter pattern block and add your custom filters there like so (below are the 2 I did) ...

plugin.properties

Then in the properties file just add a description for each of your new entries (filter.description.#)

Once you are done you have to place them back into your jar file, so in a terminal window run the following command. (This is assuming you have both of your files in the same directory as your jar)

Now in Jason Dean's post he states that you may have to start Eclipse or CFBuilder with the -clean parameter, which cleans and reinitializes the Workspace and I came up with this post from Adobe.

Clean and reinitialize workspace

Basically in a terminal window navigate to the Contents/MacOS/ path inside the app like so ...


Monday, November 15, 2010

What is up your sleeve Apple?

Oh boy am I excited, what is in store for us? I don't know but my morning browse of Apple's site had this to say.


Friday, October 29, 2010

mySQL 5.5 RC - 1500% Faster on Windows

If you are running mySQL in windows then this is good news to you! I received an email from Oracle regarding the release of mySQL 5.5 RC which they are stating that it runs 1500% faster now on windows. They stated the following performance gains:

  • 1561% Performance Gains over MySQL 5.1 for Read/Write Operations
  • 538% Performance Gains over MySQL 5.1 for Read Only Operations

To learn more about mySQL 5.5 on windows, click here to get the "Guide to mySQL on Microsoft Windows" and click here to download the 5.5 Release Candidate.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Get the old iTunes Back

This is a little tip I read this month from my MacWorld subscription that I thought would be great to share. Basically iTunes 10 adds many new features with one of them being a little controversial and that is the 3 little buttons we use to minimize, maximize and close. Unlike all other windows in our beloved OS X which show them horizontally, they decided to go vertical for this version. But if that is driving you crazy there is a solution!!!
Open up Terminal (Applications>Utilities>Terminal.app) and type the following to go back to the old way.
When you restart iTunes you will see the buttons once again appear horizontal and you actually get a little more space on the top bar (which is handy if you tend to move iTUnes around a lot as it gives you more pixels to grab).
If you feel like you've become accustomed to the new way and want to go back, it is easy. Just type the following in Terminal and restart iTunes.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Extra white space when executing a UDF in an input field

Well basically I have a UDF defined in my ApplicationHelper.cfm in my ColdBox app that formats phone numbers to a requested format. What use to drive me crazy is that when I ran it inside an input field like so:

I would get the following:

It appears that this happens because I did not have my output attribute set on my cffunction which defaults to true. Once I set it to false I no longer received that annoying extra white space.

Before

After

Which Output the following ...

Re-sort an existing Query without QoQ in ColdFusion

As I was looking today for a way to resort an existing query in my application, I though of the following options I had.

  1. Do a new call to SQL
  2. Create a QoQ and resort

Even though both options would work, I was unhappy with them. #1 because it is an additional call to the DB and #2 because I did not want to break out of my cfscript block. So I did a little googling and came up with the following post:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1166680/how-do-i-sort-a-query-object-in-coldfusion-7

Check out the 2nd post. Basically you can apply the underlying Java sort function to your query Object and it will sort it for you, Like so;

As per the original author of this hint:

The findColumn() call is needed to get the index of the sort column, because sort() is working with the column indexes and not with the column names. The second parameter specifies the sort order: TRUE = ascending, FALSE = descending.

  • Advantages: one-line call, faster than QoQ
  • Disadvantage: sort restricted to one column

There are much more hidden features of the underlying Java class. See the following links for more information:

Update 10.27.2010

I just wanted to add for all my ColdBox Friends or Newbies, remember we have a handy plugin available for us that does this and a bit more...

http://wiki.coldbox.org/wiki/Plugins:QueryHelper.cfm

Friday, October 22, 2010

Retrieving the Original URL in ColdFusion when doing URL Rewrites (IIS7 and Apache 2)

As I have stated before, I have begun to play with PHP and there is a server variable which I love that I was trying to get similar in ColdFusion and that is the following variable:

Basically that variable outputs the original URL before the rewrite. So if I requested the following URL:

http://mysite/this-is-a-test/something.html

Which rewrote to
http://mysite/index.cfm?{my query string that I build}

It would output /this-is-a-test/something.html

Which I thought it was fantastic! Now in ColdFusion, doing a simple CGI dump you do not get any variable with that value, but the servers have little secrets which I would like to share.

If you are using IIS7 you can use either:

  • HTTP_X_ORIGINAL_URL
    this server variable contains the original URL in decoded format;
  • UNENCODED_URL
    this server variable contains the original URL exactly as it was requested by a Web client, with all original encoding preserved.

Click here to read more @ IIS 7 Docs

Both of this can be accessed thru the cgi scope, even though they do not appear when you do a dump.

If you are using Apache 2 (which is what I have on my mac) you can use:

  • REDIRECT_URL

Click here to read more @ Apache 2 Docs

Thursday, October 21, 2010

An Easy Bash Shell Script to Start and Stop ColdFusion, mySQL and Apache

Well I normally do my development on my mac with code on a mounted Volume from a windows server, which is where my CF or PHP servers are running. From time to time though, I develop directly on my mac and since I don't keep my CF, Apache and mySQL running by default, I created 2 simple scripts I thought I would share with everyone here.

I called my 2 scripts cfstart.sh and cfstop.sh, when creating these files make sure to either do it on pico, vi or an editor that lets you save in unix style line breaks not windows(dos) style. Also, once you save them make sure to run chmod +x on the files to mark them as executable.

cfstart.sh

cfstop.sh

Once you are done you simply run them by typing the following in a terminal window on the folder where the files are located:
./cfstart.sh

Before it executes, it will ask for your password and this is because I added the sudo call which allows the applications to start under root, which is what you want.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Back to Mac Event

Today another wonderful Mac event occurred with a couple of cool new things coming in the near future and even available today.

To start FaceTime for Mac!
How cool is this? Today it is available as a beta download. You need a couple of things to try it out - a mac and either an iPhone 4 or a new iPod touch.

Find out more here:
http://www.apple.com/mac/facetime/

How about the Mac App Store!
Again, I think this is great and if all my mac app vendors get their apps up there it will make it easier for me to keep my apps up to date. I love it!

Find out more here:
http://www.apple.com/mac/app-store/

A Lion is heading our way!
Well the rumors where correct, the next OS X release will be called Lion.

Find out more here:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/

Even though it is great to read and find out more with the links I provided, I recommend watching the event video, available at:
Back to Mac event

Some other updates include updates to the MacBook Air.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

WordPress Redirects not working on Firefox and IIS installations

Basically I was getting this problem on wordpress 3.0.1 on IIS7 installs. On any other browser a redirect would work perfect except firefox. Which redirects you may ask? Well for instance,

  1. going to /wp-admin/ landed on a white page rather than redirecting to wp-login.php
  2. from the login it would just freeze on a white page after hitting the log-in button

So what did I do? I traced the function call and saw that it ends in /wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 874 function qp_redirect and within this function there is the following lines of code

As you can see the $is_IIS if, this is what basically runs when the install is on IIS. and that particular header() call is not responding with firefox so I added another rule to the if statement to only run if it is on IIS and is nto firefox as follows:

Tested and it works without a problem. Hope this helps anyone cause it was driving me NUTS!

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Weird Characters in my PHP Template ()

Well this is a quick note for anyone that may be having this little particular issue. Basically, for the past day I've been working on a PHP/mySQL/IIS7.5 on Windows Server 2008 R2 install. Which has been a little bit of a challenge and I will blog some of my findings soon.

Basically, I was making an edit to files on the server using notepad++ and it appears it was saving the file as UTF-8, which is what I presumed was correct but after reading the following entry I changed it to UTF-8 without BOM and it went away.

This is Byte Order Mark of the Unicode Standard and in PHP files they appear as literal text on the page. So just remove the BOM when you save and presto! Gone!

Original Post where I was schooled:
http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=275353

PHP and MySQL Web Development (4th Edition)

Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites (Animal Guide)

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

2 Cool iTunes 10 Tips

Tip #1
So in iTunes 10 you can now play music from an attached iPod. Basically if your friend has music he/she wants to hear at your party but it is only on his/her iPod, you can now attach it and play it. Before you would need third-party software like Senuti (which I still like) to do this.

Play music from an attached device

Tip #2
Music control via album artwork. Say what? OK, really easy. Next time you have a song playing, click on the album artwork on the left bottom to increase the size and then mouse over. This is pretty cool, like when playing iTunes DJ or anything like that (shuffle etc) and you want to have iTunes minimized and the artwork up on screen with controls enabled.

Music Controls in Artwork

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

What is coldfusion.tagext.io.FileTag$FileUploadException?

I truly love the resources of the web. A simple Google search and I get my answer, so in the spirit of continuing to post similar messages in case someone else in the future needs it here goes ...

Had an interesting error come in today from our app stating the following:
coldfusion.tagext.io.FileTag$FileUploadException
or also Can't find resource for base name coldfusion/tagext/io/FileTag.FileUploadException.properties

Basically all this means is that your box is out of space and CF can not write any files. Empty out some space and everything will start to work again.

I'd like to thank wellings.eu for their post which helped me get this error fixed quick with minimum brain injury.

http://wellings.eu/2010/03/01/cant-find-resource/

Wednesday, September 01, 2010

HTML5 - Based Music Video

This is the first HTML5-based music video created between Google and Canadian indi rock music band Arcade Fire.

Song is pretty cool and the window management is pretty cool!!! Check it out!

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

Works on Safari on Mac and Google Chrome all platforms.

Apple's Media Event to be streamed live.

I guess it looks like we don't have to wait this time for them to release the keynote. It is being streamed live!!!!!

Go to apple.com!!!

Cumulative Hotfix 1 For ColdFusion 9.0.1 Released

Title says it all, Cumulative Hotfix 1 (CHF1) for ColdFusion 9.0.1 has been released.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Apple store down .. 1:00 AM .. why am I checking?

Weird .. up late .. checking apple.com, looking at the new iPad commercial. Apple is amazing!

And then .. the store is down .... on a Thursday without any blog craziness today?


I wonder what they have up their sleeve?

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

DaisyDisk App Review and Coupon Code!

So last night for the first time in over 2 years I decided to defrag my drive and get rid of some stuff that I rarely ever use (like soundtrack pro and its 20g of audio files .. etc). This morning I still wanted to see if there was anything else I can get rid of but wanted a visual way of seeing where the space was taken and I remember this app that I read about somewhere called DaisyDisk. So I googled it, found it and downloaded it. WIthin seconds of just running this fantastic app I decided to purchase and as usual I love to just randomly type in anything in coupon code fields and low and behold it worked again for me today. So here goes .... explanation, review and coupon code.

What is DaisyDisk (as per their site)
DaisyDisk scans your disks and presents their content as interactive maps where you can easily spot unusually large files and remove them to get more free space. The map gives you an overview of your data, so you always know what your hard disks are filled with.

My Review
Easy to use, fast and utterly amazing results. Definitely a masterpiece utility app for seeing your harddrive(s) contents visually and on the fly.

Coupon Code
Type APPLE, which gave me a discount of $4.99 - so I ended up paying $14.96 for this amazing app.

I hope this helps some of you out there.

Click here to go to DaisyDisk Site

As far as Defrag of your drives, even though this is something that is really not that necessary on Macs as it is on PCs, there are several options out there, like (Techtool Pro and Drive Genius - that do a lot) but I prefer the simple and inexpensive solution Coriolis Systems iDefrag.

Click here to go to iDefrag product page

The only reason I honestly defrag was that I freed up over 60Gb of space on my drive and I wanted everything organized better, with large blocks available (which I assume that is what happens - not an expert here).

I recommend the following ....
Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard
Mac OS X Snow Leopard Family Pack (5-User)
Mac Box Set – (with Snow Leopard)

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

I want my iPhone4!!!!!

Ok so, this morning I am patiently waiting for the Apple Store to come back up as I am ready to pre-order 2 phones, one for me and of course the wife. It is a pretty exiting day for the entire family as now my daughter will also get her own iPhone as she will be handed down 1 of 2 3GS, the other will go to the world of eBay.

But what is this? I have been desperately trying to make my pre-order and the site keeps crapping out. I know, I know, the whole world wants this and as a developer myself, know it is hard to accurately test for situations like this. So who do we blame? Apple? AT&T?

Honestly I don;t know or care ... just please get it working!!! I want to make sure I get mine by the 24th.

Has anyone had any luck? Please comment below.

Friday, April 30, 2010

CS5 Shipping, Trials available for download and the WACK is out!

Well, you probably read this my now but CS5 is finally shipping and trials are available for download now at adobe.com. I already downloaded DW CS5 on my machine and testing to see how it compares to previous versions on my mac. I definitely wish they would of put more love into it for CF9 but oh well. I know, CF Builder is out but honestly I just don't like it.

So go get your trial downloads now !!!!!!!

Now the second topic, the ColdFusion 9 Web Application Construction Kits are available for pre-order from amazon. GO get em .. and please use my links below as it would help me feed my family :-). I hope that they do make eBook version of these for my iPad!


Adobe ColdFusion 9 Web Application Construction Kit, Volume 3: Application Development

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

CS5 Launch Thoughts

So I am sure everyone who is interested already saw the product launch videos and in the least there are a lot of updates that are very cool for the A/V side of things. What I am most excited about is the 64 bits apps especially for Mac, as I do believe they are all native cocoa 64 bit apps now (or I thinks so). I am a bit disappointed in what I saw for Dreamweaver, seems like they are pushing it more for PHP Developers and ColdFusion got no love.

Now I know, we have CFBuilder, but honestly I hate it!!!!!!! I hate the UI! I hate the colors! I hate everything about it! And worse of all it is not included in the Master Collection which is what I am buying/upgrading to.

Honestly, WTF! We get Flash Builder but no CF Builder. I am sure they didn't want to piss off the people who already paid $300, but I still think they should have included it.

Anyways, if anyone reads this blog, let me know your thoughts on yesterday's presentation.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

ColdFusion Application.cfc/Application.cfm lookup order gotcha!

So today I experienced this weird problem that had me going crazy and basically it is not a bug just a new feature that I wasn't thinking of. ColdFusion 9 has a new lookup order for an Application file, basically by default it will look all the way up to the system root rather than the web root.

So this morning I downloaded a file for a customer I had to review for some changes. This file is an Application.cfc file and I had placed it in my user folder. Now my web root is in my "user folder"/Workspace/Site/ and every time I was trying to browse to it I kept getting a cfmail error. Now my simple index.cfm had nothing in it that specified a cfmail action. So I then decided to set a default mail server on my local instance of CF and look at my undeliverable folder because I knew it would fail. Alas, I recognized the error and it was coming from this Application.cfc, but how? There you go .. that was my gotcha and then I remember about the new lookup. So I logged in to admin, went to settings and changed the lookup to go stop at my web root and error fixed.


Hope this helps someone, it only took a second for me to figure out but I decided, what the hell, let me write about it.


  

Friday, March 12, 2010

Read this! New book from 37 Signals "Rework"

Yesterday, the wonderful guys at 37Signals released their latest book "Rework" which of course I bought and I am almost done reading, well actually listening to. I really admire this company and I get a lot of inspiration from them. I originally learned about them when I started using Basecamp. I went on to purchase and read their first book "Getting Real" which is now available for free to read online (Getting Real - Click here to read online). That book really helped me a lot in regards to how I develop and they as a company have inspired me to make certain decisions. Even though I have yet to finalize my execution of them, I am hard at work at doing them.

Well enough of that. Click here to find out more about ReWork and get your copy today! If you do decide to buy, be a kind person and click on one of my link below to purchase from amazon :-).

I am an iPad owner

Yeap, I did it, I couldn't help myself. Just like being one of the first in line to get an iPhone back in '07, now I am repeating this with the new iPad for '10. I know, apple is $601.02 richer but so far no buyers regret and it will be in my hands on April 3rd. I see it this way, it is 20 days before my birthday, so Happy Birthday to me and I am planning to develop on it so if I get my act together it should turn into a very small investment. I bought the following:

  • iPad 16gb with wifi
  • iPad case
  • iPad dock

So did anyone else have this compulsive addiction disorder to purchase apple products like I did and if so which one did you get?

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

ColdFusion 9 Performance Brief Released!

Why repeat what you will eventually read. The Quick and Dirty truth .... It is way, way, way faster than before.

Use the following link to download it now!

http://bit.ly/CFFast

After that ... UPGRADE YOUR COLDFUSION SERVERS!!!!

Thursday, February 11, 2010

New Beta of Google Chrome for Mac now Available!!!

Google just released a new beta of the Google Chrome for Mac! This new beta adds several new features like extensions and bookmark syncing that was left out of the initial beta release.

I am excited and you should be too, this is a great browser and you should give it a try.

Click here to get Google Chrome

If you are on a PC and are still using IE, especially 6, get a brain and start using a real browser like firefox and/or google chrome.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Output SQL Data to XML easily

So today I needed to output data to XML at my job and rather than going the traditional way of creating a ColdFusion file to query and output the data I decided to see if I could just do it in MSSQL. Well, appears there is by using the "for XML" clause. There is a lot to learn from it and the docs are available in the following links.

What I will do here is just explain some of the basics so you can go ahead and do as you please from here on. For my examples I will use the AdventureWorks default database but you can easily modify the SQL I have to your own and play with the results.

There are several ways to get XML output based on the XML Mode used, the following are available.

  • RAW
    The RAW mode takes the query result and transforms each row in the result set into an XML element with a generic identifier row as the element tag and the columns in the SELECT as attributes.
  • AUTO The AUTO mode returns query results in a simple, nested XML tree.
  • EXPLICIT (I DO NOT DEMO THIS ONE)
    In EXPLICIT mode, you can explicitly define the shape of the resulting XML tree. Using this mode requires that the queries be written in a specific way, so that additional information about the desired nesting is specified explicitly as part of the query. The reason I don't demo this one is because of the new PATH mode in SQL 2005+, if you are still in 2000 and need to write complex XML docs then I suggest you look up this mode.
  • PATH (SQL 2005+)
    A simple way to generate complex XML documents rather than explicit.

The examples are as follows


Using for XML AUTO Returns this
Using for XML PATH Returns this
Using for XML PATH('path'),ROOT('root')
Here we add a root node and a cutom name for each row by defining the path value. Returns this
Using for XML PATH('path'),ROOT('root') and making the contactID column an attribute
Here we add a root node and a custom name for each row by defining the path value. Returns this
Using for XML RAW('path'),ROOT('root'), ELEMENTS XSINIL
This is the same as PATH it just returns the parent node with the XML Namespace. The ELEMENTS directive provides an XSINIL option to map NULL values to an element with an attribute xsi:nil="true". Returns this

In conclusion

When working with this data you can either render your results to text and/or grid. I prefered grid because the results are essentially a link that opens the xml document which then you can either copy and paste or save to your hard drive.

Some books to consider ....

Beginning SQL Server 2008 for Developers: From Novice to Professional
SQL Server 2008, Developer Edition
Murach's SQL Server 2008 for Developers (Murach: Training & Reference)

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Maximixe Google Chrome on a Mac

So today I was playing with Google Chrome on my mac and have decided to make it my default browser for "Browsing the Internet". I say that because I will still use Firefox as my main browser for "Development Debugging" and of course like any other web developer I am forced to continue to support IE 6+, so for that I use Parallels and test on my VM.

Anyways, enough for the introduction to this post. Basically one thing I did not like about Google Chrome was that I could not maximize the window to my full screen size, well at least until now. I first tried using the default Mac option of clicking the green button on the window with the option key held down but that didn't work. All that did was maximize the window to the content within. So what is the answer you may ask?

Shift+Green Button

Yeap that is it, that will maximize your window to your full screen size. If this post was useful, let me know by leaving me a comment below.

Woo Hoo!!! I got Google Voice!!!!

So as the tile of my post says, I finally got my Google Voice invitation. You will notice now a "Call Me" widget on the right hand side of my blog. So go ahead and call me and leave me a message if you need to get in touch with me. I've opted to send it directly to voice mail for now but from time to time I may be picking it up.

Monday, January 04, 2010

Easy Code Syntax in Blog.

In order to prepare to write code on this blog, I decided to go ahead and see how the code syntax plugins worked and I found one called SyntaxHighlighter by Alex Gorbatchev. So this is my test post. The following post by Carter Cole explains how to install and use.

Saturday, January 02, 2010

Jumsoft Products and Coupon Code

Since it is the beginning of the new year I was set on finding a finance application to use on my mac. I've been a Microsoft Money user for over 5 years now and it was one of the last applications that I hung on to as a PC user. This past year I read somewhere that MS will no longer continue to develop and eventually support that application so I thought to myself if there was a better time to move it would be now, so my search began.

I checked a couple of applications and I just did not like the UI or the price was ridiculous until I ran into Money3 by Jumsoft. They got it right, at least in my opinion. The UI is great, the price is great and the accompanying iPhone app ... well great for my needs. There are a couple of things I wish it could do or maybe I just haven't played with it enough but they are as follows.

  • Check Printing
  • Apply payments to invoices as deposits to accounts

That's about it and as far as the check printing, a rep told me that there is a big update coming soon and that will most likely be part of it.

Anyways, enough of that, I think they have great products that any person using a mac should take a look at, so go ahead and check them out by clicking here. Now the little extra that I found out today by playing on their store. Pick any product(s) and in the coupon code field in your cart, type "APPLE" and you will get 50% off your purchase. Now I do not guarantee this or how long it will last but it was a discovery I made so here I am to share with you. Hopefully someone found this helpful and if so let me know.

Learning Objective-C and getting back to this ....

Ok, so as anyone who has landed here before already knows I don't post much, but one of my New Year Resolutions is to be a little more proactive with what I do. First a little update on me. I still have Fuse Developments up an running but at the same time I am the Senior ColdFusion Developer at Jobsite123.com LLC. I currently work with a great team of guys and I am learning new things everyday.

Finally after all these years I am using the ColdBox Framework, even though I was at Sandals back in the day when Luis and his colleagues decided to create this amazing framework I never got around to actually using it. Now that I have, I don't see myself doing any new projects without it. Also, I've noticed a lot of CF Bloggers love to use JQuery but I am a Prototype user by heart and I will make my best effort to write some tutorials about using this great JavaScript Framework along with it's companion animation suite, Scriptaculous.

One of the main reasons I don't blog much is my terrible grammar skills, which many of you will eventually experience. Maybe this will help me become a better writer/communicator ... we'll see. Also, I am self taught and sometimes I think I don't have much to offer but since my new job, I've realized that everyone always has something to offer and here goes my attempt.

So to summarize this is what I do, what I am learning and what I will be posting about in the near future.

  • ColdFusion
    Expect version 8 and 9 tutorials and goodies.
  • JavaScript
    Expect tutorials on using Prototype and Scriptaculous.
  • CSSExpect tutorials on using css to create better layouts and leaving those nasty nested tables behind.
  • Objective-C and Cocoa (Cocoa Touch)Yes after being a member for over a year I am finally taking the time to learn how to create Mac and iPhone applications and I may post things that I learn here.

That's pretty much it .... ohh and Happy New Year!!!!!