Download it from Appstore!

Help your children learn the alphabet by using this interactive, voice-based application with colourful cartoons and letters.

This educational application is based on 2 activities: one for learning the letters through examples (a female voice pronouncing the letter and the associated cartoons) and one for playing with the newly learned letters by choosing the correct one from a list of five.

The entire game is voice assisted allowing your child to start a session of learning or playing without the help of an adult.

The application allows you to choose between three levels of difficulty, to set a maximum number of letters per lesson and the number of minutes for the playing session.

Give your child the opportunity of learning the FunnyABC way! Download it from Appstore!

We just launched kids-apps.mobi, a showroom dedicated to gathering in one place iPad and iPhone/iPod touch applications for children.

It intends to be a collection of only the best applications for your kids offering a easy way to find what you are looking for without the need of searching the entire Appstore for this.

Upload your kids application

So if you have launched an application and would like to show in the kids-apps.mobi website, drop us a line using the form here.

Have you ever tried to understand how IE8 behaves when searching? As a non-IE user I am used to going to the top right box, type a word and receive instantly the page with the search results. I work mostly with Mozilla and sometimes with Opera and Chrome (when I’m in a hurry and I need a page to load fast, I admit). So for me, as a user, the entire search process is transparent. I don’t even pay much attention to what search engine each of them uses. I know they are going to return some results and I’m always in a hurry.

So after so many years of NOT using Internet Explore I got myself searching something while testing a website. And, as usual, I type the word I need and in return I receive a page that is not a search result page. And I finally pay attention to what is happening to me.

Search box in multiple browsers

In all browsers the search box is pretty much the same. We’ve been trained to search it in the top right corner, to type the word and press enter. Here’s how it looks.

IE8 search box

Opera search box

Mozilla search box

Chrome search box

I expect them all to behave the same. IE8 apparently thinks the other way around, cause if you search for a word thinking that the box will search for it, you’ll receive a screen like this one:

How IE8 searches

Next you realize that IE8 doesn’t search by default, you have to make it search by choosing a search engine. All browsers search using Google’s engine, but if you want another one you can choose, no problem here. But if you’re in a hurry and don’t care much about the search engine, you still receive some results. IE8 added an extra step so now in order to receive the results you have to take 2 steps instead of one:choose the engine, then search.

How other browsers behave – they let you choose too

Mozilla

Opera

Chrome doesn’t even bother, it won’t display alternatives at all.

What is IE8 thinking?

I wonder why did they choose to follow these steps and if they realize that this is a usability issue – in the search engines war the fact that the user has to bother and take one extra step (in this case 2 instead of 1 is double the effort) might mean some of them won’t bother at all. And if they want to promote Bing or Yahoo, why didn’t they just put these ones as default?

It’s Friday, I was thinking to have a little fun and offer you this brand new multibrowser addon to create pixel-perfect layouts based on a horizontal grid.

We will also think about a vertical one, or mixing vertical and horizontal grids to bring some happiness into designers’ world

Suggestions and improvements are welcome and much appreciated.

We have launched the first ebook “Fairy Tales” by Brothers Grimm which contains a set of 62 beautiful bedtime stories.
It is built as an iPad application available for download on Appstore.

The application has a beautiful and usable interface allowing the user to choose the font, the size of the text and to switch to night-mode for a better reading experience during the night. It saves your current reading position in realtime so you can close the ebook at anytime and return to reading it later.

Chapter 1 stories

• Ashputtel
• Briar Rose
• Cat and mouse in partnership
• Cat-skin
• Clever Elsie
• Clever Gretel
• Clever Hans
• Doctor Knowall
• Frederick and Catherine
• Fundevogel
• Hans in luck
• Hansel and Gretel
• Iron Hans
• Jorinda and Jorindel
• King Grisly-beard

Chapter 2 stories

• Lily and the lion
• Little red riding hood
• Mother Holle
• Old sultan
• Rapunzel
• Rumpelstiltskin
• Snow-white and Rose-red
• Snowdrop
• Sweetheart Roland
• The 4 clever brothers
• The 7 ravens
• The 12 dancing princesses
• The 12 huntsmen
• The adventures of Chanticleer and Partlet
• The blue heart

Chapter 3 stories

• The dog and the sparrow
• The elves and the shoemaker
• The fisherman and his wife
• The fox and the cat
• The fox and the horse
• The frog-prince
• The golden bird
• The golden goose
• The goose-girl
• The juniper-tree
• The king of the golden mountain
• The little peasant
• The miser in the bush
• The mouse, the bird and the sausage
• The old man and his grandson
• The pink

Chapter 4 stories

• The queen bee
• The raven
• The robber bridegroom
• The salad
• The story of the youth who went forth to learn what fear was
• The straw the coal and the bean
• The three languages
• The travelling musicians
• The turnip
• The valiant little tailor
• The water of life
• The wedding of mister Fox
• The white snake
• The willow-wren and his bear
• The wolf and the seven little kids
• Tom thumb

Check the Spanish version of this post:
Cuentos de Hadas para iPad – nuestra aplicación ebook

Sometimes we need a true combobox for our projects but iPhone SDK does not have a native one (at least from what I know) and of course neither has Titanium.

So we will build one. A “true” iPhone or Ipad combobox that allows you to use the same textfield to input arbitrary text or select a value from a UIPicker element.

Updated with @CJ_Reed’s screenshot and code at the final of the tutorial.

Let’s see the video first, then we’ll get to work:

Ok, what do we need for this iPhone combobox ?

First of all we need a textField to accept input from the user. Titanium lets you set the leftButton and rightButton for this textField while constructing it. So we will take advantage of this and create a textField as it follows:

var my_combo = Titanium.UI.createTextField({
	hintText:"write your name or select one",
	height:40,
	width:300,
	top:20,
	borderStyle:Titanium.UI.INPUT_BORDERSTYLE_ROUNDED
});

Nothing special, a regular textField with a hint for the user that will disappear when the textField has a value.

Now we need to create the rightButton for it.

We will use a system button provided by Apple (Titanium.UI.iPhone.SystemButton.DISCLOSURE) only that we will rotate it 90 degrees to server our purpose. This is the code that creates the rightButton and the transformation applied to it.

var tr = Titanium.UI.create2DMatrix();
tr = tr.rotate(90);
 
var drop_button =  Titanium.UI.createButton({
		style:Titanium.UI.iPhone.SystemButton.DISCLOSURE,
		transform:tr
});

Now that we have the rightButton as we need it, the textField constructor becomes:

var my_combo = Titanium.UI.createTextField({
	hintText:"write your name or select one",
	height:40,
	width:300,
	top:20,
	borderStyle:Titanium.UI.INPUT_BORDERSTYLE_ROUNDED,
	rightButton:drop_button,
	rightButtonMode:Titanium.UI.INPUT_BUTTONMODE_ALWAYS
});

Please note the rightButtonMode:Titanium.UI.INPUT_BUTTONMODE_ALWAYS declaration, it makes this button visible all the time.

This is how it looks:

Pretty sexy, isn’t it? Well we’re not done yet.

Building the modal picker

When the user focuses on the textField, the keyboard appears – so we will have to build our picker to emulate the same behaviour and to maximize the usability of our form. For this we will need a Picker and two buttons: Done and Cancel. These two buttons will be positioned in a Toolbar, again, to emulate as good as possible the keyboard behaviour.

Let’s build everything:

var picker_view = Titanium.UI.createView({
	height:251,
	bottom:0
});
 
var cancel =  Titanium.UI.createButton({
	title:'Cancel',
	style:Titanium.UI.iPhone.SystemButtonStyle.BORDERED
});
 
var done =  Titanium.UI.createButton({
	title:'Done',
	style:Titanium.UI.iPhone.SystemButtonStyle.DONE
});
 
var spacer =  Titanium.UI.createButton({
	systemButton:Titanium.UI.iPhone.SystemButton.FLEXIBLE_SPACE
});
 
var toolbar =  Titanium.UI.createToolbar({
	top:0,
	items:[cancel,spacer,done]
});
 
var picker = Titanium.UI.createPicker({
		top:43
});
picker.selectionIndicator=true;
 
var picker_data = [
	Titanium.UI.createPickerRow({title:'John'}),
	Titanium.UI.createPickerRow({title:'Alex'}),
	Titanium.UI.createPickerRow({title:'Marie'}),
	Titanium.UI.createPickerRow({title:'Eva'}),
	Titanium.UI.createPickerRow({title:'James'})
];
 
picker.add(picker_data);
 
picker_view.add(toolbar);
picker_view.add(picker);

The code is a little long but is not rocket science. Some stuff to talk about though:

• Everyting is wrapped inside a view – picker_view – because we will have to animate like the keyboard does, so it’s faster to animate one element only.
• The height of picker_view is the height of the toolbar (43px) + the height of the picker (208px). How do I know this? I just used a ruler

The combobox interface looks like this:

Creating the picker animation

We also need to create 2 animations: slide_in and slide_out. We will animate the bottom property of the picker_view. We will need to start with the picker_view off the screen, so we will build it with:

 bottom:-251

instead of 0 as it was initially.

var slide_in =  Titanium.UI.createAnimation({bottom:0});
var slide_out =  Titanium.UI.createAnimation({bottom:-251});

The logic behind the animations is this:

• The user focuses the textField – the keyboard appears ( it’s done by the OS , no worries here) and if the picker_view is visible we need to hide it.
• The user clicks the rightButton – we need to hide the keyboard and show the picker_view.

Here is the code:

my_combo.addEventListener('focus', function() {
	picker_view.animate(slide_out);
});
 
drop_button.addEventListener('click',function() {
	picker_view.animate(slide_in);
	my_combo.blur();
});
 
cancel.addEventListener('click',function() {
	picker_view.animate(slide_out);
});

I also added the click event on the cancel button to hide the picker_view.

Filling the textField with the picker’s value

The only thing we have left is to actually put the value of the picker in the my_combo textField when the user clicks the done button and hide the picker_view.

done.addEventListener('click',function() {
	my_combo.value =  picker.getSelectedRow(0).title;
	picker_view.animate(slide_out);
});

The getSelectedRow method of the picker is returning the selected row, and we use its title. The getSelectedRow argument is the index of the columns in the picker, and since we have only one, this is 0.

Download the project

The Resource folder of the project can be downloaded from here.

Everything is MIT licensed, but as usual, spread the word

We have an update

@CJ_Reed used this tutorial “to produce multiple selection type data entry in a single window.”
Here is how it looks like:

You can take a look at he’s code here.
Great work!

Check the Spanish version of this post:
Haciendo una lista de opciones desplegables en Titanium Appcelerator – Código y Vídeo

In this post we will try to show you how to make a countdown timer using Titanium Appcelerator for Iphone or Android applications.

First we will create an OOP countDown object that can be used independently in the background of the application and then we will connect it with some interface elements.

The countDown object

To have functional a countdown timer we’ll need to declare some properties and some methods.

As properties we will set:

time:{ m : minutes, s : seconds },
total_seconds : m*60+s

I think this is pretty clear, time is an object with minutes and seconds and total_seconds contains the number of seconds until we reach 00:00.

We will need to set methods that will allow us to:

• set a time to count from
• stop the timer
• start it.

We also ned to set some callback functions that will be executed on each tick of the timer   – fn_tick – and one that will execute when the timer reaches 00:00 named fn_end.

We won’t make a callback for start because we know when this occurs we can trigger it by ourselves.

The countDown timer will look like this:

var my_timer = new countDown( minutes, seconds, fn_tick, fn_complete);

on this we will be able to apply

my_timer.set( minutes, seconds );
my_timer.start();
my_tmer.stop();

Below is the code that defines the countDown (pretty simple).

var countDown =  function( m , s, fn_tick, fn_end  ) {
	return {
		total_sec:m*60+s,
		timer:this.timer,
		set: function(m,s) {
			this.total_sec = parseInt(m)*60+parseInt(s);
			this.time = {m:m,s:s};
			return this;
		},
		start: function() {
			var self = this;
			this.timer = setInterval( function() {
				if (self.total_sec) {
					self.total_sec--;
					self.time = { m : parseInt(self.total_sec/60), s: (self.total_sec%60) };
					fn_tick();
				}
				else {
					self.stop();
					fn_end();
				}
				}, 1000 );
			return this;
		},
		stop: function() {
			clearInterval(this.timer)
			this.time = {m:0,s:0};
			this.total_sec = 0;
			return this;
		}
	}
}

And now to use it in our code we will do something like this:

var my_timer = new countDown(1 , 5 ,
	function()	{
		//something here...
	},
	function() {
		// something here...
	}
);
 
my_timer.start();

Ok, the above example is useless, we will need to display the current time on each tick of the countdown times (so on each second) and at the end we’ll have to alert the user when we reached 00:00.

We will also need some interface elements to access the countdown methods and to display the current time.

For this we will create a label named display_lbl, that will show the time and also 3 buttons : set_btn , start_btn and stop_btn.

Creating the code is pretty simple so I won’t put the code here but you will be able to take a look at it downloading the countdown project.

What is most important is to connect the interface with the countdown timer.

So we create the timer and set the fn_tick and fn_end functions

var my_timer = new countDown(5,30, 
		function() {
			display_lbl.text = my_timer.time.m+" : "+my_timer.time.s;
		},
		function() {
			alert("The time is up!");
		}
	);

And this is how we connect the buttons with my_timer

 
set_btn.addEventListener('click',function(){
	display_lbl.text = "5 : 30";
	my_timer.set(5,30);
});
 
stop_btn.addEventListener('click',function(){
	my_timer.stop();
});
 
start_btn.addEventListener('click',function(){
	my_timer.start();
});

As you see we also set the label’s text to the initial value when we set the timer because otherwise we’ll loose the first second. We do this here to keep the timer object clean of any external interaction so we can use it even without an interface.

This is how the final project looks like

Please keep in mind that this is just a simple example and we don’t have a control mechanism to detect when the user stopped the timer or it reached by itself 00:00 – but you can add it as an exercise

You can download the Resources folder of the project from here.

Everything is MIT licensed and you can use it in any application you want to, but spreading the word would be nice.

Check the Spanish version of this post:
Crear un temporizador regresivo con Titanium Appcelerator

I was writing the other day about the importancy of the H1 heading and the necessity to use quality headings and content.

I started to search for big-names-earning-money-from-good-websites in order to find good examples of smart headings in their index pages. In case anyone would ask: “Ok smart….girl, show me a million dollar website if your’re so….” I would definitely say: “Look at Amazon or HP or BMW you…..” They have the money to buy web experts in case they don’t have an in-house department. They shoud know better than anyone how important is to have a good website.

But I can’t. Amazon, HP and BMW all have something in common. They all start their index page with a H2. Well it’s not the end of the world. Their pages still look good and at least they don’t say “welcome”

What do big guys say? H2 speaking…

Amazon says: “Shop Laptops at 20% Off or More”

HP US says: “Primary content tabs” or “Messaging banner” or “HP Newsroom links”…all for accessibility purposes…..

These 3 H2 tags are all having a CSS class that hides them. There are some H2 visible though …. In the footer we have “HP Corporate”, “Resources” and “Customer Support”.

BMW US says: “Your Saved Content”, “Your Saved Configurations” and “Sorry!” in case something bad happens. BTW, nice flash banner…..

Let’s find some good guys

Apple has:

H1: the Ipad image, with the message: “iPad is here.”

H2-H6 missing

IBM has:

H1: an image with the message:”If the buildings in LA look smug, they have a good reason. Los Angeles emerges as te winner in the IBM Smarter Buildings Study. Find ut why–and see what else we learned.”

H2: missing
H3: “Featured topics”, “What IBM can do for…”, “How to buy”, “Products”, “Services”, “Evaluate”, “Design”……a lot….

The interesting thing about these 2 companies is that the H1 tag was also the most proeminent news in the page. They didn’t have, like HP, important tags used only for screen readers with no relation with what was important in the main visible layout.

In the end…

I think we all got the message. Forget about H1, who gives a ….flower about it anyway?

I needed a plugin to help me send the last posts of my blog as email to my subscribers. I chose 6 that might solve my problem and here they are, in alphabetical order:

Ajax Newsletter

It comes with a widget so make sure you install them both. It collects subscribers and sends email depending on the settings you decided upon.

(+) The widget will collect subscribers while the plugin will send email every X posts or weekly/monthly. Quite flexible with the settings and usable.
(+) You can preview the emails, to see what your subscribers will receive.
(+) The users receive a confirmation email and also there is always a link to unsubscribe from the newsletter.
(-) The user has to confirm the subscription and the confirmation page is quite ugly and not based on your theme. You have to work a bit to make it pretty. Also you have to spend a little time and improve the mail’s look.

Automatic Newsletter

Quite unusable for me.

(+) You can set the number of posts to send and how often
(-) Problems with the usability of the widget. After subscribing I am redirected to an error page while the error/success message is displayed under the newsletter form. So my attention goes to the page, displaying: “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.” instead of the message under the form saying:”Email Added, Thank you”.
(-) No confirmation email is sent to the subscriber.
(-) I don’t see the subscribers and I wasn’t sure they will all receive my email until I actually sent a test email. The interface is not as usable as it could be and might confuse the user.
(-) There is no Unsubscibe link by defauls in each mail sent to the subscribers.

G-Lock Double Opt-in Manager

This was my choice in the end and I think it is the most complex plugin that I tested.


(+) It sends confirmation mails and the unsubscribe link is present in all their mails.
(+) You can send welcome messages
(+) You can customize emails for:subscribe, unsubscribe, the newsletter’s content, welcome mail.
(+) You can customize the newsletter’s fields. In this case I chose to show only the email field.
(+) It uses the current theme to display pages Success/Error/Confirmation pages in your blog and it saves you time with customizing them.
(+) Quite usable and flexible and with useful tips in te sidebar of the admin section.
(+) You can see your subscribers and unsubscribe/delete them.
(-) In case you already used a plugin before and have a DB of subscribers, there’s no way you can import it and use it with G-Lock. Too bad…:(

MeeNews

Comes with a widget so pay attention. It’s also partially in Spanish so you have to pay attention some more. But it’s better than Glock because it has statistics and more settings, but it does not send mail automatically and it’s a little too complex – too sofisticated perhaps.

(+) Sends a confirmation email.
(+) Very customizable and skinnable, maybe too much.
(+) You can customized the confirmation email, which is very good because their English is not 100% perfect.
(+) You can see the subscribers and also import them from .csv files.
(+) Access to statistics: how many subscribers you have, how many read your email, etc. Really cool feature!! (if you pay for it)
(-) It doesn’t use the blog’s theme for the confirmation mail, but their own.
(-) It does not send mails unless you pick the posts and send them yourself. It cannot do this automatically or when your blog reaches a certain number of posts. Too bad
(-) In the emails sent to the users I saw an unsubscribe message but the link was not functional.

Newsletter

(+) You can costomize the emails sent to the users.

(+) You have access to the subscribers’ list and you can import subscribers from a .csv file.
(+) It uses your blog’s theme for confirmation message, and it sends really polite mails.
(+) Quite customizable.
(-) It doesn’t use unubscribe links in the emails.
(-) It doesn’t have a scheduler for the emails, it keeps sending you to buy a better version that hasn’t been released yet. Quite frustrating. And expensive.

Subscribe2

(+) Sends mails automatically.
(+) You have access to the subscribers list.
(-) You cannot customize many things, pretty simple compared to the other ones.
(-) You have to create a page with the newsletter form, it does not add itself in the sidebar.You really have to read the Help for this one.

Check the Spanish version of this post:
Plugins de Noticias WordPress

Google came with a new idea in their list of web toys. A font directory that allows you as a web developer to include some “fancy” fonts in your pages without struggle.

What is Google Fonts Directory all about?

All the fonts in the Google Font Directory are licensed under open source licenses that let you use them on any website, from a private blog to a big commercial site. The idea seems to be good and comes to complete the Google AJAX Libraries API.

For now there are only a few fonts available but in time I think the list will grow.

There are two ways to use this on your site

The first one is simple and only requires a css file retrieved from Google’s servers like below:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" 
          href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine">
 
    <style>
      body {
        font-family: 'Tangerine';
        font-size: 48px;
      }
    </style>

You need to specify the family of the font and if it contains spaces you need to replace this with a “+” (plus character) sign

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" 
          href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid+Sans">

You can load multiple fonts in a single call. This will decrease the loading time because you use only one http request. The multiple fonts will be separated by a “|” ( pipe character ) sign.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" 
          href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine|Inconsolata|Droid+Sans">

Normaly the fonts are loaded using the regular version but you have more control over the loaded font using some selectors for the style and weight, using a “:” ( colon character ) sign, and the values if more than one separated by a “,” ( comma )

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" 
          href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine:bold,bolditalic">

The style and weight of the font can be specified using a fullname, an abbreviation or a numeric value ( for weight )

bold:b
bold:700
italic:i
bolditalic:bi

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" 
          href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Cantarell:i|Droid+Serif:700">

Take into account that not all the fonts have the styles you might need so first of all verify in the font directory if it does.

The second option

The second option to load the fonts is to use the webloader (Javascript) that Google offer for this. This script can be called directly ( which is faster) or using their AJAX API functions. The main advantage of this method is that you can load fonts provided by TypeKit and Google or from any other font provider at the same time from the same library.

WebFont.load({
 
    google: {
      families: [ 'Tangerine', 'Cantarell' ]
    },
 
    typekit: 'myKitId',
 
    custom: { 
       families: ['OneFont', 'AnotherFont'],
       urls: [ 'http://myotherwebfontprovider.com/stylesheet1.css',
       'http://yetanotherwebfontprovider.com/stylesheet2.css' ] 
   }
});

The disadvantage of this method is the increased loading time comparing to the simple method.

Other things to consider

Loading external fonts is slow, at least the first time, until the font is cached on the visitor’s computer. Don’t overuse it.

You need to specify a fallback version for the font in case the browser is not supported. Here the browser uses a serif font in case it’s not able to load the “Tangerine” one.

  body {
        font-family: 'Tangerine', serif;
        font-size: 48px;
      }

The crossbrowsing issue

Each browser behaves in a different way, of course IE being the worse. To make a consistent behaviour across all the supported browsers you should use the webloader. This gives you the chance to display the styled elements with an initial font until the requested font file is loaded, and when this occurs to change it.

    .wf-inactive p { // Show paragraphs in serif font until fonts have loaded.
    font-family: serif
  }
  .wf-active p { // Show paragraphs in Tangerine when the fonts have loaded.
    font-family: 'Tangerine', serif
  }

If the number of fonts will increase then Google Fonts Directory will be a good alternative compared to other webfonts providers that offer this as a paid service. But you still can have fun with it, I’m sure google will continue to improve this service.

Check the demo

A demo page can be seen here. Interesting to see how IE behaves.

More resources

Google Font Directory
Google Fonts Directory API

and of course

Typekit

Check the Spanish version of this post:
Tutorial de Fuentes de Google