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technology rob on 28 Jun 2009

Substitute Tool for IKEA Malm Bed Frame and Desk


IKEA Malm Bed Frame Tool Hex Wrench

IKEA Malm Bed Frame Tool Hex Wrench

I’m in the process of moving to Cambridge, MA and was in dire need of a special tool used to take apart IKEA furniture, in particular the Malm style IKEA bed frame.

My brother, the IKEA furniture assembly master specifically said, “Do not lose this tool, we will need it when you want to move again.” Alas, I think it got packed somewhere.  So we needed a replacement or substitute.

The first trick was finding what the tool was called, because it is not a standard hand tool.  It apparently this Z-shaped tool does not have a name, but instead a number, which is 113453. Continue Reading »

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Apple & css & iphone & mobile computing & programming & sdk rob on 26 Jun 2009

Using an HTML Web View with a Transparent Background in iPhone SDK’s Interface Builder and Xcode

Something almost every iPhone application needs is an About and Help view that allows the user to learn a little bit about the application they’re using and  how it should be operated.  The problem with a UITextView in Apple’s XCode and Interface Builder SDK is that you can not use rich-text styling or even bold one line over another.

One solution to this problem would be to create image files containing stylized text and then rasterize them and allow the user to page through them.  The problem with this is that you can’t have tappable URLs or links embedded in the text.

David Peixotto, coding ninja and my business partner for Neutrinos, suggested we look at using a Webview or HTML view and put an imageview in the background.  The trick is telling the iPhone to display a UIWebView with a transparent background.  I looked around for the solution to this and came across this helpful post in the iPhone Developer SDK forums.

Step one of getting a transparent web view in interface builder is to create HTML in the controller.m for the view containing the webview that contains the CSS line: <body style=”background-color:transparent”> Inside the <head> </head> sections of the html.

Step two is to set the background color of the webview to clear or transparent:  myWebView.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor]; Continue Reading »

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iphone rob on 07 Jun 2009

Bonnaroo 2009 Pocket Images for the iPhone

iphone bonnaroo schedule wallpaper

The less you need to carry around, the more you can focus on the music and artistic displays at Bonnaroo.  I put together two sets of Bonnaroo schedules formatted for the iPhone.  

 Download the 2009 Bonnaroo Schedule Formatted for the iPhone

Set one is meant to be saved as a athe following five jpeg images formatted for the iPhone in 480×320. The schedules are taken from Mizary’s printable schedule.   Continue Reading »

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css & design & programming & www rob on 20 May 2009

Display a Simple Loading Message and Animated Loading Gif Using JavaScript

Some pages require an inordinate amount of time to load.  For most sites, this is a big problem.  Webmasters and SEO specialists know the value of a quick landing page load, because they know that netizens have short attention spans.

Dynamically built webpages, (especially applications), require time to load and visual feedback that something is happening.  The most famous example is the gmail loading page:

Loading Message and Animated Gif Example Javascript

Gmail uses a more sophisticated progress bar to represent the loading of the webpage.  I found an article on yensDesign that gives some great advice on how to do this, if you want to get really fancy.

If you have a dynamically built page that you’d like to give a loading message to that doesn’t require a full progress bar, I recommend simply displaying a message and an animated gif.

The Method

The trick to accomplishing this is a small mix of JavaScript and CSS.  You don’t have to be using <div>’s to display your content, but you should.  My example uses <div>’s. Continue Reading »

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css & programming & www rob on 06 May 2009

Custom Styling the ShareThis Button Using CSS Without API Calls

ShareThis CSS Style Classes Button

I was just doing a ShareThis icon for a client I’m working with and found that how to properly style the button is poorly documented.  In order to replace the whole icon and text, you are supposed to use the developer API.

I only wanted to style the text, so I was hunting for some CSS to style the text and could not find the right classes to call.  Some hunting turned up the following: Continue Reading »

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Society & design & music rob on 12 Apr 2009

April 2009 Song of the Month: N.A.S.A - Gifted

gifted_nasa_music_video

I struggled with April’s song of the month, “Gifted,” which appears on the album  Spirit of Apollo by N.A.S.A.  N.A.S.A (North America / South America) is a project of Sam Spiegel aka Squeak E. Clean and  Brazilian DJ Zego spent five years assembling a gang of artists spilling across genres.

Performers on this record include:  George Clinton, David Byrne, Cee-Lo, Seu Jorge, Sean Lennon, RHCP, Tom Waits, Ol’ Dirty, RZA, Method Man, oh and Kanye West. Continue Reading »

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programming & salesforce & sdk & www rob on 08 Apr 2009

Contact Us Javascript Form Validation and Custom Fields in SalesForce

The web Contact Us form serves as an important starting point for people interested in a product or service.  For a big company, handling inbound leads over the course of a long sales process requires a strong CRM.  SalesForce is a fully featured CRM plaform, however in my experience it has somehow ignored an important source for sales leads: contact us forms on the company website.

Salesforce does not explain how its clients should go about crafting a quality Contact Us web page.

What is a quality Contact Us web page?  

Generally you’ll find the same type of fields on Contact Us pages across the web.  You are asked for your first and last name, job title, complete address and something specific about your query, like Where did you hear about us? Or What model Range Rover are you interested in?

 What’s the use of having their name if you don’t have their phone number?  Usually, a company will want to set specific form fields to required. Checking whether a potential customer has filled out a required answer is called form validation. Continue Reading »

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design & facebook & www rob on 27 Mar 2009

Facebook User Interface Revision and Revolt

One of my guides for creating a slick FB profile recently made PC World’s list of 10 tips for Facebook Power Users (Tip #5).  That coverage sort of endorsed me as a thought leader in tweaking Facebook.  The user interface and design of Facebook is only of interest to me because I enjoy the service so much and like sharing my experience with it.

As you might guess I’ve been following the redesign of Facebook pretty closely. My pal Bryan just posted a link to another great PC World article on Facebook “caving” to user concerns in the redesign. The article contains a good summary but also some important links worth checking out:

  • Facebook’s Director of Product, Chris Cox official reaction (blog entry)
  • Techcrunch shames Facebook for caving to users.
  • The idea that while 2 million users complained about the redesign, yet that is only 1% of the userbase is highlighted here.

The main changes they will be making in the near term to satisfy complaints are: Continue Reading »

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Babson & energy rob on 27 Mar 2009

My Remarks at the 2009 Babson Entrepreneurial Energy Expo

Yesterday our graduate student energy club produced its annual energy conference. I have many thoughts and good feelings about how the event went. A summary would be ’smashing success.’

I could not communicate enough to those I spoke with how proud I was of the team of students involved in creating such a professional experience.

Here is a copy of the remarks I made at Babson Energy and Environmental Club’s Entrepreneurial Energy Expo (E3).  Most of the speech was presenting energy club’s Green Stewardship Awards.

pdf awards e3BEEC Green Stewardship Awards

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music rob on 22 Mar 2009

Nothing To Worry About

I just returned from an week-long trip in Norway with a handful of Babson MBA visiting students at ITNU in and looking at  renewable energy businesses.  It was a  great time, and I hope to blog about it soon.

For now I wanted to push down my last post about gmail being down with something suitably awesome.  Just before leaving for Norway, my pal Rob Teel tipped me off to a new music video from Peter Bjorn and John titled, “Nothing to Worry About.”

PB&J are not Norge, rather Swedish but I like this tune and more people should see this.

A comment by “Joe” on Booooom.com described it thus:  ”These guys are in their element, and they put alot of their money into it, but they feel relax and have no worries when they are doing their thing.

Others would call them crazy for their lifestyle but it’s what they want and like th lyrics says: aint got nothing to worry about.”

I don’t think I can put it much better than that. This serves as the song of the month for March.

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