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Tag Archives: HTML5

The perfect tool for reference search and snippets?

Development involves using a lot of tools, apis, methods and documentation for such items is often found using your friend Search. Today I have seen a very cool tool for Mac OSX. Its called Dash, and its a free app found in the App store.

The cute logo of the Dash app

The cute logo of the Dash app

You can install the Dash app from the App store.
It is free but has a “Full version” which cost around
$ 5,- which I think is a very fair price!
You may also download it from the developer website.

What is it that Dash offers?

I must admit that my experience with Dash is sparse, and this blog post is only an introduction to the app. It does search in a lot of the wide spread apis from anywhere in your Mac OSX. It has – to mention a few – HTML 5, css,  , , UI, , XSLT, Perl, Ruby, NodeJS…

In the image below I have opened a document in my preferred editor “Sublime Text 2“. I want more information about the tag “section”, and as I have set up the short-cut “Shift+Cmd+$” in the OSX global short cut settings I simply mark the tag and press that key combination. Voila! Dash opens and have found some nice HTML5 documentation for the section tag, cool!

Dash offers integration to any Mac OSX app

Dash offers integration to any Mac OSX app

Snippets – cross app too!

It also offers snippets, which I have tried only a little. It seems very cool as it works anywhere allowing you to add “abbreviations”  for each snippet. So say you have a HTML5 boilerplate which you use a lot, simply paste the boilerplate into Dash, add some variables or an date place field (which will automatically insert current date when executed) and define say “html5bp. Every time you type that abbreviation it will be replaced with the snippet!

If you have any comments or experiences related to Dash please share through a comment here on this blog post.

My small notes – updates

  • I would love to get “fuzzy search” like in Sublime Text 2
  • Seems that you cannot easily share found directly to say twitter, pity

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Whats new in Visual Studio Express 2012 for web

It has been two years sinc the last version (Visual Studio Express 2010) have been relased from Microsoft. Now it is here, this free version from Microsoft, and landing a new tool for web development in 2012 automatically calls for the release of a strong tool. The web is in a fast lane where many new features are landing every day. and offers a lot of new features and things like LESS an SASS is getting widely spread – so expetations for support of something like this are high.

I will try to post a set of small articles about this, and this is the first “tweet-alike-post”, that is a post of one or more things I notice as I play discover them playing around with this new application from Microsoft.

CSS: Color picker in VS (Visual studio)

Color picker offers a great interface for choosing colors even support for color modes which has an Alpha channel

  • Code complete: As you type your color mode selector (say: ) you can use standard VS code complete Ctrl+Space and the color chooser seen in image above opens.
  • Color picker – color swatches: Opening the color picker you will firstly get a list of color swatches which seens to start up with some default colors (actually VS has scanned your CSS and added the found colours as “swatches”), but as you use colors it automatically creates color swatches of the previously used colors.
  • Color picker – color pipette: You can click the pipette in the bottom right of the “advanced” settings of the color picker. Then you can move the pipette cursor to the point anywhere on your screen which has the color you wish to use. Click the color and voila you have the color in the color picker.
  • Color picker – : CSS3 offers a range of color modes which allows for opacity settings which can make the color partly . RGBA is supported in all major modern browsers.
  • Color picker – current and old comparation: When you change a color (opening the color picker again for a defined color) you can see the old color side by side with the current color.
Conclusion

The new color picker of VS will get 4 out of 5 points from me. It is working very well but nothing is perfect. Should it not offer an easy way to switch between color modes? It could also offer a way to convert a transparent color to a none transparent, but actually you can do this if you re-edit your rgba color choose the color pipette and hover it over the current color. Then you can choose the color there, and voila you have an RGB version of a RGBA color, nice.

I am satisfied with the color picker of Visual Studio Express 2012 web version.

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Google Chrome Frame – a quick path to HTML5?

offers so many interesting new features – like the tag which is a area on your page where you can draw something. I have always liked graphics and would love to be able to draw directly on the client – something which not really was possibel throuh SVG. SVG was a great idea, but generally did not get wide spread (for many reasons).

Chrome and other browsers allready support (part of) the HTML5 standard, and now has made something called “” for Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) . In short it will allow you to use your MSIE browser but through a plug-in get access to HTML5 elements/features inside you MSIE browser.

I will try to download it, and then comment here as I go along. You can too – find the plug-in here: http://code.google.com/intl/da/chrome/chromeframe/

Feel free to comment here on your experiences with this plug-in!

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