Since my old printer died a few months ago I’ve been looking for a suitable replacement. I ummed and ahhed for quite some time trying to work out what I wanted from a new device – eventually I decided that I wanted

• a colour printer
• integrated scanner
• ideally wireless printing & scanning
• cheap (<£100)

I’d almost given up on finding all these features in one device for the right price, then on Friday I spotted the HP Photosmart C4585 for £75 on the pc world website & decided it looked just the job.

Set up

Setting up the printer was surprisingly easy. Once the power was connected the printer displays easy to follow instructions for installing the ink cartridges on it’s screen.

Next I popped the set up DVD into my MacBook & followed the instructions. I was half expecting to experience pain trying to set the printer up with the Mac, but actually it was a doddle there’s a wizard that guides you through the whole process. Eventually it asks you to connect the the printer using the supplied USB cable; it asks you if you want to connect to a wireless network, if you answer yes the set up program displays the name of the network your computer is attached to and prompts to enter the network key and er, that’s it. Easy.

Note: When adding the printer under Print & Fax on your Mac OS X be sure to choose “HP Jetdirect – Socket” from the protocol drop down or you’ll get network device not ready errors when you try to print.

I thought it was a nice touch that HP provide a Mac OS desktop widget that shows you the printers ink levels.

Now that the printer was on the network it was very simple to set it up on the wife’s Windows XP rig. Again there’s a wizard to walk you through the set up, this time I told the software I wanted to install a network printer – it did a quick scan & found the printer. very, very easy.

Printing

If you buy a printer it’s a good idea to buy paper unless you’re sure you already have some. I wasn’t able to test the printing straight away. But when I did get to the shop and printed a documents I was very pleased with the text printing. I’ve also tried printing one photo (on photo paper) so far, I have to say I’m extremely impressed with the quality.

Scanning

Before setting up the printer / scanner I wasn’t entirely sure if the scanning function was goting to be available over Wifi, I was extremely pleased to find that it does. No more plugging in USB leads for me! The scan results seem very good, so far I’ve used it to upload embarrassing photos of my Sisters to Facebook.

Conclusion

I’ve only had this bit of kit for a couple of days, but at the moment I’d be more than happy to recommend it to anyone based on my limited experience.

It has rapidly gained popularity with web developers and designers – now software manufacturers are starting to take note with industry leaders like Adobe & Microsoft adding tools to their web development environments to help make jQuery development even quicker.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008

I spoke previously about getting Jquery intellisense in Visual Studio 2008. Since then Scott Guthrie announced that that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward and then just yesterday I spotted this article on the Visual Web Developer Team Blog with interesting updates to VS2008′s jQuery intellisense. The best development from my point of view is the ability to get code hints in your aspx & master pages, not just your .js files.

In order to take advantage of these improvements you’ll first need to install Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1and this hot fix.

Next download the jQuery IntelliSense documentation file and save it in to your website in (probably a good idea to put it in the same folder as your jQuery file).

To add jQuery intellisense to a javascript file simply add this line to the top of the file:

  /// <reference path="jquery-1.2.6-vsdoc.js"/>

To add it to aspx & master pages do add the following lines to the head of your document.

    <% if (false)
       { %>
        <script src="~/[PATH_TO_REFERENCE_FILE]/jquery-1.2.6-vsdoc.js" type="text/javascript">
        </script>
    <%} %>

Points to note:

• The “if (false)” statement will prevent the link to the reference file being rendered at runtime.  Microsoft are planning to release a hotfix to automatically search for the vsdoc file if the javascript file has a reference path in it meaning that these links in the head will become redundant.
• If you are using aspnet’s MVC framework you need to ensure that your path to the reference file starts with a tilde otherwise VS will not find the reference file.
• dding a link to the reference to a master page means all aspx pages that inherit that master page will have intellisense enabled.

Adobe Dreamweaver

CS4

Adobe have just released Dreamweaver CS4 which also has support for jQuery code hinting. Adobe have taken a different approach to Microsoft, they use “introspection” to parse any javaScript files you have linked to your page and provide code hints.

This seems to work pretty well, and even handles chaining. However, I do have a couple of minor gripes. Firstly as soon as I typed “$(” dreamweaver told me I had a syntax error which really confused me, in the end I realised that just had to keep typing and DW would eventually figure out what I was doing. The other thing is, as a VS user I’m used to to code hits appearing strait away, in DW you have to press Ctrl + [space]. It’s not a big deal but would take some getting used to.

Older Vesions

Users of older versions of Dreamweaver this extension from Chris Charlton adds excellent code hints for jQuery & jQuery UI and what’s more it prompts you as soon as you hit “.” good work Chris!

Usability testing is something I’ve been itching to do properly for years; I’ve been trying to sell the idea to various bosses ever since I read Steve Krug‘s excellent Don’t Make Me Think.

Andy’s session demonstrated that effective usability testing really is within reach. He started off with a real world example – getting people who don’t drink much wine to evaluate three different bottle openers. This had the rather pleasing upshot of there being several open bottles of wine that needed consuming during the course of the afternoon. From there Andy moved on to the main presentation which was informative and entertaining, you can see a version of the slides he used here.

At the end of the session Andy announced that Silverback, the application that clear left had been making a noise about for a couple of months was in fact a tool for doing usability testing on the mac, and we would all be getting a beta copy to play with. As a recent mac convert I was keen to give it a spin.

At work we had already scheduled in some usability testing on the product we are developing so I was able to try Silverback out almost straight away.

Silverback is incredibly straightforward to use, you create a project and then set up a new test session with in that. In your web browser of choice you navigate to the site you’ll be testing then, when you are ready to start your test click “Start Session” in silverback, the screen fades to black with the words “press SPACEBAR to start” displayed in large friendly letters.You can pause and restart recording during the session, using your apple remote if you have one. Youcan also use your remote to mark places where your tester runs in to difficulty apparently.

Once you have finished your test you can make notes and export the session. I love the way Steve the gorilla taps his foot and drums his fingers on his clipboard while the export takes place.  What you end up is a quicktime movie like the one below with the isight & screen capture videos combined, Sweet!

My Silverback Demo

The movies are incredibly useful for understanding how users will interact with your site, they’re a very persuasive tool for getting colleagues to rethink functionality.

I think Clear Left have done a great job with Silverback, we’ll definately be buying a license when they launch the product.

A note about recording audio with the mac mini

Our mac test box in the office is a mac mini running tiger, so it has no isight camera or built in mic.  I had real fun and games trying to get the audio to work, eventually I discovered that the line in on the mac mini requires an amplified source so standard PC microphones will not work.  The best solution this problem was to purchase a USB microphone – we bought this one from Logitec it’s plug & play and works a treat.

• Choose your software
• Add to cart
• Pay
• Download Software

nice and simple & stress free. Unfortunately some companies don’t get it – Tomtom I’m looking at you.

Yesterday I decided to purchase the Tomtom maps of Western Europe in preparation for our holiday next month, so I spent £60 (approx $120 US) on the map and nearly a day later I’m still waiting for it to be “delivered”.

The Tomtom  map purchase experience goes like this:

• Choose map
• Add to Cart
• Confirm your Tomtom account details
• Pay
• Get a screen that thanks you for your purchase and tells you that you will receive download instructions “shortly”
• Receive thank you email
• Receive invoice email
• Wait!

Now the thank you screen did say that if I waited more than 24hrs for the download details to get in touch, but frankly I think having to wait more than a few minutes is too long – if I’m buying a software download I want it now, not tomorrow. Come on Tomtom, sort it out.

One thing that was missing until now though was a way of getting jQuery intellisense in VS2008. Yesterday I spotted this article by James Hart which describes how this missing functionality can be be added. You need to make sure that you have this Visual Studio 2008 Hotfix installed then follow the instructions in James’ article and as if by magic you’ll have intellisense for your jQuery code! This has gone down a treat here and looks set to make life an awful lot easier.

Ever since I started blogging, I’ve been trying to come up with a good way to get html into my posts so that can write tutorials. It’s something I’ve struggled with and as an upshot – I have two or three articles that are waiting to be published that I can’t get my code examples into. I’ve tried various wordpress plugins, I also tried using flock, but that didn’t work.

Another problem I found was that it seems impossible to post video to the blog using the online wordpress editor

Yesterday I was reading a blog post (I thought it was by Paul Boag but I can’t find it now) that mentioned Ecto.

Ecto is a feature-rich desktop blogging client for MacOSX and Windows, supporting a wide range of weblog systems, such as Blogger, Blojsom, Drupal, MovableType, Nucleus, TypePad, WordPress, and more.

I’ve already successfully posted video with Ecto, so now I just need to test to see if I can include html examples (ignore the code below)

<h1>test</h1> <p>blah</p>

Today I found this post which has links to a number of desktop blogging tools, so I’ll probably try a couple of others before I pay out for one

Now I have a lovely clean install of the OS and the system seems to be running a treat, I slowly installing all my software and running Windows update many many times – I should be totally back to normal soon. All that really remains to be done is a restore of all my important data from back up.

I didn’t immediately put two and two together, I just assumed that it was time to give the laptop a bit of a spring clean; so I set about uninstalling a bunch of programmes that I had installed but don’t use (including Sky Anytime), ran a scan with Spy bot Search and Destroy, checked that my HD didn’t need defragmenting and so on.

Having done all this there was no discernible difference, the next step was to check what processes where running on my machine. That’s when I found “Kservice.exe” was using a fair amount of memory and CPU time. On investigation it turns out that this is the Peer 2 Peer service used by Sky Anytime on PC to distribute it’s content. I hadn’t even realised that Sky Anytime was a P2P application and certainly wouldn’t expect it to leave a service running on my PC one it had been uninstalled. I was not impressed.

I manually removed Kserver by stopping the service deleting the Kservice folder and romiving all the references to KDX from my registry. I subsequently found out that Sky have an uninstaller that you can download from their website. Hopefuly that’ll do the trick for anyone else who’s having problems with this.

I’ve been using Fireworks CS3 beta and it’s pretty good, certainly an improvement over earlier versions. I’m keen to see what improvements there are to dreamweaver, specifically to do with how it deals with C#. Dreamweaver 8 can write asp.net pages, but it doesn’t put the code into code behind pages – it does it all in line which is not great, this is something I’d definitely like to see sorted in DW CS3. There are a few things that do look interesting in dreamweaver CS3. The CSS support sounds like it has been improved dramatically and there’s the new “Spry” Ajax framework. Unfortunately, I think I read that Spry uses invalid inaccessible code. I’ll withhold judgement on whether it’s worth upgrading (I’m currently using CS2) until I’ve been able to play with trials of Dreamweaver and Photoshop.

Most nokia handsets run on the Symbian operating system, according to the Fring website you can download the application for the Nokia: 6630, 6680, 6681, 6682, N70, N72, N80, N90, N71, N73, N75, N91, N92, N93, E60, E61 & E70.

I gave fring it’s first proper test on my N70 this afternoon over Vodafone’s 3G network; I’m pleased to say it seemed to work. I could hear the person at the other end very well indeed although my voice was apparently a bit distorted (high pitched) and there was a bit of “satellite delay”.

If you have a skype account and a nokia mobile I’d reccomend giving Fring a try, espesially if your phone has Wi-fi. Fring was OK over the 3G network, but because I have free anytime minutes I don’t think that it would save me any money, unless I was talking to someone abroad.