I’m selling the following computer hardware and software on eBay if anyone’s interested. (PS: my old Dell Axim PDA sold in 1 minute!)

• Two 1-Gig DDR2 RAM chips – SOLD!
• Dreamweaver 8 Upgrade CD (Win/Mac) – SOLD!
• Canon CanoScan N650U : super thin scanner – SOLD!
• 3com Home Wireless Router (802.11b) (used) (Wi-Fi) – NOT SOLD

And on Craig’s List:

• Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Standard (upgrade) (Windows) – NOT SOLD re-listed below)

Addendum Aug 3, 2009

Now listed! redhat Linux 7 OS Standard with CDs, original box, and even the stickers!

Addendum Aug 8, 2009

Now listed! Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Standard (Windows; upgrade)

Last week, I attended the Web 2.0 Expo conference at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco. The sponsors included O’Reilly Media, Adobe, Microsoft, and eBay. Overall, it was a pretty good conference, with lots of discussion about mobile and geo-location, “Cloud Computing”, and of course, Twitter and Facebook. Here are some tidbits I picked up:

• Mobile web usage doubled in 2008.
• Nokia is the world’s largest digital camera producer (as they are the biggest mobile phone manufacturer).
• App written by Google in HTML5 for iPhone and Android is sweet.
• Mobilize Don’t Miniaturize
• Need to read up on the W3C Geolocation API
• Since 2003, web page file size has tripled!
• Only 1% of iPhone Apps are used long-term.
• For usability testing, research only what is necessary.
• Don’t put branding ahead of users.

The day before the conference, I took and vacation day and brought my wife and kids up from Cupertino to “the city” for a mini-vacation. We stayed at a very nice hotel for which we got a great rate through HotWire.com. Here’s a Flickr album of the family portion of the trip.

Computer nerd area

Exhibit Hall

Dennis at Golden Gate bridge

Guess what? Adobe’s Dreamweaver CS4 Beta is available! And I’m just getting used to CS3! New features include:

• Live View
• Code Navigator
• CSS best practices
• Code hinting for Ajax and JavaScript frameworks
• HTML data sets
• Photoshop Smart Objects
• Subversion integration
• AIR support
• New user interface

Adobe’s Dreamweaver (previously Macromedia) is a great application. I’ve been using it for years and never found another application that performs so well overall in code editing, WYSIWYG editing, user interface design, extendability, automatic code cleanup and formatting, and compatibility with other applications (such as Fireworks and now Photoshop). And no, it doesn’t mess up your hand-written code.

Recently, I discovered couple of specific text coding features that I believe are not included. I don’t believe there is a command for wrapping a span or code tag around text. In the Insert panel (normally the bar above the page view), there is a text input sub-menu that contains buttons for blockquotes, preformatted text, lists, definition lists, etc., but lacks the span or code tags.

So, if you use Dreamweaver’s code editor a lot, like me, you can add a couple of custom commands to wrap a span or code tag around text. This can easily be done with the Snippet feature. To create it, open Dreamweaver and:

1. Select the Snippets tab in the Files panel.
2. Select the New Snippet icon.
3. Enter as name (such as “wrap a Span”).
4. Enter a Description if you’d like, it’s optional.
5. Leave as wrap selection.
6. In before block, enter “<span>”.
7. In after block, enter “</span>”.
8. Select OK. The custom Snippet is created.

Now to use it, just wipe-select some code and double-click the Snippet in the Panel (or select the Snippet and click the Insert button at the bottom left of the panel).

So Ross Johnson and I recently did another big interview for the Web Axe podcast. We spoke with Andrew Kirkpatrick, a leader at Adobe in product development and accessibility. And a nice guy.

Podcast #53: Interview with Andrew Kirkpatrick

We used Skype to record the podcast, again, and it sure makes it easy when folks are separately geographically–I’m in the Bay area, Ross is in Ann Arbor, and Andrew is in the Boston area. Scheduling is a bit tricky because of the time zone differences and everyone’s busy schedule, but that went fine since I planned a few weeks out. It’s still a bit difficult to get the audio levels right, though, and unfortunately we experienced this problem a bit on this podcast…check it out and let me know what you think…

Last week I attended The Ajax Experience 2007 3-day conference in downtown San Francisco. There sure were some big guys speaking including Brendan Eich, CTO Mozilla; Douglas Crawford, Senior Architect, Yahoo!; and Kevin Lynch, Chief Software Architect at Adobe.

The sessions varied from Ajax security, to Javascript frameworks, to advanced techniques with forms. Fortunately, there was even a session on Ajax and accessibility, given by Orbitz. I also was happy to meet Aaron Gustafson, and attend his session relating to progressive enhancement. There was definitely a concentrate of topics around Javascript frameworks (a.k.a. libraries, toolkits) such as jQuery, Dojo, Prototype, and more.

On a personal note, I decided to make a family vacation out of the event, so I booked a hotel a few blocks from the conference, and brought the wife and kids. Yes, it was tough dragging around two boys–who are barely toddlers–but nonetheless it was worth it.

Union Square in downtown San Francisco: