Firstly I hope that everyone has had a great Christmas, and made the most of the holiday period.

As we go into what looks like being a worldwide recession, lets hope this year isn't all doom and gloom for the tech industry. As CES 2009 kicks off on the 7th, we should get a glimpse of what is to come, and see which gadget / technology will have the impact that the iPhone 3G had on 2008.

On a football note, it's great to see Liverpool up there leading the way as we turn into the new year. I just hope those few draws earlier in the season don't come back to haunt us!

I wish you all the best for 2009!

Sometimes the simplest community contributions are the most useful. Released this month: the CodeIgniter Userguide Firefox Extension.

By adding a menu entry for the userguide into Firefox, it's basically a set of bookmarks to each section. Brilliantly simple, and effective.

What's more, there's a jQuery one too!

Excellent stuff.

One question that seems to come up more often than any other, whether on the Intype forums or in the Blog, is whether or not another release is ever going to arrive.

Whilst the list of Features planned for 0.3.5 is extensive, many Intype users are hankering for a release (any release) to be provided for the community to see some progress has been made since the last release.


Intype is being developed during the nights and mornings because of our daily jobs. This lack and irregularity of the time is taking its price, we all as users are paying. Our reason for need of daily jobs is to have income from different source, so we can keep Intype free of charge during its development process. Many users are comparing Intype’s development cycle to other products being on some regular basis. But we simply cannot compete on this level, therefore we have to find other areas where we can prove to have better product.Source: Intype Blog

We can see that Martin is clearly still determined to get the product out, without compromising on the quality of the software, it is still frustrating when long standing users of the forums are starting to lose faith that we'll ever have the software released before we're all forced to abandon the wait and look elsewhere. I still use Intype for daily work but more and more the things which are missing are driving me to using alternatives. In the same blog post that provided the quote above, the team again promised much and the result is simply more waiting. The 'cutting edge' releases haven't surfaced, the forums are quiet, and there hasn't been a blog post in 2 months.

Communication even just to say that nothing has changed is key to keeping your audience. I have no doubt that Intype will be a fantastic product when it's released. I'm just not sure that I'll still be around to see it.

A strange one, this. Apple have been forced by the UK Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) to pull their current advert for the iPhone 3G.

The advert repeatedly stated that the phone was "really fast" and showed news pages and the Google maps service taking just fractions of a second to appear.

Text on the screen said: "Network performance will vary by location."

After upholding the viewers' complaints, the ASA said the advert must not appear again in the same form. Source: BBC Online

Who are these people? Why exactly are they complaining?

It's difficult for someone in the industry to comprehend someone being genuinely misled by these adverts. To give you an example, adverts for laundry products have been claiming their Whites are "more white than ever before" since back in the 60s, and yet no-one seems to stop them from continuing to do so. I don't think many of us would expect Apple to run an advert for an extra 30 seconds, showing a half loaded Google Map, just so that punters are given a realistic impression!

One of the things that drew me to Intype is the ability to create simple, but effective code snippets.

Here's an example, as written for a user of the Intype forums recently, who wanted bundles for <h1> to <h5>.

{
	title : 'Heading 1'
	tab_trigger : 'h1'
	scope : 'text.html'
	key_equivalent : 'Ctrl+1'
	content : '<h1>${1:$SELECTED_TEXT}</h1>$0'
}  

If you're an Intype user, you can download the bundle (2Kb)

Tab triggers & Shortcuts

1. h1 - Heading 1
2. h2 - Heading 2
3. h3 - Heading 3
4. h4 - Heading 4
5. h5 - Heading 5

All of the above can also be triggered using <ctrl>+<N> for example <ctrl>+<1>

Output

Any selected text will be placed between the tags, e.g.;

<h1>selected text shown here</h1>