Learning the intricacies of programming for a strict display profile has always been a headache. I’ve been doing this for many platforms including iPhone portrait, iPhone landscape, and iPad. With 720p becoming more popular with the advent of Google TV, Apple TV, Roku, Boxee and Samsung TV, it[...]
Archive for the ‘Lessons’ Category
January 24th, 2011 - 1:19 AM § in Lessons
Building a Roku Channel – Part 3
If you’ve read through Parts 1 and 2 of the roku tutorial, you’ve made some very minor modifications to an example channel. Now it’s time to package it up and publish! I just wanted to highlight again that the ability to create a private channel is wonderful for sharing touching or[...]
January 22nd, 2011 - 4:20 PM § in Lessons
Custom theme options page in wordpress
Creating a custom theme options page is very simple if you follow these steps. In this lesson we will create a very basic options page. Step 1: Init the options page. In your functions.php file add this line to the top: require_once ( get_template_directory() . '/theme-options.php' ); Step 2: Create[...]
January 22nd, 2011 - 4:02 PM § in Lessons
Recaptcha
Recaptcha is a clever way to keep the SPAM bots at bay. It forces the visitor to type in a couple of random words before the visitor can submit a POST to your site. Recaptcha accomplishes a secondary task, it digitizes books. The words you see are scanned from books, and by using humans to [...][...]
January 16th, 2011 - 4:16 PM § in Lessons
Fancy fonts in CSS
The web has all of us trained on the idea of “web safe” fonts. And as much as I cringe at the thought days when people collected thousands of true type or postscript fonts, our current avoidance of fonts is a bit too drastic. Designers are now trained to use only Arial, Verdana, Helvetic[...]
January 4th, 2011 - 11:06 PM § in Lessons
Building a Roku Channel – Part 2
Last week, I started with a quick explanation of how to get your computer and roku box ready to build and deploy your first channel. Now let’s get down to lightly customizing some example roku code. In Part 1 you set up an account on roku.com and agreed to the Developer’s Agreement. Now [...]
December 23rd, 2010 - 5:21 PM § in Lessons
Simple but complete Boxee App
One of the best things about Boxee is how simple it is to build a Boxee app. In this post, I’m going to show you how to do that with a single XML file. Don’t dismiss this method of building a Boxee app, as some of the bigger content providers have opted for this over [...][...]
December 13th, 2010 - 11:14 PM § in Lessons
Building a Roku Channel – Part 1
Feel like creating your own channel on the roku video player? It’s not hard! You’ll just need a decent familiarity with editing text files and possibly some comfort with unix. Or discomfort, but as long as you know what I’m talking about, keep reading! I’m personally very com[...]
December 13th, 2010 - 1:53 AM § in Lessons
Building a Boxee App – Part 1
In this series we’ll take a look at creating a Boxee app. At the end of the series, I’ll post an archive for you to use as the starting point of a Boxee application. Boxee is an excellent OpenSource settop box platform. The history of Boxee is an interesting one, rising from XBMC which t[...]
November 25th, 2010 - 8:14 AM § in Lessons
Custom Page Routing in WordPress
WordPress is an excellent platform, however if you want to customize the site to do more than categories and tags it can be a little confusing. We know from SEO best practices that it is important to have proper URL structure. An easy way is to also use the URL to identify class and method. [...][...]