I haven’t done much with UVFood in the last few weeks. Partly because we were traveling for two weeks, but we’ve been back for a while now.

The main reason is that I’ve been doing the dreaded refactoring of the code.

I’ve used Catalyst as the framework for building the web app. Catalyst apps use the Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm, and application builders often fall into the trap of having too thin a Model and putting too much of the work into the Controller.

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Right now I have enough work to do on uvfood.com without adding iPhone support that only I would use, so I will (reluctantly) wait to work on an iPhone interface to it.

In the meantime, I’m going to stash some iPhone-related links here.

• Via: Ajaxian » iUI gets even better: cleanup and features
• Make your content look good on the iPhone - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
• Via: Ajaxian » Firebug for iPhone

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A very nice new tool called XRAY showed up recently. XRAY works with the Safari, Firefox, Camino and Mozilla web browsers (unfortunately no Opera or Internet Explorer support yet). It helps you examine elements on a web page, bringing up information about their dimensions, inheritance, attributes and styling. Best of all, it requires no installation and it’s free. Just drag its bookmark to your bookmarks bar and click on it when you want to examine a web page.

Thanks very much to Western Civilisation Pty Ltd for sharing this with everyone.
[tags]x-ray, javascript, css, web, bookmarklet[/tags]

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Apple has published guidelines for developing web content for the iPhone. Some of the guidelines are just good practice (separating HTML, Javascript and CSS, for instance). Some of it is informational (how many pixels you can expect to be available in the iPhone - at least, in this version of it). Some of it is very iPhone-specific (META tags to help control the viewport and scaling).

The article also includes guidelines for encoding audio and video for access over EDGE and Wifi networks.

The iPhone runs a slimmed down version of Apple’s desktop browser “Safari” - you get real HTML, Javascript and CSS support, and it can do Ajax. In my few days with an iPhone I haven’t found any web sites that simply didn’t work on it, including Javascript-heavy sites like Flickr.

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For a website which is largely database navigation and which you want to attract search engines to, you want to make sure that as much of the website is available without requiring a login as is possible.

For instance, if you’re developing a restaurant review website (ahem), you really want to make sure that the information about the restaurants is available without making the user login. You probably want to have a few features like rating or reviewing a restaurant that will only be available to logged-in users, but the display of the restaurant’s information should look as similar as it can between the logged-in and not-logged-in cases.

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vCard is a specification for representing contact information. It’s used to move information between address books in a non-proprietary format, and to download or even upload contact information from web sites.

Apple’s Macintosh Address Book supports vCard as an export and import format as does Microsoft Outlook.

A vCard can contain things like addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, even photographs.

I’m working on a web site which stores contact information for businesses and I want to be able to make that information available to my users in vCard format. So… I’m coding in Perl. There are two Perl packages that look helpful - Net::vCard and Text::vCard. It turns out that Text::vCard is a more recent version of the same codebase as Net::vCard.

Text::vCard provides methods for creating a vCard and setting the data it contains. You can then create an address book using Text::vCard::Addressbook and use its export function to get the actual vCard text.
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I’m in the process of redesigning the theme on the Apocalypse Blog and I’ve been stuck on the colors. I know the basic color scheme I want to use…red, orange, black… alarming colors… apocalyptic colors. I used them in the original theme. I’ve been running into a lot of issues, though - for instance, it seems like the only thing that looks good on red is black. Other colors are just… dim. So I shouldn’t be using black for section headers, although it does look very dramatic and apocalyptic.

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Our bank is a small local bank. In general they’ve been very good to deal with. They offer a web interface through which we can access our account, pay bills, etc. The web interface is nothing special… it works, it has a couple of quirks and unnecessary page reloads.

Recently they decided they needed to beef up security. I ran into this on my own personal account a while back, and was unhappy about it. Now they’ve done it to our business account.

The security mechanism consists of them asking three questions and requiring answers to them. Then, in the future if they decide that you might be accessing the account from a different computer from the one you usually do, they may ask the questions and block your access to the account if you can’t answer them.
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