Kevin Fair
A Great Tool For Website QA – SnapaBug
I was browsing the website MakeUseOf.com this evening. It’s a great place to go to find new tools or websites that I might not have otherwise found. This evening I found a real gem, and one that could save some real time and aggravation during the QA stage of a website build.
It’s a tool called SnapaBug. It allows you to embed a small bit of javascript on your website that places a link that the tester would use to submit a bug report by email. The user enters their email address and a description of the bug to be submitted. The description is mailed to you along with a screenshot of the page being viewed and the details of the user environment. (click on the image below to see an example)
It is a free service and it seems to work very well. Can’t wait to put it into use.
Comments ServiceCapture – A Most Useful App. For Debugging Web Applications
If you are a website developer here is an application that you will find indispensable, particularly if you develop ajax or flash applications. ServiceCapture gives you a detailed picture of all browser requests and responses. This includes asynchronous requests and even flash traces if you have the flash debug player installed.
This application costs about $34 (usd) and is well worth the money. (this is not a sponsored post, by the way)
Thanks to Brian K. for suggesting this app. to me a while back.
Rogers Reaming On Roaming
Okay, I know that Rogers isn’t the only company that extorts money from it’s traveling customers with their roaming charges, but they’re going to get my special attention because they have a monopoly on iPhone in Canada and that’s the only reason I’m dealing with them.
I am going to be traveling soon so I decided to check the Rogers website to see what their roaming rates are. Finding information, particularly pricing information, on the rogers.ca takes about as long was waiting on hold to talk to one of their so-called customer service reps. Finding it on the website ended up being hopeless so I Googled it (yes, Googled it, not Binged it). Here’s what I found.
When traveling in the US Rogers customers are subject to the following rates.
SMS Message – $0.60 each
Seems high, but I suppose I can cope.
Local Calls in US – $0.95 per minute
I think I’ll send a text instead.
Incoming Calls – $1.20 per minute
Don’t be offended if I let my calls go to voicemail.
Calls Back to Canada – $1.70 per minute
I love my wife and son, but…
US Data Roaming – $0.03 per Kilobyte
That doesn’t sound like very much does it? Hold on, let’s look at that in Mb. Unless my math is wrong that’s $30 per Mb. Yikes.
Sheesh. I might as well leave my phone at home.
These rates are accessible here.
It’s not that the rates are high that makes me upset. It’s that they are obscenely high. Also, when you sign up for a plan all they talk about is the local minutes, data etc. Many people (including myself in the past when I was with Telus) understand that the rates are higher when roaming, but don’t realize how insanely high they are.
Recently Adam Savage from Mythbusters announced on Twitter (@donttrythis) that he had unknowingly rung up an $11,000 roaming charge from AT&T while traveling in Canada recently. There is something wrong with prices when a person can unknowingly rack up a bill in the thousands.
Stock Ticker Game – Now Facebook Connect-Enabled
The following is a game that I developed as a means to learn Flash and Actionscript programming. Stock Ticker is a game that I have fond memories of playing when I was younger (usually after a few BEvERages at the cottage).
After the basics of the game were complete, the project then served as a learning experience for developing Facebook applications (it can be accessed on Facebook here).
Now, it has been helpful in working out how to integrate applications via Facebook Connect.
In order to play this game you need to Login Using Facebook by clicking the button below.
When you finish logging in, this page will reload and you can click to play the game.
What Is Facebook Connect?
Facebook Connect is a means by which Facebook functionality can be enabled in third-party sites. Think of it as a Facebook application sitting outside of Facebook. One of the most common uses is to enable site login via Facebook (as is done here) to avoid the need for account registration.
This implementation only scratches the surface of the available capabilities. Facebook Connect can be used to view and post status updates, friend lists, events, photos and more. As time allows, I will try to integrate the social elements into this application (to enable multi-player mode and more).
I’m No Longer Being Framed!
As I mentioned in an earlier post, these browser bars that sit atop pages that you click to from social networking sites drive me crazy. I can’t do anything about the pages that I’m going to, but I am doing something about the pages that I create.
There is a small piece of javascript code that I’ve now placed at the top of this page which detects whether my page is being loaded in a frameset and busts out of it if it is. This code is below.
<script type=’text/javascript’>
if (window!= top)
top.location.href=location.href
</script>
I was in the habit of adding this code to every site I built for years, but got out of the habit because frames went away. Now I think I’ll remember to do so from now on.