Geolocation spoofing with Windows 8 Simulator

While working on a geo-location application, you would want to see how your app works for different coordinates.

Windows 8 has a very helpful simulator that makes testing your geolocation based web application or Windows 8 Store app, easy.

The Windows 8 Simulator exe can be found at this path (assuming your system files are in the C Drive): C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Windows Simulator\11.0

The Simulator can also be invoked through Visual Studio 2012.

Update: I noticed that this tool is available after you install Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows 8 or VS  2012

Windows 8 Simulator

To change the default location's coordinates, select the Location icon in the Simulator & fill the latitude and longitude of the place you want to test your app for.

Happy geo-location spoofing!

Related: Using the Windows 8 Simulator & VS 2012 to Debug the IE10 Touch Events and Your Responsive Design

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Interesting stats on JavaScript libraries

PPK, a JS guru, published a public poll to know the popularity of JavaScript libraries. Among 3200+ votes cast, 91% said yes to the question "Do you use any JavaScript library in more than 50% of your projects"  and the same percentage of people who participated in the poll said they have used jQuery in the last year.

Popular JavaScript libraries can be accessed from Google's & Microsoft's CDNs. CloudFlare's CDN offers 158 JavaScript libraries that you can include in your code (for improved performance) instead of having a local copy. For JS enthusiasts, their library list with links to their respective home pages, is something worth exploring.

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HOW TO quickly find if a site/service is available as a Windows 8 app

Considering that there is currently no official Windows 8 app directory, how do you search for apps related to a keyword?

Let's say, you wanted to know about Twitter or FourSquare client apps. Type in the following queries into Google or Bing to see what related apps are already in the Microsoft Store & get more information about them -


site:apps.microsoft.com foursquare 

site:apps.microsoft.com twitter

The root site, apps.microsoft.com, currently throws a "403 - Forbidden: Access is denied" error message. A Windows 8 Store directory website will probably be available after the official Windows 8 launch on October 26th.

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A rant on WebPlatform.org

Yesterday W3C announced the creation of a new website WebPlatform.org as a "place to come for answers to your trickiest (and simplest) development and design questions about the Open Web Platform."

Microsoft, Opera, Google, Facebook, Mozilla, Nokia, Adobe and W3C will contribute content.

The Web Platform Docs (WPD) Getting Started page loftily announces that "Anyone can contribute to WPD. To get started, you'll first need to register and verify your email address....The community is friendly and welcoming to newcomers..."

When I tried to register this is the message I see -

Account creation from this IP address (199.27.75.20) has been blocked by Cmills.

The reason given by Cmills is Autoblocked because your IP address has been recently used by "Ella". The reason given for Ella's block is "Inserting nonsense/gibberish into pages: Seems to be a bot, or a troublemaker"

My Internet service provider is Airtel, one of India's and possibly the world's largest service providers and they give me a dynamic IP address. It is totally unfair & illogical that WPD should block me because someone else shares this dynamic IP address.

I was also surprised to see that a community initiative like this doesn't use an authentication mechanism like OpenId as popular community websites do.

I'm also upset with some self-appointed guardians of web standards for talking low of W3schools & suggesting that WPD will supplant it. W3schools which started in 1998, beats any other web developer reference  in staying power.

W3Schools is huge considering it has been written over a long period of time. The site doesn't appear to have a large team but it is truly remarkable how they have churned out a large body of work. The number of site pages indexed by Google is a rough measure of the size of a website. The search query site:w3schools.com reveals that W3Schools has about 45,700 pages. I don't know of any similar website that offers unbiased technical guidance on the same scale and in plain English.

Critics complain the site's information is not up-to-date.  While the complaint is valid, it may be harsh to expect the site owners to make immediate modifications as things change. The inaccuracies stem out of the fact that W3Schools attempts to present information in a simplified manner. At times, it may be too simplified to upset some pedantic folks.

W3Schools has the courage to admit that the content may not be correct. This is a reasonable warning for two reasons. They don't charge users anything and due to the evolving nature of the Web, information can change fast. They have a link in the footer that asks readers to report errors.

I have come across many reputable sites that don't bother updating their sites with the latest information so why just blame W3Schools, it's run by humans after all. I wish not just W3Schools but all technical literature on the web had a last modified date on every web page of value.

I hope WPD can emulate W3Schools' simplicity.

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Get fresh news fast from Twitter and Google News JSONP feeds using jQuery

Twitter is a good source for raw local news. Google News aggregates content from publishers around the world. Both of these services provide JSONP feeds.

Try out my search application written in JavaScript that gets the latest tweets and news from these JSONP feeds. As it is all in JavaScript, you can view the HTML source to see how it works.

Resources you may need if you want to adapt it for your requirement -

• Infinite scrolling with JQuery, AJAX & Twitter
• Google News Search JSON API Developer's Guide
• Twitter Search API Reference
• Using JSON to Exchange Data

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Windows 8 - Rant #1

Forget the Start Button, there are no pre-installed games either in Windows 8 (basic RTM edition) unlike all previous versions of Windows.

The Minesweeper game is now a free install-able app - a whooping 100 MB download!

As there is no proper progress indicator, just a message "Installing Microsoft Minesweeper...", there is no way of knowing if there is anything happening at all and how long you'll have to wait for it to finish installing. It took more than 20 minutes on a low-bandwidth Internet connection to finish downloading and I don't recollect seeing any message that the app was successfully installed.

The new Minesweeper with lots of bells & whistles, is no longer the Minesweeper of yesteryears.

And oh, you have to remember Windows 8 keyboard shortcuts to get your way around. The keyboard shortcut to take a screenshot is Windows key + PrintScreen key.

Update: While installing the Wordament app, I discovered that if you click on the "Installing app..." message in the top right corner, you get to see the progress bar on a separate page.

I think it would be helpful if the progress indicator was shown on the same page.

All apps go full-screen and you don't get to see the time in the system tray. That's how apps like Wordament get you addicted ;-)

Also see: Which Windows 8 edition is right for me?

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The State Of HTML5 Video

Key points from the The State Of HTML5 Video report by LongTailVideo (last updated on April 19, 2012):

• 75% of the desktop & mobile browsers can play HTML5
• 50% supports either WebM or MP4. Firefox doesn't support MP4 as it has "no plans to support patent encumbered codecs"
• 90% of tag attributes (poster, preload, autoplay, controls) are supported. Mobile browsers ignore preload (video is never preloaded) and autoplay (video is never played upon page load).
• 80% of API features (loading, buffering, playback, seeking, volume) work reliably.  The video tag provides an extensive JavaScript API for controlling its content.
• 50% fullscreen support is halfway there. Although the HTML5 fullscreen specification is still in its infancy, most browsers have now implemented either a fullscreen control or a scripting API.
• 30% of accessibility (keyboard control, closed captions) is available. The HTML5 Text Track element (<track>) is designed to add closed captions to videos (plus subtitles, descriptions, chapters & metadata).
• iOS is the only platform with streaming. Adaptive streaming formats, like video codecs, are not part of the HTML5 specification.

Also see:

• HOW TO check what HTML5 features a browser supports
• Get Microsoft certified in HTML5 with exam 70-480
• Free 42 episode video series on HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript for beginners

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