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It’s strange how influential an operating system UI can be on web design. I remember back in 2006 everyone was using Apple’s shiny table effect and it seems we may be about to see a wave of websites designed using Microsoft’s Windows 8 ‘Metro’ UI style. Do these large companies that make our most popular devices’ operating systems set the trend, or are they one step ahead? The interesting thing this time round is that the Windows 8 style we see here is designed primarily for touch. The buttons aren’t just part of the UI, they are also delivering content. This means almost the entire screen real estate can be UI. It also works well on various screen sizes - not just desktop and mobile, but desktop to mobile with everything between. This is addressing the same problem many web developers have been solving by using responsive web design. If web design is inspired by operating systems it’ll be interesting to see what affect Windows 8 will have in the coming months.

Things have been ticking over nicely since Microsoft updated its Exchange Online services to Office 365. The other day I needed to find the spam controls (Forefront) and they weren’t where I was expecting them to be so I thought I’d post the details here in case anyone else is having trouble finding them. You’ll need to be logged in as an Office 365 admin: Login to the Office 365 Portal Click ‘Admin overview’ on the left Click ‘manage’ under ‘Exchange’ Click ‘mail control’ on the left Click the ‘configure’ link on the right under ‘Forefront Online Protection for Exchange’ That’s it. Hope this helps :)

I’ve been a big fan of Clay Shirky since I read ‘Here Comes Everybody’, and he’s recently been featured on TED talking about how the open source model of organising, or self organising, groups of hundreds of people can be an incredibly powerful way of producing software, not just technically but democratically. Specifically, he references Git, which unlike many other Version Control Systems (VCS), operates in a distributed way, that is there isn’t one central place or repository - everyone who is participating has access to all the source code and all the source code history. As he explains, this is a remarkably powerful way to foster distributed collaboration, but so far this has mainly been harnessed by the open source software community. This video really gets you thinking about the possibilities of version control for other purposes, such as politics, law, business, etc. The video is just under 20 minutes and I highly recommend watching it. ...

Most modern browsers, such as Firefox 15, Chrome 21 and Internet Explorer 9, have a nifty spell-checker built in to help us ‘auto-correct’ generation write, but when you install the CKEditor some of this functionality is hijacked by the default javascript used by the text editor. Fortunately, if you’re using CKEditor for Drupal, it’s a quick fix to get the browser default spell-checker working again. If you’re not using Drupal you may still be able to apply the fix by noting the configuration settings and using them in your setup. ...

I’ve just released a new Math CAPTCHA Library for CodeIgniter, which can use plain text English words for numbers and random question phrases. It’s also supports multiple languages (as it uses the core language library) and both addition and multiplication. It’s still in the early stages so it needs to be put through its paces, but hopefully the CodeIgniter community will find this a nice alternative to the regular image CAPTCHA or simple math CAPTCHA. ...