We got back yesterday from another weekend mountain biking in Scotland, which the same group of us have been doing bi-annually for the last 4 or 5 years now. This morning I am riddled with aches and pains. Nothing in comparison to what my friend Tim must be feeling right now though, having fallen off on the first day, breaking his collar bone in the process.
Nobody saw Tim's fall but it happened on my favourite stretch of all of the 7 Stanes - the "Omega Man" at Ae Forest. Here's a video of what it's like - although it doesn't really do justice to either how fast and fun the 2 minute descent can be.
I always get to the bottom with a massive grin on my face. It's a shame Tim didn't, as this was his first time. Although he says it hasn't put him off and he'll come next time. Nutter.
While sat in Dumfries hospital waiting room with Tim on Friday night I tweeted:
After a day mountain biking at Ae forest it seems fitting that we're now in A&E.
This probably looks like a typo and makes no sense unless you happen to know there's a place in Scotland called Ae and that A&E is the Accident & Emergency department in UK hospitals.
Credit is due to the Dumfries A&E staff. Rather than a 5 hour wait just to get seen we were in and out with a couple of hours and the staff were just as friendly as I've come to expect the Scots to be.
Last week, in response to a post about creating arrow-like menus, Dragon Cotterill linked to a tutorial called How to Build a Kick-Butt CSS3 Mega Drop-Down Menu. Earlier in the week I'd seen elsewhere a "top 50" list of cool-looking "mega menus" and wondered then where I could use one of them. Dragon's link made the urge stronger and, in the end, I found a perfect use for them.
What's a Mega Menu?
We're all used to the idea of drop-down menus by now -- you see them everywhere. You hover over a menu item and up pops a list of other related items. In terms of HTML this is just a set of nested <ul> elements. Any <ul> element that is a child of an <li> is hidden until the mouse hovers over the parent <li> element and then CSS is used to display the child <ul> until the mouse cursor leaves and then it's hidden again.
As I see it Mega Menus are just a logical progression of this. Instead of hiding and showing a UL element we just stick a DIV in there. In that DIV we can place whatever HTML we like. Here's an example, taken from the above tutorial:
Pretty damn cool aren't they!?
Now, that said, I don't really see Mega Menus as being much to do with CSS3 at all. Unless the :hover pseudo-class only came about as part of the CSS3 spec, which I'm pretty sure it didn't. I just think the author of the linked tutorial and many others are guilty of using the CSS3 tag to make things seem cool and more relevant. Just like people over-used the term "Web 2".
You can in fact start using Mega Menus today without needing to worry too much about support among current browsers for CSS3.
A Practical Example
Recently I've been working on merging the websites for three self-catering properties - Hurdlow Grange, Crewe & Harpur Arms and Lapwing Barns. Owned by the same people, each had their own website, which made no mention of the other two properties.
The aim of merging the three was to cross-sell them from each of the other sites. To do this I came up with the idea of each property being a tab, like so:
By clicking on the middle tab for the Crewe & Harpur you'd then go to that site. The middle tab would shift to the left (to assume the expected position of the main site logo) and the other two tabs would now become less prominent.
What worried me about this approach was that it broke the user's understanding of how a tab should work. If you press a tab it should stay where it is and becomes selected. Not jump to the left.
To try and get round this and to try and explain the tab in the first place I added a mega menu that goes some way to addressing these issues, like so:
Not exactly a "mega" menu, but the principle's the same - it doesn't have to be a simple list nested in your menu!
Adding A Little CSS3
The screengrab above is taken in IE8. All works fine, but the CSS3 support is lacking. Compare it to the grab below, which was taken in Chrome:
Nice, no? Rounded corners. Background gradient fills. Drop shadows. And not a single graphic needed. The only difference between the two is about 6 lines of CSS.
So, there you go. You can make practical use of mega menus right now. You can also use a little CSS3 to add a that something special. Just as long as you check how it looks in non-CSS3 capable browsers too.
Support s/mime, so that small companys are no longer stick to the BlackBerry environment if they need/wish to support s/mime.
It you have currently running s/mime in your environment (for security reason) the only way to read these emails on a mobile device is a BlackBerry enviornment. That caused some cost issues for small companys with +- 300 users, so they need to implement BlackBerry instead Lotus Traveler.
give an option in the back end to customize the way views are pulled (by status) - giving the option to change it to either Most Recent, Most Voted, or Most commented. Currently, the subcategories pull by most commented, and the categories pull by most recent. If you give an option on how to pull, admin users can select how they want the queue to be pulled.
provide a ranking system on the admin/manager view for each idea to help prioritize ideas. This could be a ranking system determined by the admin group - wether it be in words like "favorable, unfavorable, neutral" or numbers "1,2,3,4...etc. The admin group can decide and customize
Currently, when you edit an idea and update the idea, it takes you back to the most recent view, starting on page 1. It would be great if rather then doing that, it would take you to where you left off in navigating through idea jam. For instance, if you are on page 11 of 40 and decide to enter an idea into the detail view and then edit it, you should go back to where you left off on page 11.
Chris Connor has released V1.0 of his new OpenNTF project xDesk. xDesk is an XPages helpdesk and issue tracking application developed in XPages. xDesk is a generic xPages database application that can be used in a variety of situations such IT Helpdesk, ...
Ferry Kranenburg has just released a reusable Login custom control component that you can use for your XPages apps. The control can be controlled by setting the following ...
A Domino server is upgraded from a prior release of Domino which uses a different JDK to Domino 8.5.x which uses JDK 1.6.and agents connecting via JDBC no longer successfully connect to remote systems.
Meetings, appointments, allday events, and event announcement count as busy time on your schedule. If the calendar doc is flagged "Mark private" it stays busy. With the flag "Mark available" there won't be an entry in the busytime.nsf. Anniversaries and reminders do not count as busy ...
Clicking on the details button from an ambiguous names dialog sometimes returns error message: "Unable to open person record on server". This case is specific to LDAP users in an LLN2 Hybrid setup
IBM Lotus Domino Server 8.5.1 Fix Pack 5 for IBM i V5.4/ Type: Incremental Installer / Release Date: 18 October 2010. See 'More info' link above for additional information.
IBM Lotus Domino Server 8.5.1 Fix Pack 5 for IBM i 6.1/7.1 Type: Incremental Installer / Release Date: 18 October 2010. See 'More info' link above for additional information.
IBM Lotus Notes Client Standard 8.5.1 Fix Pack 5 for W32/ Type: Incremental Installer / Release Date: 18 October 2010. See 'More info' link above for additional information.
The default device settings for users come from the Lotus Notes® Traveler administration database default device settings document. Users can change their device preference settings from their devices, but only an IBM® Lotus Notes Traveler administrator can change device security settings. A ...
Users can download the IBM® Lotus Notes® Traveler client to their mobile devices using the Lotus® Mobile Installer application. All delivery methods of downloading the Lotus Mobile Installer (LMI) and Lotus Notes Traveler client to a mobile device are supported. The following list includes some of ...