[csharp]
public static string[] SuffixLookup = { “th”,”st”,”nd”,”rd”,”th”,”th”,”th”,”th”,”th”,”th” };

public static string AppendOrdinalSuffix(int day)
{
if (day % 100 >= 11 && day % 100 <= 13)
return day + “th”;
return day + SuffixLookup[day % 10];
}
[/csharp]

Source: One Steve Jobs down, one to go

If you like living life on the edge and can’t wait for the stable release, Umbraco 4.1 Beta 2 is available for download.

New features and enhancements in 4.1 include:

• Syntax highlighting editor for CSS, JavaScript, Templates, Python and XSLT
• Image Cropper data type
• Media recycle bin
• Medium Trust support with MS SQL Server

Here’s an example of how easy it is to get to embed a font from the directory into your webpage.

[html]

Check out this funky font!


[/html]

A big advantage of this is since the fonts are served from Google server’s it saves you on bandwidth, provides optimized caching and is served from a CDN.

It’s not only fonts Google offer this kind of service. The Google AJAX Library API allows you to pull libraries such as jQuery, jQuery UI and MooTools from Google servers. See my post The Benefits of Google AJAX Libraries API

Update: This site is now using the Lobster font for the header which is served up by the Google API.

Android 2.2, nicknamed Froyo, adds Wifi and 3G tethering, meaning phone owners will now be able to hook there phone up to their laptop and surf the net on the train, in a field, hell anywhere with a decent signal. Potential bad news is this feature is dependant on whether or not your network carrier permits this.

Another exciting new addition is full Flash 10.1 support. Take that iPhone! This has been achieved partly down to huge speed improvements to the OS, meaning the CPU hungry platform will run painlessly. Early testers AndroidPolice, are reporting about a 450% performance improvement.

I’m not getting too excited yet though as official updates roll through your manufacturer first and I’m still waiting on an upgrade from my HTC Hero’s, now ancient, Android 1.5.

return String.IsNullOrEmpty(value) || value.Trim().Length == 0;

Spotify

If your buying at least an album a month, you might as well pay the £10/month Spotify Subscription fee and download this amazing app from the market. With millions of songs available for streaming via wifi or downloading for offline playback. Since Spotify stores all your playlists online you’ll get automatic synching with changes made on the desktop mode. Oh, and also, NO ADS!

Barcode Scanner

This app allows you to scan barcodes of CD, books, anything really and will perform a lookup of prices. QR Codes containing URLs can also be scanned for direct linking. While running the app point your camera at the image on the left to see the results. These URLs work for the Android Market too.

BBC News

Displays the latest headlines by category with in app display of full article. I mostly use this for checking the football scores but there are over a hundred other categories to select. Bundles with a homescreen widget for adding scrolling headlines to your homescreen.

Facebook for Android

I’ve been told this app is nothing compared to it’s iPhone cousing but it has all I would really need from a Facebook app. The simple UI for displays most recent status updates and photos as well as changing your status and posting to friends wall’s. I’ve yet to try the photo uploader but that’s in there too. Great how all those application posts are excluded from the feed.

Best of the Rest

So those are the four apps I see as essential downloads. Saying that there are around 50,000 apps available in the market including unit convert, improvements to almost every core feature of the Android such as Dolphin Web Browser, Battery Manager and alternative homescreen software so there is bound to be something to match every need, if not it’s probably on it’s way.

Previously to protect your website against a vandilizing technique used by hackers known as Cross Site Scripting (XSS) you would have to include a HtmlEncode call like so :

<p>
  <%= Server.HtmlEncode(Model.CustomerFirstName) %>
</p>

but now all it takes is:

<p>
  <%: Model.CustomerFirstName %>
</p>

As I mentioned I’m only a week into .Net 4 and MVC 2 so hopefully I’ll have plenty more of these gems to report on as I find them

A simple way to speed up your websites is to forget about hosting your own copy popular libraries such jQuery, MooTools and YUI, and instead let Google host them for you and use the AJAX Libraries API.

Here are some benefits:

Automatically use the newest version. Saves editing your pages. Don’t worry though, you can specify specific versions if your worried about problems that can always come with updates.

Reduced bandwidth requirements. Serving a 23kb jQuery file to every new visitor eats away at your bandwidth allocation pretty quickly.

Take advantage of the user’s cache. An easy way to understand this is to imagine a friend’s website makes use of the AJAX library API to load the jQuery library. If the user was to then visit your site at some point they wouldn’t need to download jQuery as it can just be loaded from the browser cache, leading to faster loading of your website. Using the API contributes to a faster internet for all.

Free Content Delivery Network. CDNs can be expensive for hosting your entire site but luckily you can get the next best thing for free. Users far away from your server can suffer from high latency. With servers scattered all over the globe, getting Google to host your JavaScript libraries can reduce latency for these files.

Improve parallelism of your site’s components. Browsers are rigged up to limit the number of parallel downloads from the same domain. Distributing your components across a second domain will result in faster page download completion.

Here’s and example loading the jQuery.

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> google.load("jquery", "1"); </script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

It would be nice to see  browser’s come with these libraries built in to avoid the problems mentioned here but until then remember what this API has to offer.

All thats left to do now is to pick a name…