I had this problem on my Samsung Charge where YouTube videos would play and I could hear it, but the video was blank. At first I just rebooted and it would then work fine, but I kept having to do this. So I did a search through some forums to see if anyone had found a way to fix it. Most just said to reboot, but that is a hassle that I kept having to do over and over again. But then I found somebody who said they uninstalled the twitter app and it worked fine. So I tried it and that did the trick for me. I use TweetDeck anyway on my android phone so no biggie. Problem solved! Still, what the hell could twitter be doing that would make videos not show?
Tylar Farrar honors Wouter Weylandt in his Tour de France stage 3 win
I decided a couple months ago that I was going to finally take the plunge and get a smart phone. I used them a long time ago when I worked at Microsoft on their Windows CE device. But it was big and didn’t have a lot of features that I cared about back then, so never bought one. Then the popularity of the iPhone caught my attention. But since I have a computer everywhere I go, I figured I didn’t really need one. But more recently, the GPS enabled applications started getting press, android started getting popular, friends started getting them, and I noticed people were making money on apps so I decided I needed one.
But which platform should I choose? At first I thought that since I use a lot of Google products, I should go with Android. But iPhone gets high ratings, is more mature, has more apps and I know more people that have them. I heard that iPhone is tied to iTunes so I downloaded iTunes and gave it a spin. Unfortunately it couldn’t play most of my music since I have mostly wma format music. That reminded me of the reasons I like Windows, you can find software to run anything on it for a lower cost. And I expect Android to be more like Windows.
So after all my reading and testing I came up with the following criteria for people to make their own decision:
Choose the iPhone if:
Choose the Android if:
I compared a lot of other criteria, screen size, resolution, battery life, etc. But the above criteria I think are the most important. I got Verizon’s Samsung Charge Android and it’s great, but I’ll bet I would have liked the iPhone as well.
Want to make your site look good on mobile devices, but still look good on all browsers? Media Queries are your friend. It’s really not that hard and you can serve the same data to all page requests. You just modify your css to target different page widths. You can see how it works by changing the width of your browser on the neonenigma.com (moved to neonguru.net) website.
The first thing I did was change the doctype to html5:
<!doctype html>
Pretty simple and seems to work in all browsers. I also added a viewport meta tag for mobile devices:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0">
Then I looked at the site and modified the css as I changed the width of the browser. I use the chrome browser mostly but it should work in any of the latest browsers. I noticed that Firefox has a minimum that it will shrink to though. The key to modifying your css is to create sections for certain widths:
@media screen and (min-width: 970px)
{
//css to override for wide widths
}
I created the wide width css first, then looked to see how the page transitioned as I shrank the browser width. The end goal is to make the default css at the top apply to most browsers, then a section for minimum width and mobile devices:
@media handheld and (max-width: 480px), screen and (max-device-width: 480px), screen and (max-width: 600px)
{
//css for mobile and widths less than 600
}
Then override that with incrementally larger widths further down in the css. For my page, I have the default section, then sections for mobile and less than 600, 840, 845, and 970 pixels.
As I shrink or grow the browser width, I tried to make it fairly seamless in the transitions. So your min-width settings will vary depending on the width of the contents. You also want to make prodigious use of percentage widths. 100% is your friend here. Then, as the browser shrinks, your images and divs will resize to a percentage of the available width.
For older browsers (IE!), you can use css3-mediaqueries javascript to use these techniques. That’s it! Check out neonenigma.com (moved to neonguru.net) source and css for just how easy this is!