It's good to be out of the hospital after conquering a bout with pnumonia and it feels GREAT to be able to learn something new! My first night I wanted to relax and not yet jump into catching up on assignments, which I surely must do indeed. So, since I had just added the newer IE9 to my Vista machine, I decided to go ahead and learn something utilizing the newer HTML5 features... an audio player. There were two tutorials to try on the MSDN site concerning HTML5, the other being about the GeoLocator. It was more complex so I opted for the easier of the two to start with...
Here's a ScreenShot of what you'd be creating in this tutorial on MSDN. It does look rather crude, but the beauty is creating your own aesthetics later. You're using some math and graphics work to produce the Progress bar.
And, of course, I learned a few new things in the process. Like the F12 Dev Tools. VERY interesting stuff. It's basically a small "suite" of tools added into IE9 that sort of emulates the Mozilla FireFox's add-on FireBug. It shows the webpage code, errors generated and what's going on behind the scenes live-time, plus it includes a VERY interesting IE Dev Tools Network Capture feature that lets you see the traffic details on a specific webpage. Individual connections, timing for items to load and render, etcetera. As you can imagine already, it would be highly useful for optimization, but it also helps when creating more complex AJAX based applications. (Chat, anyone?)
Another noticed appreciation was how this was bringing together the very newest of technologies and making it work via the very first code taught to us in Learning-To-Program (Or L2P) at BTC; JavaScript. This works out great, since the newer codes I am working on for the KA ToolBox project has already implimented JavaScript on the most basic of levels, so this is a cinch to start adding into the code, making it truly top-of-the line stuff that supports it all. Now it has an Audio Player that doesn't need to use a 3rd-party plugin or add-on in order to run.
If I had Windows-7 installed I would have also added Pinned Sites features to my knowledge base, it seemed quite simple to do. So I am adding the link for this as well if you want to take a look. This is an interesting concept that is able to add webpage based content to a users desktop! Things like Jump Lists and Thumbnail Preview Toolbar controls. Say what? OH! The Graphics? Yeah, I hear that, they ARE very kewl. And next on my hit list before returning to my acedemic responsibilities...
My revised version with slimmer progress bar and drop-down list of music choices takes up less space.
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