Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Announcing jQuery Mobile 1.4.0 Alpha

The jQuery Mobile team is thrilled to announce the 1.4.0 Alpha release. For this release we focused on performance improvements and reviewing widgets. We also introduced a new default theme and SVG icons. Some of the new features that come with this release are a flip switch widget, a generic filter widget named “filterable”, popups with arrows, tooltips for sliders and we integrated the tabs widget from jQuery UI.

Performance

To improve performance we reduced DOM manipulation. Generation of inner markup for elements styled as butons has been completely removed. In many cases the framework just adds classes to the native element during enhancement and we even reduced the amount of classes that are added by the framework.

Theme inheritance

One of the biggest changes is the way theme inheritance works. In previous versions we used JavaScript to find the nearest parent element with a theme and added theme classes to all elements. This has been replaced by a pure CSS solution where the level of specificity of the selector determines what theme (swatch) is applied. In almost all cases the default for option theme has been removed and widgets get the same theme as their container or page via CSS.

New default theme

This was also a good time to switch to a new default theme with a flat, more modern, design. The number of swatches has been reduced from five to two; a light “A” swatch and a dark “B” swatch. We will update the ThemeRoller soon so you can create your own themes for 1.4.

SVG icons

Not only the theme is new. A big thank you to Glyphish for creating a complete new icon set for jQuery Mobile! These are vector-based SVG icons, but we included a fallback to external PNG icons on browsers that don’t support inline SVG. We are also going to provide additional stylesheets, each with different icon CSS (inline SVG, data-uri PNG, and external PNG) that can be used with the full Grunticon solution.


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Sunday, July 21, 2013

What is SSRS and Why SSRS is asked for in many Job Opening?

This example is from the Beginning SSRS by Kathi Kallenberger. Supporting files are available with a free download from the www.Joes2Pros.com web site.
This will be a 5 day blog post in getting started with SSRS. Today will show the importance of SSRS in the business.
Why is SSRS asked for in so many job openings?
If you talk to an SSRS expert it’s very clear to them exactly why companies really need this invention and how it saves time and adds business value. You don’t have to be an SSRS expert to know its value or to start using it. For example you don’t have to be an airline pilot to know the usefulness of modern transportation. Even the people who don’t know how to run SSRS but need the reports can tell you why that is needed. This blog post will go into why SSRS is an important invention by showing how it improves the usage of information in your company.
Before SSRS there has always been a need for a company to benefit from the use of its own information. Excel spreadsheets have been a popular way to do this for a long time. With SSRS you can still use this solution and gain many other options too.
A friend of mine told me a story about doing database work in the 90s for a major company and how he wished SSRS was available back then. The Vice President of the marketing channel would often come to him just before an important meeting with the board of directors. He often needed to show how certain product sales were performing over time. All this information was in the database so it was my friend’s job to get the information out and organized into a medium the VP could use. This medium was usually Excel. The VP often had meetings all over the world where he showcased this Excel report.
The solution to get the VP to him anywhere he was in the world was an Excel file attached to an e-mail. This worked pretty well but with some drawbacks. One time my friend sent the wrong file in the e-mail. A few minutes later my friend realized his mistake and sent another frantic e-mail to VP. This one was saying to ignore the last e-mail and use this newer one. Would the VP see the correct e-mail in time?
If SSRS had been available, my friend could have created a solution that let the VP run the report any time he wished. The report could have been published to the company intranet where the VP could run it from any of the offices he happened to be traveling to that month. There is a fair amount of work up front to develop and publish the report, but once that work is completed, the report can be reused as many times as needed. My friend could even be on vacation for the first day of the monthly and the VP can get his real-time report.
Not only could the report show the most recent data, the VP could choose to view reports of previous months with just a few clicks. The deployed SSRS is user friendly, and can also be configured to protect reports from being run by the wrong people.
Tomorrow’s Post
Tomorrow’s blog post will show how to know if you already have SSRS installed.
If you want to learn SSRS in easy to simple words – I strongly recommend you to get Beginning SSRS book from Joes 2 Pros.

Announcing jQuery Mobile 1.3.2

The jQuery Mobile team is happy to announce 1.3.2. This is the second maintenance release for 1.3 and contains fixes throughout the library. Try it now!

Demos & docs | Download & CDN | Change log

Download

CDN-Hosted JavaScript:
CDN-Hosted CSS:

Copy-and-Paste Snippet for CDN-hosted files (recommended):

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.3.2/jquery.mobile-1.3.2.min.css" /> <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.9.1.min.js"></script> <script src="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.3.2/jquery.mobile-1.3.2.min.js"></script>


ZIP File:
If you want to host the files yourself you can download a zip of all the files:
Microsoft CDN hosted jQuery Mobile files:
Fork jQuery Mobile on GitHub
https://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile

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