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Archives for April 2011

My First Impressions of Unity

The neat thing about Linux is you can test certain features of the distribution before they become part of an official release. Unity is such a case. You can install and play around with it before it hits the store. So to speak. Unity is the future default desktop environment for Ubuntu starting with Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. It will replace the the steady and unflappable Gnome 3.

My first impressions were not good. Although navigation and the overall feel of Unity were very positive, I had one big issue. Opening any of the new browsers (Firefox or Chrome) in full screen mode, resulted in a blank white screen. Minimizing the browser seem to work.

So, I abandoned Unity, swearing it still needed a lot of work. After all, Unity is still under development, just to be fair. A few weeks later, I came back to Unity. The full screen browser mode seems to be fixed. Now, I can really test this new desktop/netbook environment.

Working with Unity is like driving a new car, and driving on the left side of the road at the same time. It takes a whole lot to getting used to. One major impression I got with Unity is, it really is geared towards netbooks. Every application seem to start in full screen mode. This is fine if you own a netbook.

If you have a desktop, applications tend to be stretched out. I have a desktop with lots of screen real estate. I don’t need every application to start in full screen mode? And where is the minimize button when you need one?

It’s going to take a while to get use to Unity. It has its advantages. Switching applications seems to be easier. The icons of every active application are laid out on top of the bar. Clicking on any of the icons switches the user to that application. Clicking the Ubuntu icon clears the screen and displays the Unity menu.

After a few hours with Unity, I miss Gnome badly. I’m lost at times, and that happens in a new environment. I will test it for a few days, perhaps two weeks before coming down with a final verdict.

Adding FULLTEXT Search

A few days ago, I wrote an article on how to add a search feature in CodeIgniter projects. The method I used was “Pattern Matching” using SQL’s LIKE statement. Although the LIKE statement works great, it is slow. The search will crawl in situations where there are millions of rows in a table.

An alternative method is using a FULLTEXT index search. It uses SQL’s MATCH AGAINST. To start using a FULLTEXT search, a database table will need to be indexed first. You can accomplish this by altering a table and adding FULLTEXT indexing to certain fields:

Alter Table

ALTER TABLE books ADD FULLTEXT(bookname,author,characters,synopsis);

Once a table has been indexed, you can start using MATCH AGAINST.

Match Against

I tried using CodeIgniter’s active record and MATCH AGAINST, but I could not get them to work. So, I ended up writing out the SQL statement using $this->db->query.

$match = $this->input->post('search');
$searchcount = $this->db->query("SELECT * FROM books WHERE MATCH 
  (bookname,author,characters,synopsis) AGAINST ('.$match.')");

So, if you want to increase search performance, consider using a FULLTEXT search.

JSColor Is The Best Color Picker

Javascript color pickers are fun. They make picking colors on web forms an easy task. One of my favorite color pickers is called JSColor. I like it for its simplicity. It’s easy to install and use. It’s also elegant.

To use JSColor, just download the source and paste this code in your pages:

<script type="text/javascript" src="jscolor/jscolor.js"></script>

Add the “color” class to your input tag:

<input class=’color’/>

And you’re done. Simple.

This is the main reason why I rated JSColor the best Javascript color picker.

See the demos here.