Nic Bell RSS Feed

Why We Should Not Need Creative Technologists

Nic Bell — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I feel that good creative use of technology is not achieved via a mediator (creative technologist) as you are only as good as this one guy.

Simple NHibernate Session Manager

Nic Bell — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 11:23:53 GMT

One of the more complicated parts of using NHibernate as an ORM, is session management. Here is a simple session manager for those that don't need to manage multiple session types.

HTML5 makes my ears hurt

Nic Bell — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 03:23:08 GMT

HTML5, everyone is talking about it at nausea which is pretty standard for a technology related buzzword. The problem with buzzwords is that they are often exactly that, just buzz. A constant buzz that has been making my ears hurt for quite some time. A large amount of this buzz is being produced by people that have never opened an HTML tag in their life.

Ways of Building Android Apps

Nic Bell — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 11:05:47 GMT

There are many ways of building applications for Android. Here are a few.

Event Driven MVVMP in .net

Nic Bell — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 03:48:17 GMT

Most ASP.net developers are probably familiar with the Model-View-Presenter (MVP) pattern. This pattern comes in many mutations. I like taking the basic pattern 2 steps further by adding in a "view model" and using view events. I call it event driven Model-View-ViewModel-Presenter.

Dot-Less As Conditional Build Event

Nic Bell — Tue, 03 May 2011 10:28:54 GMT

I have really enjoyed using Dot-Less dynamic CSS but up until now I have been using a handler to process the .less files on the fly.

Minify Your .net Web Application

Nic Bell — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 03:22:02 GMT

This is an easy way of minifying your JS and CSS files when building your web application in release mode in .net.

Getting Better

Nic Bell — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 15:50:07 GMT

When you get better you notice things and wonder why they were not dead obvious to start with.

Java Method to get a Fibonacci number

Nic Bell — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 12:00:57 GMT

My simple solution to get a Fibonacci number assuming the first Fibonacci number is 0.

PNG Fix For IE using Mootools

Nic Bell — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 11:32:43 GMT

Firstly use PNG fixes sparingly as using regex selectors on your markup can be expensive and PNG's can cause some strange side effects.

Android on HTC HD2

Nic Bell — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 04:34:37 GMT

My guide to running Android on your HTC HD2. It is easier than you think and pretty stable too.

MooTools - Give it Time

Nic Bell — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:24:01 GMT

A lot of people do not really fully understand why I rate MooTools so highly. It is not just about how it lets me write elegant JavaScript using an object orientated approach.

Strongly Typed Collections in MooTools

Nic Bell — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 04:31:52 GMT

Here is how I create strongly typed collections in MooTools.

The Skeletons in Googles Closet

Nic Bell — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:40:11 GMT

One of my colleagues recently pointed out that Google AdWords does not support Opera. This immediately struck me as odd..

App Store, Android Market and Windows Marketplace for..?!

Nic Bell — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 02:49:17 GMT

My take on mobile application stores.

Rise Against's "Audience Of One" - Great Video

Nic Bell — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 04:35:48 GMT

This is one of my favourite music videos at the moment so I thought I'd share it with all of you.

AJAX Air Apps with Custom Chromes and Flash

Nic Bell — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 02:50:03 GMT

One of the great things about building an Adobe AIR application is the ability to make it any shape you want, it is not without its problems though.

My New Html 5 Website

Nic Bell — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 01:19:43 GMT

Welcome to my recently relaunched website(nicbell.net). I have built it in HTML 5 powered by my new .net CMS, which I might send open-source when I have finished a few more features.

Helvetica/Arial Based Font Stacks

Nic Bell — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 01:34:12 GMT

I was recently a working on my own site nicbell.net when I notice my the text looks really poor on Linux(which is growing fast). This is because Linux does not necessarily have Arial or Helvetica pre-installed.

Why are web standards important?

Nic Bell — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:06:59 GMT

After discovering that many people don't understand why I'm so keen on web standards I decided to write a short post.

Div off!

Nic Bell — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:33:07 GMT

As usual I've been ranting about poor mark-up.
This is not just a war a against table's, a lot developers seem to think if you replace all the TABLEs with DIVs its suddenly modern semantic mark up.

XHTML 2 vs. HTML 5

Nic Bell — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:30:06 GMT

Work on XHTML 2.0 began shortly after XHTML 1.1 became a recommendation in 2001. The first XHTML 2.0 working draft was released in 2002, but much of the document was in a non-normative, incomplete state (some still is). By 2004, some prominent industry stakeholders - browser vendors, web developers, designers, and content owners - had grown unhappy with the direction of the XHTML2 working group. Citing the closed nature of the W3C process, they decided to start over and develop their own standard.