CrunchWeek: Heartbleed Terrifies The Internet, And Dropbox Hires Condoleezza Rice

Heartbleed, Big Board, and Dropbox News

Happy Friday everyone, and welcome to another episode of CrunchWeek, our weekly round up of the biggest stories in technology.

This week Leena Rao, Kim-Mai Cutler, and your humble servant took to the round table to dig into Heartbleed, and the NSA-thereof, along with Dropbox’s new controversial board pick, and its new products.

(If can add a small production note, the show was taped in between Bloomberg’s bombshell post that the NSA knew about Heartbleed and had exploited it, and the NSA’s later vigorous denial. Naturally, this short explanation itself will become dated as well once more truth shakes loose. For now, enjoy the show!)

How to Enable Box Sizing in Internet Explorer 7 [Quicktip]

We have covered CSS3 Box Sizing in a previous article. Box Sizing, with the value of border-box, allows us to retain the element width and height, regardless of the additional padding and border it has.

This makes measuring and defining element size easier. However, CSS3 Box Sizing would not function in Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and earlier versions, as you can see below.

Both of the columns that you see in the above screenshot have width, height, padding, and box-sizing specified. But as IE8 does not recognize the box-sizing property, the second column is pushed down when their total width exceed their parent container’s width.

You will have to adjust the size for each column accordingly to make them fit in it, which could be a very tedious task depending on the number of elements that you need to handle. If your website has to support IE7 (for whatever reason) while also preserving CSS3 Box Sizing, you can use the following trick.

Recommended Reading: A Look Into: HTML5 Shiv And Polyfills

Box Sizing Polyfill

To make IE8 (and below) acknowledge Box Sizing, we can use a polyfill. This polyfill comes in the form of an HTC file and is developed by Christian Schaefer. Download the file from the Github repository and put it in, for example, your CSS folder.

Create a CSS stylesheet, dedicated for Internet Explorer. Add the link in the HTML document this way so it will only be served in IE7.

<!--[if lte IE7]> <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/ie.css"><![endif]-->

Then put the following code in the ie.css. This CSS rule below will apply box-sizing for all elements.

* { behavior: url(css/boxsizing.htc);}

A few things to note when applying this trick:

The url path of boxsizing.htc must be relative to the HTML files location, otherwise it will fail to work.

Paul Irish also has a tip to apply box-sizing in pseudo-element with *:before, *:after. But, since IE7 as well as IE6 does not support pseudo-element, there is no reason to use pseudo-element selectors in this case. And as you can see above, we don’t include them in the code as well.

The Result

Here, we have two columns with the parent container’s width set to 500px. The column width are set to 50%, so each column should have 250px width, even though we also set padding for it. Let’s open Internet Explorer 7, and launch the Developer Tool (F12).

Go to the Layout tab of the Developer Tool to see the column size in detail. You should see that in IE7 the column now includes padding as well as borders as part of the total size. In our case, the box width remains at 250px.

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How to Enable CSS3 Border Radius in Internet Explorer 8 and below

CSS3 gives us the ability to create rounded corners with the border-radius property. But as you might already know, this new feature is not recognized in Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) and its earlier versions. So when you apply CSS3 Border Radius to an element, it still appears as a box with pointed tips.

You may find a lot of different advice on the Internet suggesting you ignore IE8. You wish you could do so. But if you’re working on a website for a government institution or a bank, you may not have a choice. You still have to make the website look as nice as it does in modern browsers, which includes the ability to apply CSS3 Border Radius.

If you really have to make your website IE8-ready, while being able to use the CSS3 feature, we have just the tip for you.

Recommended Reading: Beginner’s Guide to CSS3

CSS3Pie

CSS3Pie is a kind of polyfill for CSS3 decorative features. Aside from CSS3 Border Radius that we’re going to discuss in this article, CSS3Pie also supports Box Shadow and Gradients, though it’s limited to the Linear Gradient type.

Download CSS3Pie (here). Put it inside your project directory – I placed it in the css folder. As you can also see from the screenshot below, I’ve created one stylesheet as well as one HTML file.

Open the stylesheet in code editor and set one of the elements in the HTML file with rounded corners, like so:

.border-radius { height: 100px; width: 100px; background-color: #2ecc71; -webkit-border-radius: 50px; -moz-border-radius: 50px; border-radius: 50px;}

As the element’s width and height are both 100px, and the border-radius is set to 50px, the element will become a circle:

In IE8, as we expect, it would still be a square (sigh), but don’t worry.

To enable the rounded corner effect, insert this line: behavior: url(css/pie.htc);, like so.

.border-radius { height: 100px; width: 100px; background-color: #2ecc71; -webkit-border-radius: 50px; -moz-border-radius: 50px; border-radius: 50px; behavior: url(css/pie.htc);}

Note that the file path in url()has to be either an absolute path or relative to the HTML file. You can also add this line in a separate file.

You may have a stylesheet that is designated for Internet Explorer. You can put behavior: url(css/pie.htc); within that file, but ensure that it’s declared within the same CSS selector, like so.

/* declared in ie.css */.border-radius { behavior: url(css/pie.htc);}

Refresh the page in IE8. The rounded corner should now come into effect (ta-da!). It should work in IE7 as well.

Troubleshooting

Internet Explorer may behave unexpectedly. If this does not work (maybe the rounded corner does not take effect, or the selected element has disappeared), adding the position and zoom property should solve the problem:

<style>.border-radius { behavior: url(<?php echo get_template_directory_uri() ;?>/css/pie.htc); position: relative; zoom: 1;}</style>

Using CSS3 Pie in WordPress

You have finished putting your website in HTML form. You also utilize pie.htc in the website to enable CSS3 in IE8. At this stage, you are ready to transform the website into a functioning WordPress theme. In this case, as WordPress is dynamic, where pages may serve in different level URLs, we have to specify an absolute path.

You can either change the path in CSS like this:

.border-radius { behavior: url(http://localhost/{website}/wp-content/themes/{the_theme}/css/pie.htc); position: relative; zoom: 1;}

Or add internal styles in the header.php, this way:

<style>.border-radius { behavior: url(<?php echo get_template_directory_uri() ;?>/css/pie.htc); position: relative; zoom: 1;}</style>

Final Thought

Having cool things such as CSS3 Border Radius work in IE8 is fascinating, and CSS3Pie makes that happen, while giving us one less reason to hate IE8.

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Google’s Project Loon Internet Balloon Traverses The Globe In Under A Month

Google’s Project Loon, the effort to bring Internet connectivity to more remote areas using a network of hot air balloons, has racked up an impressive achievement – going around the world in just 22 days. One of the project’s test balloons just managed this, despite estimates from the team that it would take around 33 days for it to make the trek.

This particular prototype balloon is just the latest in a series of revisions designed to put various aspects of their design to the test. It featured an improved air pump, according to Project Loon’s Google+ page, making it more adept at handling the high-wind weather systems it encountered on its journey and helping it speed things along.

Both Google and Facebook have ambitious plans to bring the Internet to the next billion people, and while Zuck’s vision involves drones with lasers, Google’s going steampunk with its hot air balloon network. Of course, these initiatives aren’t altogether altruistic; more Internet means more users for both companies. Does that mean we’ll eventually see Google’s zeppelins waging war with Facebook’s robo-drones for control of the global network? Unlikely, but not impossible.

Via Engadget.

Link Bubble is about to revolutionize the way you use mobile internet

Kris Carlon 2014-03-21T09:15:00Z1 day ago

Kris Carlon

Putting down roots in Berlin after six years of traveling is a major step for Kris Carlon, who has spent more time living out of a tent lately than sitting at a desk. Kris comes to the AndroidPIT Editorial Team via a lengthy period spent writing on art and culture in Australia and other places he has lived. He joined the Android community while resurfacing in civilization back in 2010 and has never looked back, using technology to replace his actual presence in other people's lives ever since.

Chris Lacy, the man behind the very impressive Action Launcher, has finally posted his legendary new app Link Bubble in the Play Store. The launch was delayed by a few days after Lacy decided at the last minute to take out a patent on the idea. This is a wise move, because Link Bubble is such a beautifully elegant solution to a problem you didn't even know you had that it will literally change the way you use the internet.

Link Bubble is an elegant solution to a problem you didn't even know you had. / © Chris Lacy

Until now, when you click a link in a browser, Twitter app or Google+, you are taken to a new window that slowly loads, sometimes painfully slowly, while you stare at a white screen that represents precious seconds of your life ticking by. The genius of Link Bubble is that the loading takes place in the background while you continue to use the previous screen. Once the new page is fully loaded, the new window will pop up fully populated and you've wasted no time waiting – Link Bubble will even inform you just how many seconds it saves you. The idea is glaringly obvious and not entirely new, but it's done so elegantly and cleanly that Link Bubble deserves to be a hit. Even if loading pages in Chrome is faster, Link Bubble lets you carry on with what you were doing until your link is ready. Check it out in action.

Link to Video

In the free version you can only choose one app to use Link Bubble with and you can only open one bubble at a time. In the paid version, which it will take you all of about 15 minutes to realize you can't live without, lets you open links from all of your apps and as many link bubbles as you want. There's more than just background loading though. Link Bubble uses flick physics, so with the flick of a finger you can share a page, close it out or save it for reading later with another service like Pocket. Link Bubble brings gestures we're already familiar with from elsewhere to your browsing experience which, combined with the pre-loading feature, really will change the way you use the internet on your mobile devices.

You can set up your left and right actions and save content for later or share. / © AndroidPIT/Chris Lacy

Have you tried Link Bubble yet? Know of any other brilliantly simple ideas?

Via: Chris Lacy (Google+) Source: Google Play Store

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