Here's the latest installment of our monthly series on "search quality highlights," with 17 new quality improvements to read about for January.

The free Google Currents is a welcome addition to the Android newsreading apps space thanks to a slick design, the ability to tap your Google Reader feed for content, native offline reading, and cross-device syncing.

There are lots of active, vibrant developer groups in the DC area: DC PHP, Baltimore PHP, and the Frederick Web Tech group. The DC PHP Beverage Subgroup meets monthly in Northern Virginia. But in the middle between all these groups lies Montgomery County, Maryland. In that area live hundreds of developers who struggle to reach [...]

The LG Galaxy Attain is a fine midrange smartphone for MetroPCS users, but it could easily have been a better one.

It used to be that once a year I would take a good, hard look at the tools I used and endeavor to learn something new or change my workflow with those tools. However, I've been living the #startuplife for the past two years, so it's been about three years since I last addressed my development toolchain. I decided to come up for air and take some time this weekend to rectify that by addressing five main areas: my terminal emulator, my shell, my terminal multiplexer, my IRC client, and my color scheme—yes, even my color scheme! In addition, I decided to push out my updated Octopress-powered blog, even though things are still a little rough around the edges.

Switching to iTerm2

I've been a long-time user of Terminal.app, but I had been hearing good things about iTerm2. I actually used iTerm (version 1) years ago, but I switched back to Terminal.app for reasons I cannot recall. Nevertheless, iTerm2 has come a long way, and I wanted to take advantage of some of its functionality like split panes, better full-screen support, etc. So, that was the first major change I made to my tools.

Ditching bash for zsh

Bash has been my favored shell since I began using Linux about fourteen years ago. I'd never given much thought to using a different shell, and to be honest, switching shells always seemed a daunting task. I thought I'd have to relearn my way around the shell, and everything I took for granted with Bash would be non-existent in a different shell. Fortunately, this is not true. As it turns out, zsh “can be thought of as an extended Bourne shell with a large number of improvements, including some features of bash, ksh, and tcsh” (Wikipedia).

I was able to switch to zsh without ditching my knowledge of bash. As a result, I've gained all the advantages of zsh, which include advanced customization and scripting capabilities, while continuing to provide most (if not all) the same functionality and commands I'm used to in bash. I have much more to learn, though, so if you have tips and tricks, please share.

If you're interested in switching to zsh, I recommend checking out oh-my-zsh. It's a framework for managing your zsh configuration, and it contains lots of goodies. In addition, there are great posts by Mark Nichols and Jon Kinney that will get you quickly up-to-speed with oh-my-zsh. The latter post has the awesome title “It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds…with ZSH”.

Using tmux instead of screen

Generally, I've really only used screen when I started noticing that my connection to a remote development machine was getting sluggish or I wanted to keep a constant connection to IRC, but tmux has opened my eyes to so many more possibilities that a multiplexer can offer. I've just only started using it, so I can't say much about it, but I encourage you to read Hawk Host's two-part post on tmux.

Moving back to irssi

I used irssi in a screen session for years. Then, I decided I needed Growl notifications from my IRC client. I quit using irssi in favor of Linkinus. I've used Linkinus for about two years—together with the IRC bouncer znc for some of that time—but I've continued to miss the flexibility and functionality of irssi. On a whim, I decided to switch back to irssi, but it wasn't without so

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WebmasterWorld's monthly look at Google's SERPs changes.

This is almost like the time they made a Facebook game out of a popular TV show. Except it isn't. Family Guy Online isn't your standard social grind. It's not even a Facebook game. It's a graphically convincing free-to-play browser-based RPG with plenty of character, TV-showness and gameplay challenges...

Sublime Text 2 is a new cross-platform text editor that I've recently switched to. It's still in public beta, but already offers better performance (and battery life!) and a better look (fonts that render properly!) than Java-based IDEs such as Netbeans.

One thing it didn't have was support for PHPUnit, so I've made a plugin. It's available to install via Package Control.

You Need A phpunit.xml or phpunit.xml.dist File

To use this plugin, your project needs to contain either a phpunit.xml or a phpunit.xml.dist file. This file contains all the configuration that needs to be passed to PHPUnit. The plugin searches upwards from your code, and will favour a phpunit.xml file over a phpunit.xml.dist file if it finds both.

If you don't have one, you need to go and create one now.

How To Use

If you have your code open in a Sublime Text 2 window, right-click inside the window to see what your options are:

• Test This Class – click this option to run just the unit tests for this class.

  This option appears if the PHPUnit plugin can find your unit tests. It takes the name of your class, and uses the standard PSR-0 transformation to figure out what the name of your test file should be.

  For example, if your class is called ‘Phix_ProjectCommandLineLibCommandParser.php', the PHPUnit plugin will search for a file ‘CommandLineParserTest.php' that's in a folder called ‘Phix_Project/CommandLineLib'.

• Open Test Class – click this option to open up your tests in Sublime Text 2. If you already have the tests open, this will switch tabs to your tests.

  Again, this option only appears if the PHPUnit plugin can find your unit tests.

• Run All Unit Tests – click this option to run all the unit tests for your code.

  This option just points PHPUnit at your phpunit.xml or phpunit.xml.dist file.

If you have your tests open in a Sublime Text 2 window, right-click inside the window to see what your options are:

• Run These Tests – run these unit tests, using the phpunit.xml or phpunit.xml.dist file that the PHPUnit plugin has found.
• Open Class Being Tested – open the class that these tests are for in Sublime Text 2. If you already have the class open, this will switch tags to your code.
• Run All Unit Tests – click this option to run all the unit tests for your code.

If you're someone who prefers keyboard over mouse, then you'll probably want to run the PHPUnit plugin commands from Sublime Text 2′s Command Palette:

You get the same commands that appear on the right-click menu … the right commands will appear for the file that you're currently editing, just as you'd expect.

Finally, you can also right-click on your phpunit.xml (or phpunit.xml.dist) file in the Project Sidebar, and run your unit tests using that specific config file.

Helpful Snippets

Like TextMate before it, Sublime Text 2 also has a handy snippets feature, where it can insert a pre-crafted block of text (or, in our case, PHP code) to speed up your coding. I'm collecting most PHP-related snippets in my Additional PHP Snippets plugin (hat-tip to Rob Allen for the inspiration for this), but the PHPUnit plugin includes a few PHPUnit-related snippets to help.

• phpunit-testcase – will create a new test class for you to fill out.

  I find this handy mostly so that I don't have to remember which class my test class has to extend :)

• phpunit-test – will

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Simple to use and extremely useful, Dropbox for Android is a file synchronization app will keep all of your files in step. You can't move files among folders, but it's still a very capable app.

WebmasterWorld's AdSense barometer - a monthly look at Google AdSense earnings and observations.

USA Today reviewer Edward C. Baig describes his experience using the first Multi-Touch digital textbooks published for the iBooks 2 for iPad app, noting that they are “engaging in ways that were simply not possible with the textbooks I grew up with.” Baig likes the portability, updatability, and low pricing of iBooks 2 digital textbooks and touts specific features like instant search, highlighting, bookmarking, and interactive graphics. Writes Baig, “It's better to see an animated tour of the genome in E.O. Wilson's Life on Earth than just to read about it. ”

Many are still busy plowing through the insane amount of content included in Skyrim. Maybe you're not one of them. Maybe you've unlocked and spent every perk point, cleared every dungeon and punched every NPC in the nose. Maybe you've tried out every mod and are looking for more. Bethesda will relea...

Bethesda's Creation Kit for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will be made available on February 7, according to a Twitter update by VP of PR and Marketing Pete Hines...

Good news, we just received an invite to play in an upcoming round of beta testing in ArenaNet's highly anticipated Guild Wars 2. Unfortunately we can't share, but you can expect plenty of coverage to hit on Monday, February 20 at 6 AM Pacific...

Apple OS X Lion is hands-down the best consumer OS on the market today.

Simple to use and extremely useful, Dropbox for Android is a file synchronization app will keep all of your files in step. You can't move files among folders, but it's still a very capable app.

The CRU-Dataport ToughTech Duo QR rugged, RAID-equipped hard drive is made for photographers and videographers in the field.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X130e is a semi-rugged netbook, outfitted with enough padding to survive the day-to-day dings of traveling across campus or running from terminal A to B.

The 24-megapixel Sony Alpha 65 is capable of shooting at a blazing fast 9 frames per second with continuous autofocus, but is held back by a kit lens that doesn't match the quality of its high-resolution image sensor.

The LG Marquee has a bright, beautiful screen and plenty of Android power for Boost Mobile users.

The Monster iSport Immersion In-Ear Headphones are waterproof and can be washed, making them ideal for the gym, but they're a bit expensive compared with other exercise-focused earphones.

Sony's XBA-NC85D is the first-ever in-ear noise canceling earphone pair without an in-line box to house the circuitry, but it suffers from some deep bass distortion and a high price tag.

The CRU-Dataport ToughTech Duo QR rugged, RAID-equipped hard drive is made for photographers and videographers in the field.

WebmasterWorld Members discuss title changes, and the potential for a site/page penalty.

An update posted to the Team Fortress 2 blog teases "something brand new" for Vavle's free-to-play online shooter. No word yet on what it is, but Valve did say it wasn't a hat, and it wasn't a new map. Could it be a new class? A new layer to its microtransaction system? Gordon Freeman? Err, sorry about that last guess, I just really miss Half-Life...

I was privileged to be invited to be a part of the /dev/hell podcast this week. Thanks to Chris and Ed for having me on. Check it out. And subscribe to their podcast.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X130e is a semi-rugged netbook, outfitted with enough padding to survive the day-to-day dings of traveling across campus or running from terminal A to B.

With the release of Zend Framework 1.8 came the long awaited component for bootstrapping a Zend Framework application. Many different bootstrapping-solutions became obsolete with Zend_Application.

In the beginning of the framework most developers didn?t give much thought on bootstrapping. Most of the initialisation work was done directly in index.php, the central starting point of the application. Teams often moved that bootstrapping code to a separate configuration script. The solution worked, but many people wanted a more standardised process for application initialisation.

Continue reading "Zend Framework application.ini Cheat-Sheet"

The 24-megapixel Sony Alpha 65 is capable of shooting at a blazing fast 9 frames per second with continuous autofocus, but is held back by a kit lens that doesn't match the quality of its high-resolution image sensor.

In a letter to Google's chief executive Larry Page, Europe's 'Data Protection Working Party' wrote that "we call for a pause in the interests of ensuring that there can be no misunderstanding about Google's commitments to information rights of their users and EU citizens, until we have completed our analysis".