R7 Weekly Retro

Twitter’s Official Analytics Product Has Arrived

Twitter has finally started providing analytics. The social media giant is offering this service free of charge. Analytics users will be able to see information like, their most successful tweets, which tweets caused people to unfollow and who their most influential users are that reply and retweet messages. Twitter also provides a dashboard to help organize the desired stats. http://on.mash.to/bCtV7L

Facebook Now Provides “Test User” Accounts

Facebook app developers will be pleased to hear Facebook is now offering “Test User” accounts for testing applications. Developers can create an account or the application can create up to 50 test accounts in order to test friend connections between the test accounts. Facebook developer relations Douglas Purdy states, “This feature is absolutely key for us to be able to work on stability and bugs… Our hope is that this lets folks build automated tests to give us an early warning into any breaking changes we miss… This should help people give us narrowed repro of bugs they encounter in their test suites.” This new testing aspect should make debugging and testing apps much easier. http://on.mash.to/9qxBoF

Understanding CSS3 Transitions

This is a great article about some new capabilities with CSS3. CSS Transitions allow you to smooth out value changes in the stylesheets. The W3C defines CSS Transitions as follows, “CSS Transitions allow property changes in CSS values to occur smoothly over a specified duration. This smoothing animates the changing of a CSS value when triggered by a mouse click, focus or active state, or any changes to the element (including even a change on the element’s class attribute).” It doesn’t provide the dynamic animations or effects that are capable with Flash or JavaScript, but it is easy and takes the user experience up a notch. When you are looking for subtle ways to enhance your site, this is a relatively simple way to go. Also, CSS Transitions are no longer exclusive to Safari. Most browsers like Firefox, Chrome and Opera now support CSS Transitions. http://bit.ly/dk1dQJ