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Web browsers have come a long way since the days of Internet Explorer 6 release back in 2001. You would think 9 years on we would have all dumped this piece of software in the garbage heap by now. Alas, we still have users to this very date who still use IE6 either due to personal preference or by force (company IT policies).

As everyone knows, developing a site to be compliant with main stream browsers in addition to carrying out additional fixes to fit in with the slim 6.7% of global users can be a real pain. So instead of trying to fit your site around the small number of IE6 users, why not just knock some common sense into them and notify them to upgrade.

Thankfully, there is a really easy and polite way to do this. Go to http://code.google.com/p/ie6-upgrade-warning/ and download the JavaScript file and embed the following code to your webpage…

<!--[if lte IE 6]>
    <script src="js/ie6/warning.js"></script>
    <script>window.onload=function(){e("js/ie6/")}</script>
<![endif]-->

…which outputs the following result:

As great as this idea is I don’t see many web developers or web agencies implementing this on the sites they create unless really needed. Nevertheless, its step in the right direction to hopefully put a final nail into that IE6 coffin!

I am currently in the process of learning how to build applications for the iPhone. I have recently upgraded from the iPhone SDK 3.0 simulator to the iPhone SDK 4.0 simulator. But this caused some issues when trying to run some of my previous applications I developed prior to when I had the iPhone 3.0 simulator installed.

Normally, the dropdown box within the XCode window allows you to select different simulators. For example: iPad Simulator 3.2 or iPhone Simulator 4.0. As you can see from my screenshot (below), none of these options were available.

Apparently, the iPhone 4.0 SDK can still have the ability to run iPhone 3.0 applications and this is something we should be doing from now on. This requires a couple of changes to carry out in your older 3.0 projects.

Firstly, you will need to go to Project > Edit Project Settings. When the window appears, click on the Build tab and change the “Base SDK” value to “iPhone Simulator 4.0”.

Secondly, go to Project > Edit Active Target. When the window appears, you will have to carry out the same procedure as you carried out in the “Edit Project Settings” whereby you click on the Build tab and change the “Base SDK” value to “iPhone Simulator 4.0”.

If you have carried out the changes correctly, you should be able to Build and Run your project successfully. I admit this is not exactly ideal to do this if you have many iPhone 3.0 application projects. But I suppose this fix is better than nothing and plus its quite a quick change.

I have a HTC Hero which was recently upgraded from Android 1.5 to 2.1 a few months back. It has definitely been a significant and worthwhile upgrade packing in lots of new extra features and most importantly extra applications to download from the Android Market.

The only downside to the upgrade is that I now have less memory to play with and this can cause a detrimental effect if you get the “Phone memory is running low” warning. Since I received this warning I found that all my Google Synchronisation tasks stopped syncing automatically. Even if I tried manually starting the synchronisation service nothing would happen. In addition, I couldn’t even download any applications from the Android Market.

Soon as I went on a massive clear out on my phone and resolved the low memory error, my Google Synchronisation worked instantaneously. All the problems I previously had were magically rectified. Its just a shame that all the applications get stored onto the phone memory rather than the external memory.

The weirdest thing is that I still had around 14MB of free space on my phone prior to having my cleanup. I find it a little strange the low memory threshold is set so high.

I guess its good to know that Google has rectified this issue by allowing applications to be stored on external memory in their Android 2.2 release. Unfortunately, it highly unlikely my HTC Hero will see this update.