Today we are sharing our plan to automatically upgrade Windows customers to the latest version of Internet Explorer available for their PC. This is an important step in helping to move the Web forward. We will start in January for customers in Australia and Brazil who have turned on automatic updating via Windows Update. Similar to our release of IE9 earlier this year, we will take a measured approach, scaling up over time.
-Microsoft
Source:  Windows Steam Blog

UPDATE:  A good point has been raised by a fellow Front End Developer in that IE9 is quickly gaining speed, and now with this auto-update we will see IE9 on Windows 7 rise from 30% to probably 80% or more within mere months.  Feel free to see these stats at Windows Stem Blog posted back in September.

An added benefit of delegate I have discovered is that when you delegate to something with class, and later remove that class, that delegation updates thus removing itself from the object.  For example lets say you have a delegation bound to a button that has a class of disabled to start with, later when you meet the requirements to enable that button and remove the disabled class that button no longer has the disabled delegation assigned to it, thus it undelegated itself without any extra code effort.  Check out this test case on jsFiddle. This has proven to be a very helpful technique, and surely adds to the reasons to use delegate over bind.

jsPerf aims to provide an easy way to create and share test cases, comparing the performance of different JavaScript snippets by running benchmarks.

Feel free to check out my Google+ Profile, where I be post about jQuery and other web development/design topics.

Along with new features Google is re-branding Blogger to Google Blogs and Picasa to Google Photos.  Google has also chosen to redesign their entire catalog, including but not limited to Search, Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Images, and possibly soon Docs.  Part of the reason for a redesign is to develop a look that can seamlessly work on many platforms from Desktop to smart phones and TV’s.  As a front-end web developer I am happy to see Google using HTML5 and CSS3, while dropping support for outdated browsers like Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

From what I’ve read some well known SEO sites have been getting high amounts of traffic from Google+, surprising since Google+ is still closed field testing and not open to the public as of yet.  Currently what Google+ does lack, though hopefully not for long would be an equivalent to Facebook Pages, which would intern drive the business to consumer side of social networking.  Google also has a change to support ads in a non intrusive and yet functional way that can still bring plenty of profits and business.  There is also some evidence that Google is working on a social gaming aspect for their network, and even a question/answer system.

A good sign that Facebook is threatened would be the removal of email address’s from their API, thus shutting down the Google Chrome plugin that allowed users to import their friends list into Google+ from Facebook.  Along with that days after Google+’s initial announcement Facebook has declared that they have a big and exciting announcement coming today.

From a survey done 2/3rd’s of current Google+ users would happily move from Facebook permanently.  Overall my experience thus far with Google+ has been nothing but enjoyment, I for one can hope to one day ditch Facebook in favor of Google+.  I would like to see YouTube and Google Music integrated, as currently the videos tab just uses Picasa based videos.  Check out Google+’s page which has videos showcasing the above mentioned features and more.  Be on the look out for the official public opening, rumored to be July 31st, less than a month away!

Honestly I think this only strengthens the need for mobile and tablet friendly websites.  Personally my website could use a bit of an overhaul to support mobile and tablet devices, and perhaps I’ll finally make time to do so thanks to WordPress 3.2 and my growing experience with responsive web design, HTML5, and CSS3.

Recently the MLB (Major League Baseball) switched its 15,000+ blogs from Movable Type to WordPress.com, bringing with them 3 new themes offered to WordPress.com users.  This sort of major move only shows how big WordPress has become, and I expect we’ll see more major companies move their blogs or even sites over to the engine.

Other notable CMS‘s found in this survey are Joomla at 2.8%, Drupal at 1.5%, vBulletin at 1.3%, Blogger at 0.7%, and phpBB at 0.4%.  Kentico the content management system I deal with in my daily job sadly ranks in under 0.1%, but it is a pricey system thats just up and coming.

For Statistics/Survey information check out “Usage Statistics and Market Share of Content Management Systems for Websites“.

The first thing I noticed about Producteev is how simple and clean the service is, not to mention inexpensive.   Sure there may be totally free services or programs out there, but in some cases paying a little gets you a whole lot more.  From a designers perspective Producteev is very modern, clean, and professional.  You will find lots of AJAX, rounded corners, subtle gradients, subtle shadows, subtle highlights, and pretty icons.

The ability to simply send an email to a specified address to add a task is brilliant. For instance Johnny sends me an email asking me to add Google Analytics to his website, all I have to do is forward that email to the specified Producteev task address and the system will add the task.  Then I’ll get an email letting me know the task was successfully added, and from there I can manage that task simply by replying with different commands.

If I can convince myself to actually care about task management I may end up using this service regularly.  Otherwise it was fun seeing what new tricks companies can come up with to make their product stand out in a crowd.

Producteev is a cool, Cross-Platform (IM, E-mail, iPhone, Web, Gmail, and more…) Task Management Application for Teams and Individuals. The Task Manager that works the way YOU do. Check them out at www.producteev.com

.bind('mouseenter mouseleave focus blur keypress', function(){ });

Recently I came to realize that this lacked something, the state of releasing a key. Without this state, if I was to empty the entire text field with a backspace it wouldn’t trigger as I planned. So I found the answer quickly thanks to jQuery API. The “keyup” state is what I was lacking, and I know this may not be 100% bullet proof covering every plausible event, but I think this covers quite a bit of everything now.

.bind('mouseenter mouseleave focus blur keypress keyup', function(){ });