Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

The Developer Tools (F12 keyboard shortcut) of popular browsers show the JSON output returned by an API, like this - Firefox add-on Firebug's JSON tab within the Net tab, presents it neatly like this - This makes it easy to extract the specific details that you are after.  The above view helps to visualize how to get to a flickr photo's id on making a call using the jQuery getJSON method to one of the flickr API services - data.photos.photo[i].id

Geocoding is the process of taking an address and getting the associated latitude and longitude so that it can be visually represented as a a point on the earth with any mapping service. MapQuest API has a free batch geocoding service that allows multiple locations to be geocoded at the same time. A limit of 100 locations exists for one call. I haven't seen any of the popular mapping services  offering this kind of a bulk geocoding facility. An AppKey is needed to run that service & you can get it by creating a free Community Account . An AppKey is generated when requested but it will take approximately 1 hour for your AppKey to be active.

With a Office 365 Preview Developer account, you can build SharePoint 2013 & Office 2013 Apps. This account includes an app called NAPA that contains a small subset of Visual Studio features to build an App within the browser & run it. As a keyboard person, I like that it includes keyboard shortcuts for common tasks. Here are my favorites: F1                  : Show & trigger commands Ctrl+F            : Find Ctrl+H           : Replace Ctrl+/             : Comment Ctrl+L            : Jump to specified line number Ctrl+E            : Quick Open Ctrl+D           :  Delete line Ctrl+A           :  Select all Ctrl+Space    :  Intellisense Ctrl+G           :  View Methods?