Josh McCarty

Burn ISO File to Disc in Windows 10

I wanted to make a bootable Ubuntu 16.04 disc the other day for an older PC and I wasn’t sure how to burn the ISO image to a disc. It’s not that I’ve never done it–I’ve created dozens of bootable discs since the days of Windows 98–it’s just that I haven’t needed to burn a disc for so long that I’d forgotten whether I needed to install software to do it. I’ve been using bootable USB drives for a…

Use SharePoint Callouts to Create an In-page Tour

SharePoint 2013’s Callouts are used frequently throughout its UI to display contextual information. They also happen to be a great tool for creating in-page tours to guide users through learning about key features on a page. The first time I encountered one of these “tours” was after a Facebook redesign several years ago. Of course, there are other librariesthat exist to create these tours, but I…

Blog Post: Bookmarklet to Remove Zero-width Spaces (​) from SharePoint Pages

When editing pages in SharePoint, the rich text editor inserts zero-width spaces to assist with text selection. Unfortunately it does not always remove these when a page is saved. These characters appear as ​in Chrome’s dev tools, for example. These “leftovers” can cause spacing issues for content authors, so we created a bookmarklet to remove these when editing a page. The instructions for this…

“Cannot Read Property ‘STS’ of Undefined” When Using SP.UI.ModalDialog in SharePoint 2013

I’m using SharePoint’s built-in modal dialog for a single page application I’ve been developing. When I refresh the page to test changes I’ll randomly get an error saying that “Cannot read property ‘STS’ of undefined.” I’m using the Script-on-demand functions that should make things work:

SP.SOD.executeFunc('sp.ui.dialog.js', 'SP.UI.ModalDialog', myFunction);

Looking at the stack trace, I can see…

Ever since smartphones started adding video recording capabilities, I’ve seen a lot more videos recorded in “portrait” mode. This happens when you record a video while holding your phone upright instead of sideways. Depending on the phone, the video recording app you used, and how you are playing it back, the video may end up sideways when you try to view it (because some phones and some media…

I’m working on a project where I need to grab the contents of a Page Layout HTML file on a publishing site via JavaScript. The obvious solution would be to use a GET request via AJAX (I’m using jQuery here). The file contents are plain text with no binary data, so it should be a straightforward task:

$.ajax({ url: "http://server/_catalogs/masterpage/custom-page-layout.html", method: "GET"…

SharePoint 2013’s corev15.css file comes with a bunch of useful CSS classes. It doesn’t compare to something like Zurb Foundation or Bootstrap, but there’s enough in there to allow you to write less CSS for your custom apps. It’s also a great way to ensure that your app blends in with the SharePoint UI for a more consistent user experience.

Keep in mind:

This is not a comprehensive list, and…

Upgrading a 2009 13″ MacBook Pro with SSD and RAM

My fiancé has a 13″ MacBook Pro from 2009. While it probably worked great when it was new, five years later it had become painfully slow (#firstworldproblems) with its 2GB of RAM and 160GB HDD. A few searches online uncovered others who had similar setups and successfully upgraded them to modern performance standards with an SSD and additional RAM.

A Bit of Background

When I first used this…

My employer, Apollo Education Group, published our 2013 Corporate Social Responsibility Annual Report in February of this year. The project, like our 2012 report, was a fantastic team effort and fun project for me personally. From a web development perspective, my team added a lot of tools and techniques to our repertoire during this project, and we are very proud of the results.

Making the…

Steam Game Always Asks for UAC Confirmation or Installs VC Redist

I recently picked up Assassin’s Creed III during the Steam Summer Sale. The first few times I played the game, I noticed that I was getting a UAC prompt and that Steam was was running a first-time setup for VC Redist (as though I had just installed the game).

Steam would try to install VC Redist every time I started the game.

This was mildly annoying, and neither restarting Steam, restarting my…

This is a trick I hadn’t used in a couple of years until just the other day. You can create a hyperlink to a specific page in a PDF by appending #page=3 to the URL. For example, if I want to link to page 35 of “SharePoint-Magazine-Issue-2.pdf” on my website, the link would be http://joshmccarty.com/ … /SharePoint-Magazine-Issue-2.pdf#page=35.

Note: This only works for PDF files hosted on the web,…