New on her blog Elizabeth Smith talks about tree views and rendering in a PHP-GTK application (with sample code included).

I get this question a lot - "How do I change the background color of a single cell in a treeview?" If you look around you'll see a couple of ways of doing this using display callbacks and other highly processor and memory intensive methods - but there’s a much simpler way.

She explains how the tree views are rendered (with the GtkTreeView component, of course) via a "cell renderer" with different variations based on the contents of the cell - each with their own properties. Her example code illustrates how to manipulate this by making the tree object and attaching other columns to it with custom background properties. A quick screencast is included to show it in action.

On the Zend Developer Zone today, there's a new post from Maarten Balliauw about a set of PHP classes he's created to work with Office 2007 SpreadsheetML documents (yay! another format!).

I finished my first goals (some basic XLSX writing), and I want to share this set of classes to the community. [...] Each cell supports the following data formats: string, number, formula, boolean. Visual formatting is not implemented, but I'll get to that later.

Features supported currently include the creation of the Spreadsheet object, adding worksheets, adding cells, and exporting the object to the Excel 2007 OpenXML format.

You can check out the project and the latest version over on his blog.

On the Zend Developer Zone today, there's a new post from Maarten Balliauw about a set of PHP classes he's created to work with Office 2007 SpreadsheetML documents (yay! another format!).

I finished my first goals (some basic XLSX writing), and I want to share this set of classes to the community. [...] Each cell supports the following data formats: string, number, formula, boolean. Visual formatting is not implemented, but I'll get to that later.

Features supported currently include the creation of the Spreadsheet object, adding worksheets, adding cells, and exporting the object to the Excel 2007 OpenXML format.

You can check out the project and the latest version over on his blog.

In one of his latest posts, Marcus Whitney looks at the upcoming year and what the future holds for mobile applications - and where PHP might fit into it (with a little help from Flash Lite).

Since meeting with Jackson for lunch this week, I am definitely convnced that he is on to something when he says 2006 is going to be huge for mobile. Here's another challenge to the PHP community. Flash Lite is pretty cool. So.. I'm pretty excited by Flash Lite, and the announcement that Samsung phones will support it is good news for me and all the Sprint/Nextel/Embarq customers out there.

Any chance us PHP devs will be able to start writing robust mobile apps? Maybe working in tandem wiith the beauty of Flash on the front end?

It'd be interesting to see if this line of thought would lead to any major PHP/Flash applications. The possibility is definitely there with its ability to not only import data like XML, but pull in other resources as well...

In one of his latest posts, Marcus Whitney looks at the upcoming year and what the future holds for mobile applications - and where PHP might fit into it (with a little help from Flash Lite).

Since meeting with Jackson for lunch this week, I am definitely convnced that he is on to something when he says 2006 is going to be huge for mobile. Here's another challenge to the PHP community. Flash Lite is pretty cool. So.. I'm pretty excited by Flash Lite, and the announcement that Samsung phones will support it is good news for me and all the Sprint/Nextel/Embarq customers out there.

Any chance us PHP devs will be able to start writing robust mobile apps? Maybe working in tandem wiith the beauty of Flash on the front end?

It'd be interesting to see if this line of thought would lead to any major PHP/Flash applications. The possibility is definitely there with its ability to not only import data like XML, but pull in other resources as well...