Web Development Lounge

So I got a palmOne Treo 650 last week. The Treo 700w is coming out soon. I’ve had a chance to play around with it and figured I would share my experience so far. Some of the cool features of the Treo 650 are:

• Camera/Camcorder, Word and Excel,Bluetooth, Spearker Phone
• Cool Messaging App, Multi-Function Calculator
• The Keyboard is a great feature
• Calendar HotSyncs nicely with Outlook
• Good Email App, VersaMail, supports IMAP and Exchange

Some complaints I have about the device/palmOne are

• You can’t set MP3s as ringers, unless you buy additional software
• The phone service is not as good as I expected
• You can’t customize a contact’s ringer, unless you buy additional software
• You can’t simply store a number after typing it into your phone, you have to add a new contact first, or dial the number and add it to your contacts that way.
• The photo shown for incoming callers is really small. Can’t we use the whole screen?
• You always have to start all over using the home button, Back button anyone?
• You can’t edit a photo size and or crop it, in your Media
• The built in speaker seems cheap, it makes popping scratch noises, even in low volumes.
• The Number pad on the keyboard is too small and tough to use while driving.
• Palm’s Contacts app is not user friendly. Each entry is shown with all that user’s information making the contact list way too long to scroll.

Here are some cool apps to try on your Treo 650:

• Google Maps for the Treo, You gotta have this one. Very nicely done as always
• Directory Assistant is a life saver. Forget about 411. This is self contained Yellow Page/White Page app, Free!
• AIM in your Palm, This is actually good, Stays connected even if you close the app, Free!
• SSH Supports SSH2, Free!
• Universal Remote, need the hardware to handle long distances, Free Trial
• TealPhone, a much better contacts app, frankly Palm’s Contacts sucks. Free Trial
• Treo Voice Dialing enables voice activated calling, it costs 19.95 after 14 days. This should have been included with a Palm, No?
• SplashBlog Use your phone to setup a mobile photo blog
• Ringo lets you set MP3s as ringers, and allows for per user ringer assignment.

Some tips

• There is a voice recorder built into the device but it is so hard to get to it, if you ever find it. Go to Sounds/Phone Tones/Manage/New
• In order to use the 5-way button to scroll up and down, you have to first move up within a list, like the call log, then you can move down the list and select using the middle button. This is pretty unintuitive design though.
• You can assign ringer to your favorites, Just create a new favorite and make it a speed dial to a contact. Now you can set the ringer for that contact. This is really backwards design though. I suggest using Ringo instead.
• Try 1-800-Free-411, never pay for 411 again!
• Try using Menu/Options/Tips in different applications for more tips.

This is a list of the Free OSX Tiger software I use that kick major booty. No down payment, no monthly payment, No BS! Don’t leave your mac without ‘em.

1. Adium iChat is good, Adium rox, IMHO, they just added Google Talk support
2. Quicksilver mouse? what’s that? have you tried these?
3. Cyberduck FTP software that does what it needs to, without scaring you
4. CronniX GUI for crontabs
5. Iterm Terminal for OSX with tabs and bookmarks
6. JellyfiSSH SSH GUI for OSX, kinda like Putty for Windows
7. CocoaMySQL manage MySQL db, local or remote, nice!
8. MenuMeters now i can finally see what my mac is doing
9. TextWrangler If you don’t have the bux for BBEdit this one is almost as good
10. VoodooPad Amazing, its a wiki based notepad
11. Tofu reading just got a whole lot easier thanks to horizontal scrolling
12. PTHPasteboard keeps a log of your copy/past buffers
13. Eclipse one of the best IDEs, the Mac OS X implementation has been significantly extended and improved
14. Sidenote Just a lil notepad, usefull when you dont have a pen
15. NetNewsWire Lite Free RSS/Atom reader
16. SeeSS funny title, shows you CSS info in a widget, very handy
17. Free Ruler Do you measure your pixels? I do
18. HexColorPicker, QuickPicker color pickers galore
19. Paparazzi Simple app to get screenshots of webpages, real handy
20. FinkCommander After you get Fink, you will make your life much easier with this toy
21. TinkerTool Kinda like TweakUI for XP, loads of good stuff
22. Diablotin an admin panel like msconfig in XP, shows what you’ve added to your Library folder
23. Yasu ok last administration tool, very simple, mostly cleans your mac
24. Synergy Sharing is caring
25. Widgets Preference Pane tweak your Dashboard
26. Picture Namer simple is good, just rename photos before they go into a black hole called iPhoto
27. Recent Tunes wanna see what you just heard on iTunes? goes in the menu bar and can FTP too
28. VideoLAN Play media without worries
29. Cocoalicious If you are a deliciousaholic, this is a must
30. delimport runs in the bg and imports your delicious into spotlight
31. Khronos time tracking app, shows your earnings in real time
32. Check Off keep track of tasks so you dont end up kicking yourself in the head later
33. Dash Blog Simple yet usefull, a dashboard widget that post to Blogs using XMLRPC

OK now for some not so free and experimental apps to poke around with BluePhoneElite let your Tiger pick up the phone, doesn’t work with my Treo 650 yet, I’m waiting…. TextMate New age text editor with some unique features CandyBar icon changer thingy, i haven’t played with this thing yet TrailBlazer view your history as images, kinda cool but not too practical 3DOSX Great proof of concept, a Virtual 3D desktop! Apple should hire these guys for OS11

From time to time you need to capture a web site in the form of an image. While you can easily use the Ctrl+Alt+PrtSc for windows or Command+Shift+4 in Mac, you might want to screen a site that is tall and or wide and requires scrolling to fully view in your browser. You also might want to perform multiple screen captures of various pages in various web browsers or only grab sections of a page. Below is a list of Windows, OSX and Linux tools you can use to take browser based screenshots in FireFox, Internet Explorer and Safari.

While there are paid services such as Browser Cam that do cross-browser screen captures, I tend to prefer using software since I can fine-tune the results to my liking, and I can see the results immediately.

add-ons via Firefox

ScreenGrab - This FireFox extension installs as an icon in the lower right corner of the he status bar.  This plugin uses the Gecko canvas for faster processing. IT allows for capturing either a selection, the visible window or the entire page. You can customize the options to save either a PNG or JPG image and add a timestamp to the filename, and captures frames and flash files sections without any problems.

PageSaver - This alternate extension from Pearl Crescent installs two new entries in the context menu of FireFox, allowing to save either the visibile portion or the entire page, although it does not allow for saving a selection. It has a slew of options however. For example you can assign a keyboard shortcut which is a great time saver.  You can also set your image filename patterns and choose the format of the saved image. PageSaver can capture frames and flash files.

Windows Software via Internet Explorer

WebShot - You may want to save the screenshot using IE for testing purposes in which case you need to use WebShot which is a tiny executable written in C by Nathan Moinvaziri. It is available in both a GUI format and a command-line format.  WebShot is able to capture any URL and handles frames, and flash files and can also capture java applets. The processing time is somewhat slow for some reason however compared to the other tools. WebShot offers a ton of options when using its command line version.

OSX Software via Safari

webkit2png - is the official command line tool for the Mac which uses python and the WebKit rendering engine, which is used in Safari.

Paparazzi - If you need a simpler GUI try Paparazzi which is a great shell on top of webkit2png, making your life much easier. Paparazzi like PageSaver has many similar options you can set for your captured screenshot images.

Unix Software

khtml2png - is a great command line tool for Unix which uses ImageMagick and libkhtml used in Konqueror to create images from web pages.

Do you want to load your blog faster and cleaner on your iPhone? The iWPhone beta v0.1 is here. The good people over at ContentRobot have created this plugin for WordPress that will render an iPhone optimized version of your WordPress blog when it is accessed from an iPhone.

The plugin sniffs the client’s user agent and uses its special theme for iPhone visitors. The theme looks similar to the basic WordPress blue theme and contains sections for your categories, trackbacks, permalinks, comments and even a share links section with post links to delicious, digg and technorati.
I have installed this plugin and tested it on this blog from the iPhone. Now this blog loads very fast and is very readable on the iPhone and I don’t have to zoom in to read either. I’m hoping to see an admin theme in the future as well. Read more and download the iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme v0.1 here to iPhonify your WordPress blog.

The latest release of the iPhone SDK from Apple comes with an array of new Mac utilities for developing iPhone specific software. One of the new tools included with the iPhone SDK beta is the Aspen Simulator. Aspen is an iPhone simulator that developers can test their apps on which emulates all of the the features and functionality of the iPhone. For example you can use the mouse to swipe the page up, down, even pinch and more.The Aspen Simulator app is located in the folder: /Developer/Platforms/AspenSimulator.platform/Developer/Applications and has a few of the basic iPhone apps including Contacts, Settings, and most importantly mobile Safari. Using mobile Safari is in Aspen Simulator is a nice way to test out your webapps and see how they would look like on the iPhone. The problem I have found so far in this release is that the user-agent of the Safari browser is not set as an iPhone. This is problematic if you are doing some sort of user-agent sniffing using JavaScript in your webapp in order to show the iPhone specifc version of your site. Here is a screenshot of the Safari in Aspen Simulator and the user agent string. I used a basic alert statemnet to get this and the value is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Aspen Simulator; U; Aspen 1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Mobile/5A147p Safari/5525.7

This means if you load up sites that only look right on the iPhone they won’t render correctly on the Aspen Simulator. An example of this is the Yahoo Ajax Flickr website designed specifically for the iPhone. This page renders correctly if you’re on an iPhone, but will show you the basic mobile version if it doesn’t see iPhone in your user-Agent. Next version of Aspen will hopefully have an option to easily edit the user agent string of the Safari browser. For reference the mobile Safari app is located in this folder:

/Developer/Platforms/AspenSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/AspenSimulator1.2.sdk/

miniMIZE - miniMIZE catches windows that you minimize and puts a thumbnail of the main application window on your desktop. This is great for getting a visual representation of your taskbar and makes more sense to me. It also creates an uncluttered taskbar.

Launchy - Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes! It is like QuickSilver for the Mac and makes finding and launching stuff on your PC a breeze and joyful. It supports plugins, skins and more. Just hit Alt+Space to get to it after you install it.

Defraggler - A cool defragmenter tool that lets you easily defrag the files you want to, without having to process the whole drive. Once you run it it shows you list of the files and the number of fragments per file. Now you can target just the major defragmentations.

hott notes - Post-it pads for your windows desktop, without all the fuss. Supports lists or notes format and you can set reminders and alarms as well.

Eraser - Its like an eraser for your PC with options to integrate into the Recycle Bin. It completely removes sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns.

CCleaner - The C stands for Crap and it does just that. The program is split into 3 sections, Cleaner: which finds crap in your Windows, System and IE folders, Registry: finds errors in your Windows registry, and Tools: does Uninstall and Startup tasks.

Like it or not you’ve got to do SEO and keep it on your radar at all times. Here is a list of the best free tools related to Search Engine Optimization. These tools try to bring in all the aspects of the complicated world of SEO and make it easy for you to get a grasp on how friendly your domain name is to search engines like Google and Yahoo, and how popular it is within its related topics.

The Main Players are:

Alexa has a nice charting system. You can see your Reach, Rank and Pageviews charts and filter using date ranges and compare to other domains as well.
QuantCast gives you Traffic overview, US Demographics, Brand & Site Affinities, Similar Audience, Top Subdomains and traffic charts.

Here are some of the best tools to check your PageRank and more:

TagURLs is a web analytics tool combining the top 500,000 U.S. websites with their topic tags, using data from del.icio.us and QuantCast. Use it to discover the most trafficked sites for any topic of interest, such as “videos” or “education”, or by url, such seifi.org.

SEO Keys is a nice tool to search your domain for sites that link to you and their respective PageRank

Compete shows you a snapshop of your domain with a People Count chart and Top Keywords.

UrlTrends gives a trend report for your domain, that includes PageRank and Alex Rank, Incoming Google Links, Incoming Yahoo Links, Incoming MSN Links, Incoming Alexa Links and more.

Submit Express gives a nice table of your keywords, urls and a good analysis of your meta tags.

SEOmoz displays its own Page Strength and shows you details on how it calculates that score.

URL Investigator shows basic information such as Google Pagerank, Alexa Traffic Rank, WhoIs and Link Check data.

popuri is a simple Ajaxy tool that gives you the Google, Alexa and Quantcast Ranks, Google BackLinks, Yahoo BackLinks, Live Search BackLinks, Technorati Links, del.icio.us Bookmarks, Bloglines subscribers and more.

Statsaholic shows charts from Alexa and Quantcast for up to 3 domains.

WebConfs is another powerful and tool with lots of SEO checking utilities, such as Keyword Density Checker, Keyword Suggestions and more.

The number one search engine on the planet has just announced the biggest deal to hit the internet since its YouTube buy. Microsoft has just made an offer for Google for the amount of $200,000,000,000 which is about $638 per share of the 137 million outstanding shares.

Google shares have plummeted to all time low of $41 per share on the news of the buyout, while Microsoft shares opened trading at an all time high of $121 this morning. Google is shipping its PageRank and search index which contains 1.34 Petabytes of data stored in over 550,000 tape drives over to Microsoft using 3,000 Armored Trucks, driving up north from Mountain View to Redmond. The 848 mile road trip will be overseen by law enforcement agencies both on the ground and in the air.

There is yet no official announcement as to what Microsoft plans to do with the new Google acquisition, but rumors are flying around that Microsoft plans to start selling a new search based operating system with a new built in software called Windows Internet Search that will perform web searches at an alarming fast rate using Google search. The new upgrade will cost around $149 for existing Windows Vista users. Microsoft has no plans of providing search functionality to Apple users.

Microsoft will also be offering a subscription based search to its customers starting next year that is said to incorporate the new Google logic. The search feature will provide subscribers with 10 Google searches per day starting at 0.99c.

In related news, Google announced that it is experiencing unusually high traffic today, as users of the search engine giant around the world are are frantically trying to back up the entire search engine’s database before Microsoft officially shuts it down in the coming weeks.

Google employees have made a pact to never give up and are voicing their disapproval of the announcement by forming their own Open Source startup search engine company called AprilFools that is expected to be a noteworthy replacement for the many fooled Google users worldwide.