Entropy

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Another info packed post with some exciting news making waves in the technology world.

• 3G iPhone update
• Vista - uptake inevitable
• Twitter rising
• Javascript curvy corners
• Worthy mentions

3G iPhone update

We have reported previously on speculation regarding the launch date of the 3G iPhone, now more information is starting to filter through. One hot topic drawing much attention is the price the new model will go on the market for. $199. While this price is contract dependant, it is still a hefty saving of $200. Apple are also expecting huge sales, with reports coming in that they have ordered 25million units to be manufactured by the same company, Foxconn, that put the first gen iPhone on shelves. 3 million of which will be ready for sale by the end of May.

the author of the story also says that the new phones will be available in “8-gigabit-memory and… 16-gigabit-memory” versions (for $399 and $499, respectively), so take that as you like. In addition to these discounts, the source says the new iPhone will be 2.5mm thinner than the previous iteration, although we understand that right after telling Fortune this information, the “person” burst into a cloud of rainbow-colored sparkles and went flying off into the night sky.

Vista - uptake inevitable

Let’s not beat around the bush on this subject. Vista has been a disappointment. I personally prefer it to Windows XP, but I am not the majority in this issue. XP is end of life with it being pulled from sale in the near future. Once this happens what choices do consumers have other than linux distros? You can order a new pc with Ubuntu, for example, installed. While Ubuntu is a worthy alternative, you must again remember about a corporate roll out of a new desktop environment. I know that companies have switched to linux over windows solutions, but the majority have been in the server market. We are talking about the average employee having to make the change and with that comes training (read expenses). I find Ubuntu quite easy to navigate and fx uses it on his laptop, but not everyone adjusts well. A computerworld article goes into more detail on this topic, while another reminds us about current uptake problems.

“They are sort of in a ‘caught between a rock and a hard place’ situation,” said Gray. Administrators may not want to move to Vista, but neither of the alternatives — the older XP and the not-even-officially-scheduled Windows 7 — is attractive, he said.

Twitter Rising.

Seen as pointless by some and indisposable by others, the stats don’t lie. Twitter usage is rising. I think the number of mashups using the API to do abstract things with what users are pumping into the system has a direct influence on the stats. Repeat users loyal to the service are also a big  influence in the increase of market share seen by Twitter, which is a healthy sign the site is gaining a strong foothold in the social network arena. fx and I were actually throwing around an idea for a Twitter mashup, so you might see something from us in the future putting a spin on what people are doing.

The chart makes the growth look impressive - and it is. However, to put things into context, the site ranked #439 among Social Networks and Forums last week and #4309 among All Categories of websites. Twitter’s size is notoriously difficult to measure as there are so many access points (mobile phones in particular). However, the website traffic data does give some idea of the rate of growth and also reveals that the service still hasn’t reached mainstream adoption.

Javascript curvy corners.

The rounded look of Web 2.0 designs can be a pain at the best of times. Most of the time you will need a few images combined in a bit of CSS to pull it off.  Being able to apply curvy corners on the fly is a huge step in the right direction, and Curvy Corners offer just that.

curvyCorners will automatically pickup style information from the DIV element. So for example if you give the DIV a 2px black border in a stylesheet then the borders will be automatically added to the rounded corners.

Worthy Mentions

Seeing as we have covered some news on Twitter, why not give you the Linux desktop options to make Tweeting easier - 6 Twitter clients for the Linux desktop and one for the road.

Twitter is a popular social networking utility that’s gaining popularity as a micro-blogging tool. Registered users can post messages — also called Tweets — via the Web interface, but many prefer to use desktop applications that offer additional functionality and move Tweeting out of the browser entirely.

Cool web stuff for April 2008 brought to you by WebKak - April 2008 round up of cool web stuff.

Well before we kick off with yet more cool web apps & stuff next month, it’s time for a round-up of the most popular posts for the month of April

Mighty Mouse Easter Egg

Since it’s Easter for a lot of people, and there are still things to be done, I don’t want to keep you waiting. Today, I just found an older picture of Apple’s Mighty Mouse, and I think it’s something great to see. Yes, it’s a hardware Easter Egg. No, this is not a fake image, is a picture made more than 2 years ago, but I guess this is still true today.

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Firefox is without a doubt the future of the internet browser. This however doesn’t mean that IE will disappear completely - as much as most web developers wish it would. It has happened to most developers where you get your new app running peachy in Firefox, but the second you open it in IE you are using hacks and the like to get it to render and behave as you wanted it to.

Debugging in Firefox is easy with a vast number of extensions aiding you in tracking down the bugs in your code. Doing the same in IE can be very frustrating with one usually only having access to the mostly unhelpful js error icon in the bottom corner of the browser.

Luckily Six Revisions has put together a list of IE tools that can aid you in the development of your app.

For Web developers wanting to use Micosoft’s Internet Explorer as their primary browser, there’s some terrific IE extensions/add-ons that can aid you analyze, troubleshoot, debug, and speed up development of web pages.

Here, you’ll find the top 6 free IE extensions for web developers.

Where appropriate (and available), you’ll also find related resources, their download page, and documentation.

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Seeing as I haven’t posted anything for a couple of days, I thought I would make one post with all the things that have caught my eye.

• Maximize Firefox without extensions
• Gmail hacks for better spam protection
• 7 of the best designed sites on the web
• 60 AJAX/Javascript resources for professional coding
• 3 ways to test web input with CAPTCHA

Maximize Firefox without extensions

We have made a couple of posts relating to improving FireFox and getting the best out of your FireFox experience and plugins. There are plugins that could do what this article details, but with the release of Beta builds quite frequently over the past 2 months or so, not all plugins work the whole time.

If you type about:config in your address bar, Firefox opens the master directory of user-defined preferences and built-in settings. The ultimate arena for performance tampering, the about:config settings are the foundation for programming Firefox extensions.

We’ll show some simple about:config modifications below. Even if the word “Boolean” means nothing to you, we’ll try to make it easy to understand about:config settings

Gmail hacks for better spam protection

I happen to have a ‘.’ in my gmail address just by chance, and also use the + tip for signing up on certain sites to keep things more organized. But you could just as easily use them to help combat spam.

You can create alias emails for things like shopping sites, places you know will spam you, or anything you want to track to see who they are sharing your email with. To do this, simply put a “+” after your account name and add words.

Apparently, Gmail doesn’t really acknowledge dots in your account name. So I can use “mr.marky.mark@gmail.com” or “mr.markymark@gmail.com” or without any dots at all, “mrmarkymark@gmail.com”.

7 of the best designed sites on the web

Titles of this nature always grab my attention. I’m constantly trying to see how designers are innovating using the latest techniques. While I may not completely agree with this list, I do agree that the sites are visually appealing, even google.com, and that they have crisp layouts.

A sites design is its identity. It can make the biggest difference in attracting and keeping traffic, keeping visitors happy, promoting products and services and establishing an identity on the web.

Website design has come a long way. Previously, down-to-the-point, straightforward sites with minimum graphics and fastest loading and easy navigation were considered the “best” sites in terms of design.

60 AJAX/Javascript resources for professional coding

AJAX is one of the most commonly used techniques for creating seamless webapps these days. However, if you have ever tried to develop something using AJAX, you may have found that it can be frustrating sometimes trying to accomplish the crazy idea that you have set down as your goal. Infact, I was wrestling an AJAX idea in the office today that was partially solved with the scriptaculous javascript library.

When it comes to design of modern web-applications, Ajax is considered as a standard approach. Interactive solutions for lightboxes, form validation, navigation, search, tooltips and tables are developed using Ajax libraries and nifty Ajax scripts. Ajax is useful and powerful. However, when using Ajax, one should keep in mind its drawbacks in terms of usability and accessibility. With an extensive use of Ajax, you can easily confuse your visitors offering too much control and too many features.

3 ways to test web input with CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA is something that we are all used to by now, it’s those barely readable images we have to re-type to prove that we are human. Turns out that computers are becoming more and more human with spam bots being able to break CAPTCHA codes, in record time, to webmail sites bypassing the human requirement of owning an account. However, it is still seen as an important part of a website where differentiating a legitimate user from a spam bot is required and even though it is being beaten more and more these days it is still one of the best ways to help combat spam.

Many Web forms these days feature a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) as an effort to stop people from setting up computers to automatically fill in Web forms. A typical CAPTCHA is an image with some numbers and letters in it with distortion and/or background noise, and a Web form input field where you are to enter the numbers and letters from the image. This article investigates three CAPTCHA applications that you can use on a PHP Web site.

• You Used JavaScript to Write WHAT? [via Zemanta]

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As I’m typing this post I am lying in bed with my notebook. This has become a common situation for many people, having mobility where and when you need it. Unfortunately, as I am typing this I am also keeping an eye on the battery indicator waiting for Vista to kick me out of bed and fetch the power pack.

Keep your processor working at a walking pace

Most notebooks offer power regulation software, and almost all have the ability to change profiles using the Vista power manager. Click on that battery icon on the bottom of your screen, and make sure your notebook is set to Balanced or Power Saver. High Performance is great if you are encoding video or playing games, but it makes your processor work harder than it has to, using more power and throwing out more heat.

For more tips on how to squeeze that last bit of juice out of your notebook, head on over the Tablet PC Review.

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Every now and again you come across something on YouTube that you have to have forever. Up until now you had to download the video in the, now common, .flv format. Here’s a website that allows you to add a bookmarklet to grab the video. In case you are not sure what I mean by bookmarklet, it’s essentially a link that will sit in your bookmarks that executes some JavaScript allowing you to download the video. Alternatively, you could install greasemonkey and have it do all the clicking for you.

An interesting side-effect of YouTube’s recent push for higher quality videos is that most videos can be downloaded as MP4 files directly from YouTube. Until now, you could only get FLV files from your browser’s cache or using one of the many websites that let you download YouTube videos. In fact, to download the MP4 files, you need to use the same URL like for FLV files and append “&fmt=18″:

You can find the full guide here.

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CSS can be a greatly frustrating part of your design, whether it be trying to get what you have pictured down into the actual layout or making sure it is cross browser compatible. Thankfully there are a number of tools that can help with CSS design as well as optomize it ensuring your site is not bogged down.

As a web designer/developer you must continue to find ways to reduce the time it takes to design/develop websites. This is very important to improve your productivity and to maximize your profits. The CSS Tools below, which are categorized by function, are here to save you time designing websites.

via Webtecker

COLOURlovers, the website dedicated to colours has an API that developers can use to their advantage ensuring that whatever they are working on looks as good as it should. API’s can sometimes be a dawnting challenge when it comes to understanding them, but this guide helps simply the use of the COLOURlovers API.

And if for a second you may think the business of colours sounds a bit rediculous, you should also be reminded that Adobe themselves have what can only be seen as a replica of the COLOURlovers service.

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CNET has a guide on how to GMail search like a real professional, with advanced parameters and a full explanation of how it works and what options there are. Check it out here.

The first app I open and the last one I close each workday is Gmail. Even though I use the service’s labels and filters to sort my mail, I often found myself scrolling through the 600-plus messages in my Gmail inbox to find the one I need. Then I discovered Gmail’s search operators, and my scrolling days were over.

Wanting an Invite to the new CushyCMS closed beta? Look no further than TechCrunch who’ve manged to hook up the free invite for its readers, simply enter the invite code “TECHCRUNCH” on the CushyCMS signup page.

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Every time I upgrade my Firefox 3 beta all my plugins stop working, and I’m almost always certain that there is no real reason aside from the version shift - there are no relevant changes etc.

The most critical of these is my new favourite blogging tool, Zemanta. As I’m sure you’ve noticed there have been no posts for 2 days because of this

So here’s how to force plugins to work on new versions.

Step 1: Nightly Tester Tools

Nightly Tester Tools is a plugin for Firefox (that will install) which allows you to do a few nifty things, one of which is force plugins to be compatible. Go download it now!

Step 2: Restart Firefox

This is a step on its own because it can be tricky. After installing Nightly Tester tools I had to use the Tools->Addons menu and tell it to update it and restart again to get it working. But, worry not, it is possible to use this on beta5. Do whatever it takes people.

Step 3: Use the Tool

Once you’ve got your nightly tester tools installed (you can tell as your titlebar will include a Build number), its time to enable Zemanta (or your other plugin).

Go into Tools -> Add-ons and select the extensions menu. Right click on Zemanta and choose to “Make Compatible“. Now restart Firefox; when you come back you’ll notice your Zemanta is running once again!

Step 4: Other Apps (Optional)

Note that you can do this for any plugin - be careful though because there are changes between versions. I can tell you that Zemanta runs fine on beta5; but other plugins might not - although to be honest its very unlikely in my opinion when we’re almost RC.