Looking for New & Exciting Technologies
From consumerist.com comes this article which goes into a full review of the changes and value of purchasing the Geek Squad PC Optimization package when you purchase a new computer at Best Buy. The article describes the steps taken and the results compared to buying an un-optimized computer.
It’s kind-of a long read, but the detail it provides is rather eye opening.
I came across Last.fm last week or so. It allows you to play music for free. There are apps for iPhone and Android so you can listen via those devices also. But you define your favorite artists across different genres and Last.fm will provide recommendations of music you might like. For example, if you make one of your preferred artists say Trace Adkins, there is a link called “Listen to Trace Adkins Radio”
While looking to see if I could find some kind of emulator for mobile browsers I came across BrowserShots.org. This is a tool which allows you to select browser versions to test your website with. Once the test is done screen shots of the results are published on a web page that you can look at and then download all the screen shots. It takes a little while to run, but it seems to do what it advertises.
Today Bob Balfe posted about his top 10 Open Source developer tools, so I thought I would follow suit. Here are my top 10 open source developer tools not in any particular order:
In an LA Times article Google states
We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites
We’re continuing to support Gears so that nothing breaks for sites that use it.
I downloaded the Chrome OS image the other day and started playing around with Chrome OS. I installed the image into Virtual Box and it runs fine, I wasn’t so lucky with Parallels. So far, the OS is very minimal, not really a whole lot to play with. It’s basically just the Chrome browser running everything. If you close all the browser tabs, it relaunches the browser. The OS itself is very clean looking and minimalistic,
From Lifehacker today they outline the new Google Maps with turn by turn navigation which will be available on all Android powered phones. This is really cool and should help me find my way quite nicely. If it works as well as shown in the video then it’ll be better than the built in GPS in my Wife’s vehicle, as long as you stay in a service area for your phone I assume.
From LifeHacker :
Over the weekend someone stumbled onto a Chrome browser build for Chrome OS on Google’s servers. We’ve seen several false-alarm looks at Chrome OS, and while it is only the browser, it provides a glimpse into the direction Google’s going.
the Chrome browser would likely be the main, basic windowing system for Chrome OS.
Here’s the link for the entire post. I thought this was interesting,
While working on a request for a customer the other day he had the need for a drop down menu in one of the products I developed for him. Now, I’ve attempted to do these menus before without much success. I can get it to work in Firefox, Opera and Safari with no problems, but can never get it to work in IE. So, I started searching the web and came across the CSS Menu Generator.
I had been looking for a different software keyboard for my new Android powered phone I spoke about the other day. As I mentioned, the delete key was giving me some problems, actually all the keys along the edge of the screen were giving me issues, which is why I was looking for a replacement keyboard. I just happened across TouchPal while browsing the market and I started reading about it.