Tag Archives: google

Sepo11

Christian Decker

0

Hacking iUI

Joe Hewitt‘s iUI is just great. As long as you do standard stuff…

I’ve been working on a small application based on the iUI Framework for some time now, and I hope to release it soon. So far iUI was working fine for me and I managed to squeeze everything into the limited functionality it provided me. But now, just like the iUI Author, I’m getting a bit bored by the “standard iPhone look” so I’m trying to find new, innovative, ways of adding functionality. Sliding from left to right and from right to left is cool, as long as you don’t have to see it over and over again, it’s time for some cool new stuff, that might not already exist in iPhone-land. I’m currently experimenting with scriptaculous to add some effects and I’m also trying to get some inplace editing to run smoothly.

Callbacks from iUI
iUI dictates some default behaviour when clicking on something, be it a link or a form button, even adding additional callbacks won’t prevent iUI from reacting. Wouldn’t it be nice to add callbacks directly into iUI, in a declarative way, so we don’t have to hack around too much?

Edit in place
Many have already forgotten about this nice thing: you have something displayed somewhere, you click on it, and can edit it, without having to load an extra page, maybe loosing the context. With the above mentioned callbacks this shouldn’t be too hard to realize.

iUI for everybody
Maybe it’s just me but limiting my application to the iPhone is a bit… restrictive, isn’t it? I noticed that iUI applications actually are great for start pages, such as iGoogle, Netvibes and similar. By making a Netvibes module you even allow users to add it to the Mac OS X Dashboard or the Vista Widget engine. So making iUI compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox would be a source for new users (well ok Firefox already works with some minor bugs, not much to do here…)

Well these are just a few ideas I had while developing with iUI, what about you?

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Augo23

Christian Decker

1

9 must have Firefox Extensions

Firefox is certainly one of the best browsers to browse the Web, but out of factory it is lacking some features I really like, luckily there are a variety of extensions that provide just that functionality. These are the extensions no one should miss:

  • AdBlock PlusAdBlock Plus:Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now and get rid of them. After installing it you will be asked which blocklist to download, after which you will see far less advertisements.
  • All-in-one-Sidebar: we all hate popups, they are annoying, catch our attention right when we were reading something and did I mention that they are annoying? But what about the browsers own popups, when a download starts, to manage the bookmarks, extensions, themes and the like? We want to see them but we don’t want them to jump in our face. This is what All-in-one sidebar does, it puts all the stuff that would usually require an extra window in the sidebar.
  • Download StatusbarDownload Statusbar: as mentioned above we don’t want download popups all over our desktop, yet we want to see when a download finishes. Download Statusbar puts all the needed information (and even more) into the status bar, where it is visible, but not annoying.
  • FirebugFirebug: Firebug is probrably the best extension for Web developers ever. It is unobtrusive yet powerfull, with it’s DOM-Inspector, HTML-Inspector, Javascript Console, JavaScript debugger, it even allows you to tweak the CSS on the fly and for those worried about the last millisecond in loading times it has a network monitor that tells you exactly when an element started loading, how long it took and how big it was. I don’t know how I survived without Firebug for so long.
  • Fission (Firefox Extension)Fission: actually just a visual gadget that displays the loadstatus in the address bar instead of the statusbar on the bottom. I really love this unobtrusive little piece that was borrowed from Safari. With this little png it looks even more like Safari
  • Gmail Manager: I love GMail, this is no secret, but I’m not one of those that keep a browser tab open for it, yet I want to know immediately when new messages have arrived. GMail Manager allows you to monitor multiple accounts in the statusbar, when hovering over the icon it even shows you the subjects and a short extract of the mails. This is an absolute must have for all GMail lovers!
  • Google Browser Sync:Using Firefox on different machines I’d really like to have the passwords, bookmarks and sessions across all of my Browsers, and right then Google Browser Sync comes along: Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.
  • GreasemonkeyGreasemonkey: Sometimes single sites don’t have all the features that would be nice to have and that’s about it what Greasemonkey does. Greasemonkey allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. Hundreds of scripts, for a wide variety of poular sites, are already available at http://userscripts.org. You can write your own scripts, too. Mark Pilgrim’s definitive Greasemonkey guide, diveintogreasemonkey.org will show you how.
  • Secure Login: A login extension similar to Opera’s Wand login. It uses the built-in password manager, but deactivates the prefilling of login forms. Instead, you are now able to login with one click or a keyboard shortcut (ALT+N – changeable via settings). Just add the Secure Login toolbar button to your toolbar, or use the provided statusbar icon.

With these FireFox should get even more usefull, becoming a true allrounder and great productivity tool.
What about you? What are your favorite extensions?

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Juno06

Christian Decker

0

Google Gears, my two cents

I know it’s a bit late to unveil the news that Google has published yet another great tool to you, since you’ll probably already heard it about ten times until now (2 days too late and it’s old news, I sometimes hate the internet…). Now all of you (probably no one at all) will be waiting for my personal point of view in this matter. At first I was pretty excited (hell I even made about 10 screenshots just to show them in my next blog post), and even more when I found out that Google Gears is already used in a bunch on non-Google applications too (RememberTheMilk being my personal favorite for now). But the excitement soon wore off, sure taking my stuff offline and being able to manipulate my wonderful Ajaxified applications is a great proof of concept, but when will I ever use it? What I mean by this is that, yes you can take the data offline, but you can’t yet take the interface offline, so you have to open the application, synchronize your data to use it offline, then switch to offline mode (which basically means you put your Notebook in suspend mode, and then resume when you don’t have network (think Plane), don’t ever even think about closing your browser because you won’t be able to get back! And what’s even worse you can’t access linked information either, which is bad since I really enjoy having some flick(r) through my Flickr-Feeds and look what my friends and contacts did last weekend.

My verdict: really impressive stuff, but please make something similar to load pages/interfaces from the cache.

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Juno02

Christian Decker

1

Google punishes Link Exchange?

Over at the german Forenblogger Google seems to be actively punishing Pages that sell links:

Google is undeniably one of the most widely used Search Engines, in Germany it has a market share of 90%. The financing scheme of Google is well known: it primarily relies on Advertising.

Now it starts to be interesting: Google apparently doesn’t like it too much if you sell Links (see post by Mac Cutts: how to report paid links). The reason should be clear: paid links influence Googles Pagerank and therefore the quality of the search results. So Google started punishing Link-Sellers and -Buyers (Internetmarketing-News, David Naylor).

The question therefore is: doesn’t Google misuse it’s Marketposition? [...] It’s a legitimate way of advertising. If Google now starts downranking pages that use this kind of advertisements it’s a clear misuse, because it means that you’re only allowed to use Google Adsense as the only way of advertising that doesn’t imply getting downranked by Google.

It’s quite an extreme point of view but I have to (partly) agree, Google does have a point for trying to keep search results good, but isn’t there another way than to punish other means of advertising?

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Mayo02

Christian Decker

0

Google Homepage becomes iGoogle

For some time now I have been wondering what the ig in the URL of the Google Homepage (http://www.google.com/ig) was standing for. Now we know: it’s iGoogle. Apparently Google has won the battle against the i-people at Apple ;-)
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