Alpha 2 Beta

Firefox3 Beta1 is ready for download

2007-11-29T14:38:00.000-08:00

Whilst surfing the net yesterday I found out that the new Firefox3 Beta1 is ready for download. Off I trotted and downloaded the Beta. My first impressions, as expected from Mozilla, were good to great. It's not yet a complete package but it certainly adds some welcomed functionality.

Increased security
Easier to use
Easier to personalise
An improved platform for developers
and improved performance

The full release notes can be read on the Mozilla website and a detailed list of all Firefox 3 changes with their bug numbers can be found on the Burning Edge website.

Firefox 3 may not be suited to all users yet, but for those of you who are prepared to become a part of the developement and improvement of the latest and greatest browser of all time, I am a little biased :), should really download Firefox3 Beta1 and start giving your feedback.

The games are about to begin and beta testing has started

2007-11-29T04:43:00.000-08:00

Some time back now, I came across a site that was offering an opportunity that just couldn't be sniffed at, in actual fact it seemed to me to be one of the best online ideas I had seen for a long time so I signed myself up and got my very own piece of the action.

I was excited, this was my chance to be part of a growing business at an early stage of development that has the potential of going global, and when I say global I mean GLOBAL!

Here's a quote from the uVme site:

uVme is a fast-moving and unique business that combines three of the most exciting phenomena on the internet: ONLINE GAMES, SOCIAL NETWORKING WITH INSTANT LIVE COMMUNICATION, and Social Marketing. This market is so powerful, it’s growing four times faster than the Internet. It’s NEW, VIBRANT, DYNAMIC, and above all else, it’s FUN.

The online games business, although already massive, is extra special right now because of the timing. Timing is critical in business, and this market is emerging as the next evolutionary step in online entertainment.

It's about to explode.
The market today (2007) is approximately worth $164 USD per second ($5.2 billion USD annually), and in the next 156 weeks is expected to grow to $412 USD per second – of every minute of every day, and growing.

Now to the crunch. The uVme games are just about to begin and beta testing has started and I am looking for three strong team players to join me each week and to become a part of the boom. If you interested in joining me, all you have to do is register for uVme and I'll see you there.

GTD - Things is in Alpa

2007-11-24T04:40:00.000-08:00

I signed up to the Things News Letter sometine back and received an email yesterday announcing that Alpha testing of Things is in full flow, and that those that signed or sign up for the Newsletter will soon receive an invite to try out the Beta version.

Aaron Ross Powell has written a good review about Things over at Newsvine, the post is well worth checking out!

For a first look at Things, there's a great Screen Cast of Things from Ian Beck from Tagamac, the screen cast covers all the main points of Things. All in all it looks like Things should be able to help those with a scattered mind to start to Get Things Done.

Image editing made easy

2007-09-26T09:42:00.000-07:00

I signed up some time back to an email alert for an app called Pixelmator and I received my email today, with a link to the latest download.

Uploaded with Skitch!

Sure enough I downloaded and installed the latest version of the app. This is what the artistic mac fanatic has been waiting for, this app will surely make even more of an impact than ever. It has a sweet looking GUI with transparent tool palettes and all the tools any good vector artist could want.

I am far from being an artist, so I won't offend those who are by posting some sort of doodle, instead I took the photo of the flowers I use in my header on this blog and gave it the kaleidoscope effect and Heh presto!

I know, what is that you ask. Well that is just the first effect I tried and nothing more than that, take a look to see for yourself, image editing made even easy than ever!

Strictly CSS templates

2007-09-26T08:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was pointed towards a site called free css templates and as inquisitive as I am I had to take a look. As is often the case with sites like these, I expected to find 'some boring old templates' but to my surprise I was welcomed to a site with fresh, clean, mean, CSS based templates that were all valid xhtml strict.
The designer has painstakingly taken the time to produce these templates and in my opinion some of these are works of art!

These were the first three thumbnails on the site when I looked
| |

When you reach the site you will read that all templates have been released FREELY under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license, and the templates themselves are very lightweight in terms of images, are table-free (ie. they use no tables for layout purposes), they are all W3C standards compliant and valid (XHTML Strict) and are provided with public domain photos, generously provided by PDPhoto.org and Wikimedia Commons

All of the templates are free so what are you waiting for, get downloading!!!

But dont forget to put a link back to the site.

www. free css templates .org

Alerting all code demons

2007-09-25T12:49:00.000-07:00

This is an alert to all code demons who admire semantic coding at it's best. I stumbled upon a beauty of a site desribing a way to make buttons that scale both horizontally as well as vertically with the minimum of coding, don't believe me take a look at these beautiful buttons
See what I mean this is coding at it's very best! clean code that degrades in legacy browsers.

Who could ask for more?
Well there is more, the same guy has also taken the time to write another breath taking tutorial desribing a way to create even text display across all browsers.
Here is a link to the blog post that describes Tripoli in more detail. ENJOY!

Look in to your web cam to leave a comment...

2007-09-07T18:38:00.000-07:00

Well this one I found about ten minutes ago, it's a video commenting sytem that looks pretty cool to me.

I haven't tested this little baby out yet, I thought I would leave that up to you.

GET YOUR OWN BLIPBACK!

Editing Photos Web 2 Style is a Picnik

2007-08-01T07:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I came across this little app whilst rolling around the Google Code Blogspot.

A new Web 2 app that makes online photo editing possible. The app uses the Picasa Web Albums Data API and looked pretty cool to me, so being the inquisitive type I went ahead and created an account at Picnik.com.

Starting the Picnik app took a little time, but heh there was some Web 2 magic happening in the background somewhere. Once logged in, I was welcomed by a similar clean and straightforward layout as the home page, the only difference was that the page was flash not html. The instructions on how to allow Picnik to access my Picassa account and to start editing my images were clear, and I started at this point to wonder whether this was all too good to be true.

I shouldn't have been worried though! The process of editing my photos was easy, the app performed flawlessly, and at the end of the editing process I was offered the option to save my edited photo back to Picassa or to save and delete the original.

I choose to save the edited photos back to Picassa and to delete the original image. The app seemed to save the image ok and overwrite the other but on inspection at Picassa, I noticed that my crops were visible in the thumnail preview window but the originals had remained the same, I am sure this is just an oversight on behalf of the developer and will soon be fixed (I will keep you posted on this one).

All in all, Picnik is a great app and does exactly what it says it will do and at times it's hard to believe all this is happening online in real time.

Editing photos web 2 style really is a Picnik.

A quick edit of a glowing candle

The original unedited version

Photo Drop for quick and easy effects

2007-07-30T08:15:00.000-07:00

I was taking a look earlier today at some of the widgets I have installed on my mac, when it dawned on me that I had a widget that made it pretty easy to make "push pin stickups", for use of a better description.

Here's the type of thing I mean:

They're pretty easy to make really, all you need is a mac running 10.4 or later and the photo drop widget. You can download the photo drop widget from here , use your creative flair, don't be scared it really is pretty easy.

These are the steps I took to make the one above;

Download the Widget
Place the widget on the dashboard
Close the dashboard by hitting F12
Open a finder window and choose your photo file, you wish to edit
Click the photo and begin to drag it
Hit F12 whilst still dragging the photo
Drop the photo file on to the Photo Drop Widget
Click the i sign on the widget, the widget will flip and you can choose your options (I used the push pin effect)
Click done and the widget will flip back over
Click done again and either choose to copy to clipboard or save to the dektop.

That's it, you have a push pin stickup of yourself that you can place on forums or blogs or where ever you may need it.

Just in case you were wondering where I found this, it was published on the apple site back in April, you can read about the drop photo widget on the apple site or alternatively you can go to the developers site, dropping.inc.

Extra Skitch Invites

2007-07-25T10:24:00.000-07:00

I ran out of invites for skitch, so wrote an email to Plasq asking for more. Mark replied straight away and was kind enough to send me some more, so if you need an invite to skitch let me know...

Skitch Invites

2007-07-10T13:07:00.000-07:00

Skitch, from Plasq, is one of those mac apps that you just shouldn't be without. Once you start using skitch, whether for collaboration or just for fun, you will wonder how you ever managed without it! Skitch really is intuitive, don't just take my word for it, take a look at the video below and you will see what I mean.

Skitch is presently, a limited beta, and I have five invites to give away.

If you would like an invite to skitch, leave a comment on this post explaining why you would like one and I will send out invites for skitch to those that leave the most original comments.