First, what the <insert explative here> happened to Facebook? Then, the best little budgeting tool you’ve ever seen (unless you’ve already seen it). And, finally, an easy JavaScript dock menu for you. If you like what you see, keep your eyes on the page.
- Okay. I wanna know. I wanna know what focus group was picked to review the new Facebook and its usefulness. And I wanna know now. Here’s my problem. Or rather, here’s their problem. As of now, Facebook looks like the script kiddie who lives in his parent’s basement munchin’ on cheetos while he plots to take over the Internet. This time last year, they were the professional company with efficiency and connectivity in mind. In other words, they took a step backwards.But, of course, you know what I mean. The Home Page. Sucks. First of all, we’ve gone from Live to hitting F5 to refresh the page every 10 seconds. What the hell is that? Pardon the French, but how does “getting the AJAX out” compute with Facebook? In the words of the great Bill O’Reilly, “DO IT LIVE!”
More Home Page woes: they’ve decided to compartmentalize everything. Wall posts look like status updates. And the worst part has to be the news feed is definitely not the full feed. In the greatest part of the old Facebook was the Live Feed (Log Mode). You see everything in a list. Easy to scan and see what you want to find/comment on/like. The best part is the filtering. That should have been a pre-req of the last home page. Filtering makes it easy to see wall posts, added friends, status updates. But, like I said, the greatest part is that I’m missing stuff </sarcasm>. Why am I missing stuff?
The T&C (Terms & Conditions) of a regular “company” now exists as “Rules & Responsibilities” over at Facebook. Who is running this company? A bunch of socialists? I don’t want a set of Rules. I want the Terms by which I can use your damn service. Strap on a pair.
- Mint.com brings all things money to your fingertips. You have bank accounts, 401Ks, IRAs, and even credit cards. So, why not have them all in the same place? At Mint.com you can. I was able to get logged in to my Citizens Bank account, my CitiCard credit cards, and even my Sallie Mae student loans.
The fun doesn’t stop there. Once you set up your accounts, you can also add assets like real estate, vehicles or other valuable property. Then, Mint gives you over to your home page, which is basically a budget tool for managing how much you spend a month. It takes credit card purchases, categorizes them, and then you can set budgets on categories. You can also take a look at spending trends over a period of time.
- JavaScript downloads are a dime a dozen these days. But, I found a couple I would enjoy using over and over. Here’s one such menu that I enjoy using:
Webber 2.0 Dock Menu
I’ve taken the liberty of implementing it on the new Final Edge website.
This awesome little piece of JavaScript just tweens the dock up and down based on where your mouse is on the page (onmouseovers). Just take a look on the author’s site for intructions on how to implement it.
Hope that was interesting for you. I haven’t been here in a while, and all three things happened about the same time, so I had to give them some equal reporting on.
The newest edition to my technical arsenal is the iPhone. Though it is a long time coming and many say it’s overrated, my suspicions of its usefulness were not disappointed.
The apps give you complete control. And with the Internet wherever you go, you never miss a beat. I’ve been able to find the nearest ihop at 12:30 at night, have their phone number, and call them to find out if they are open 24 hours. Today I was sent a text in Spanish. In 2 minutes, I had a translator app, figured out what the text said, and responded in Spanish. Tell me you can find me something better.
I have only 4 quarrels with it: you can’t run multiple apps at a time, there is no removable memory, you have to own a Mac (or hackintosh) to develop apps for it, and the battery life isn’t great.
Many people have complained about the typing on it. Hands down, the easiest typing ever. If my fat fingers can type on it with no trouble, then it’s not a problem. The autocorrect feature easily fixes any mistakes you may have committed.
There you have it. I’ve made my way into the smartphone world and it rocks. Signing off from my iPhone, goodnight.
In the most recent project for Final Edge Computing, we wanted to easily parse some astronomy RSS feeds from APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) and Sky & Telescope. So, after googling a bit for a PHP framework that would fit my needs I came across SimplePie.
SimplePie makes dealing with a feed amazingly easy. SimplePie is just one include file which is a class built to handle RSS feeds using PHP’s various XML extensions. The class itself is very long (347KB), and yet full of a lot of useful functions dealing with RSS. Before uploading SimplePie to your server, though, make sure you meet its minimum requirements.
SimplePie’s constructor is so easy to use, in fact, all you have to do is call the constructor with 2 parameters: the feed’s URL, and where you are putting cache.
<?php
$apod = new SimplePie("http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod.rss", "./simplepie/cache");
?>
From here it’s really easy to manipulate the feeds items.
<div class="RSS_Header">
<div class="header_title"><a href="<?php echo $apod->get_permalink();?>"><?php echo $apod->get_title(); ?></a></div>
<span style="font-size:9px; color:#999999;"><?php echo $apod->get_description(); ?></span>
</div>
<?php foreach ($apod->get_items(0, 5) as $item): ?>
<div class="RSS_item">
<div class="title"><a href="<?php echo $item->get_permalink(); ?>"><?php echo $item->get_title(); ?></a></div>
<?php echo $item->get_description(); ?>
</div>
<?php endforeach; ?>
<div style="padding:12px 0px;"><a href="<?php echo $apod->subscribe_feed(); ?>">Subscribe to the APOD feed</a></div>
Just wanted to throw this out there as a really easy way of dealing with RSS. I’m definitely going to continue using this on future projects.
Just as we were all getting used to that crazy “ribbon” Microsoft decided to fashion into our latest version of Microsoft Office, here comes a new Office for the year 2010. According to Lifehacker, they are planning on bringing Office to your web browser this time, which is sure to screw even more people up than when 2007 was released. Though I’m not a huge fan of 07 because it did rearrange A LOT, I could get on board with a web based version which could mean easier updates and less hassle of install/reinstall/uninstall.
Apple has pulled a quick one on the entire Internet community and are setting iTunes to go completely DRM Free. You got it. No more “only 5 computers are authorized” crap. We now get AAC files that can play on any device (as long as the device supports the codec and AAC filetype). Most songs are available now with iTunes going completely DRM free by April 2009.
There also is the option right now to upgrade your iTunes library to DRM Free “iTunes Plus” music. If you go to the iTunes Store from iTunes, and click the link on the right “Upgrade My Library to iTunes Plus,” you are directed to a page where you can pay $.30 a song to upgrade. If you have been collecting iTunes music for a while, this is going to cost you. I paid $21 to upgrade 94 songs. But in the end, being DRM free is just worth it.
The price structure will also change. This was perfect timing too. Apple has been trying to find a way to deal with the increase delivered by the Copyright Royalty Board. From the blog over at Wired,
As part of their general muscle-flexing of late, music publishers asked the board to increase the royalties paid to publishers and songwriters for the sale of digital downloads from 9 cents to 15 cents per song.
Though I won’t speculate about what happened behind closed doors, I would assume that the new pricing structure is to deal with the 6 cent increase on songs. Instead of passing the increase directly onto the iTunes store as a whole, which would make songs $1.05, they have decided to charge for a song based on its popularity.
More popular songs will be $1.29, moderately popular will be $.99, and not very popular at $.69. My guess here is that their profit comes from the top two lines of popularity making up for the songs that sell for close to no profit at $.69. Though I would still rather find a highly popular song at Amazon for $.99 than $1.29, Apple is headed in the right direction (as opposed to shutting down the iTunes store altogether which was threatened back in October).
