Archive for January, 2008
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
Here’s a good Firefox addon which allows you to take screenshots of web pages, annotate them, edit the image and save the image to a file, send it to clipboard or even email it. This addon also allows you to capture long webpages even if the page scrolls on the browser window.
FireShot is a Firefox extension that creates screenshots of web pages. Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify captures and insert text and graphical annotations. Such functionality will be especially useful for web designers, testers and content reviewers. It’s possible to choose whether entire web page or only visible part of this page should be captured. Screenshots can be saved to disk (PNG, JPEG, BMP), copied to clipboard, e-mailed and sent to external editor for further processing.
Link: Firefox Add-ons: FireShot
Posted in Software | 1 Comment »
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
Got a Nokia N82 mobile this week with a ton of features which my ol’ E61i didn’t have. The first thing which struck me was the responsiveness of the OS compared to the E61i. This phone’s got a built-in GPS receiver, a 5MP camera with Xenon flash, 2GB memory card, Wifi, TV out, FM receiver and lots more…
The GPS functionality works well with Google Maps (for mobile) and Nokia Maps. The Nokia maps software even gives you a turn by turn route to your destination. I couldn’t get Google Maps to suggest routes for Bangalore, but the the Nokia Maps software did give pretty decent results. It does miss out and plot a route through the wrong end of some new one-way roads. But it’s not too much of a bother, cos if you take another route, the software recalculates and plots another route for you.
The camera’s pretty good, with the Xenon flash, which is quite powerful. I wouldn’t be giving up my digital camera anytime soon though - cos only digital zoom is available on this mobile.
The price is around Rs. 22,000 here in Bangalore, but you’ll be able to getter a better deal if you hunt around.
One software I love on this phone is Panoman - which is a panorama capture software. I’ll post a few examples of these snaps soon on flickr.
Posted in General Stuff | 3 Comments »
Thursday, January 24th, 2008
Here’s a PHP script from Leon Chevalier which improves your page load time drastically. His compressor class improves your site’s performance by combining and minifying the css, Javascript and HTML files on the page, allowing for fewer HTTP requests and smaller sizes of these files. All you need to do is to download the class file and add the following php lines at the top of your page
require_once('class.compressor.php');
$compressor = new compressor('css,javascript,page');
and the following line of PHP code at the end of your page
$compressor->finish();
Read more about this script and see the benchmarks of this over at: Aciddrop.com| Improve website load time by 500% with 3 lines of code
Posted in PHP, Web Development | 1 Comment »
Friday, January 18th, 2008
knjPHPBcompiler is a application which compiles PHP files into Bytecode PHP files. You can use this application to byte compile all the pages of your website. This helps in speeding up the “cold” load of a PHP script on the server. This program requires bcompile which is available at php.net/bcompiler.
Link: knjPHPBcompiler Sourceforge project
Posted in PHP, Software | No Comments »
Friday, January 18th, 2008
Here’s a tutorial which shows you how to create a thumbnail of a text file using PHP and GD. It’s quite useful if you’d like to show a snippet of the text as an icon for the text file.
Link: Creating thumbs from textfiles with PHP and GD
Posted in General Stuff | No Comments »
Sunday, January 6th, 2008
Looks like Microsoft’s gone ahead and gotten a patent for Wish Lists right on New Year’s day. Here’s part of the abstract from the patent:
An electronic item list system and method, such as a wish or gift list, for an electronic shopping mall/online shopping portal, or an item list system provided as a software service. The system and method provides a user with the ability to create a list of items that the user would like others to purchase for the user as a gift or as a list of items that the user would like to retain for a later purchase.
One more reason to fight against Patents.
Source: USPTO Site
via: Techdirt
Posted in General Stuff | No Comments »
Sunday, January 6th, 2008
Here’s a cool image gallery script written in Javascript. It’s quite easy to integrate into your site. This is how the author describes ImageFlow:
ImageFlow is a picture gallery, which allows an intuitive image handling. The basic idea is to digitally animate the thumbing through a physical image stack. That intuitive handling is automatically caused by the metaphorical use of the well known process of thumbing through.
The script is compatible with the browsers on Windows, OSX and Linux:
- IE 6.0+
- Firefox 2.0.0.9+
- Opera 6.0+
- Safari 1.3.2+
- Konqueror 3.5.7
The current version of ImageFlow’s features are listed below :
- Supports most image formats
- Supports large amounts of images (>100)
- 100% JavaScript
- Scroll bar
- Mouse wheel support
- Arrow-key support
- Loading bar
- Captions
- Supports image links
- Scales 100% dynamically
- Implemented using div Tags
Links:
Download ImageFlow 0.8
ImageFlow Demo
ImageFlow Documentation
Posted in Ajax, Javascript | No Comments »
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008
If you’d like to get help on PHP commands without having to fire up your browser, here’s something which you may like. In Ubuntu/Debian systems you can install phpm, which is a command line PHP help utility.
The installation instructions are available at: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/11/28/php-manual-cli-style-20/
Posted in PHP, Software | 1 Comment »
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008
Here’s a site I came across, which has a boat load of links to Open Source software. The list is divided into various categories to ease your search. So if you’re looking for open source tools to get work done, check this one out first.
Link: Open Source Living
Posted in Sites, Software | No Comments »
