The procedure of working with Muse is very simple and lucid. While using Muse and creating a webpage, a designer can make use of familiar software and tools such as Photoshop, Fireworks, PageMaker and so on. Even .PSD files can be imported to Muse. Moreover, operating Muse is extremely web friendly. There are drag and drop boxes in the manner of flowcharts. Designers can put videos, pictures, interactive web content in these spaces with the option of ‘insert HTML’. The layout of the webpage of Muse is exactly the same as other Adobe’s software; hence, it would not be a difficulty for users to operate it.

Muse has been very beautifully designed and structured. There are four parts into which the functionality of Muse has been divided; they are, plan view, design view, preview view and publish view. Following these four short steps, a person can launch its own personalized website. With Plan View, the user can select the hierarchy of the web pages; design view enables the users to design their web pages, which includes customization of the templates and addition of content to the website. Finally, Preview shows how the whole website will look in the browser and Publish helps you in publishing that webpage.

There are some other interesting features as well. Various other applications such as Google maps, images, you tube videos, can be merged and embedded with Muse. These are done through HTML codes. Muse can be accessed from most of the common browsers like internet explorer, goggle chrome, Firefox and others.

Until version 1 is released, Muse will be available as a public beta. It is most likely to be released in 2012. After that prices will be charged, the details of which are available in the official site. Muse will be perfect for those who want to create a static website, like a wedding website or a small business site, in which information need not be altered regularly. Since for the first year it is free, it is an attractive offer for designers who are planning to create and launch their web pages. Muse has made a tutorial page for beginners to sharpen their skill before working with this site.

Thus, Adobe has done a commendable job in launching this new tool or software, which has become a milestone in the history of website designing and creation. It has attracted many designers all around the world and since it is free now, it is the most suitable time to create your own webpage.

Zynga is a widely popular game maker on Facebook which has under its banner, such trendy games like the Farmville, CityVille, Mafia Wars and Frontier Ville. This is a step in which Zynga will follow LinkedIn which is the world’s largest site for professional networking. LinkedIn has shown wonderful results last week after it has filed IPO. Recently even the web search giant of Russia named Yandex has made a whopping profit on Tuesday, the 24^th of May. Moreover, the plan for Zynga’s filing an IPO has been in the charts for a year, so this move seems quite expected.

An estimate already shows Zynga’s worth as on May 2011, to be $10 billion, again the post IPO success could therefore increase the game giant’s market value significantly or expectedly double its value, like the IPO did to the valuation of LinkedIn. Investors are too keen to put in money on the social networking sites especially Groupon and Facebook and other internet companies. Given the popularity of Zynga for its online gaming on Facebook, investors are eager to spend their money on it, expecting a huge turn over. Therefore, this could be called quite a profitable move for Zynga.

According to what the company claims, it has 250 million active gamers per month. Zynga’s original game of Poker still attracts as many as 35 million players; the game that is presently highest on the cards is CityVille, which reportedly has 90 million users for it as reported by AppData. These statistics prove that Zynga leads its nearest competitor, the second, most popular game developer by six times.

Last month, Zynga had hired John Schappert who had been the previous COO of Electronic Arts to hold a senior post in their company. They have also had meetings with the people who represent the Goldman Sachs (GS) and the Morgan Stanley group. Thus, they have had talks for their next task of opting for bankers to fund them as well as assist in the preparation of the regulations for the filing.

Therefore, the post IPO Zynga will supposedly bring about a hugely profitable business for the investors and both the company and the shareholders are keenly awaiting this move. Moreover, off late, Zynga has also been increasing its assets keeping this plan in mind.

Let’s wait & watch the fairytale story of Zynga!

RewardVille is supposed to “delight” players by rewarding them with points that help you to move to various Zynga levels. It also provides the users with exclusive limited-edition virtual items. One of the cool factors of the application is that it is integrable with Zynga’s various social platform games. For instance, you can get assistance from your fellow Farmville, CityVille, Mafia Wars and Zynga poker players. You can also send and receive something called “Mystery Gifts” and additional zPoints and zCoins using the cross-game application. You earn zPoints for playing any of the following games - Café World, CityVille, FarmVille, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars, PetVille, Treasure Isle, YoVille, Vampire Wars and Zynga Poker. As your zlevel increases you are awarded with zCoins which can be redeemed in RewardVille for in-game items. Redemption of zCoins requires a registered Zynga account while zPoints can be earned by anyone who plays any of the Zynga games.

Now doesn’t all this sound addictive? Yes it is, indeed!

What changes can you expect? Well a lot! First of all, there will be a great boost in the addiction level of game addicts. Not to mention, hours will increase substantially where players are kind of locked inside a motivating game where every stage encourages them to move ahead by providing them with rewards. Since it is all connected to Facebook everyone can expect loads of notifications and requests about joining the games, gift transactions, requesting specific help and so on. Youngsters will make their parent pay huge bills for sure. Not to mention, there will be a rise in the number of un-authorized in-game purchases and other transactions.

Leaving that aside, we should note the this game has been useful for some relief fund. Yes, the developers made the virtual items available for purchase and said that 100% will be donated to support the rescue and relief operations in Japan due to Tsunami and earthquake. So, there you see, the good cause. Zynga has earlier raised over $6.8 million for other groups including UN World Food Programme and Water that were providing relief to people affected by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Zynga has over 200 million monthly users of all its games and one million users who purchase the virtual items. With this huge number, Zynga stands to be the largest game designer and the fastest growing company. The gaming freak in you should for once say – Hail Zynga !!

“We love open source; We have worked with open source for a long time now” says Jean Paoli of Microsoft in a recent interview with Network World.

The mistake of equating all open source technology with Linux was “really very early on“, Paoli says. “That was really a long time ago“, he says. Further, he adds – “We understand our mistake“.

You realize one mistake and you dive head long into yet another by banning apps involving any open source licensing from its Windows Phone Marketplace.  Section 5.e of the Microsoft Application Provider Agreement reads as - The Application must not include software, documentation, or other materials that, in whole or in part, are governed by or subject to an Excluded License, or that would otherwise cause the Application to be subject to the terms of an Excluded License.

‘Excluded License’ incorporates the GPLv3, LGPLv3, Affero GPLv3 license and equivalents, or pretty much “any license that requires redistribution at no charge,” as open source evangelist Jan Wildeboer pointed out in February.

This clause will hamper Microsoft’s reputation with the free and open source developers. This ban means Windows phone platform will lose out on great apps like VLC, just like Apple did, with its parsimonious control over its Apps Store.

Apple and Microsoft do not have means to make source code for applications directly available. They also have a DRM lock which prevents the binary being passed onto another user, on all applications. Developers work around this handicap by making the software available under a dual license, GPL and proprietary.

Microsoft has not been an instant hit in the mobile arena, and hence has partnered with Nokia to achieve greater success. This might raise the product’s marketability, but the quality will be tested by its users, and that possibility seems grim now. Excluding open source applications cannot be seen as a smart move for Microsoft, especially when launching a new product.

Rather than being fastidious about what to include or not, it should focus on inclusivity and adjustment, so as to compete with the enormous success of the Android.  Interoperability among many technologies, which often involves integration with open source software, is what customers are demanding.

Microsoft has a “shared responsibility”, and not one single Head, of overseeing open source initiatives, which is a major reason for the setbacks. In an era when Microsoft is no longer the world’s most important tech company – that title, calculated by stock performance, is now held by Apple; Steve Ballmer can’t afford to ignore a market force as large as the one posed by open source.

Google has released a Web Application Security Scanner over at Google Code. This can be used to scan you site for possible security issues which might be lurking around. Skipfish prepares an interactive site-map for the targeted site by carrying out a recursive crawl and dictionary-based probes.

This scanner is easy to setup on an Ubuntu machine. You’ll need to have the packages for gcc and make installed on your system in order to compile Skipfish from it’s sources. Once you install these, download the Skipfish package from the project download page. Once you download it, unzip the files to a folder of it’s own and head over to that folder in your terminal window and issue a make command by just entering this in the terminal.

make

After the package compiles you can test to see if it was successful by issuing the following command in the terminal

./skipfish -h

This should show you a the Skipfish help screen. If you don’t get that, check the make output to see if there were any errors during the compile process.

Once you get Skipfish compiled and ready on your system, head over to their documentation pages to learn more on how to use this to tool to scan your site.

This tool creates a html report of the scan in the output directory you specify and the output looks like this:

Skipfish has a highly optimized HTTP handling which allows you to achieve up to 2000 requests per second on servers which can take that load. It also doesn’t depend on the technology you use to host and build your web application.

If you’re interested in what types of scans are currently implemented on this tool, here’s what it supports (from their documentation page):

• High risk flaws (potentially leading to system compromise):
  • Server-side SQL injection (including blind vectors, numerical parameters).
  • Explicit SQL-like syntax in GET or POST parameters.
  • Server-side shell command injection (including blind vectors).
  • Server-side XML / XPath injection (including blind vectors).
  • Format string vulnerabilities.
  • Integer overflow vulnerabilities.

• Medium risk flaws (potentially leading to data compromise)
  • Stored and reflected XSS vectors in document body (minimal JS XSS support present).
  • Stored and reflected XSS vectors via HTTP redirects.
  • Stored and reflected XSS vectors via HTTP header splitting.
  • Directory traversal (including constrained vectors).
  • Assorted file POIs (server-side sources, configs, etc).
  • Attacker-supplied script and CSS inclusion vectors (stored and reflected).
  • External untrusted script and CSS inclusion vectors.
  • Mixed content problems on script and CSS resources (optional).
  • Incorrect or missing MIME types on renderables.
  • Generic MIME types on renderables.
  • Incorrect or missing charsets on renderables.
  • Conflicting MIME / charset info on renderables.
  • Bad caching directives on cookie setting responses.

• Low risk issues (limited impact or low specificity):
  • Directory listing bypass vectors.
  • Redirection to attacker-supplied URLs (stored and reflected).
  • Attacker-supplied embedded content (stored and reflected).
  • External untrusted embedded content.
  • Mixed content on non-scriptable subresources (optional).
  • HTTP credentials in URLs.
  • Expired or not-yet-valid SSL certificates.
  • HTML forms with no XSRF protection.
  • Self-signed SSL certificates.
  • SSL certificate host name mismatches.
  • Bad caching directives on less sensitive content.

• Internal warnings:
  • Failed resource fetch attempts.
  • Exceeded crawl limits.
  • Failed 404 behavior checks.
  • IPS filtering detected.
  • Unexpected response variations.
  • Seemingly misclassified crawl nodes.

• Non-specific informational entries:
  • General SSL certificate information.
  • Significantly changing HTTP cookies.
  • Changing Server, Via, or X-... headers.
  • New 404 signatures.
  • Resources that cannot be accessed.
  • Resources requiring HTTP authentication.
  • Broken links.
  • Server errors.
  • All external links not classified otherwise (optional).
  • All external e-mails (optional).
  • All external URL redirectors (optional).
  • Links to unknown protocols.
  • Form fields that could not be autocompleted.
  • All HTML forms detected.
  • Password entry forms (for external brute-force).
  • Numerical file names (for external brute-force).
  • User-supplied links otherwise rendered on a page.
  • Incorrect or missing MIME type on less significant content.
  • Generic MIME type on less significant content.
  • Incorrect or missing charset on less significant content.
  • Conflicting MIME / charset information on less significant content.
  • OGNL-like parameter passing conventions.

You can get more information about Skipfish and download it from their project site on Google Code.

Links:
Skipfish Project on Google Code
Skipfish Documentation
Skipfish Downloads

• File format: MP4 and MKV
• Video: MPEG-4, H.264, or Theora
• Audio: AAC, CoreAudio AAC (OS X Only), MP3, or Vorbis. AC-3 pass-through, DTS pass-thorugh (MKV only)

To install Handbrake you can either download the deb installer for Ubuntu from their download page. You can also add this to your apt sources so you get updates to the program automatically. To do this, type in the following into the terminal (works in Karmic)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:handbrake-ubuntu/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk

For more information on Handbrake, head over to their site handbrake.fr.

via WebDevOnLinux

If you’re using Linux as your primary OS, here’s a useful too to check for broken links on your websites. gURLChecker is a simple tool to check for broken links on any website. It can work on a whole site, a single local page or a browser bookmarks file.
If you’re using Ubuntu, it’s quite easy to install this tool, just head over to your Terminal and run the following command:

sudo apt-get install gurlchecker

Once the application is installed, you should be able to access it from Menu>Internet>gurlchecker

If you’re on another version of Linux, you can build from sources. Here’s how you can build gurlchecker for other version of linux by downloading the source from their svn:

svn co svn://labs.libre-entreprise.org/svnroot/gurlchecker/branches/stable
cd stable/
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
make
su -c "make install"
/usr/bin/gurlchecker

You can learn more about this software over at the project page at: gurlchecker.labs.libre-entreprise.org/

Here’s a chance for you all to win a free license for Gravity, a native S60 Twitter client with a really slick interface. MyNokiaWorld is holding a contest to giveaway 4 licenses to Gravity. All you have to do is to tweet or blog about the contest or subscribe to their RSS feed to enter the contest. Easy as that. You can even just follow them on twitter to enter.

For more information on this contest and how to enter, check out the site at: http://bit.ly/gkGp4

I’ve always wanted to know how the various opensource search engines performed when running head to head with each other. I’ve personally not had the time nor patience to setup such a benchmark. Luckily Vik Singh has done just that and blogged the results of the benchmark.

He’s benchmarked the latest versions of Lucene, sqlite, Xapian, zettair and sphinx while indexing twitter messages (968,937 tweets to be exact) and Medical data sets. I was not too surprised when Lucene came up as a winner from these benchmarks

Read the Blog post by Vik to get the details of the benchmarks.

You can get the deb files for this plugin over at GetDeb.net:
http://www.getdeb.net/app/GIMP+%22Save+for+Web%22+plugin

Just download the deb file for your version of Ubuntu and double click the deb file once downloaded to start the Package Installer.

What I liked about the design was the 30 degree tilt of the screen when the QWERTY keypad slides open. This allows the user to interact with the keyboard and the touch-screen at the same time. The tilt also allows the user to hold the phone with just the index finger – pretty comfortable – unlike the slide out of the E75.

One snippet which kind of surprised me in the presentation is that Axel mentioned that there  more than 1 billion users of Nokia phones. This particular model is targeted to users who are looking at having a personal experience with their mobiles – targeted towards people who share photos, videos, microblog, are active on social network and need a phone which doubles up as a personal computer on the go. During the Q&A session, one of the bloggers did ask about the high price of this model (expected to be around Rs. 35,000 during the launch). Axel answered that this mobile is meant for people who are looking a niche phone which provides the full online and social experience  the N97 provides.

After the presentations, I got to play around with the N97 for sometime – pics of the phone are at the end of this post.

Some of the points which caught my attention about the N97 are:

• A whopping 32GB of internal memory – which can be expanded to a maximum of 48GB. This is great for carrying around your media and there’s no need of another media player
• 16:9 screen ratio – perfect for viewing widescreen movies on the go – this unit’s got a TV out so you can project the movies on your phone on the big screen.
• A FM transmitter – to listen to your music on the car radio without the need of extra cables to hook it on.
• Home Screen Widgets – this allows you to have a pieces of the Internet on your home screen.
• The QWERTY keyboard had a good feel to it. Even though the keys on the N97 are smaller than the E75′s, they layout seems to just feel better laid out on the N97.
• The touchscreen also seems to perform better than the 5800′s.
• The phone comes bundled with the Facebook application, apart from other Social Media application like Hi5 and Qik. So you don’t have to hunt for these apps once you get your phone.
• The tilt of the screen when the keypad is open is a very useful feature allowing the user to place the phone on a table while typing out messages and emails, taking calls or surfing the web.

Thanks to Nokia India and Songita B. Verma & team for getting this event organized! It was great having to hear direct from the Design Team on the rationale behind the various features which are packed in the N-Series phones.

Learn more about the Nokia N97:
The Nokia N97 Datasheet
Nokia NSeries Background
Nokia N97′s product page

Some of the Pictures from the Event:

The N97 Presentation

Home Screen Widgets

Axel Meyer during his presentation

Q&A Session

First look at the N97

Trying out the Handwriting Recognition

30 Degrees Tilt of the Screen when the keypad's open

More pictures from the event are available on Flickr.

Google has brought out their Google Mobile App for Nokia S60 Phones. You can get the application by visiting m.google.com on your mobile browser. This application provides a shell for Google applications and services. When you start the app, you get a search screen, and the app detects your location to give you area specific suggestions.

As you start typing in a search term, you get search suggestions. Performing  a search opens up the mobile browser to continue browsing. The app provides a shortcut key to quickly jump to Google search from the Home screen on your mobile. This cuts down the number of keystrokes required to startup a Google search.

Apart from the quick access to Google Search and mobile apps, this app provides little else for Indian users, as the suggestions I saw while using the search were hardly relevant to my location.

Link : http://www.google.com/mobile/nokia-s60/

Apart from the standard tests on if your content is gzipped, server headers are correct and enable client side caching and parallelizing downloads from differnent host names, this addon also does the following:

• Inspect your CSS files for unused styles
• Inspect your Cookie size – the bigger the cookie size, the bigger the request sent to the server everytime, since every request will send your cookies from the browser to the server
• Checks image compression ratios to see if you’re running on the optimal compression.
• Checks to see if your Javascript is minified, if not, it’ll show you how much you can save if you minify your javascripts
• Inspects the execution of Javascript on the page on load to show which Javascript files can be deferred in loading, by placing the Javascript loads at the end of the page instead of the head. This can drastically increase the page render times.
• If you load multiple Javascripts and CSS files, Page speed will give you recommendations to merge these into a single file.

Page Speed helps you improve your site’s performance based on the following categories of best practises:

• Optimizing caching — keeping your application’s data and logic off the network altogether
• Minimizing round-trip times — reducing the number of serial request-response cycleshttp://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/
• Minimizing request size — reducing upload size
• Minimizing payload size — reducing the size of responses, downloads, and cached pages
• Optimizing browser rendering — improving the browser’s layout of a page

Get Google Page Speed at: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

Screenshots:

Google Page Speed Recommendations

CSS Optimization Recommendations

Javascript Minify Savings

Suggestion to Defer Javascript Loading

If you’re looking for a free native Twitter client for your S60 device, you’ve got to check out Tweets60. It’s works on S60 3rd and 5th Edition phones. As with most Twitter clients you can view your Timeline, Replies, DMs and Favorites and follow/unfollow Tweeple.  The interface is good and simple with the actions to post, reply or retweet in the Option menu.

One cool functionality in Tweets60 is that you can configure multiple access points and prioritize them. Useful when you’ve got Wifi access and then default to GPRS/3G connection when you’re not in Wifi range. If you’re on a tight data plan, this application also comes with an option to save your bandwidth by allowing you to set the refresh frequency to manual or set it to 5, 10 or 30 minutes.

For a basic twitter client – Tweets60 does it’s job pretty well. According to Ravensoft’s tweets, it looks like a pro version is in the making. I just hope the free version doesn’t get too crippled to promote the sales of the pro version.

A few missing functionalities in the current version of Tweets60 are (in my order of my preference):

• Delete & Mark Tweets as Favorites
• Custom Twitter Search Timelines
• Post images from phone to twitpic ( hopefully will be out in a future version)
• Multiple Twitter Accounts
• Theme support – A darker theme ( like Gravity? )

Get Tweet60 from : http://www.tweets60.com/

jQuery Tools provides some UI addons to the basic jQuery Library. You can create Tabs, Accordions, Tooltips, Overlays and more using this library. The whole library fits in less than 6Kb, so you can replace all the separate libraries you are using for these functionalities by using this library.

The library has an easy to use API, which both beginners and advanced developers can use to integrate. To show you how easy it is to setup tabs in this library, here’s an example from their site. The HTML code looks like this:

<!-- the tabs -->
<ul>
	<li><a href="#">Tab 1</a></li>
	<li><a href="#">Tab 2</a></li>
	<li><a href="#">Tab 3</a></li>
</ul>
<!-- tab "panes" -->
<div class="panes">
<div>pane 1 content</div>
<div>pane 2 content</div>
<div>pane 3 content</div>
</div>

The Javascript which powers the tabs is simply :

// setup ul.tabs to work as tabs for each div directly under div.panes
$("ul.tabs").tabs("div.panes > div");

To see this in action and more information on the code, check this link out:
http://flowplayer.org/tools/tabs.html

You can also check out the other functionalities which this library provides :

• Tooltips ( this example shows tooltips working on form fields)
• Overlays
• Accordians
• Other Demos

Learn more about jQuery Tools over at: http://flowplayer.org/tools/index.html

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• jQuery from the very beginning (slideshare.net)
• Glimmer – jQuery Made Easy (blogs.msdn.com)
• jQuery UI 1.7 Released: New CSS Framework & Dramatic Updates to Controls (ajaxian.com)

Nokia just launched a site emailwithease.com to help users setup email to go on their mobiles. The forum on this site is the place to go to if you’re looking for help on setting up emails on your mobile. Even though the main site is centered around the Nokia E75, the forums have sections to look in for help on other models as well.

If you’re looking for help on setting up your email on the E75, do head over there and check out the easy steps required to setup your emails.  Did you know that you can setup your mobile to get mails from your Corporate Exchange server as well?

If you still can’t find your solution head over to the Email with Ease site, where you can ask your question and get experts to answer them.

Head over to Email at Ease’s latest poll and make sure you send in your views counted as well.

Link:
emailwithease.com
Email With Ease Forum