Warping it up!

Fini Alring’s Glossy Tech Zine

Extend Firefox Contest Finalists Announced

Wednesday, February 8th, 2006

The Finalists for the Extend Firefox Contest have been announced. Adblock, All-In-One Sidebar, Deepest Sender, DownThemAll!, Firefox Showcase, Forecastfox Enhanced, Groowe Search Toolbar, IE Tab, My Stickies, PDF Download, Platypus, Reveal, Sage, ScrapBook, Separe, Viamatic foXpose, Web Developer and Wizz RSS News Reader will be vying for awards in eleven categories, including Best New Extension, Best Upgraded Extension and Best Use of New Firefox 1.5 features. Winners will be announced mid-February.

Release: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5

Thursday, January 12th, 2006

The Mozilla Thunderbird E-Mail Client v1.5 was released today, this client just rocks and I recommend it very much.

Here’s what’s new in Thunderbird 1.5:

  • Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Thunderbird may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
  • Sort address autocomplete results by how often you send e-mail to each recipient.
  • Spell check as you type.
  • Saved Search Folders can now search across multiple accounts.
  • Built in phishing detector to help protect users against email scams.
  • Podcasting and other RSS Improvements.
  • Deleting attachments from messages.
  • Integration with server side spam filtering.
  • Reply and forward actions for message filters.
  • Kerberos Authentication.
  • Auto save as draft for mail composition.
  • Message aging.
  • Filters for Global Inbox.
  • Improvements to product usability including redesigned options interface, and SMTP server management.
  • Many security enhancements.

The Rumbling Edge has more detailed lists of new features and notable bug fixes.

Download Mozilla Thunderbird.

Blog Searching with Google

Thursday, September 15th, 2005

Google has released a beta edition of Google Blog Search. It is designed to index weblogs and related feeds. The advanced blog search is quite good and has special fields for blog title, post title and author name. Additionally you can limit by post date range as well as language.

Google has built it into blogger.com, so choose your favorite skin below.
Google Blog Search (beta)
Google Blog Search (beta)

Blogger Blog Search (beta)

AJAX based site built on Prototype

Saturday, September 3rd, 2005

Nader Cserny at bandnews.org sent me a notice that he and his team have just released their site. The reason he told me is that it is using AJAX extensively, and as he said “Unlike all the hyped websites we tried to use Ajax in an intelligent and useful way.” This of course lit my appetite and the rest is history.

The site acts as an RSS aggregator for music bands. This could of course easily be refurnished for other purposes, but I think it’s quite neat idea, which might also make RSS feeds more accessible to the non-techies out there (because they won’t know it’s RSS before it’s too late!! he he)…

The website uses yet another “AJAX” / Rich-App framework called Prototype (JavaScript toolkit for class-driven development). I am not sure what to think of this framework myself, but perhaps it’s because I am too much in love with my own. The code is pretty much stripped from comments, making it hard to grasp all the cool stuff (No, manuals are not enough when trying to read sourcecode, not even a single line describing each class! truly bad code habit). Ok so I don’t think Prototype can be called an Ajax framework, since it does so much more it’s more proper to call it Rich-App framework. Personally I would have divided stuff up in more modular parts, i.e. there is a toColorPart() function in the same framework as Ajax and Event code.. This makes me itch, but ofcourse it’s just me flaming other peoples code, which I’m sure will haunt me in my dreams… Check out their own demos, and also a host of fancy UI components made by others with the use of Prototype, such as Rico. There is some really great stuff there.

Bandnews.org - Search & Read Music News.

Prototype JavaScript Framework

Atom 1.0 vs RSS 2.0

Monday, July 18th, 2005

/. heeeraldo writes “Is there another format war on the horizon? This wiki compares the two, and finds that even though RSS has far greater deployment (and mindshare), Atom 1.0 solves a lot of the problems associated with it.”

* Slashdot | Atom 1.0 vs RSS 2.0