Firefox 3.5 is out

July 1st, 2009

A great new release of Firefox.  Most changes are under the hood but they are great changes

  • Firefox 3.5 is a lot faster
  • It supports HTML 5
    • It is location aware so for instance if you search for pizza restaurant it will return a pizza restaurant near you
    • You can easily add videos to your website by using the <video> tag and you can do cool things with it.
    • It supports local storage. By using a local database, web applications can also work offline
    • It supports web workers. As a web developer you can run code in a different thread.
    • and more

Get your copy of firefox

More cool firefox 3.5 demos

Adding RSS feeds directly from Firefox to Google Reader

June 23rd, 2009

I’m an avid user of Google Reader and Firefox

Subscribe to RSS Feed

Subscribe to RSS Feed

Therefore if I encounter an interesting site or blog I usually subscribe to it. In that case Firefox shows the following window by default

A Feed in Firefox

A Feed in Firefox

I just discovered that you can click on the option menu and that there you can select Google as your default RSS reader :-) . Optionally you can also check the checkbox that will say “Always use Google to subscribe to feeds”. This saves you a click. When you have that checkbox checked and want to change something you have to go to the Firefox Preferences/Options to change it.

Change RSS feed reader preference

Change RSS feed reader preference

How to price your product: Camels and Rubber Duckies

June 22nd, 2009

I came across this very entertaining post of Joel Spolsky about how to price your product

Which search site is the best

June 7th, 2009

Without being influenced by the graphics you can try blindsearch. It searches Yahoo, Google and Bing and shows the results of these engines in three columns. After you select which result you prefer it shows you which search engine the result came from.

It seems that Google and Bing give the best results. I’ve tried a few times and I chose mostly Google, sometimes Bing and just a few times Yahoo.

blindsearch

The future of email, blogs, IM, wikis, social networks

May 30th, 2009

It’s Google Wave and it’s built completely in Google Web Toolkit and even better most of it will be open sourced. Really cool technology. Check the video below

Scoopler: Real Time Search Engine

May 13th, 2009

The Real Time Web is a popular topic at the moment. There was already Twitter Search which searches twitter but now you get search engines that search multiple realtime sources like Twitter,  Delicious.com and Digg. An interesting contender in that area is Scoopler because the search restults change while you are watching the result page. Look for instance at this search of the Obama.

What do you think? Is it useful? Is it too easy to copy by Google, such that Scoopler won’t make it?

Google Search Options

May 13th, 2009

Google today introduced search options, which enables you to refine your search. Looks pretty nifty. Check the video below

Theora better than H.264

May 8th, 2009

The open source community keeps on tinkering on the open Theora video format (The format that Firefox 3.5 will support natively and is part of the HTML5 spec). They now report better video quality (expressed in PSNR) than H.264. I see in the post that they compare it to the open source x264 encoder. I wonder how that compares to commercial H.264 encoders out there

Really cool demo of how Firefox 3.5 can play video

April 15th, 2009

Check out this cool demo what the upcoming Firefox 3.5 can do with video using the new W3C Standards

Google Web Toolkit + Google App Engine Rock

April 14th, 2009

As I wrote 2 days ago I was looking into Google Web Toolkit (GWT) in combination with Google App Engine. Google recently released support for Java on App Engine and a plugin for Eclipse fro GWT and App Engine. This provides a very slick development environment. Deploying your web app is just pushing one button and your app is deployed.  Actually you can deploy multiple versions of the same web app.  So you can first test drive the app before making it the live version.

I’ve implemented the Hagman application from the Google Web Toolkit Applications book and you can try it now on http://jaaphtest.appspot.com

The really cool thing is that all the code on both client and server is Java, which make development and debugging a breeze.

If you want to know a bit more I can recommend you watching  Google App Engine Campfire on YouTube.