Google Notebook is a Fantastic Journaling Tool!

Just a quick note on a diamond in the rough dear readers. A few years ago, Google created Google NoteBook as a link sharing service. Something like Delicious I suppose. Well... as a link sharing service it was a failure and they stopped development on the project in the spring of 2009.

Well a month our two back I started playing around with the tool and realized this thing is freaking awesome as a personal journal. I keep a journal for work so I can prove what I did when the year end review comes up. Also, I like to store any sort of text data or links I may need for future reference. Google notebook is just great at this! It is easy to create individual entries. Just click and start typing. You can label each entry for easy search later. In addition, it is easy to create hierarchy to put your entries into different buckets and thus making it easy to navigate around your journal. Plus, its really easy to export the whole to HTML for safe keeping.

As an online personal journal tool, Google Notebook is pretty much perfect. So if you are interested in that sort if thing, check it out. You will be glad you did. And Google... change the name from Notebook to Journal or Diary and I think you have a hit on your hands. :)

73% of iPhone Users are Very Satisfied

According to Mashable, a Yankee group study found 73% of iPhone users are very satisfied with AT&T.

This does not surprise me as my iPhone seems to work really well most of the time. In addition, it has performed well on most of my business and pleasure trips. When I hear it does not work well for many prominent bloggers I believe them. However, just because the phone does not work well in a few cities, doesn't mean it performs badly in all cities. I think the AT&T haters are in the "distortion field" not most of the actual users as indicated by the study.

Dojo 1.5 is out and its Feature Packed

Dojo 1.5 is out and its feature packed, details from Ajaxian.

From the Ajaxian, story Dojo certainly looks to be a lot prettier. If you don't know, Dojo is a full featured open source JavaScript framework. It provides all the controls and widgets you would find in something like Visual Basic. And from the sounds of it, they are getting a lot of help from IBM. Definitely worth a look if you are comparing JavaScript frameworks for your next project.

Two Good Articles on Designing Mobile Apps

These are not new, I have been meaning to post links for a week, but two good stories on designing for mobile platforms. It is a sponsored series on Mashable. Let's hope a few more of this quality are written.

• 5 Things to Consider when Designing your Mobile App
• Optimize your Sites Across Multiple Platforms

The second article is especially important. Only a few sites are doing this now, but everyone should be designing for the desktop, laptop/netbook/iPad, and mobile devices. In just a few short years, my guess is the majority of sites will be browsed on something other than a desktop computer. Does your site look good on something other than Windows and IE?

Ever Want to Know How Fast a Thumb/Flash Drive is?

Ever Want to Know How Fast a Thumb/Flash Drive is? I have. It is really hard to get any good decent information on speed. The reviews I find by Googling around cover all the frickin' features except the drives speed! That is the only feature I really care about other than size. Plus if I want to encrypt something, I am going to use an open source tool like truecypt, not some proprietary piece of feces.

Anyway, I found a good free Windows tool to do a little benchmarking, Crystal Disk Mark. It gets the job done and is really easy to use. Based on my testing, the only thing that seems to matter is the sequential read and write tests. That, in effect, is a file copy test, which is what I would use the drive for most of the time. All the drives I tested were horrible in the random access tests. You are much better off getting an external USB hard drive for that purpose.

Free Open Source JQuery Training Materials

I have been wanting to post this link for a couple of weeks. Rebecca Murphey has released open source training materials for JQuery! The materials are first rate and are available under a creative commons share license.

The training materials looks to be quite comprehensive. I really need to read through everything, myself. But, this sleeping at night thing is really getting in the way of my personal development. :)

Serialize and Deserialize an Object in Java

For work today I had to write a short program to serialize and deserialize an object. Since I could not find an example that include both steps, here is my own serialize deserialize example. Its pretty easy once you see an example.

Thanks to Example Depot for their examples: Deserialize an Object and Serialize an Object.

Visual Basic for Android?

Visual Basic for Android? Well sorta. Google has announced AppInventor for Android, which looks more or less like VB for Android to me.

This is probably a really good idea. The more people you have developing for your platform, the better. It seems like there were a few good apps developed with VB, even though none come to mind at the moment. :) Anyway, at a minimum, geeks can write little custom utilities for themselves with this.

Update (2011/04/26): Today I became aware of a LUA based tool that looks really amazing. You may also want to check out Corona SDK.

Toy Story 3 is Awesome

I saw Toy Story 3 last night and it is freaking awesome. It totally lived up to its great reviews. Those guys at Pixar really know how to tell a story.

Too bad the same thing can't be said about the Last Airbender movie.

JQuery: Handling Combo/Select Box Events

While creating a Namespace example yesterday, I needed the code to actually do something to provide a good example. So, the code created an example of how to manipulate an HTML combo/select box using JQuery. The key is to use the change event on the combo box to execute the code needed to update the list.

$('#ListSelect').change(Blue.gen.comboSelect);

Check out the example's source code for the details.

JavaScript Namespace Example

I am currently working on a personal project that is getting kinda big in regards to the size of the JavaScript code. So it is time to organize the code using JavaScript namespaces. Since I could not remember how I did this in the past, time to create an example! :)

This namespace example puts almost all of the JavaScript code in the Blue namespace. The key point I was missing was the declaration of the space. For example, the namespace can be defined using JSON like this.

   1:var Blue = {
   2:  obj:{}, // Objects
   3:  gen:{}  // General Functions
   4:}
   5:

Note: Line Numbers are unrelated to the actual position of the code in the example

The 3 letter abbreviations separate functions and objects into something similar to Java packages. The package names should be spelled out, but I'm lazy so 3 letter abbreviations for me.

Declare your instance variables and methods with code similar to this.

   1:Blue.obj.List = function(newName){
   2:  this.listName = newName;
   3:  this.itemArr = new Array();
   4:}
   5:
   6:
   7:Blue.obj.List.prototype.addItem = function(newItem){
   8:  this.itemArr.push(newItem);
   9:}
  10:
  11:Blue.obj.List.prototype.deleteItem = function(index){
  12:  this.itemArr.splice(item);
  13:}
  14:

It may seem a bit wordy or maybe a bit of overkill at first. However, in the end your code will be much easier to maintain if you use this approach.

JQuery: Handling a Selection from a Combo or Select Box

How do you handle when a user makes a selection from an HTML combo or select box? First, in HTML combo/select boxes are created with a <select> tag which encloses a bunch of <option> tags. With JQuery, use the change event to capture selection from the combo box. A well written article on the subject can be found on jetlogs.org.

How do I add Favicons to SeaMonkey?

How do I add favicons to the toolbar in Seamonkey? All the steps outlined on this SeaMonkey help page. Not the most straightforward way to do things, but still pretty easy.

How will HTML 5 Change the Web? Look and See

How will HTML 5 change the web? Some of the Mozilla developers gave a presentation in London. Ajaxian has link to videos of the preso. Pretty cool stuff that would be done entirely in Flash today.