Entries from October 2007 ↓

Last night we outlined the details emerging about Google’s social networking initiative, OpenSocial. Below are some screenshots of OpenSocial in action that we didn’t have time to include in that post.

Most of these shots show the integration of iLike and Flixster applications with social networks on Ning. A few show the integration of applications with orkut and hi5. We’ve also included an overview document below.

Update: See Marc Andreessen’s screencast here.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

The gadget: The Eye-Fi. It’s an SD memory card that adds Wi-Fi to any camera. Plus the free Eye-Fi service supports automatic uploads to 20 different web photo sites (like Flickr) as well as a computer on your home network.

The verdict: It works flawlessly.

The performance: Like we said, the Eye-Fi works flawlessly. Setup takes roughly five minutes (you program the card through your computer and bundled card reader.) From there, you simply snap pics in the range of your router, and chances are, by the time you go back to your computer, the pictures will be viewable. If your router dies, you turn off your camera, or even if you take out the card and put it back in, the photos will upload when you get things sorted out again. It’s actually a normal 2GB memory card underneath all of the other functionality and can work as such.

The catch: We figured iIt must drain more battery —but apparently in-camera SD power standards dictate that this extra consumed power needs to be minimal, to the level of not noticeable to the end user. Unfortunately, the product doesn't support hotspots.

The price: $100

The verdict Part II: Sure, the Eye-Fi is basically a cradle replacement. But snapping photos and automatically uploading them in real time to share is truly fantastic, especially when the images can be better than one’s camera phone. And the entire product experience is built with Apple-like simplicity. If you can get over the price and are sick of cords, we strongly recommend the purchase. Available now. [eye-fi]

The bad news is, we have discovered a Leopard-related issue that may very well throw a monkey wrench into your Time Machine. Anyone trying to use Time Machine with a previously PC-formatted drive could be at risk. The good news is, there is an easy—albeit none-too-obvious—fix. Here's the dilly-o:

After I upgraded my MacBook Pro to OS X Leopard, the first thing I did was grab a brand-new Maxtor USB drive and format it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) using Disk Utility, just like I had countless times before. As soon as I erased the disk, Time Machine popped up as promised, and asked if it could use the disk for backup. I said yes, and was on my merry way. Only I wasn’t.

Time Machine ran for a bit, and then crapped out after about 10GB. I went into Disk Utility and saw that although the partition was formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled), the volume itself still said FAT32. I clicked Erase to reformat the drive, and got the format failure error you see above.

I tried this with FAT-formatted drives from Seagate, Iomega and HP as well. Each time I saw the same thing. I could reformat the partition to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and Time Machine would recognize it. Get Info would say that it was formatted correctly. But Disk Utility showed that the volume was formatted for PC. Inevitably, if the Time Machine backup was greater than 10GB, there were problems. Worst of all, if I dared try to format the volume for Mac, I would get the dreaded error, and the disk would be temporarily unmountable.

Not only did I vary drives, but I tested the problem on various systems too. I tried it booting from the Leopard DVD, with the same results. Ditto when I tried it using my wife’s Leopard-upgraded MacBook Pro. (Yes, his n’ hers MBPs. You can insert your “awwww” here.) The end result was that I couldn’t break the FAT grip on these damn drives.

I made some calls, I talked to some people, and eventually here was the solution: you wipe the hell out of the drive by creating new and different partitions. So, do not head to the Erase tab in Disk Utility to prep a PC-formatted drive for Time Machine. Instead:

• Go to the Partition tab. Create two partitions. Under Options, select GUID Partition Table (what you would use to make a Mac OS boot disk) and click OK then Apply.

• Once your partitions are in place, do it again, reverting back to just one partition, but still keeping the GUID Partition Table option. Click OK and Apply again, and at this point you should be cool.

• To be safe, you can then go to Erase and set formatting for Mac OS Extended (Journaled), then format it once and for all. But when you get there, you will probably see that your volume is already formatted in the right way.

UPDATE: Some people have gotten this to work without creating two partitions. If you like, try creating just a single partition, but using the GUID Partition Table option. This may be all it takes to break the chokehold.

Using this method, I have gotten all of the disks to work just fine with Time Machine, and I don’t anticipate any problems in the future.

OK, I know, quite a bit of nerdiness, but I wanted to get out there and tell you about the problem I encountered, in case you are having the same troubles, or plan on getting there sooner or later. Also, this solution is actually a workaround of sorts. My hope is that Apple can update Disk Utility with a stronger form of disk erasing that doesn’t require so many manual steps, but if I am missing something obvious, I’d love to hear it. Please share any troubles you’ve had, or any better solutions you’ve cooked up.

Special thanks to Dorian and Ken!

It seems like the semitransparent menu bar in Leopard is a love it or hate it thing. Well, we have some good news for those of you that hate it out there. Eternal Storms Software has released OpaqueMenuBar 1.0, a free little application that allows Mac users to turn off the transparent menu bar effect in Leopard.

Instant Jailbreak for iPhone and iPod touch  —  A crew of hackers (including hdm/metasploit, rezn, dinopio, drudge, kroo, pumpkin, davidc, dunham, and NerveGas) have introduced a one-touch instant jailbreak for both iPhone and iPod touch.  The jailbreak opens your iPhone for full disk access …

Source:   The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Author:   Erica Sadun

Link:   http://www.tuaw.com/2007/10/29/instant-jailbreak-for…

Techmeme permalink

The nifty Keyport, which we first saw back in April, is actually becoming a reality. From next week, Keyport Inc will start contancting people who signed up all those months back and inviting them to send their six favorite keys off to be copied. Then, in return for $300, those lucky customers will receive the aluminum and steel device back by post.

Sign up quickly if you want in: the Keyport will be a limited edition of 5000. If you’re not picked, I have a great alternative. Send me your keys, your address and $300. Your vacation dates are optional but will help your application.

Product page [Keyport via BBGadgets]

The Java collections framework is a staple for almost every enterprise Java project. In this entry, explore how some developers over at Google have extended this library and made these new features publicly available for the Java community.

What it does

Are you a web designer that would like to optimize your CSS codes? CleanCSS.com is a tool for web designers that helps them optimize their CSS codes. CCS is short foe Cascading Style Sheets which is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in markup language or webpage written in HTML, or XHTML. CSS can define the color, font, layout, and other aspects of document and webpage presentation. CleanCSS.com offers web designers the CSS optimizer, CSS Tidy, which the site owners’ claim is the best CSS optimizer around. Web designers use CSS optimizers to get smaller CSS files and better written code. When you first enter the site you can see the optimizer. You have a section for the CSS input and the CSS layout where you choose a compression code layout from; highest, high, standard, low and custom. Then you have your options where you can remove unnecessary backslashes, compress colors, save comments, etc… to create a clean CSS code. CleanCSS.com also helps you with shorthand coding so you can consolidate information such as color and orders into one line. CleanCSS.com is a helpful site for web designers.

In their own words

“CleanCSS is a powerful CSS optimizer and formatter. Basically, it takes your CSS code and makes it cleaner and more concise.

The CSS optimizer was originally developed by some awesome dudes over at CSS Tidy. They built the program and have made it free for everyone to use. I stumbled across their optimizer one day while looking for help with my CSS. I wanted to know the shortest way I could style a background of a web site without having to use all the “background-image” and “background-repeat” tags. I found some other optimizers which I tried, but none worked as well as CSS Tidy. It was actually hosted on some random CD Burning website. Why? I have no idea.

But after I posted about it on my blog, I noticed that a week later, the site no longer existed. I was bummed because I was trying to show my fellow designers at work this amazing utility. So I took the liberty and installed CSS Tidy on my own webserver and registerd cleancss.com. I also styled it up to my liking (see the grass green colors?). So now I can make sure this kick-ass CSS utility stays up forever. And gets used by web designers everywhere.”

Why it might be a killer

CleanCSS.com has a clean interface which is fitting for the title of the site. The lime green color is appealing and the site is easy to navigate. Putting the CSS Tidy optimizer on the homepage is a good idea so users don’t have to look at all to find it. The description of why you should optimize CSS code is useful for those of us who are not experts in the web designing field. CleanCSS.com does a good job of explaining how and why the optimizer is useful.

Some questions

There are other CSS optimizers available, how will CleanCSS.com deal with competition from other sites that offer the same type of tool? CleanCSS.com could show examples of CSS codes before an after using the CSS Tidy optimizer, so users could get an idea of how to condense the codes.

Updates

 » original news

Inside Facebook reports that Facebook has added new metrics for app developers to track the spread of their application. The new “Application Adds by Facebook Referrer” displays how many application ads were a result of the app directory, the profile box, the news feed, the mini feed, Facebook search, or requests.

These stats will certainly be helpful for app developers to gauge the best way to market and promote their apps, and whether their marketing campaigns on Facebook ad networks like Social Media are worth their time and money. But just how most Facebook apps spread is likely to remain hazy until more data can be gathered from multiple app developers.

Justin Smith has data from a friend’s application, which shows that the profile box is far and away the most popular channel for attracting new users to an application. Surprisingly, given the amount of press about how ingenious the news feed and mini feed are for spreading things virally, they do not factor nearly as much into the overall spread of this particular application. That said, Inside Facebook’s example is a very small sample size for one (undisclosed) application. As Smith notes in his post, “the relative importance of viral channels will depend on your application.”

The Zombies app probably benefits more from requests, for example, because of the way it encourages people to invite users, while the Where I’ve Been app probably gets many installs from the profile box, and the Movies app likely does well in the product directory as a result of its prominence there.

Would any app developers out there care to share some of their data? It would be great if Facebook would release data across the entire network in aggregate, but until that happens, if you want to share trends you’ve notice for your application. please do so in the comments.

Dov B. Katz has released JSLoader, his open source on-demand JavaScript library. He explained to us:

It provides a methodology for organizing JS libraries, and programmatically loading them by simply “asking” for them. Example code: JSLoader.load(“ria”,”ext”,”2.0-beta1”);

I developed it as a mechanism to provide hosted Ajax libraries within a large enterprise (zero install, we maintain the latest releases) and it has been very successful. Furthermore, because no install is needed, I have leveraged TWiki to create a rapid prototyping environment, which has led to widespread adoption in the enterprise.

Ultimately, it’s just dynamically writing script and link tags onto the page… Not rocket science, but it works well, and it’s proven its value in an enterprise environment.

Why JSLoader?

• First of all, it’s a zero-install solution. The goal is to eventually deploy this style of loading and file organization on a “hosted toolkit” system and allow websites to leverage the distribution of new toolkits without having to figure out how to install them.
• Second, because multiple sites will share this code the browser and proxy caches will help make things more efficent
• Finally, the maintainability of toolkits is minimized as content needs to be distributed only once, instead of having each user download a private copy

You can see some demos such as PlotKit.

Dov is going to be at The Ajax Experience this week in Boston. He is keen to meet you to discuss it!