Entries from July 2008 ↓

Adam Pash / Lifehacker:
Set Up Push Email, Contacts, and Calendar on Your iPhone for Free  —  One of the coolest features available in the new iPhone 2.0 software update is the ability to get new email messages, contacts, and calendar events pushed to your device automatically.  The catch: If you don't want to shell …

The Radiohead video for “House of Cards” that used no cameras or lights, only fancy lasers, just hit the web, and it’s just as crazy and trippy as the screenshots suggested. Above, check out the video, while after the jump you’ll find another video that details just how it was made. Did I mention that because this video is pure data instead of images you can manipulate it in real time using a visualizer? Because you can.

Also be sure to check out the awesome visualizer, which lets you manipulate the data to adjust the image and rotate around the objects in real-time. The most fun time waster you’ll find all week, guaranteed. [Radiohead]

You know how it is: you’re camping in the wild, and your iPhone suddenly runs out of juice, just as you get bored stiff with the music selection you’ve got aboard it. Previously you’d've had to carry a bunch of stuff around to sort this out, but Macally’s PowerLink has come to the rescue. With USB plug on one end and 30-pin iPod connector on the other, it acts as a sync cable, but also has a battery inside to give you a squirt of extra power if you’re in a pinch. It also packs a 2GB flash drive, but you’ll need to get mp3’s off that via iTunes, sadly. No info on how long the battery lasts, but as a 3-in-1 gizmo it’s pretty useful. Out “soon” for $49.99. [OhGizmo]

The video above is Tom Robinson, one of the 280 North fellas who is smart enough to port Cocoa to the Web, showing us his multitouch “virtual light table” using the JavaScript APIs nicely documented by SitePen, as well as Apple.

His ~100 lines of code uses the new CSS transforms handles all of the touch events: touchstart, touchmove, touchend, touchcancel with code such as:

He also added a nice bridge to allow you to somewhat play from the desktop:

In desktop browsers it uses the previous clicked location as a second “touch”, so you can click a photo then click and drag another spot on the photo to resize and rotate (notice the yellow dot).

Clearly the reverse of this bridge would be even more useful, since iPhone only sends mouse events under specific conditions. The mousedown, mouseup, and mousemove events could be emulated using the touch equivalents to make certain web apps work on the iPhone without much additional work. Of course you would need to either cancel the default actions (i.e. panning and zooming) on touch events, or have some way to manage the interactions between them.

A clickable dropdown menu with (theoretically unlimited) submenus made out of an unordered list.

A simple vertical menu digg-like using CSS and javascript to show/hide sub-menu.

Highly customizable message boxes with the mootools framework

The simplest way to do justify the labels in the form using Jquery

An easy to use hint box script for forms using Jquery

Scrolls a collection of phrases of your choice across the screen, with various sizes for perspective.