For those of you that have always wanted a web site, but don’t want to deal with all the cost of updating it when your content changes, there’s a solution for you.
Concrete5 is a new Content Management System (CMS) that blows everything else I’ve used out of the water. Everything else I’ve used (and I’ve been around the block with CMSs) has been either overly complicated and not user-friendly or too simple to really work for my needs.
In steps C5.
I’ve reviewed the iPhone in the past and although I love the device, it has it’s problems and I have my pet peeves. One of the cons I mentioned in my review was a lack of third-party applictions. And although I am waiting with baited breath for the iPhone SDK (promised by end of February), which will bring third-party apps, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the quality of the online applications inspired by the iPhone.
Within the first few days oh having my iPhone, I went looking for the scriptures online. But not just the scriptures. I wanted something that was optimized for the iPhone so I wasn’t waiting for several minutes in Church for a verse to load. I found a decent application at MountainMighty.com ScripturesApp.com. This little site provides not only a the scriptures formatted for the iPhone, but handy tools like bookmarks, community bookmarks and searching. Just recently though, they outdid themselves by adding the current Elder’s Quorum and Relief Society lesson manual as well as the words to the hymns. I’ve been wanting the hymns for a while and although the manual is available on lds.org it’s much more bulky and hard to navigate. So thank you Chuck!
Designing your own home just got a lot easier. Suite75 (from the Netherlands) has created a fantastic application which allows you to not only create your own floorplan, but also design what goes inside.
Buying a new home, rearranging your room, or moving into a new office? You can save time and have more fun if you lay out your ideas ahead of time.
And the coolest part, it’s free!
Well, it’s free for the average home user. If you want to use it professionally, then of course, there is cost involved. Go ahead, try it out and if you like it, sign up for a free account.
Note: Although it may sound like it, they aren’t paying me, I just though it was cool.
RamblingEngineer.com is now iPhone enabled!
What does that mean? Well, that means when I visit the site on my new iPhone (yes, I gave in to the Apple seduction), the site appears in a nice iPhone friendly style. No sidebar or bulky navigation. A simple and clean interface.
But that doesn’t mean that the rest of you without iPhones will be affected. In fact, you won’t see a difference. The iPhone style/layout will only show up through the iPhone. For those technically minded, it means that it looks for a specific “user-agent.”
I’ll post a review of the iPhone in the near future.
Sometimes a company does something very innovative and you think… well, duh, why didn’t anybody else do something like that before.
Google translate does something that will have the same affect. There are many companies that do online, automatic translation of text. It’s been around for years. But since the good old days, when babelfish was the only translation service, the translation has always been quite poor. And even if you didn’t know the language from which you were translating, you new from the resulting translation into your language that it didn’t work well.
Google recently announced a new feature for Google Maps. It’s called “My Maps”, but the name doesn’t really do it justice. This new feature now brings Google Maps a little closer to the functionality available in Google Earth [download]. Don’t get me wrong, Google Earth has so many more amazing features that it blows Maps out of the water, but it’s an installed desktop application.
The huge benefit of Maps is that you don’t need to install an application in order to use it. It works in any modern browser and is lightweight and quick.
Almost everyone has heard of Mozilla. The Mozilla organization is the descendant of Netscape and is the producer of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. One of the little known technologies behind the Mozilla products is called XUL (pronounced zool). XUL is a scripting language (and interpreter) that provides all the user interface for Firefox and Thunderbird. It’s very powerful and several stand-alone applications have been built with it.
So recently, some Mozilla developers tossed around the idea of creating a new desktop environment built on the XUL technology. This would not only compete with Gnome and KDE, but also with Windows, Mac OSX and many of the other platforms. Because the heart of the Mozilla technologies has been ported to all kinds of different platforms, this new desktop could potentially run on many of the diverse kernels (the software that connects all other software applications with the hardware — the heart of an operating system).
This would be amazing! The Mozilla Desktop (has a nice ring to it) would provide a universal interface to many different platforms. Regardless of the underlying technology, the user experience would be the same. And XUL could handle all the intricacies of the diverse platforms. Windows users could more easily switch to Linux or Max OSX (or Solaris for that matter) without having to relearn an interface.
Of course, there are all kinds of issues that would need to be worked out in order for this to really work, but it’s the best start to a centralized user interface that we’ve ever seen.
So what do you think? For you tech guys, do you think this is feasible? And for you non-techies, is this something you would like?
So the above title is designed to drive Google traffic to my site… ok not really, but I don’t mind if it does.
I’m getting tired of all the buzz words associated with the new web design and application development philosophies on the Net these days. Admittely, I like to through around AJAX, although I fought calling it that for several months.