Month: April 2007

  • April 26, 2007

    Sync Lightning with GCal

    provider for GCal

    A few days ago I wrote about how to get calendar functionality in Thunderbird with Lightning. Today I want to talk about making Lightning 100 times better by giving it the ability to sync with Google Calendar. Since Google is my primary source for Email, Calendar, online document storage, notes and whatever else they offer, I always look for ways to seamlessly sync these things with my desktop or PDA. Since I’ve started using GooSync to synchronize my Treo with GCal, I’ve been more productive, being able to check my calendar anywhere online. Now with Provider, I can synchronize my desktop calendar with Google Calendar, “completing the circle,” so to speak.

    Sure I could use Outlook or Palm Desktop, but why if I don’t have to. I have Google. Now I can have bidirectional synchronization between my desktop and GCal or my Treo and GCal. Plus, installation is easy and updates are automatic (and instant as long as you have an internet connection). Simply download Provider, open up Thunderbird, go to Tools>Add-ons and choose install. From there all you have to do is add Google Calendar to your list of calendars in Lightning. Click on the calendar tab (bottom right) and click New. Then Choose “On the Network.” From there choose Google Calendar and copy your Google Calendar feed in to the box. There is a nice step-by-step with screen shots here.

    I find this solution especially nice because it’s quick and easy. Now If I can’t get WiFi in a classroom, I don’t have to sweat not accessing my calendar and pulling out my PDA to add an important date. Since I take notes on my laptop, I just have Thunderbird open and add appointments and due dates that way.

  • April 19, 2007

    Get Calendar Functionality on Thunderbird

    Lightning

    Gmail is my numero-uno choice for email. However, in my constant quest to backup all data I have anywhere, I felt Thunderbird would be a good desktop email client. After using Thunderbird a couple of days, I wanted to make it more “Outlook-esq.” I wanted calendar functionality. Knowing Mozilla made Sunbird, I figured there was something out there to integrate into Thunderbird. That something was Lightning. It’s a nice little plug-in that gives great functionality, supports multiple calendars and even iCal, for those of you who use it. It gives you the basic Day, Week and Month view, and lays it out pretty nicely. If you are a big Thunderbird user, I strongly recommend it.

    In the next couple of days, I will also do a write up on a really easy way to sync Lightning with Google Calendar, making the program even better.

  • April 16, 2007

    How Design Effects Users

    As a web developer, I feel I know a little bit about design and functionality on a website. Lately I have been noticing my use of a website depends heavily on design and functionality, as I’m sure it does for most people whether they realize it or not. Take, for instance, how I get my news online.

    CNN

    Fox News

    Here are screen shots of both CNN and Fox News. Click the images to go to the sites. While Fox News is more my brand of news (surprise surprise), I find myself going to CNN more often. This is because I feel CNN has a nicer, cleaner looking site. CNN’s logo blends nicely with the rest of the banner, unlike Fox’s, which just looks like it’s thrown there. There isn’t too much going on ‘above the fold’ for CNN. With Fox, it’s a different story. For example, Fox offers 27 links in it’s main navigation. CNN offers 20 (which was actually more than I thought). CNN’s navigation is also contained to one, solitary line. Fox has theirs on two lines, each a different shade of blue. Below the fold on Fox is even worse.

    Where CNN offers more stories organized in a pretty nice fashion, Fox offers links to all of their shows and a litany of thumbnail images. I feel that I get much more information from CNN’s homepage, which is what the user wants. Plus, CNN’s links are much friendlier. If you’ll notice, a link to a story on CNN appears like this, after ‘cnn.com’: /2007/US/04/16/vtech.shooting/index.html. Year, region, month, day, name of story. Here is a link following ‘foxnews.com’: /story/0,2933,266463,00.html. This is not informative, nor very nice looking. But news isn’t the only problem area. Because of GMail, I never use my school’s email system.

    What got me thinking about this was Google asking students to take their survey about campus email. I am a staunch user of GMail and tell everyone I know to use it. It’s a good interface, easy to use, lots of space and has great IM and Calendar integration. I was also able to make it a one stop shop for sending and receiving email from the multitude of email addresses I have. “Royal Mail,” as the University of Scranton calls it, is not a good experience. It’s poorly designed and not very intuitive. Unless you change the settings, you get oldest mail first, and deleting a lot of email at one time is not easy. But the biggest annoyance I feel, is no search. GMail has excellent functionality here, allowing me not only to quickly find mail, but the search also allows me to use GMail as a file server. And with near 3GB of space, I have the capacity to do so too.

    Design and functionality is everything on the web. If your site doesn’t make the user experience easy, you’re app is dead in the water. GMail has turned me away from my school’s lousy email system, and CNN’s design helps me tolerate their particular branding of news (though CNN isn’t nearly as bad as MSNBC).

  • April 9, 2007

    Finding Originality

    In a world with mash-ups, open source, and the Internet, it’s pretty tough to find an original project- something that has not already been done. For instance, I’ve thought of many projects that have already been done, most notably something similar to Facebook. About three months before Facebook got popular, my friend Steve Mekosh and I started planning what we were calling a MySpace for College Students. In retrospect, I don’t think we could have done something as awesome as Facebook is, but still the idea was there. I’ve also wanted to do something similar to Remember the Milk, a tasks website. So where do I draw the line and say, ‘This has already been done, forget it’ or ‘I can make this better?’

    Right now I have two projects in mind that are out there that I can make better. So here is my process. I’ll come up with an idea, write some notes on it- basic plans, a mission statement for the website, etc. Then I will use Google to find similar websites. If I find something that’s strikingly close to what I want to do, I’ll sign up for it and use it. I will keep track of changes I’d make that I feel the general public would also like. After a week or so, I’ll decide if the project is worth doing.

    I’ve done that with two websites now and I really feel with one website, my project would be an improvement. With the other, I feel the mission of my site is different enough that it is worth doing. The important part of this ordeal is not to get discouraged because something has already been done. Check out the product and see how many people actually use it and what they like/dislike about it. If you honestly think you can do better, try it out. If anything, it will be a learning experience for you. That’s the way I look at it. However, one thing I do need to work on is finding time to actually do the projects I have in mind.

  • April 6, 2007

    My HDTV

    HDTV

    In my quest for all things tech, I made a serious purchase a few weeks ago. My friend and I were talking about HDTVs and he mentioned he got a good deal for one on ebay. Usually skeptical of purchasing things on ebay, I decided it can’t hurt to look. I searched for the same thing my friend got, a 32″ LCD HDTV. To my surprise I came across this TV. The maximum bid was $225 with 6 minutes left and being sure there was no way I was going to win it, I placed a max bid of $300. As you might have seen, the winning bid was me at $275.

    I’ve got to say while I’m not usually one to do things like this, I am very happy with the TV. It was listed as defective for fuzzy lines at times, but I have seen no problem with it. And while I don’t have HDTV cable service, playing Xbox 360 on it has been incredible. The picture quality and color range is much better. I can see every movement and detail. The gaming experience is much better over all. I was also very happy to see the multitude of A/V connections on the back, including support for a monitor. As we speak, I am using my TV as a dual monitor for my laptop, and can watch TV shows and YouTube videos in full screen on the TV. You would think the large screen would skew the picture, but it does not. It looks just as good, and at a much bigger size.

    Finally, the price was a steal. Here is the same TV on sale at WalMart for $598. I basically paid half price for it. The sellers also offer a 3 year warranty for an extra $40, which I took. The grand total price I paid after shipping was $366. Kudos to Webs Best Deals for the offer and great service. I could not be happier with the TV, even if I might be spending some more money soon for accessories; like an HD-DVD player, for instance.

  • April 3, 2007

    New Design- Dynamics

    This is part 3 of 5 of the mini series for my new design. In this part I will be talking about the dynamics of the site and using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS).

    A change made more on the back end of this site is all of the pages on the site can now be edited through WordPress. This makes it much easier when I want to update things like my resume, the about page, etc. One of the reasons I never did this before was I did a lot of PHP stuff on the seemingly static pages, and there was no way for me to integrate PHP code via the WordPress admin panel. To fix that problem, I found a plug-in called runPHP.

    This handy little plug-in ads a check box to each post asking if I want to run the post or page thought the PHP preprocessor. All I do I add in the php code (with normal tags) and I’ve got dynamic, easy to update pages. This comes especially handy on my projects page, which calls a number of custom functions. With runPHP I can easily change parameters or function calls right from WordPress.

    On the same token, my projects page is also completely dynamic. I will talk more about the plug-in I wrote in the next series, but I would like to touch on the fact that this was something I had been planning for a while. I needed an easy way to add, edit and delete projects from my resume site, Casabona.Org. With WordPress, I was able to add another set of pages to the admin panel to do just that. In the coming months I will be combining Casabona.Org and this site, making them fall under one roof. This plug in will make it much easier for me to manage my projects.

    Using the power of WordPress, I am able to quickly and easily manage my site, transforming the open source blogging system into a CMS. Now, this site is updated more frequently with some very rich content.