Software, Note From The Editor | featured news

For a while I was wondering why sites I visit regularly are getting buggy. When I visit Alexa, the traffic charts doesn’t render unless I refresh the page, sometimes a couple times. On Compete.com, it defaults to the “Site Profile” tab instead of “Compare Sites.” Clicking on the latter tab doesn’t do anything. On NBA and FoxSports, the dynamic slideshows doesn’t rotate, has formatting issues, and clicks don’t work. After logging into Contextweb, clicking on “Selling Desk” doesn’t work either. It’s seems to have trouble loading pages with javascript, jQuery, or Ajax.

I'm finally taking the Android plunge. Ever since I bought the HD2, I had been keeping track of the development of the Android port for it. Why didn’t I just get an Android phone? Well, at the time, the HD2 was the first smartphone with a 1GHz processor and a 4.3” screen. I also liked the HTC Sense UI and had been using Windows Mobile since I started using smartphones. I was looking more for an alternative mobile OS for additional apps and games.

With all the talk focused on Android, iPhone, and lately Windows Phone 7, I’m glad the guys at Opera haven’t forgetten about the group of us who are still using Windows Mobile 6.5 (or earlier versions). Opera released a native version of Opera Mini 5 Beta for Windows Mobile earlier this year, and being a beta release, it was buggy. Sometime in September, they finally got a chance fix those bugs and improve the page rendering.

HTC's Sense UI runs on top of Windows Mobile 6.5 on the HD2, providing a better UI and convenient shortcuts to Windows Mobile apps. It's finger-friendly and hides most of WM 6.5's software and interface flaws. Sense UI is a slick and mostly well thought-out interface, but it has a few shortcomings of its own. On the home tab, the first screen you see when you power up the phone, the quick links to your favorite apps are limited to nine; the calendar contains only one entry; and there's no task list. Co0kie's Home Tab (CHT) fills these voids.

About a month ago, if you want access to your Dropbox files from your Windows Mobile phone, your only option is Ruttensoft's CloudFiles. Now, they have a competitor - Droppedboxx. It's not as fully featured as CloudFiles, but it gets the job done, especially if all you want to do is ftp between your phone and your Dropbox account.

The only feature I miss from CloudFiles is the internal text editor, but I can live without it. Price wise, the official releases for Cloud Files and Droppedboxx are $6.99 and $2.99 respectively.

I just installed Read It Later and Screengrab for Firefox and Firebug Lite for Chrome. All three add-ons/extensions are really helpful in my day-to-day management of Wopular.

Dropbox has became an indispensable web development tool for me. It lets you share and sync files across multiple computers - your desktop, laptop, and netbook. It also keeps a history of your edits, like google docs. I use it as a poor man's svn to keep track of my edits to pages on Wopular, in addition to syncing design comps, and to-do lists. Since I already use my HD2 to pick stores to feature on the site, I thought wouldn't it be nice if I could also do some coding with it.

Recently I've updated the Alexa Sparky add-on for FireFox 3.0, which displays website traffic rankings on the status bar. It's a nice little plugin that not only lets you see how large other sites are, but it also helps improve your rankings a little bit. After updating the add-on, I started noticing some strange behavior while browsing the web.

With the iPhone, it's all about the apps. At least that's what the commercials on TV tell us. Naturally, I wanna see what apps are available on the App Store. Disappointingly, it only shows a categorized selection - out of the 100,000 that's available. Directories died a long time ago; just give me a search box.

I recently upgraded to FireFox 3.5 because I accidentally clicked on the upgrade button. I didn't mind initially because FireFox upgrades hadn't done me wrong in the past. My initial reaction was: "Hey, they copied Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 with the new tab button." Chrome and IE, of course, both copied FireFox's tabbed browsing feature to start with. So everyone's copying everyone. I'm surprised at how convenient that new tab button is. I initially thought that button would be useless. I didn't think I would ever use it because I'm so used to pressing Control-T. Well, I did.