Archive for the ‘What is’ Category

Getdropbox doing something right!

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

A few days ago I received an invite from the team at www.getdropbox.com.  I had totally forgotten that a few months or weeks I signed up to be one of their beta testers. So the invite arrived. Of course I was totally no idea what exactly the software did so I again took at look at their video on their home page. And wow, did I get excited.  And that doesn’t happen to often.

I won’t explain the whole features since their video which is only a few minutes long does a great job explaining how drop box works.

The company plan on charging for their software, but right now you get 2.0 gigs of free space as a beta tester. The awesome thing about dropbox is that is works just like  plain folder except with cooler features.  To start off you download the software, then you have to link it to your account( you create a dropbox account).  When your dropbox account you can link computers to your account. The reason for linking seems to be the following. Your email and password for your account provide the necessary information to keep track of whatfiles you have in your dropbox folder, since there is also in online interface where you can acess files online.

The neat thing lies in the following. So your dropbox folder functions just like a folder. Its sorta like a shared folder. So say you have three computers. Laptop at home, desktop at home and work pc. All in different locations. With drop box you install the software and link the accounts. All three computers will have a folder called  My Dropbox inside My documents folder.  The awesomness lies in that when you put any file in any of the My Dropbox folder in any of the computers, those changes to that folder migrate to the other computers. So say in my home desktop computer I put 3 pictures. Those 3 pictures will magically appear in the My Dropbox folder of all the other computers. Is not that awesome. So its sorta like shared folder in a windows home or office network, but here you can be in different part of the world, no need to be in same physical network.  So that is only one the kool things about getdropbox.

Another extremely cool thing is the following.  Say I wanted to show someone a picture briefly. If I send them a picture of an attachment they will have record of it forever.  What if I just want them to see it for a second.  Well since the world wide web is ment to be public it is very hard to do that, but you can come close if the other person is not too computer savvy.  My Dropbox folder comes with a handy Public folder. You can put any thing inside this folder and anythign that you put inside this folder has a public url. So you can copy that url and send it to someone. When they are done with the link, just delete the file in the folder and that file, picture will no longer be visible.

Lastly, you can share folder with friends.  Say you have a folder of  picture you want to share with family member but not your friends. You can set to share certain folder by email invitation. So when your family members get their invite and create their account , right inside their drop box they will see that   folder you shared and none of your other drop box files. So now you can add pictures to that folder and whomever you shared it with, will view all changes.  Which is very vey neat.  This way you can share folder with diferent sets of friends.

I have a few invites… so if you want to give it a try send me a comment with your e-mail.

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Open Office Writer beats Microsoft Word 2007

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

So I am the occasional typist. I pop open Microsoft Word 2007 when I need to type something fast and need to correct it.  The grammar check and spell check is pretty darn good…. no complaints there. But today I needed a little something more involved. I was created a 3-4 page report, with nested list number list and bullet list.  I tried for about 30 minutes a simple example to get everything to align correctly. But I simply couldn’t.   Its probably due to the fact that I have not studied the new interface, but well to me it seems that it should be pretty intuitive.  The goal was something like this.

1.0 Main

1.1 submain

*

*

2.0

What a pain, just to get the simple thing. I would click multi-list button and i would be the first item. If i gave it heading 1, the number would dissapear. For the sub items I tried looking for heading 2. But no where to be find. I didn’t want the identation for subitems… no where to be found(probably cuz i don’t know where to look)… i wasted too much time.. I admit I was doing it in word because the different styles look good, but i now I just wanted it to work. I gave up.

I soon pop up. Openoffice writer.  Quickly I had a multi-list. I quickly realized that the headings(heading1,heading2, etc) correspond to items on multist. So all I had to do was type something and give it heading 1 or heading 2 and it would automatically know what number to put beside it. also I found the ‘bullets  and numbering’ button and wow. Everything is there.  Level by level. You click on level one, you can adjust the numbering scheme, the indentation, everything .wow. Click on level two and do the same. I wanted level 1 and level 2 to look exactly the same, I just changed heading 2 to look like heading 1. What a freeze. Took me 15 minutes to get the hang out it.. And now I have a 4 page document looking good… and i just tested the table of contents feature… and wow. Automatically created it. :)

So Word is good… but when you on the run and need to create somethign fast with multilist… somethign simpler like Open office write could save tons of head aches and hassle.

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Ajax Explained

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

There is lots of hype out in the www about something called ajax. What exactly is it? Well according to wikipedia it basically “is a group of inter-related web development techniques used for creating interactive web applications”. What does that mean? Well lets see. Say you took a piece of paper, a pencil, a pen and some white out and put them into a little package that you decided to call “Papete”. You took exiting items and packaged them together an called it something different. Ajax is sort of like that. It took existing technologies, javascript, xml and asynchronism and called it ajax.

So what is ajax and what does it do? Well going back to the fictional “Papete” example. Say you sent the package to your friend Bob. Bob will take your items and create a masterpiece of an illustration for your business, with out the use of anything else except your items. He will have pictures of your business, your logo and text describing what you do. Bob sends you his work by mail. So say he sends you his first draft and has a couple mistakes, you correct the errors and send him a letter saying where exactly he messed up. Bob of course has to start from scratch again with only the items in the “Papete” package. Of course this will take time. So on his second draft he has more mistakes, the process repeats itself until eventually its perfect. And the process could pretty much keep going even if its perfect but you want to keep changing things in the illustration over time. This process of sending Bob the changes and Bob redoing the changes from scratch of course is time consuming and not really idealo. What if there was a better method.

What if you could just send the changes to Bob, and he magically does the changes on the first draft of the illustration. No need for him to start from scratch or anything. Once he reads the changes he magically makes the paper change to have the new changes even if he is not physically present where the paper is. For example say the illustration needs to change the Business name from ‘Bu’ to ‘Bo’. Once Bob reads the changes  he magically somehow makes the illustration text read ‘Bo’ instead of ‘Bu’. So of course Bob has some really powerful powers if he can do this. This would saves tons of time and effort since all changes happen in that first draft.

Well what Bob does with his magic is pretty much what Ajax does for the internet. See every time you visit a page you are asking Bob(Your Browser) to send you a page. If you visit another page on the same site—nothing changes on the new page just the content) Bob sensd you the whole new page from scratch in a sense. So the browser is sorta stupid. It keeps re-drawing each illustration from scratch even thought there are only minor changes from one page of a site to another. So this is where the magic with ajax happens. Just as Bob was able to magically fix that element of part of the illustration that needed changing ajax does to web pages. Say you are viewing a gallery. Instead of asking your browser for a new page every time you want see the next picture you ask your browser to just change the picture element and nothing else. So instead of the browser fetching a new page each time( when nothing really changes between pages except the pic) with ajax the browse is able to just magically fetch the new picture and nothing else. So what is so special about this?

This means that just as Bob was able to save time by magically making changes, ajax allows web pages and web applications to saves tons of time by only changes parts of pages that need changing not the whole page.

Note:
This comparison between Bob and ajax is written for a quick explanation of ajax. For detailed information visit the wikipedia page found here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX

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