Google Reader Changes
September 4th, 2007 at 10:19 PM by Matt FreedmanIt looks like the Google Reader team has made some minor-ish changes to Google Reader!
You can now hide your subscriptions by clicking a little arrow between your subscriptions and the feed entries. Once they’re hidden, the feed entry space expands to fill the gap. There is then a little “My Subscriptions” link that expands into a dropdown of all your feeds, when clicked.
The loading “screen” is different now too. Instead of a Erlenmeyer flask and “Loading…” in the center of the window, it’s a little yellow “Loading…” with a little circle animation in the top center of the window.
Even though the new changes are fairly minor, I like them.
Update [September 5, 2007 @ 9:30 PM]: There’s a search box in the top-center of the page now, with a dropdown box to narrow your search to certain feeds and/or folders. Sweet.
Update [September 5, 2007 @ 10:37 PM]: The Google Reader blog confirms this. You can also use the Back/Forward buttons in your browser, and the unread count stops at 1000, now, instead of 100. Awesome.
Got My Free Stuff From Zac Johnson
August 29th, 2007 at 12:44 PM by Matt FreedmanAwhile ago Zac Johnson posted that he was going to give away some free stuff (from Affiliate Summit) to anyone who posted about it. Well, I posted about it, and I got my free stuff. I actually received it awhile ago, the same day as Michael Kwan actually, but I’ve been to lazy to post about it. 😛
He sent me a t-shirt for FunnyReign.Com, 5 pens and some sort of tin from ThinkPartnership (which I’m pretty sure doesn’t open 😛 ).
Thanks for the Free Stuff, Zac!
Now, when’s my BlueFur shirt getting here…
Google Phone: My Predictions
August 28th, 2007 at 9:32 PM by Matt FreedmanThere’s been a lot of rumors going around the Internet about Google releasing a cell phone. Some say in about 2 weeks, and some say Q1 of 2008. Here’s my predictions for the Google Phone:
- It’ll be released in the first half of 2008
- It will have a multi-touch widescreen display and will have 4 physical buttons. 3 of which will be customisable “shortcut” buttons (eg. Gmail, Docs and Spreadsheet) and one will be a home key
- It’ll have a Virtual Keyboard, like the iPhone
- A major part of it’s OS will be the built-in stuff. Such as Gmail, Reader, gTalk, Docs and Spreadsheets and the other popular Google services
- You will be able to store stuff in your Google/Gmail account. If you get the phone, your storage will be boosted to 5GB
- It will be available in multiple countries at the same time
- It will have a full HTML/Javascript browser.
- Google will have an API in the OS so that 3rd-party apps will be able to be developed for it
- It will come with unlimited data and texting (hopefully 😛 )
- You’ll be able to watch YouTube videos on it
- It’ll be 3G
- It’ll have Wi-Fi (a/b/g)
- You’ll be able to use gTalk to make free VOIP calls through a Wi-Fi connection
- You Contacts will automatically sync with your Gmail contacts (and vice-versa)
- It will have a couple GBs of memory
- It will also be a Music and Video phone
- You’ll be able to store Music and Video in your Google/Gmail account and stream it down to your phone
- Built-in GPS with Google Maps
- Be able to choose to browse through Google’s servers, which will compress/optimise the sites you browse to on Google’s servers, then send it to you (for faster browsing)
- You’ll be able to store a copy (in MP3 format) of your phone calls in your Google/Gmail account
Pretty specific, but I’m curious on how many will be correct, if any…
I think the idea of a Google Phone is great, if done properly. I also doubt we’ll hear anything official about it until close to the launch (that is assuming that there will be a Google Phone). Why, because when was the last time Google announced any new products in advance?
What do you think the Google Phone will be like?
New IE6 and 7 VPC Packages
August 20th, 2007 at 1:45 PM by Matt FreedmanThe IE Team has now updated the IE6 and 7 (w/ XP SP2) VPC Images. They have all the updates and are set to expire December 7, 2007.
If you don’t know about these, they’re Virtual PC “images” of Windows XP SP2 with either Internet Explorer 6 or Internet Explorer 7 installed. They’re great for cross-browser/Windows version testing purposes. You can see my previous post on them here.
Download IE6 or IE7 VPC Image (appox. 500-700 MB)
Download Virtual PC 2007 (appox. 30 MB)
Conditional Comments
August 15th, 2007 at 2:41 PM by Matt FreedmanConditional comments are special HTML comments that can be used to do certain things in Internet Explorer only without using any scripting. They only work in Internet Explorer and were introduced starting with version 5. This can be quite useful when making a Website because all Browsers don’t display things exactly the same. Usually Opera, Safari and Firefox all display it alike, but Internet Explorer may display it differently (for me, usually correctly 😛 ). This is where you can use conditional comments to make IE use, say, some different CSS values than other Browsers.
Take Matt’s Blog’s current theme for example (the upcoming theme also does this). I use conditional comments to have a stylesheet called ie7style.css to be loaded if the Browser is Internet Explorer 7. In that stylesheet, it overrides values set in the main stylesheet to make the Sidebar display correctly in IE7. These conditional comments are only recognized in IE. Other browsers just see them as meaning-less HTML comments.
Conditional comments start are usually in the format of:
<!--[if <em>expression</em>]>Special IE Only HTML<![endif]-->
Usually (if not always) the expression contains “IE”. You can then add a version number after that (eg. “IE 7”). Here’s an example of what you would use if you wanted to show it to all versions (above 5) of IE:
<!--[if IE]>Will Show Up in Internet Explorer Only<![endif]-->
For IE 7 only:
<!--[if IE 7]>Will Show Up in Internet Explorer 7 Only<![endif]-->
You can only use operators such as less-than (lt), less-than or equal-to (lte), greater-than (gt) and greater-than or equal-to (gte). Here’s an example:
<!--[if gte IE 7]>Will Show Up in Internet Explorer 7 and Above Only<![endif]-->
Conditional comments are particularly useful for specifying IE only stylesheets that overwrite settings in the main stylesheet, to make your Site look good cross-browser.
You can see the full list of expressions in the Microsoft Developer Network.
Now, if only other Browsers would implement conditional comments…
