Archive for June, 2009
Mozilla claims one million copies of Firefox 3.5 have been downloaded during its first day of release.
During the browser team’s weekly meeting today that began at 2:00 pm EST, developers reported the crossing of the one million download milestone. By the end of the meeting, the number of donwloads reached 1.1 million, according to developers on the call.
Firefox 3.5 was officially made available Tuesday, meeting the planned milestone that was announced last week. It is a major release for the openundefined source browser team. Developers initially planned a minor 3.6 update late last year but opted to do a more significant upgrade following the release of Google’s open source Chrome browser after Firefox 3.0 hit the streets in June of 2008.
During the meeting, leaders acknowledged that there are a few bugs still being worked on that will be resolved in a soon-to-be-released Firefox 3.5.1 update.
Here’s an except from Mozilla’s official announcement today:
Firefox 3.5 is the best performing browser Mozilla has ever released and delivers radically improved JavaScript performance, a new Private Browsing mode, native support for open video and audio, and Location Aware Browsing. The newest version of Firefox is more than two times faster than Firefox 3 and ten times faster than Firefox 2 on complex websites. With extensive under the hood work to support new technologies, Firefox 3.5 is the most powerful and complete modern browser and helps upgrade the Web experience.
Filed under: E-mail, Productivity, Google, Web
It’s been a while since we first looked at ToodleDo, an excellent web-based task manager. But as cool as ToodleDo is as standalone web page, it’s the integration with other services like Google Calendar that make it a task manager like this really useful. Recently ToodleDo launched a gadget for Gmail that makes it easy to view, create, or sort your tasks from Gmail, which is a killer feature for anyone who leaves Gmail open all day as they go about their other tasks.
In order to use the ToodleDo Gmail gadget you’ll need to enable the Gadgets feature in your Gmail Labs settings. Google also offers its own Tasks application which you can also view in the Gmail sidebar. But while you can easily create tasks from email messages with Google Tasks, you don’t have as many options for sorting and filtering apps as you get with ToodleDo.
[via WebWorkerDaily]
ToodleDo gadget brings powerful task manager to Gmail originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Following up on yesterday’s post about Peter Drucker’s principles of effective executives, I asked former CEO of MySQL Mårten Mickos to discuss the principles that we has used in building an effective executive team. After all no single executive can be successful on their own; to build a high-performance culture requires a discipline that extends across the entire leadership.
Developer’s interested in giving back to the community should check out All for Good’s new API (our All for Good API Profile). If you are not familiar with All for Good, it is a new service that lets you browse volunteer activities and find events based on your location or interests.
According to the All for Good site, the new application was developed in response to President Obama’s call for citizen action:
Inspired by the call of President Obama to engage more Americans in service, a group of individuals from the technology, marketing and public sectors came together to build an open source application that allows you to find and share volunteer activities. All for Good lets you browse activities and find events based on your location or interests. The site is governed by Our Good Works a nonprofit organization that was formed by some of the people who initiated the project and who support the product’s growth. vities.
All for Good is backed by several influential private and non-profit organizations, including Google, Craigslist Foundation, UCLA, YouTube, FanFeedr and Aha! Ink. There are numerous founding activity providers, including the American Red Cross, United Way, Sierra Club, and many more.
All for Good’s RESTful API accepts several request parameters, including search keywords, volunteer opportunity providers, and proximity to a geographic location (either a city/state or latitude/longitude). Documentation for the API is already available, as well as an application gallery that features a web page gadget and Android App developed with the API. Developers should note that an API Key is required.
The All for Good API is a great addition to our API directory, and it joins the ranks of other APIs like the Green Thing API, Social Actions API and the Kiva API, in providing developers with access to valuable information that can be leveraged to do good.
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources
The Open Source Team’s Cat Allman will be in Berlin, Germany this week to present at LinuxTag 2009. Cat’s talk, Getting Started in Open Source: An Overview for Newbies, will take place on Friday, June 26th at 4 PM local time. This will be Cat’s second time presenting at LinuxTag – in 2008 she gave a talk about Google Summer of Code™.
This year LinuxTag expects over 10,000 visitors from around the world- If you are there make sure to attend Cat’s talk!
By Ellen Ko, Open Source Team
Filed under: Fun, Ask DLS, Browsers, Humor
Don’t get me wrong – we kicked it around on the list and there’s the obvious roundness in the phrase World Wide Web. But is there any other sector where the iconography is this uniform?
Netscape used to have a big, boxy icon, but even that vanished as time went by. With the digging I did this afternoon, I only found one non-round icon: Midori (right). And even it has kind of a squashed-but-still-round look to it.
Oddly, Opera, whose name “sounds” like it should be the roundest logo of the bunch, is noticeably less round than the others I shopped together.
What’s the deal? Is the circle just the ultimate shape for a browser logo?
Could there be some kind of Illuminati-run conspiracy at work?
Sesame Street was all about circles the other day, maybe those creepy little muppets are behind it all…
Ask DLS: why is every damn web browser logo round? originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Reading the Windows Internet Explorer 8: Get the Facts marketing campaign instantly made me wonder, “When did Microsoft hire Oracle’s marketing team?” While Oracle is getting much better, it was legendary for making bold claims by cherry-picking “data.” It used to drive me nuts when I was in the IBM market intelligence group and was asked to pull background data to refute these claims — not b
Whether for exercise, sight-seeing, or just for fun, most of us enjoy walking, running and biking our way through the city or the country side. Below you’ll find six mashups from the Programmable Web database that help you track, share and measure your excursions outside of a moving vehicle.
Share Your Workout Route
If you want a place to store or view routes that also has a community of users, run–don’t walk–to WalkJogRun (mashup profile). You can search nearby routes and view details. Each route contains mile markers and lets you edit your own copy of the route. Even better, developers will appreciate that any route can be exported to KML or GPX. This is also the only such site I’ve found that has its own iPhone app.
With a name like WikiWalki (mashup profile), you might expect an unstructured database of GPS tracks. Not so, as it actually has one of the best interfaces for entering route data. Any point can be moved or deleted, so there’s no need to get it right the first time. A cool measurement tool lets route viewers and creators to calculate the distance of specific segments.
Simplicity is key for WalkDB (mashup profile), which stores and displays basic routes. Most simply have a beginning, end and the turns in between. One feature that not every route takes advantage of are landmarks. WalkDB would be the perfect site to use to share walking tours of historic districts, for example. The only downside is that users are required to register to add a route to its database.
Get Off The Road
If you like getting out of the city and onto some trails, MTBGuru (mashup profile) is for you. Though focused first on mountain bikes, the site breaks routes into several categories, including hiking, running and skiing. It appears to only allow new routes through GPS tracks, probably because it’s hard to plot trails from satellite photos. That means MTBGuru has richer data, including how long a route took. Mixed with altitude, it makes for some detailed graphs.
The more casual trail hound might prefer Trail Chaser (mashup profile). You can add data from a web interface in addition to uploading from a GPS. There aren’t many trails yet, but those that are there have elevation data (better to know about the 2,000 foot climb ahead of time, no?) and, in some cases, photos taken along the route.
Find the Distance–Quickly
When it comes to simply measuring distances, there’s still nothing better than GMaps Pedometer (mashup profile). No login is required, so you can jump right in. It measures elevation, shows mile markers and exports as GPX. Plus, it has a feature I haven’t seen in any other track-entering interface: it optionally uses routing to plot the path between two points, easing the job of inputting a route.
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources
Do desktops matter?
Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation insists they don’t. (The picture is from Terry Jones’ wonderful “flying penguins” ad for the BBC.)
As he explained to me during CompuTex, people are more focused today on connectivity and applications.
Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop no longer gives it control over whether or not you run open source, and it is merely competitive on the new platforms of the Web and phones.
Thus, he would argue, when our own Adrian Kingsley-Hughes asks, “could you switch over to being 100% open source” we may be asking the wrong question.
We’re all a lot more open source than we were, in part because we’re a lot less wedded to our desks.
This desktop still runs Windows, but most of its applications are open source — The Gimp, Open Office, Thunderbird, Google Chrome. Give me the right stick and the netbook I took to China will belong to the penguin.
Meanwhile I define my life more-and-more by online resources, less and less by what’s on my desk. What is most remarkable about my netbook is how it constantly seeks open WiFi connections. The netbook computing experience is defined by being online.
Bing may be on Windows, but does that matter? I’m writing this post on WordPress, not Linux, and I’m looking up links using Google, not Linux. When you’re online no one knows if your OS is a dog.
Much of Linux’s success has been in the fact that, in an online world, it’s invisible or, to put it another way, transparent. This transparency is a key open source value. Transparency gives Zemlin hope that phones will run open source operating systems like Moblin or Android. But will those users even know they’re running Linux?
The biggest computing job today is fitting all these pieces into a coherent computing experience. Right now people remain wedded to a device. It’s a desktop in my case, but in Japan it’s often a mobile phone, and increasingly an iPhone. For some people it’s an iPod or Kindle.
It’s obvious that the only way to achieve device unity is online. One operating system is not going to bind our futures. You may choose to live in a Windows world, but each part of that world must compete with components running something else.
So where do you live your computing life? Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.
Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Productivity
Venerable New York Times technology columnist David Pogue recently posted a list of his productivity tips and tricks that allow him to be uber productive. The list is good in that he tries to generalize and talk about ways of doing things instead of specific software or hardware. For example, Pogue talks about using macro utilities instead of specifically naming utilities like Quicksilver for the Mac or Launchy for Windows.
While some of his tools seem somewhat outdated, it’s not a surprise given the time investment he has in them. And really, although we all to a greater or lesser extent have a case of “shiny object syndrome” and need to try the latest and greatest of everything, the truth is that if a tool is working, the most productive thing to do is to just leave it alone.
Of particular note (at least for me) is Pogue’s first tip that he uses text expansion software. It’s not so much that he uses it, but how he uses it that intrigues me; Pogue has expansion words configured for even the smallest word. For example, to type the word “the” he needs only type the letter “t”. That’s some serious configuration, but I can definitely see how it could be very useful once in the mindset of always using abbreviations.
What do you think of Pogue’s tips, and what is your best productivity tip?
David Pogue’s productivity secrets originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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