Zinio for the iPhone is a good idea but…
I tried to access my magazine subscriptions on Zinio from the iPhone. It turns out that Zinio has a special website for iPhone users, and the website does display the content in a manner which is suitable for viewing from an iPhone.
But the actual text is horrendous. The displayed text is a compressed bitmapped image, rather than vector based text as in a PDF. This is a problem because once you zoom into the text you start seeing a lot of "noise" surrounding the text, and when you zoom out you don't see the noise, but you don't see the text clearly as well, as shown in the screenshots.
As a general rule, you should only use bitmapped based formats for static displays ie. an image sized at only 1024x780. However if some scaling maybe involved, one should always go for vector based formats, because it is redrawn at every size.
Why I think strong password generators are a bad idea
Recently in twit.tv's MacBreak Weekly, they advised about a simple technique to get secure passwords, by using openssl, then in another episode they talked about 1Password.
The advise was to generate a strong password and have your keychain manager remember it! Now, if you do follow that advise, and set up complex passwords, and have your keychain manager remember it, what happens if your keychain becomes corrupted due to any reason (or your hard disk crashes and you don't have a backup), you would be completely locked out of your accounts, because the password was too complex to remember. Or imagine your traveling and get your laptop stolen (happened to a friend recently), there is no way you can login into any service, because you don't remember the passwords any more. So are strong random passwords really a good idea??
I rather think, that phrases, you remember are better as passwords. Or if possible try to use openssl keys for identification. The best methods I've seen so far, and I think its pretty secure from keyloggers as well, is method used by my bank.
The site does not prompt for the entire password, rather, you have to type in certain characters in the password, for instance:
And every time you login the character a different set of characters is asked. This method is secure from keyloggers for sure, because no one will have an idea what character was asked.
Zinio makes Magazines accessible!
Don't you love to read magazines in your field? I love to read MacWorld, PC Magazine, PC World it helps me keep up to date and provides a good way to pass my leisure time. However before today I did not want to subscribe to magazines independently and have them pile up in my room.
Today I ordered a Digital subscription of MacWorld, in order to be environmentally friendly, preemptively remove a lot of mess in my room and make the content searchable. The MacWorld site took me to Zinio, where I discovered what a treasure trove it is.
Zinio makes a lot of magazines accessible to the casual reader. It offers a wide range of popular magazines from MacWorld to Playboy to Jane's Defense Weekly. Subscription are cheap. For a whole year subscription like costs $20 for a single magazine.
The only downside of ZInio is the DRM'd format in which the digital magazines are delivered. The content is not indexable by spotlight. I have to use their own search utility to search through the magazines. They have a client for Mac, which downloads new magazines available to you.
Create desktop client easily for web applications
I love to use tada lists, however I hate to open a browser and go to the URL and login. I would love to have a desktop client for tada lists. Similarly there are various web applications which I love to use, however I dont want to browse to the site. If you face these problems, enter Fluid.
Fluid allows you to create a 'desktop type' application of any web applications, for example, I used it to create desktop client applications for tada lists, my mail, facebook and some other sites.
Fluid can also support various client application modes. For example
This is a standard client application of tada lists.
And this is another mode, this is a Digg Application, where you can access it form the system menu bar.
Ebay Nightmares continue…
As I had previously recounted a bad selling experience on ebay, a similar but prolonged episode is been narrated here. Ebay really needs to deal with the scammers effectively if its business is supposed to survive.
Google Reader Hacks
Google Reader is one of my favorite feed aggregators. Its the first thing I check after checking my mail every morning, and every evening.Over time I've come to love its keyboard shortcuts which really make browsing feeds so much easier and less time consuming, so in this post I will share my top Google Reader hacks:
- Feed Item browsing shortcuts
The keyboard shortcuts J and K, can be used to browse feed items, while viewing a feed, you can tag it by pressing T, and by pressing V you can view the original item in a popup, S is for staring and shift-S for sharing. Another highly useful keyboard shortcut is U, with which you can view feed items in full screen mode.
2. Browsing Feed Subscriptions
This is my favorite part, you can use old school keyboard shortcuts like shift-p/n to move to the next or previous subscription, however, I have some favorite feeds which I always read first, hence manually traversing is a time-consuming operation. However Google Reader has something to offer here aswell: By pressing 'g followed by u' you can see all your subscriptions in a popup panel, this popup panel implements a incremental search feature, which is extremely time saving when looking for a specific feed.
The full list
After pressing W we get this:
I haven't covered all of Google Reader's shortcuts exhaustively, you can view them by pressing '?'.
Google Gears the first offline web application toolkit?
One thing I hate that the IT Industry is that when someone releases a piece of technology that is completely revolutionary, and no one takes stock, however when some company with a lot of clout in the industry such as Google or Apple release, everyone think that they rock!
From my RSS feeds I stumbled across this article in ZDnet "Can Microsoft change "gears" for the sea-change ahead?". The title was attractive so I started reading it, however early on in the article I came across this:
"During that time, I have drawn attention to the work being done with JavaDB and Derby as examples of how the offline problem might get solved. But, ultimately, I have routinely said that when the problem gets solved, it will get solved by Google. Last week, with Google's announcement of Google Gears, that day came."
Once I read this I stopped reading why? Because Google Gears is NOT the first offline web application toolkit. The first on to my knowledge is Dojo Offline. Dojo is a popular AJAX framework, and Dojo Offline extends basic Dojo's capabilities by allowing Dojo applications to be used while you're offline.
Another related news, is the launch of the Apple iPhone. I've seen Blogs dubbing it as revolutionary because it has a pure touchscreen interface etc. But is it the first smart phone with a pure touch screen interface? Certainly not! I've been using the Motorola e680i since 1 year, and it was released in 2005, and it too has full touchscreen interface with minimal buttons and no keyboard. Surely it would be an improvement over those Palm Treo and Motorola Q type devices with mini keyboards, but the iPhone is not as revolutionary as people think.
So why is it that the IT industry does not recognize achievement and give credit where it's due?
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