Guess I can’t carry an extra laptop battery, camera battery, and Archos battery anymore. Now I have to choose which is most important…

Full Press Release

“This rule protects the passenger,” said Lynne Osmus, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) assistant administrator for security and hazardous materials. “It’s one more step for safety. It’s the right thing to do and the right time to do it.”

What a load of crap…

This first new release adds Java SimpleDateFormat support. Look for Ruby next…

Find it in the widgets section on BlueNeedle.com

“Effective Saturday, August 4, passengers must remove all electronic items, such as DVD players and video cameras, from their carry-ons at security checkpoints. The new requirement does not affect electronic items in checked luggage.”

They say more information can be found at the TSA web site, but I found nothing there, so I’m not sure if this is nationwide or just in Seattle. If I were you, I’d be ready just in case no matter what city you happening to be flying out of.

For what its worth, Timbuk2 has some seriously awesome see through plastic zip containers. Their web site’s accessories section doesn’t list them at the moment, so they are out of stock. I use the smaller orange one for all my cables, but the next time I get down to San Francisco, I’m going to pick another slightly larger one up for all of my small electronics like my digital camera, iPod, Archos, etc. That way I can just toss a bag in a bin and be on my way (depending on how thorough the searches are going to be…)

[tags]TSA, air travel, flight, iPod, phone, digital camera, electronics, security measure[/tags]

A lot of mobile sites like those provided by Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, and Remember The Milk construct their mobile sites such that older phones without directional pads can use numbers for navigation.

The Motorola Q has a directional pad and can scroll through the links; however, some of these numeric links are so time saving it is more beneficial to use them. You do so by just pressing the corresponding number, and the link is automatically selected and navigated to.

Unfortunately, the numbers on the Motorola Q are accessed by pressing a function key and the letter with the correct number. this can get old real quick when you continuously browse one of these sites.

The solution?? Double tap the function key and it turns on the numlock feature. This setting persists through your entire browsing session until you single press the function key one more time. With numlock on, you can just press say D to get a 5, E to get a 2, and so on.

Happy mobile browsing!

For those that wanted to but didn’t come - shame on you! Just kidding. I’m sure you had good reasons, but the conference would have only been better with you there. Check the site for news about Mashup Camp 5 later this year.

If you were there or want to catch up on what you missed, there are of course photos, session notes on the wiki, and I recorded the sessions I went to and published them on xDrive.

If you have some extra time (yeah right, huh? :) ) I’d ask you to take a look at my two mashups: BookmarkCleaner.com and Twitterlicious.com. In fact, I got the chance to do a short video interview with ZDNet Executive Editor David Berlind about Twitterlicious.com.

Thanks to David Berlind, Doug Gold, the Computer History Museum, and all the great sponsors for putting together another incredible camp! And how did I forget to give the biggest thanks to my employer Pure Networks for allowing me the time to attend?

Hope to see you at a future Mashup Camp!

[tags]mashup, web application[/tags]

lilill is a little OS X application that makes using menubar extras fun. It is optimized for use on laptops, especially the 12″ & 13″ models where menubar extra space is at a premium. I believe in using menubar extras, and am frustrated when I can’t see them all due to limited horizontal screen space and overly aggressive menus in applications.

When you make lilill the active application, all you see is its name. No help menu, no edit or window menus. Just a simple thin name with TONS of space to see all those previously hidden menubar extras.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Sweet, huh?

If you like it, feel free to go to the lilill Web site and download it. If it changes your life, you’re welcome to send PayPal donations to myko AT blueneedle DOT com (donation button to come). There’s also advertising on the site if you want to contact me to put your ad up there, too.

I’m also looking for an exclusive icon that I can use instead of the freely licensable non-exclusive one I choose for this version.

[tags]lilill, menubar extras, os x, menubar[/tags]

I presented a demo for my site Chunk Love at iPhoneDevCamp that showed how to disable scaling and which allows icons and content to float from portrait mode to landscape mode. I’ll summarize that demo here with sample code and screenshots.

The first thing you need to do if you know your UI is the correct size is to disable scaling by using the viewport META tag:

<meta name="viewport" content="user-scalable=false; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; minimum-scale=1.0" />

1. The portion “user-scalable=false” tells the iPhone that you do not want the user to be able to use pinch and zoom to control your content.
2. The “initial-scale=1.0″ tells the iPhone to not scale your content at all upon initial load.
3. The “minimum-scale=1.0″ and “maximum-scale=1.0″ tells the iPhone itself not to scale your content AT ALL when the viewport size changes. Without these two sub-attributes, your content would increase in size slightly when flipped from portrait mode to landscape mode.
4. One thing to note is that when using all three scaling sub-attributes, you do not need to set a width, as the iPhone automatically creates the proper width assuming a width of 480 at 1.0 scale when in landscape mode, and a width of 320 at 1.0 scale when in portrait mode.

This alone will not get your UI to flex, it will only allow it to as the iPhone will not scale anything for you. To actually get your content to flex, you need to use what are called floating divs. To show you what I mean by a flexible UI, I will insert two screenshots below; one in portrait mode, and one in landscape mode.

Keep in mind, these are approximate shots taken from Safari, but the UI looks exactly like this on the iPhone. Note how the icons shift up a row to fill the space provided? this is what a flexible UI is, and is a perfect way to adjust your content when you have blocks of it.

Below is the code for nine of the icons that is in the HTML page:

<div class="Column"><a href="/scanners/an/percent/30?category=1"><img src="/images/electronics.w.png"></a><span>Electronics</span></div>
<div class="Column"><a href="/scanners/an/percent/30?category=3"><img src="/images/software.w.png"></a><span>Software</span></div>
<div class="Column"><a href="/scanners/an/percent/30?category=6"><img src="/images/photo.w.png"></a><span>Camera</span></div>
<div class="Column"><a href="/scanners/an/percent/30?category=8"><img src="/images/garden.w.png"></a><span>Garden</span></div>
<div class="Column"><a href="/scanners/an/percent/30?category=9"><img src="/images/tools.2.png"></a><span>Tools</span></div>
<div class="Column"><a href="/scanners/an/percent/30?category=10"><img src="/images/apparel.w.png"></a><span>Apparel</span></div>
<div class="Column"><a href="/scanners/an/percent/30?category=11"><img src="/images/computer.w.png"></a><span>Computer</span></div>
<div class="Column"><a href="/scanners/an/percent/30?category=12"><img src="/images/dvd.w.png"></a><span>DVDs</span></div>
<div class="Column"><a href="/scanners/an/percent/5?category=16"><img src="/images/isbn.w.png"></a><span>Books</span></div>

The divs with “class=Column” are the surrounding container that encompass the icon and the text below it. Now, take a look at the CSS applied to these divs:

.Column { float:left; width:100px; height:60px; border:1px solid white; vertical-align:middle;}
.Column A { clear:right; }
.Column A IMG {width:44px; height:44px;}
.Column span { clear:left; display:block; font-size:14px; color:#000000;}
.Column SPAN A {font-size:25px; font-weight:bold;}

The most important line is the first line where we use the CSS style “float:left;”. This is the magic that gets the elements to flow around each other to take up the available space. I included the entirety of the CSS that applies to the icon blocks if you want to see how the text is placed below the icon.

The best thing about this UI is not only that the iPhone will not scale any of it, and that it naturally fills available space, but also that as is, it will work with ANY mobile phone with a decent sized browser. This UI works the exact same way on Windows Mobile, Treos, Blackberries, etc…

I hope you were able to take something out of this demo and the accompanying code samples. If you have any questions or what nots, feel free to leave a comment.

[tags]iPhone, Windows Mobile, CSS, viewport, float, div, iPhoneDevCamp, UI[/tags]

* Auto ringing of multiple phones when one phone number is called
* Ability to record any call received by pressing a button on the phone
* Ability to mark numbers as spam
* Ability to assign ring backs for groups of people
* Ability to import your address book
* Ability to screen calls from any phone type, just like your home answering machine
* Ability to put calls on hold and switch the phone you are talking about (e.g. cell phone in the car, get home, and transfer the call to your home phone, all with 2 button presses.)

The site changed to invite only after the acquisition. I have between 5 and 10 invites open depending on the disposition of a few close friends’ needs. If you’d like to get an invite, just post in the comments. I’ll use a generic name if I can’t figure yours out from your post or email.

BTW - I plan on making invites available to sites which I become a member of. You can subscribe to the invite category’s RSS feed if you want special advance notice of this type of post.

EDIT - THEY ARE ALL GONE NOW.  SORRY IF YOU MISSED OUT!!

I have del.icio.us set up to auto post my bookmarks to Life, it is a Travesty (my personal site) and since then, the daily post has failed. I noticed it a month or so ago and made a task to fix it, but never really got around to it.

Yesterday I made a new task to start using Marsedit to post again. When it failed for the same reason I knew I had to find the answer and find it quick. I haven’t been able to find information on Dreamhost’s site as to when they expect to fix the issue, but I’d be glad for them to comment here on the issue.

When you see you are getting the error

XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only.

from Marsedit, del.icio.us, or any other application using XML-RPC to access your Wordpress (or otherwise PHP based) site, then keep reading for what you can do to fix this.

Add this at the VERY top of {WORDPRESS_ROOT}/xmlrpc.php (replacing the first line):

<?
$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA = file_get_contents(”php://input”);

That’s it! You’re now ready to go.

Scoble has a call for help for Zoomr.

I’ll admit that I know very little about Zoomr (as I am not in the Beta) except that it is looking to compete with Flickr.

What I DO know is that Thomas Hawk has done more for photographers’ rights than almost anyone else in the field of late. For that reason alone I’ll be jumping over and hitting the PayPal donate link.

Keep fighting for us, Thomas, and we’ll fight for you.

[tags]zoomr, flickr, thomas hawk, photography, startup, scoble[/tags]