Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on January 09, 2007 by CyberNet.

If you are just the slightest bit familiar with Linux then I am sure that you have heard of XGL. It is what adds all of the realistic 3D effects to the windows that you drag around and the virtual desktops that you switch between. Of course, one of the most popular features is probably the 3D cube for switching between your virtual desktops.

There is a new Firefox extension in town and it is called Tab Effect (the screenshot above is from the extension, not XGL). With the assistance of a little DirectX 8 (and beyond) it is able to provide transitional effects when switching between your tabs. Now it isn’t exactly like XGL where you can manually rotate a cube for switching between tabs, but the animation makes it look like you are rotating a cube each time you switch tabs. Honestly, this is the most amazing visual effect that I have ever seen in Firefox. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t like a little extra “eye candy” then this extension won’t be for you…it doesn’t make you more productive or add any useful features.

So now for the downside. I’m not sure if this will happen for everyone, but whenever I tried to create a new blank tab Firefox would crash if I was running this extension. If I was just opening a link to a site in a new tab it would be fine, but that is still quite a huge drawback for me. The extension was just released yesterday so there are a lot of kinks that needed to be worked out (and reading through the comments confirms that), but I’m sure it will continue to be developed since it is a new extension. Not to mention that this could put Firefox ahead of other browsers in terms of visual effects.

Once it stabilizes I will definitely be adding this to my small collection of extensions!

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on March 31, 2008 by CyberNet.

It has taken a little while to get to this point, but WordPress 2.5 was released earlier this weekend. The biggest thing about the new version is the completely revamped administration area (pictured to the right). It not only has a new color scheme, but has also been reworked to make you even more productive. And the cookie system has been made more secure, and so any of our users will need to login again to our site.

Note: I noticed that you can switch back to the old color scheme by pulling up your profile page. The new layout will remain intact, but the colors will be changed.

I upgraded our site to WordPress 2.5 yesterday, and I have to say that it handles itself quite well. Performance is better according to some early benchmarks I’ve done, productivity will definitely increase, and best of all WordPress is now able to upgrade plugins for you. Since nearly all of the changes have been made to the administration section of WordPress you should find that the upgrade process will go rather smoothly. Very few themes should break as a result of the upgrade, but there could be issues with some of your plugins.

I also spent some time getting our Recommended Tags plugin working on WordPress 2.5. There is now a version available solely for the WordPress 2.5 series because of the significant changes to the administration screen. I considered rolling both versions of the plugin into one, but overall the performance is better by keeping them separate.

Want a better idea of what’s new in WordPress 2.5? No problem! Here’s an overview of the features organized according to users and developers:

User Features

• Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard
• Dashboard Widgets — you can customize any of the dashboard widgets to show, for example, news from your local paper instead of WP news.
• Multi-file upload with progress bar — now you can select a whole of folder images or music or videos at once and it’ll show you the progress of each upload.
• EXIF extraction — if you upload JPEG files with EXIF metadata like camera make and model, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, et al. WordPress will extract all the data into custom fields you can use in your template.
• Search posts and pages — search used to cover just posts, now it includes pages too.
• Tag management — you can now add, rename, delete, and do whatever else you like to tags from inside WordPress, no plugins needed.
• Password strength meter — when you change your password on your profile it’ll tell you how strong your password is to help you pick a good one.
• Concurrent editing protection — now if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress magically locks it and prevents you from saving until the other person is done.
• Few-click plugin upgrades — if the plugins you use are part of the plugin directory since 2.3 we’ve told you when they have an update available. Now we take that to the next logical step — downloading and installing the upgrade for you.
• Friendlier visual post editor — I’m not sure how to articulate this improvement except to say “it doesn’t mess with your code anymore.” We’re now using version 3.0 of TinyMCE, which means better compatibility with Safari, and we’ve paid particular attention this release to its integration and interaction with complex HTML. It also now has a “no-distractions” mode which is like Writeroom for your browser.
• Built-in galleries — when you take advantage of multi-file upload to upload a bunch of photos, we have a new shortcode that lets you to easily embed galleries by just putting [ gallery] (without the space) in your post. It’ll display all your thumbnails and captions and each will link each to a page where people can comment on the individual photos.

Developer Features

• Salted passwords — we now use the phpass library to stretch and salt all passwords stored in the database, which makes brute-forcing them impractical.
• Secure cookies — cookies are now encrypted based on the protocol described in this PDF paper.
• Easy taxonomy and URL creation — probably best illustrated with an example: I can call register_taxonomy() with a few arguments to register a “people” taxonomy and whenever I edit an image I’ll see a UI like tags has for identifying the people in a photo, and these will be URL addressable with /person/firstname-lastname/.
• Inline documentation — the vast majority of the new code going into WordPress include inline documentation that explains the functions and documents their arguments.
• Database optimization — we haven’t changed the table layout in this release, which is one of the reasons so many plugins work fine with 2.5. We have added a few new indicies and made a few default fields more flexible based on some bottlenecks we found on WordPress.com.
• $wpdb->prepare() — now almost all of the SQL in WordPress is prepared first, and the same functions are available to your plugins. This should prevent elementary SQL escaping issues.
• Media buttons — the add media buttons above the post are both expandable, so you could have an “Add Google Map” button if you like.
• Shortcode API — the new gallery functionality is powered by the new shortcode API. Shortcodes are little bracket-delineated strings that can be magically expanded at runtime to something more interesting. The Shortcode API is fully documented.

Get WordPress 2.5

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on September 03, 2007 by CyberNet.

Do you have empty directories cluttering up your computer? The truth of the matter is that you probably don’t realize how many empty folders actually reside on your PC. Before using the free Remove Empty Directories program I had no idea that I had 219 folders that were not being used.

The program does require that you install it, but the whole thing is rather simple to use. You can designate a hard drive, or a folder on you computer to perform the scan on. Any of the folders that will be deleted will then be highlighted in red.

Here are some of the features:

• Integrates into Windows Explorer
• Can ignore system folders
• Specify files to ignore when scanning. This is a nice feature so that it will still mark folders for deletion even if they include things like "desktop.ini" or "Thumbs.db".
• Specify folders to skip, that way the program won’t delete some of your important directories even if they are empty.

Remove Empty Directories Homepage (Windows only)
Source: Inspect My Gadget

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on September 10, 2008 by CyberNet.

One thing that really sucks with the iPhone and iPod Touch is that neither of them can be used to store files. When you have that much storage space available to you, being able to store files would be really nice. There are a handful of programs in the App Store you can use to store some types of files on your iPhone, but the only downside is that most of these apps are $5 and above.

Luckily for you Avatron is offering their new Air Sharing app (iTunes link) for free for the first two weeks (release date was September 8th, 2008). With it you can wirelessly transfer these various types of files from a Windows, Mac, or Linux machine. Here’s a quick list of the different file formats that Air Sharing supports:

• iWork (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote), full resolution if saved with preview
• Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), with limited support for XML formats
• Web Archive (web-page downloads packaged by Safari)
• Web page
• PDF
• HTML
• RTF (Rich Text Format)
• RTFD (TextEdit documents with embedded images)
• Plain text (many different file extensions), with Unicode support
• Source code (C/C++, Objective C/C++, C#, Java, Javascript, XML, shell scripts, Perl, Ruby, Python, and more), with color-coded formatting
• Movie (standard iPhone formats: H.264, MPEG-4, 3GPP, etc.)
• Audio (standard iPhone formats: MP3 VBR, AAC, Audible, Apple Lossless, AIFF, WAV, CAF, etc.)
• Image (standard iPhone formats: GIF, PNG, JPG, TIFF, etc.)

It’s a little disappointing that these programs can’t support other types of files, but on the plus side you can preview all of those documents right on your iPhone. The syntax-highlighting for code files is particularly cool.

Make sure you grab Air Sharing from the iTunes Store while it’s free. After the first two weeks it will be $6.99. Man, I wish more of the paid apps did this. 😉

[via TUAW]

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com