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Feb 10

CyberNotes: Create a LightBox Photo Gallery

This article was written on October 25, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

One of the hot new ways for viewing photos is using a JavaScript technique called LightBox. I’m sure you’ve seen it before on sites where you click on a thumbnail, and a fullsize version of the image is superimposed on the page that your viewing. It then grays out the background so that it’s easy for the viewer to focus on the image. Here’s a working example of LightBox that demonstrates the feature.

Personally I’ve never been a big fan of LightBox, but there are a lot of people who swear by it. When I came across a free program called LightBox Web Gallery Generator, I knew it would be an extremely handy tool for many of you.

What’s so great about it? Not only is it open source, but you also don’t have a thing to install. Once you download the LightBox Gallery Generator you can start working with it immediately!

–Basic Settings–

When you launch the app for the first time, you’ll notice that it’s extremely simple, and there isn’t much you can configure. It’s important to know that the LightBox Gallery Generator will only work with JPG images, but that’s the format that most cameras use so you shouldn’t have any problems.

LightBox Web Gallery Generator

You’ll want to select the folder with the images, and the folder that you want to output the gallery to. The program will generate thumbnails for all of the images and align them to a grid with however many columns and rows you specify. If you have more photos than can fit on the page it will show next/previous buttons on the generated site as well as page numbers.

The “Image” section in the program is used to specify what the dimensions are of the photos that are shown when the thumbnails are clicked on. By having them resized it helps cut back on the bandwidth needed especially when the original image is gigantic! You can always provide a link to the original image by checking the “Add link to hi-res image” option.

–Advanced Settings–

At first I didn’t really realize that the program had any advanced settings because the text links at the bottom looked like they were hyperlinks for a website. When I clicked on one of them it actually expanded the program’s window to show more settings that you can change to truly customize the look and feel of the gallery that is generated.

The “CSS” option is used to specify your own custom styles to the site. This is where you can customize border, background colors, font types, and more:

LightBox CSS

At the top of the gallery is a breadcrumb trail that visitors can use to navigate to other pages on your site. This is where you can specify your own custom homepage link or turn it off all together:

LightBox Link

The “Master Page” option is truly the heart and soul of the LightBox Gallery Generator. You can create your own custom HTML template to be used with the galleries that you generate. How’s that useful? It means you can put your own header, footer, and sidebars on the site with the gallery being placed in the center of it all.

LightBox Master Page

–The Result–

**drum roll** The end result is what you’ve worked so hard for, well, I use the term “work” loosely. The screenshots below are from a gallery that I generated in under a minute after starting the program up for the first time. The one on the left shows what the thumbnail gallery looks like complete with navigation links, and the one on the right is the “fullsize” image that visitors are shown when a thumbnail is clicked.

If you chose to include a link to the high resolution images you’ll see that next to the title of each photo:

LightBox Hi-Res

This program doesn’t quite stack up to the JAlbum software in terms of configuration options, but this is definitely the simplest gallery generator that I’ve ever used. If you need to quickly create a photo gallery with some pizzazz I don’t think there is a better option.

LightBox Web Gallery Generator

Feb 09

MyColors Caters to Sports & College Fanatics

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on April 24, 2008 by CyberNet.

(Click to Enlarge)

Stardock has released a new application called MyColors that will really appeal to college students/alumni and sports fanatics. The program itself is a free download, and it’s goal is to completely skin your Windows XP or Vista operating system. It changes the theme, background, icons, gadgets, media player, and more.

There are two themes that that you can get for free with MyColors: Diamond and Quest. Diamond appears to be their signature theme as it’s also bundled with WindowBlinds, and Quest is pretty sleek despite the overwhelming amount of gold. Since the program is also free those are the two themes that you can get without dropping a dime.

The really cool themes, however, will run you about $20 each. From the looks of it MyColors is really focused on themes for the NBA, NHL, and college teams. I was extremely pleased to see the university I attended, Iowa State, was in the list. A screenshot of what it looks like running on Vista can be seen above, and Stardock does a terrific job of providing high-quality screenshots of each theme so that you know what you’re getting.

A video demonstration of MyColors is available, but I recommend just diving in and start checking out all of the themes available. There are over 50 that are college-specific, 30 NBA, 30 NHL, and dozens more. Also, you’ll notice that some are easier on the eyes than others. 😉

Feb 07

Flock 1.2 Beta Includes Digg Integration

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on May 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

Flock 1.2 Beta is now available, and as hard as it is to believe this version is even more social. This Beta makes it possible to keep up with your friends’ activity on Digg or Pownce, and get AOL email notifications instantly as new messages come crawling in.

Below are two screenshots of what the Digg integration looks like. On the left is what appears in My World, which is your personalized homepage. Here you’ll see your friends’ activities from all of the social networks including Digg. Pictured on the right is the People sidebar, and it shows stories that were recently submitted and Dugg by your friends. There’s also a handy little search box at the bottom that makes it easy to search through your Digg friends.

flock 1.2 digg-1.png

Curious what services Flock supports? The list continues to grow at a steady pace, and right now it includes:

People: Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Pownce, Twitter, and YouTube
Media Sharing: Photobucket, Picasa, Piczo, Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, and Typepad WordPress.com, and Xanga
Online Favorites: Del.icio.us and Magnolia
Webmail: AOL Mail, Gmail, and Yahoo! Mail.

Flock is truly becoming a shining point of Web 2.0 services, and to help attract new users the Flock team has also started to assemble how-to videos on using Flock 1.2. Here are the six that they have put together thus far:

Once Flock gets updated with Firefox 3 I think it will become an even better browser. Hopefully that will help out on the performance side a bit, because even in Flock 1.2 I still see it eating up too much of my precious memory.

Flock 1.2 Beta

Feb 05

Vista Beta Tester? Good News! You get 3 Copies of Vista for $100.

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on February 01, 2007 by CyberNet.

There’s good news is you were a Vista Beta Tester! According to Windows-Now.com, the Ultimate Vista key that was issued for participating in the Beta will qualify you for the Vista Family Discount. Remember, the family discount means that with a purchase of Windows Vista Ultimate, you can purchase two copies of Windows Vista Home Premium for $49.99 each. Your Vista key counts as a retail copy which means your three copies of Vista will only cost you $100.00. Make sure to use your non-Beta key for your copy of Vista, because the Beta key will not work. I guess this is Microsoft’s way of saying thanks!

The Vista Family Discount is of course available to everybody with the difference being that if you weren’t a Beta tester, you will have to purchase Vista Ultimate at full price ($399.99) before you can get the discounted copies of Home Premium. Either way, it’s a reasonable discounted offer from Microsoft and will give multiple computer households the chance to upgrade more affordably.

Source: Windows-Now

–Extend the 30-day Windows Trial–

In our review on Vista, we mentioned the 30-day trial of Windows Vista that anybody is able to take advantage of. Because you could potentially be dishing out quite a bit of money for this new operating system, it’s nice that you have the option to ‘try before you buy.’ I’ve come across two different sources that explain how to extend the 30-day grace period to 120 days. They also say that no hacks are required, and that it’s supported by Microsoft.

All you have to do is start a command prompt as an Administrator and then issue this command:

slmgr -rearm

After you have issued the command, you’ll need to restart your computer for the extension to take effect. Now, this doesn’t extend you to 120 days, instead it gives you an additional 30 days. You’re able to issue the command 3 times which will give you 120 days to try it out. This gives you plenty of time to determine if it’s worth the money or not.

Source: Bink.nu

–Microsoft Confirms Vista Speech Recognition Remote Execution Flaw–

According to George Ou over at ZDNet, Microsoft has confirmed that a flaw with Vista Speech Recognition could allow an attacker to verbally execute commands using the speech recognition feature. The UAC wouldn’t give the attacker control over administrative level commands, but anything outside of that could potentially be at their disposal. A few things would have to be in line for an attacker to be able to do anything harmful.

First, you’d have to have a microphone and speakers connected to your system. Remember, this is a verbal attack. And secondly, you’d also need speech recognition to be configured. The odds of this actually happening are probably very slim, but the fact that it could potentially happen means that it’s something that Microsoft needs to address.

You can read more about this here and here.

Source: Thanks wlancowboy!

Feb 04

Official Service-Plan Pricing from Apple and AT&T

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on June 26, 2007 by CyberNet.

I think we’re going to be all iPhoned out by the time Friday gets here! The news today is that AT&T and Apple have FINALLY announced the service plans for the iPhone, and surprisingly, they’re much more reasonable than I ever expected.

Yesterday the speculation was that prices would run similar to those for BlackBerry users with a price range of $84.98 and $179.98. Fortunately for those of you who plan on getting an iPhone, the BlackBerry pricing isn’t even close to what iPhone users will be offered.

Besides being affordable, they’re also pretty simple because each plan is actually three plans bundled together. It’s simple. They all include unlimited data, visual voicemail, 200 SMS, and the standard roll-over minutes and unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling that AT&T offers. So here it is, official prices straight from AT&T and Apple:

$59.99 for 450 minutes
$79.99 for 900 minutes
$99.99 for 1,350 minutes

The only other charge will be a fee of $36 to activate the phone, and family plans will also be an option.

See, I told you it’s affordable! I think that’s by far the best service plan I’ve seen that includes unlimited data (email, web), so way to go Apple and AT&T. While the phone isn’t exactly affordable for the majority, at least service plans are.

Regarding the service plans, Jobs is quoted as saying:

“We want to make choosing a service plan simple and easy, so every plan includes unlimited data with direct Internet access, along with Visual Voicemail and a host of other goodies.We think these three plans give customers the flexibility to experience all of iPhone’s revolutionary features at affordable and competitive prices.” And yes, he did say “Goodies.”

While I still won’t be seen standing in any iPhone line on Friday, I must say that they did a great job of coming up with simple plans and affordable prices. I guess the cheaper plans will help people justify spending so much on the phone itself? Remember, a two year contract is required, and you can activate your phone via iTunes. This ensures that you get the experience of un-boxing the phone instead of some AT&T rep. doing it for you. More info on that here.

Iphoneplans

Feb 03

Windows Vista Ultimate not 1st Choice for Consumers

Posted in: Today's Chili

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

Microsoft’s Windows Vista has been available to consumers now for 10 days. Results from the first five days of Vista sales are available with nothing really too surprising to reveal.

The first thing which the analysis report shows is that the sales of PC’s for the week ending February 3rd increased 173% which is certainly an impressive number. However, think about what that number could have been if Vista was launched before the holiday season.

It was all about Vista Home Premium for the first five days of sales. Home Premium alone made up 70% of sales for PCs with Vista. This of course does not factor in that many computers come with Home Premium as the pre-installed version. It is not know how many Home Premium sales came from upgrades.

Vista Home Basic, the simplest version that you can buy made up 22% of the sales, and Windows Vista Ultimate made up 1.2 percent of the sales. Microsoft is probably disappointed in the Ultimate number because this is obviously where they’re going to make the most profit.Samir Bhavnani who wrote the report says that “”You can expect over time that Ultimate will become a bigger part of the overall mix.”

Only time will tell how the sales of Vista Ultimate will play out. One of the biggest factors that will keep people from upgrading to the Ultimate version is price. When buying a computer with Vista Home Basic, you can upgrade to home-premium for just $50 more, but an upgrade to Vista Ultimate from Vista Basic would cost $150. Consumers are going to be much more willing to spend an extra $50 versus $150.

Also included in the report was the percentage of sales from PC Vendors. In the first week, Hewlett-Packard accounted for 54% of Vista Home premium sales and 53% of Vista Home Basic sales.

Clearly, Vista Ultimate is not a 1st choice for consumers. Home Premium appears to be the “go-to” version that will satisfy the needs of most people and comes in at a much more affordable price when compared to Vista Ultimate.

I’d be interested in knowing how many PC’s and copies of Vista were actually sold. The percentages give you some perspective to how Vista is doing, but if there was an overall number that these percentages were derived from, it would be much more insightful. It would also be interesting to see how many people are going for the much more affordable OEM edition.

Source: InfoWorld

Feb 03

Microsoft’s Bank-Busting $6 Billion Acquisition

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on May 18, 2007 by CyberNet.

News is buzzing around about Microsoft’s $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive! Yep, you read that right. Microsoft didn’t want to be left behind after Google bought the DoubleClick advertising firm for a whopping $3.1 billion, and Yahoo! quickly followed that up by purchasing Right Media for a mere $680 million. Now Microsoft is back in the advertising game thanks to their all-cash transaction of $6 billion for aQuantive!

It’s kinda funny though, because Microsoft was up-in-arms when Google announced that they were going to buy DoubleClick, now Microsoft went and purchased a company that is even larger (aQuantive has 2,600 employees while DoubleClick had just 1,200). Of course, it was expected that Microsoft was bidding on DoubleClick along with Google so when they lost the war they knew they had to do something. Instead of pushing harder against the Google/DoubleClick deal, it looks like Microsoft just decided to go bigger.

According to CNN Money, Microsoft said that they are happy with the price they paid for aQuantive, and that future acquisitions aren’t out of the question. At the end of last quarter Microsoft had $28.2 billion in cash, and in regards to other acquisitions Microsoft said “We certainly have the economic fire power if we decide to do more.”

I could definitely see Microsoft eyeing other companies to acquire, and the first that comes to mind is Zoho. They offer a wide variety of Office-like applications similar to the ones being developed by Google. Microsoft seems to be falling behind in that respect, so I would expect them to try and quickly catchup by making a few acquisitions. After all, the cool thing to do these days is to throw billions of dollars around!

Feb 01

CyberNotes: Taking Screenshots in Firefox

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on April 16, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Sometimes it’s hard to grasp just how valuable something as simple as a screenshot can be. When we first started writing on CyberNet we didn’t always focus on providing screenshots of the things that we wrote about, but it didn’t take long for us to see that they often got our point across more than words ever could. And that is part of what’s made our site as successful as it is.

So what about taking screenshots yourself? Sure there are all kinds of applications out there to do it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the screenshots you want to take are only of websites. If that’s the case and you’re a Firefox user then this is the article for you! Today we’ve got two different Firefox extensions that will appeal to both novices and professionals alike.

–Abduction (Homepage)–

First up is Abduction. This extension is rather different from the other one below. It’s not geared towards the people who want a screenshot utility brimming with features. Instead it focuses on how it can make snapping screenshots as easy as possible.

To activate Abduction just go to the File menu or right-click anywhere on the current site, and then choose the Save Page as Image option. You’ll immediately be shown a window similar to this one:

(Click to Enlarge)

Immediately after snapping the screenshot the entire site will be highlighted. That means if you hit the Save button without making any changes you’ll be including everything on the page… even the areas you would have had to scroll to see. That can easily be changed by drawing a box around the area that you want the screenshot to capture.

Abduction also lets you choose whether to save the screenshot as a PNG or JPG depending on what filetype is your preference. That’s it. No fancy interface and nothing to confuse you. Just snap your screenshots and go!

–FireShot (Homepage)–

FireShot, on the other hand, takes a completely opposite approach to screenshots. It’s possible to grab snapshots of a website in mere seconds, but it comes with a lot of additional tools that some users may not want. In particular it has a built-in editor that is extremely handy should you decide that you want to annotate a screenshot.

Here’s a list of features that I assembled after using FireShot for a little while:

You can take a screenshot of the entire site (including scrollable area) or just the area currently visible. And then:
- Modify the screenshot using the built-in editor
- Upload it to screenshot-program.com where it will be hosted completely free
- Save it to your computer
- Copy it to the clipboard
- Open it in an external editor that you specify
Built-in advanced editor

Add shapes, drawings, lines, or text to any screenshot
Crop, blur, convert to grayscale, invert colors, or add a glowing border to any area you select on the screenshot
Color-picker available when selecting colors, which makes it easy to match any color on a screenshot

One-click screenshots are available using the settings you specify in the options.
You can automatically have a website URL added as a removable object to each screenshot

The editor aims to keep things simple, but it has a lot of different controls that take a little getting used to. Here is what the editor looks like:

(Click to Enlarge)

–Overview–

The Firefox extension that you choose to use for taking screenshot really depends on what you’re looking to accomplish. If you just want to share a screenshot with someone I recommend Abduction because I found it to be a fast and efficient way to save a screenshot. However, if you need to point things out and need some more advanced tools FireShot will better suit you. Whichever you choose you really can’t go wrong!

Jan 29

New gOS Space 2.9 even more Mac-like?

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on April 08, 2008 by CyberNet.

Last year Wal-Mart started selling a Linux-powered computer for under $200 called the gPC. After some confusion amongst consumers they decided to boot the budget computers from the store shelves, and offer it solely online. Ever since it looks as though the operating system that powers the low-cost computer, called gOS, has started to go through an identity crisis with Mac OS X.

The most obviously clone is the dock that is the home of your application shortcuts. The gOS has had that ever since it debuted last year, but it’s worked hard to become even more Mac-like in its latest release dubbed gOS Space 2.9. The goal of the new version was to become more appealing to the 100+ million MySpace users, and thanks to the Avant Window Navigator a feature remarkably similar to Mac OS X’s Stacks has been added to the dock. Not to mention that it includes Compiz Fusion for some added eye candy.

And as Crunchgear noticed even the gOS site has become remarkably similar to that of Apple’s:

gOS Website:

Apple’s Mac OS X Website:

So what do you think? Are they smart for trying to grab ideas from an operating system that is often lauded for its great design, or should they be trying to distinguish gOS from the competition?

The gOS Space 2.9 Linux operating system is freely available for download.

Jan 25

Firefox Tab Groups – Like Folders for your Tabs

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on February 26, 2007 by CyberNet.

This morning when I woke up I noticed that I had more than 20 tabs open in Firefox that I still needed to sort through and read. Most of them were articles that I found the previous day, but never got around to reading. Despite having a 24” monitor I still find that having 20 tabs open takes up a lot of room, and what I really needed was a folder-like structure for my tabs.

Some of you might be thinking that I should just bookmark the items into a temporary folder to read later on. That’s not a bad idea, but I’ve tried that before and I typically forget about reading them. So I did what every Firefox user does…went and searched Mozilla’s Firefox Extension page for something that would fulfill my needs.

I was pretty disappointed that I didn’t find anything. I then turned to Google trying to see if I could find something that would do what I was looking for. After about 30–minutes I came across an extension called Tab Groups that was just released three weeks ago. My initial thought was “why didn’t I see this on the Firefox Extension page?” which I later found out was because the developer has not yet submitted this to Mozilla.

Firefox Tab Groups

It sounded like exactly what I needed so I went ahead and installed it. As you can see in the screenshot above it creates a new toolbar that essentially adds tabs to your tabs. Here are features it currently offers:

Tab Groups: Grouping of tabs into groups with a tab bar to manage groups, only the browser tabs in the currently selected group are shown.
New tabs are opened in current group
Drag And Drop of tabs between groups
Renaming of groups
Support for Session Store (Firefox 2 built in session storage) and undo-close tab (again only the one built into FF2). In other words tab groups will be restored along with tabs with restored tabs being placed in the correct group.

This extension is only for Firefox 2 users which makes sense since it uses the built-in session restore to remember tab groupings. There are some known bugs that you should also consider before getting cozy with the extension, such as a lack of “group overflow” management. That means if you have too many groupings they will extend beyond the edge of your Firefox window and simply run off of the screen without allowing you to scroll and see them.

I also began thinking about some features that would be pretty cool to see in this extension, such as bookmarking a whole group of tabs. Then I noticed the Planned Features section for the extension which says that particular feature should be in version 0.05 which is currently three releases away (it’s currently at 0.02). Looking at the Planned Features page will make you realize that the developer has a lot of things he/she would like to do with the extension, and I can’t wait.

I’m currently using this on a Firefox 3 nightly and it is running great, except for a small gap between the grouping tabs and the Tabbar (pictured above), but that is something I can live with. I’m actually not sure if that problem is with Firefox 3 or if it is the visual properties of Vista that’s causing the problem…either way it doesn’t detract from the value that the extension adds.

Tab Groups Homepage
Here is a mirror of Tab Groups 0.2 (I recommend downloading from the homepage since it will probably be frequently updated).

Hasta La Gadget!