The O’Reilly MacDevCenter has a great article that lists some Mac OS X Screenshot Secrets. The author shares some built-in OSX screenshot gems along with a nice sampling of third-party applications (both free and shareware) that can turbo charge your screen capturing experience!
In light of my premature linking to Firefox 2.0 Alpha (sorry ’bout that) here is a link to the Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 Community Refresh (note link goes directly to Microsoft site). This community refresh version was released on March 20th at the MIX 06 Conference.
It looks like Firefox 2.0 Alpha is beginning to make its rounds. This version of Firefox is a very early release meant for testing, so you should be well aware that the browser may be prone to crashing and will not include a full set of the features promised for the final release.
UPDATE: It looks like somebody jumped the gun on announcing this release.
Michael Arrington from TechCrunch has a good summary of the new Amazon Grid Storage Web Service. In a nutshell this new service from the number one online bookseller, provides web developers with a very inexpensive ($.15/GB of storage) online storage system that can be accessed using both REST and SOAP. The idea is that Amazon provides the storage, bandwidth and scalablility any you the developer build applications on top of it.
I saw a fantastic live demo of YackPack yesterday at SXSW. The site offers a web-based voice messaging service that is totally cool, and extremely practical for communicating ideas across groups. You can think of it as similar to email expect instead of using text, you use your voice, which adds emotion to your conversational threads. The most interesting aspect of this site is from the user interface standpoint. The IA is fantastic and very visual and makes sending and recieving voice messages from within groups is very impressive.
I just finished listening to Jason Fried of 37 Signals speak at the SXSW Keynote today. If you’re an aspiring web entrepreneur you should definately listen to what he has to say. If you aren’t fortunate enough to hear him speak in person, you can now download his latest e-book titled - Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application that has some really neat ideas on how to build a web app and the bennefits of starting small.
Geo-Names provides free geo-data such as geographical names and postal codes. The database contains over 6 million entries for geographical names and the whereof 2.2 million cities and villages worldwide. The service can be accessed through an webservice API or you can download and use their data to host on your own database server.
IF you’ve been following the Ruby on Rails scene, you may be interested to read What (will be) new in Rails 1.1 by Scott Raymond. Some cool new features like global support for JSON and built in support for many SQL Aggregate functions.
Suso Technology Services is offering this great SSH Tutorial for any operating system that supports OpenSSH. SSH (or Secure Shell) allows you to securely connect to your computer over a TCP/IP connection and run commands on the remote computer using a command prompt or terminal window. You can even use SSH to transfer files from one computer to the other. SSH is truely a powerful and interesting technology to learn.
Paul Whitrow has a handy PHP script that lets you insert a 5 Star Rating System into your web pages. The script uses small text files to store the data so no server-side database is required. Another nice touch is that the results display uses the hReview microformat.
