In an update to our previous post on Google Buzz, we now have a screenshot to show of the Google Buzz interface within Gmail. The following screenshot shows the Google Buzz Welcome screen, as shown the first time you access Google Buzz.
Google has tried social networking in the past, with ventures such as Orkut and Google Friend Connect, however neither have really become very popular. In fact, I imagine many of you reading this article may not have heard of Orkut at all. Google Friend Connect on the other hand is a API for web developers to put Google hosted social networking features directly into their websites via a iframes, JavaScript and AJAX.
Anyway, I’m here to talk about Google Buzz, which is a new social network that Google are releasing to all Gmail users. It combines elements of Twitter and Facebook and is integrated directly into the user interface of Gmail. Google started the launch of Google Buzz to a small selection of Gmail users yesterday (9th February 2010) and is continuing to release Google Buzz to more and more people over the next few days.
Take a look at this Google Buzz demonstration video. It is obvious from Google Buzz, that many elements of the service are inspired heavily by existing microblogging and social networking services, such as Facebook, Twitter and identi.ca.
Google has stated that Google Buzz is not yet available for users of Google Apps for Domains yet, but it is being worked on. Based on this, it can be anticipated that Google Buzz for Google Apps will probably be released within a couple of weeks, towards to end of the Google Buzz launch for regular Gmail users.
I may be discussing Google Buzz more as this service develops and is released to more and more users. As Google Buzz listing will appear alongside Twitter results in Google search engine results pages (SERPs), Google Buzz may also create a buzz in the search engine optimisation community.
If you’re interested in search engine optimisation for your website from a team who really know what they’re doing, take at look some of the search engine optimisation work we do and see examples on our live SEO results page. If you just want some more about this intriguing new product from Google, take a look at the official Google Buzz pages.
As web developers, we are using web browsers continually to preview and debug our web pages, dynamic web application and the website page’s we develop. However, many consumers are unsure of what a web browser actually is. Admittedly, for many, this can be very confusing as there are such a lot of Internet related terms flying around now that it can be difficult to explain exactly what a web browser is. This can be especially true where many web services, such as e-mail and search engines are so tightly integrated into the web browser and the web browsing experience.
Speaking of search engines, Google, which I’m sure you have all heard of, prepared an excellent video which demonstrates and explain the concept of a web browser and attempts to explain exactly what a web browser is, and indeed, what it is not. If you are in any way unsure, take a look at the video below.
At Rapid Web, our best work is in our websites and our dynamic web applications. If you wish, you can find out a bit more about us, our web design and some of the work we do.
Version 1.4 is the latest inception of the highly popular lightweight cross browser JavaScript framework. The new version features many new additions and speed improvements over 1.3.
jQuery was developed in 2006 by John Resig and since launch has been adopted by many large companies such as Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Digg and many more. The mantra behind jQuery is “write less, do more” With a wide range of easy DOM manipulation calls and user interface effects jQuery is an attractive option for developers looking to make applications more intuitive, user friendly and feature rich.
Aside from all the new additions and improvements one of my favourite new functions is .delay(). Delay provides us with the functionality to delay execution of subsequent items in the queue.
For example we can fade out and fade in an element with a second delay.
jQuery not only allows us to delay on effects we can also apply delays to custom queues.
One of many new updates is the addition to pass event data to the function .live(). This gives developers much more flexibility to capture events. From form submission, focus changes, clicks and custom events.
The example below shows how to smooth scroll on all anchor tag elements using live to capture the click event data.
// all “#anchor” smoothscroll to those elements
$(“a[href^=#][href!=#]“).live(‘click’,function(e){
$(‘html,body’).animate({’scrollTop’: $($(this).attr(‘href’)).offset().top+’px’});
e.preventDefault();
});
According to BuiltWith.com’s statistics jQuery is running on one in five websites on the internet. Not surprising considering the adaptability of the framework.
14 days of jQuery is still running and you can find more information via the below links.
http://jquery.com/
http://jquery14.com/
As a user of desktop Linux distributions, both at work and at home, I’m often trying to promote the use of Linux-based systems such as Ubuntu.
Systems such as Linux to often seen to be only for the most geeky or technical minded of people, whilst Windows or Mac are heavily promoted as being used for everyday, family orientated purposes. This can be as complex as managing home finances and budgets with a spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Excel or the more simple managing of your family and friend’s photographs with some kind of photo album software.
Linux systems, such as Ubuntu, have plenty of tools available for spreadsheets and budgeting and the more complex home productivity. For budgeting, there are spreadsheet application such as Gnumeric Spreadsheet, KSpread and the more well known OpenOffice.org spreadsheet application, Calc. This is all very well and good, but what about the simpler, nicer and frankly muchc more things in life like grabbing, tweaking and showing off your friends and family photographs. Well, there are certainly quite a variety of Linux photo album applications available out there. In case you are thinking of moving to Linux, or are just curious about the available Linux based photo management applications, I have put a few details about the best of the bunch below.
First up is F-Spot. F-Spot is one of the top open-source Linux photo albums. It allows you to import your photos from anywhere – your camera, your phone, a CD, DVD, USB drive or even images you pull from the Internet. Take a look at the screenshot of F-Spot below.
As you can see from the screenshot, this is an imported picture I took from our office window. Down the left hand side, the view is set to ‘Metadata’ showing all the details which are sneakily embedded in your image files by your camera. As you can see from this information, this photograph was taken with my fantastic Nokia N97 phone’s camera, and even gives advanced photography details such as Exposure Time and ISO Speed Ratings.
But F-Spot is not just about these details, it also lets you perform special effects on all your photos, such as cropping, red-eye reduction, desaturation, sepia toning and much more. It also stores a clever history of all changes made in F-Spot so any accidental mess ups can easily by reverted with only a click or two. Of course, F-Spot is a photo album tool, and does indeed allow to you manage entire albums of photos, give them captions, rate them, tag them as favourites, organise by name, date and much more.
Overall F-Spot is a very comprehensive tool, which is both easy to use and comes with a great set of features. It also ships with the very popular Ubuntu Linux distribution.
Next up is digiKam, which is a professional, open-source photo album management tool. It is primarily designed for the KDE Desktop Environment, but works in essentially all Linux systems. A screenshot of digiKam running on my Ubuntu system is shown below.
digiKam is quite a clever photo album management tool, and offers the vast majority of features present in F-Spot. It also allows for filtering by ratings, file types and has a comprehensive pop-out image editor which allows for additional manipulation of photos and the applying of special effects. Renaming of your images in application, searching, adding of captions, ratings and tags and sorting by the physical location photos were taken (via a geolocation service) are also some of the many cleverly supported features.
digiKam is, in my opinion, a more professional photo management suite, but its range of features is of such magnitude that it may daunt the non-professional. However, for those wishing to make perfect albums and manage their photographs with intricate details and changes, it is a perfect choice.
Although not open-source, Picasa is an excellent family orientated image editing tool from a big brand name who you might just have heard of – Google. It is very much aimed at being simple to use, whilst still provided a nice range of features.
Along with being user friendly, many of the features have the same aim and are targeting at having fun with your photos. For example, the above screenshot shows Google Picasa 3.0 allowing you to create a collage from an album of photos in many different styles. It is hardly limited to collages however, allowing you to create gift CDs to send to friends, ordering online prints, creating slide-showing and more more in the way of fun and funky features. Picasa is defintely the way to go if you wish be the easily creative and produce stunning creative elements with very little effort.
Although fantastic functionality and feature wise, for those who are dedicated to open-source software, Picasa is proprietary and indeed, not a native Linux application but is instead a custom build of the Windows version running under Wine (a Windows compatibility layer for Linux). Although this works very well in most cases and it very fast in terms of performance, sometimes even outstripped the Windows version of Picasa, some users do report issues running Picasa for Linux. However, these issues do seem to be few, far between and usually quite simple to resolve.
I hope this quick little guide gives you some good advice on the best of the best in Linux photo album software, regardless of whether you are switching to Linux, looking for an alternative to an application you already use or just stumbled upon this article and have had your curiosity spiked.