Jay Hathaway
- http://jayhathaway.com
Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity
Dropzone adds tons of drag n' drop functionality to your OS X dock
by Jay Hathaway Jul 4th 2009
Dropzone is a utility described by its developers as "the Swiss Army knife of drag and drop for the Mac." That's definitely accurate, because with Dropzone in your Dock, you can quickly do just about anything you'd want to with a file. You can install apps, upload pics to Flickr, save text, open something in Skitch and more, all by dragging and dropping. Even better, it's got an API, and there are already some useful user-contributed actions you can install.If you're a die-hard command line junkie, this app is probably not for you, but if you're the typical Mac user who gets a lot done with the mouse, it could be just what you're looking for to speed up your tasks. There have been individual apps for some of these actions (iike Flickr or FTP uploads) for a long time, and it's an even better deal when they're combined into one.
Filed under: Design, Utilities, Browsers
Modernizr: start implementing CSS 3 and HTML5 features now
So, you're a web designer, and you want to start taking advantage of new features in CSS 3 and HTML5. That's great, but you know that most of your users aren't running browsers that support these new standards. You could just wait for browsers to get with the times, or you could check out Modernizr.
Modernizr is a JavaScript library by Faruk Ates that detects which functionality a browser can support, and allows you to use if-statements to fine-tune your fallbacks for browsers that don't support the new hotness. Modernizr can't fix old browsers, but it can make it more practical to support newer ones. On top of all the CSS 3 styles it can detect support for, it also allows you to use and style HTML5 elements without breaking your site for IE users. Not too shabby for a little bit of JavaScript.
Take easy web screenshots with Aviary
Once you've got a page open in Aviary, you can crop and edit it online. The standard brush, text and shape tools you're familiar with from other image editing programs are available, so you might be able to get away with doing everything you want on the web instead of resorting to Photoshop.Two caveats: you'll need to sign up for an Aviary account to save your work, and editing results may vary if you use the CPU-intensive "advanced editing" features.
[via Lifehacker]
Filed under: E-mail, Productivity, Beta
Mozilla-based email client Postbox finally gets add-ons
The latest build of Postbox also adds a long list of other useful features. If you're switching from Mail.app, you can now easily migrate your settings to Postbox. Postbox will now also pull photos for your contacts from OS X's address book or from Twitter. Several performance upgrades and fixes of annoying issues from earlier versions are also in place now, so it looks like a good time to consider giving Postbox a try.
Filed under: Design, Social Software, web 2.0
Twitter's follower and following pages get a big redesign
Several users have correctly pointed out that the new design makes Twitter look a lot more like an iPhone-optimized site. It's definitely an improvement in many ways, but there's one small quirk I have to take issue with: in the old layout, the appearance of the "direct message" link next to a username gave a quick visual indication of whether that user was following you. You can still figure this out by clicking the drop-down menu, but it's definitely not as efficient as before. On the other hand, the new design does a great job of showing who you're following when you browse another user's list.
Brightkite for Android is the best version yet
by Jay Hathaway Jun 30th 2009 {1 comments}
A popular social network that has a strong following on the web and on the iPhone is now taking aim at the Android market. Brightkite, a slick little app that lets you check in at any location and share photos and notes with your friends, is available for free in the Android store as of this week. Current Brightkite users won't be disappointed with the Android version, and Android users will ...KissTunes: make music online, with your keyboard
KissTunes is an online service that makes it easy to play and record music using your computer's keyboard. It offers three different instruments, and all the home row keys (and a few from the row above) represent notes. You can save your song, along with any comments from friends, as a .kiss file that will open from the KissTunes on any computer. The "kiss" in KissTunes probably refers to a ...Tweetboard turns Twitter into a comment system for your site
The trend of using Twitter for absolutely everything doesn't show signs of stopping. Tweetboard, the latest hot Twitter add-on, inserts Twitter as a comment system for your website. Conversation on the site is posted (neatly threaded, of course) in an expandable sidebar, and a user's comments also post to their Twitter account. To make it easier for people who are reading these tweets outside ...DocMazy: a search engine dedicated to documents
DocMazy is a novel kind of search engine exclusively dedicated to finding documents. Instead of returning websites, it digs up PDFs, DOCs, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and text files. DocMazy was designed to find information that gets buried in other search engines because documents often don't score well in search engine algorithms, or aren't indexed by search engines at all. Once ...DropRecord: send one file to multiple hosting providers
Sites like Rapidshare and Megaupload tend to be used heavily by music blogs and other sites that don't have the bandwidth or the storage space to handle a high volume of downloads. Even the biggest mirror services can get bogged down, though. Sometimes one mirror will be slow, your file will be taken down, or you'll reach the limited number of downloads some sites allow. Mirroring your file on ...
