Tuesday, October 30, 2007

MockupScreens

I found a very nice application to design mockup screens or wireframes.
MockupScreens helps you to sketch screen mockups of your application and organize them in scenarios. With MockupScreens you can experiment interactively with your clients, and quickly visualize scenarios of your application, even before the coding has started.
Seems to be very good application seeing at the feature list. Yes Visio is the best bet, but tats expensive ...and Gliffy is reasonably good, but it's web based, which not always the best solution.

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Sunday, October 28, 2007

Expense Tracker

There are quite a few Expense Tracker solutions on internet. Expensr , Mint are among popular expense trackers. They are really good, but was overkill for my requirement. So I decided to go for a Excel sheet solution and I am using the sheet for past 3 months and am very satisfied. The main reason being it's fast on data entry part :)
I am sharing the document with you all, hopefully some of you also will find it useful.

Here is the Google Doc link to see a preview. And here is the Excel File.




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Firebug Tutorial - Part 1

Those who don’t know what firebug is, let me tell you, it’s a firefox extension. It can not run standalone; you need firefox installed in it. To know what firebug can do visit http://www.getfirebug.com/.

Now let’s come to the point. Here I am going to show you only how to debug HTML and CSS.
Let’s take a small HTML file to make the session easier.

<html>
<body>
<p>This is a text</p>
</body>
</html>

Now open this file in Firefox. Once the page is loaded, press F12, the Firebug console with open.
Other ways to open firebug are:

1. Tools > Firebug > Open Firebug
2. Click on the small green tick icon on the bottom-right corner of firefox.

If you are using firebug for the first time then once the firebug consol is open click on “Enable Firebug for local files”
After you click on “Enable Firebug for local files” you will see something like the image below.



Click on the small + sign beside <html> and and you will see the page tags being unfolded one by one.
Hover you mouse on <p>This is a text </p> and see how the page element being highlighted on the page, as shown in the image bellow



Now click on “This is a text” and notice that it becomes editable.
Change the text to “This is another text”. See how the text in the page also changes. This is one area where Firebug rocks. Real time editing, forget going back and forth to editor and browser, when you can edit directly on page. Only this is these are all temporary changes, and if you refresh the page all changes will be gone.




Now let’s add some HTML real time.
Right click on <body> and choose “Edit HTML …” from the popup menu. Once you are in the edit mode type

<p>another line</p>

after the first line. See the page changes real-time. After you add the line, click on Edit button beside “Inspect” button to exit the Edit mode.



That’s all for today, please let me know how is it going. The tutorial series will not be for advanced user, but novice. I will try to be clear and explanatory as much s possible. Please let me know which places you need more clarification or I need to improve.

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Thursday, October 25, 2007

Where is "make noise" button

Yesterday my mom asked me to put her phone to ringing mode, which has accidentally went to silence mode. I casually picked up the phone to finish the job ASAP. Well guess what I spend almost 20 minutes to figure out how to switch off the silence mode !!!

She has a Samsung N361 phone, pretty decent one. But somehow it went to silence mode, she herself is not aware of how. SO naturally as a tech savvy person, to rescue her form the problem I went to sound settings &gt; ringing volume ... well guess what , I could not enter there !!! I completely freaked out ... what the hell, I want to change my ringing volume and I am presented with a warning message ..." Please switch off the silent mode" come on, I want to do exactly that, and as a sensible guy I came to this place. After doodling pointlessly though the menu structure , I was completely exhausted. I even tried pressing here and there on the phone body to find out if there is any button or not :( but no success.

Suddenly I found a small vibrating mobile icon printed on top of "#" button. I pressed that and viola ...it worked. Now let me tell you I was not at all happy finding this easter egg. I cursed Samsung on top of my voice ... anyway. And also think of the situation this phone has Hindi characters printed on top of every button making it more difficult to identify those tiny icons. I don't personally think I am a dumb ass but this made me feel like I don't know anything about mobile phone ...duh!!!

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