This past week SixApart announced that the SplashBlog mobile blogging site will close down in a month. I’ve been following SplashBlog and its use as a mobile blogging client: In February 2005, SplashBlog.com launched as a free hosting service for SpashData’s SplashBlog mobile client (initial price $20). When launched, the client could post to either the TypePad or SplashBlog services. In September of that year, they released client version 2.0 which was now free, but only connected to their own SplashBlog service. The service was free for up to 100 pictures and about $30/year for an unlimited account. In March…
Kent Brewster (from the Yahoo Developer Network) has created another cool hack making use of the Flickr photos API: Ransomizr (Kent’s blog entry). Ransomizr makes use of the Flickr “One letter pool”, a collection of photos of single A-Z letters found in the real world. Type in a short message and it will be drawn in ransom-letter style. Kent also includes the HTML code snippet so you can use the result in your blog, MySpace, or wherever.
Earlier this week Yahoo! released a public version of an internal website performance tool called YSlow. Visit the YSlow page for instruction and downloads. YSlow runs on Firefox and requires the Firebug extension. I’ve used YSlow a lot to help improve the Messenger web sites, so I’m pretty familiar with its operation. I can see where some people using it on either personal blogs or smaller sites will be surprised a the somewhat harsh grading for things like using a CDN. For a large site with huge traffic like Yahoo, it’s a no-brainer, but for a small blog it doesn’t…
iPhoney: It’s not quite a simulator, but will certainly help web developers understand what their sites will look like from an iPhone. Since the iPhone uses Safari, the iPhoney app can use the same on an OS X system to provide a pretty decent testbed: Looking for a way to see how your web creations will look on iPhone? Look no further. iPhoney gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment—powered by Safari—that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone. It’s the perfect 320 by 480-pixel canvas for your iPhone development. And it’s free.
Having worked for Palm for as long as I did (and having managed the desktop software team), I’ve continue to stick with Palm Desktop to keep track of my contacts, calendar and so on. Today it crashed on me, so I clicked Yes to send the error report to Microsoft. I know there’s no one at Palm that will ever pick up these crash reports, but it’s an old habit. The Microsoft Windows Error Reporting site gave this summary of my problem: This problem was caused by Palm Desktop. Palm Desktop was created by PalmSource, Inc.. Microsoft has been unable…