Feed Mingle & Apple's RSS Visualizer Screensaver

My schedule, of late, has become really hectic and sometimes I don't get to watch or read the news. So I started using a screensaver - RSS Visualizer, on my mac to pull news from local websites - Jamaica Gleaner & Jamaica Observer.

Unfortunately I can only pull 1 feed at any given time. While checking my latest feeds in Google Reader I noticed a feed from Go2Web20.net about FeedMingle. Basically I can merge 2 or more feeds as one.

How to add FeedMingle to RSS Visualizer
Step 1: Create you Mingled feed
Step 2: Open Mail.app (Hopefully you have this setup already . If not do so!)
Step 3: Go to File » Add RSS Feeds
Step 4: Select Specify a Custom feed URL and mingled feed
Step 5: Go to Apple Menu » System Preferences » Desktop/Screensaver
Step 6: RSS Visualizer » Options
Step 7: Select feed from Mail.app

This works perfectly for my screensaver and I think it's really cool and not just limited to my screensaver. I can use it in any rss reader, whether it's a standalone application or integrated into a web-app or website. You should give it a try!

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Get DropBox

My friend and I work in the same field as Graphic / Web Designers and have worked on a few projects together. Our biggest challenge is location. He's located at one end of Jamaica and me at the other, so I'm always looking for ways to improve our virtual work relationship.

Over the years we've used several applications to aid us in our collaboration, BaseCamp (free), YouSendIt, Hamachi along with others. Hamachi was the last one we used and it was a lil difficult to get it to work seemlessly between a Windows Vista Laptop and iMac (running OSX 1.5). Plus there was no official interface for mac users ( I had to type commands in the terminal whenever I wanted to use the application). As a result I went looking for an alternative and I found it - DropBox.

Now dropbox was a term I first heard being used at a advertising agency my wife worked at and was only available to macs. Once all the macs are on the same network users could add files into a default shared folder know as a 'dropbox.' But I came across another DropBox that was available for the specific platforms - Window, Linux & Mac (Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!! As the choirs of angels sing and the beam of light shines done upon my ignorance :-) ).

In no time I had DropBox installed on my mac and my friend and I were able to share files, it was sweeeeeeett!

DropBox Features
DropBox initilally gives you 2Gb of storage for free, which you can upgrade if you want. It allows you to see the various versions of a file once changed or updated, restore deleted files, see previes of images and share specific folders with anyone you desire.

The lovely thing about DropBox is that it's linked to a physical folder on your computer, has a web interface to manage your account and shares files over an SSL connection. If you have growl installed on your mac you'll also get a notification everytime I file/folder is updated.

DropBox is a great collaboration tool, you should get it!

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Web Development Project Estimator

Have you ever been to a meeting where a client asks you to estimate how much a project will cost and you think to yourself " I wish I could tell them right off the bat!"

Well now you can with the Web Developer Project Estimator. It a hosted service that is free and allows the developer to quickly punch in hourly rates for each task and have it calculated on the fly. If the default listed items are not tasks you would do, simply delete them and add those that are relevant to your development process. Once you're done simply click "view estimate" and you are good to go! As simple as that.

I give the Web Development Project Estimator a 4 out of 5. All that's left for it to get another star is the ability to download or e-mail estimate as PDF to client.

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Inquisitor for Firefox and IE

Some time I wrote about Inquisitor which at the time was only available to Safari. But now they have released beta version for both Firefox (mac or pc) and Internet Explorer 7. That's awesome.

I use my Firefox browser more than I use Safari and when I installed the plug-in I could tell that Firefox was most disappointed. But now my Firefox rejoices!

Truth is! It's really nice 'eye candy' that functions well. It allows you to choose your preferred search engine - Yahoo or Google, and auto completion for words or phrases. My only regret is that when you use Google as the search engine it cannot do basic mathematics which can be done if you use Firefox without Inquisitor. Apart from that I love it!

If you want to learn more about Inquisitor before installing it you can watch this video.

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MySpace 2.0...I'm so late!!!

Recently I had the opportunity to customize a MySpace page, for Danah Cameron. Though I've always wanted to customize a MySpace account I've often feared using CSS to manipulate a webpage heavily designed using tables.

However, from the experience I've decided to add MySpace customization to the list of services I offer and I started looking more into how to use CSS to achieve this. Only to find that MySpace has decided to make their layouts tabless and added ajax to the member interface. They have joined the web 2.0 movement (in terms of design).

With the 2.0 layouts pages will load faster and members have more control over the look and feel of their MySpace pages. In Tom's blog - on Nov.10.2008 - he highlight that the new 2.0 layouts are "fully W3C compliant" and incompatible with Internet Explorer 6. Which is great! My only disappointment is that the 2.0 layout is not available for musicians, flimmakers or comedian profiles.

To learn more about MySpace 2.0 Layouts CLICK HERE and HERE. You can also get additional themes from PYZAM and I'll be sure to have some on the PXL Junkie soon.

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