There’s a new Windows shell extension available for lovers of the Gmail service — Gmail Drives. The add-on connects a new drive to your system, allowing to store arbitrary files using a space available at your Gmail account. It could be very helpful. Just think of it as another drive on the net.
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Gmail Drives Windows Shell Extension
Increadible Painting Experience
Eric Grohe demonstrates unbelieveable creativity. He paints unusual and extremely impressive pictures on the walls. His creations are supposed to bring more colors and space into our grayed out cubicle living, prolonging the space and time. I can swear he has much more works. Does anyone know some other locations on the net to enjoy his wonderful art? Before: After:Accelerating The Future
Yesterday I saw a wonderful post by Francois Gossieaux telling us, the readers, about his own observations of the Web 2.0 evolution. It required some time to structure my own thoughts on this and here I would like to comment just a few of his points and broaden the discussion onto the whole world of software development carried on nowadays.
Many of the new web 2.0 companies are built by a few passionate individuals - and with budgets that fit on credit cards. And forget about traditional marketing expenses - it’s all word-of-mouth, sometimes enhanced with a few dollars worth of search engine marketing - but gone are the days of expensive direct marketing campaigns and traditional promotions. It’s all about influencing the influencers - but more on that later…
Advanced Installer for Java Goes On Mac
Hooray! Wonderful news knocking at the door — Advanced Installer for Java (3.3) goes on Mac; and this is a really big step forward. We, as the proud users of AIFJ, are extremely happy to have an opportunity to build the Mac distributions of our application — BlogBridge — without serious messing with console. When we were choosing the installer for the application our main criteria was the presence of the Windows platform support. The Mac support was preferred but rather optional as we knew how to build a distribution package from the command line or with a console script. Of course, having this process automated means a big boost in our performance. A lot of thanks to you guys!
Also the team reports the following changes:
- Inclusion and exclusion filters for Synchronized Folders.
- Editing multiple files’ properties at once.
- File version override.
- Stretched or fixed size switch for dialog banners and bitmaps.
- Configurable Merge Modules.
KlipFolio and Future Desktop Thoughts
Here comes an interesting piece of software — KlipFolio. It’s the desktop-integrated RSS reader and can do far more than that. It is capable of showing stock news, the weather and lots of other interesting bits of information. Here’s what the authors tell about their creation:
It’s the smallest, smartest and most configurable RSS Dashboard on the planet. KlipFolio can be used to monitor anything you want online–like weather, stocks, Hotmail, news, RSS feeds and even auctions–right on your desktop.
Police Robot or… Police-Robot
Never heard of a bigger stupidity than this — Robot inspects bank robber’s mouth for bomb. Well, I still think I have a good sense of humor, but wasn’t it a human who ordered the robot to scan the mouth of a guy, which makes the situation sound less funny, if it was done seriously and intentionally. Or maybe the picture was fabricated in Photoshop? :)
Hey, people, are you all robots out there? Turn on your brains!
Java Timestamps go Database
Couple of years ago I wrote a small application to manage a post cards distribution for a small advertising company. The application worked with a Cloudscape database but it’s not the point. The point is that my friend, who was working for that company, asked me to help with some strange problem. After the hardware upgrade all of the records in the database became invisible. I need to say that there is a screen where you can examine the amounts of cards sent to a different organizations at the given dates, and there is another screen where you can build a comprehensive reports with the same information but for a given dates range. Well, the records were not visible on the single-date statistics page, but they were in the reports. I was shocked…
User Interfaces
Check this out in the mean time: Leo Burnett’s design studio. You will be impressed with the design, variety of user-interface solutions and visual effects. I fancy the idea of making non-linear interfaces and avoiding menu-ish look. The existing paradigm has turned into habits of our users already and its dearly hard to break this stereotype. The more applications we write, the more our users go down into the swamp of their stereotypes. The sites (which are also the applications of some sort), like Leo Burnett’s, is a lot of fun to the visitor not only for its fancy graphics, but also for its navigation approach. It doesn’t grate on your eyes since it looks unusual and surprising at first. Two minutes of education and you are “operating” the site, like a pro, since it’s still intuitive and easy to learn. When you are in “free flight”, it’s hard to maintain overall style and paradigm of your user interface because you aren’t bounded in your choices and it’s up to you how your creation will look and feel.Wonderful Resource On EJB3
For those of you who already started to study this wonderful world of enterprise applications programming with EJB3 I suggest to visit fascinating resource on the web — Oracle’s EJB3 Resources. You will find lots of details on nearly every aspect of EJB3 application plus downloadable source code. As a learner, I found many interesting bit there.
Highly recommended!
Two approaches to testing of code with database access
Often we deal with database. Data is flying back and forth between application and data store. Following the modern influences, we wish to have tested everything that might break some day. When you get enough experience and develop the sense of well code design, this task will become easy and straightforward, but unfortunately I can see very often bad samples of code separation and awful design. So what it is all about?