Funcoder Technology Blog

Book Recommendation: Find out how to do anything online with Rule the Web: “BoingBoing founder Mark Frauenfelder’s new book, Rule the Web, answers every question anyone might have about how to get things done online. From security to travel to finance to productivity, this tome’s chock full of Lifehacker-style tips and tricks. Mark says:

Writing about technology for BoingBoing and a variety of print publications for nearly twenty years, I’ve spent a vast quantity of time scouting out the very latest, the very coolest and the very best of what’s out there, and translating those discoveries into concise and clear tips for my readers…. There are so many things you can do online today beyond paying your bills and searching for good prices on digital cameras, but there’s no single resource that a.) makes readers aware of the possibilities and b) culls out only the most effective tools.

I had the pleasure of contributing a small bit to the ‘Tips from My Favorite Bloggers’ chapter, too. While much of the book’s material might not be new to lifehackers in-the-know, it would make a great gift for less savvy friends and family.

“

(Via Lifehacker.)

WSL-Amazon 2.0 - REALbasic Amazon.com web services library. (Commercial): “

WSL-Amazon - Easily Integrate Amazon Web Services into Your REALbasic Applications. This HTTPSocket subclass wraps the Amazon Web Services ECS 4.0 API into an easy-to-use library of 36 powerful methods and 164 properties with support for their US, UK, German, French, Canadian, and Japanese Amazon stores.

Includes extensive search and information retrieval capabilities, plus the ability to create, update and checkout Amazon shopping carts — all from within your REALbasic applications! This class library also comes with the project source code for a fully- functional Amazon-powered application, which you can reuse in your own REALbasic projects!

“

(Via MacUpdate - Mac OS X.)

At the weekend I spent time thinking about the direction of this blog and where I wanted it to go in the future.

Currently there is no direction except for being a general tech and media information site with everything feeling bitty. So I looked at the areas I would be excited about to publish and provide a service to the pro/enthusiast/hobby developer.

The decision is that I will be focusing on web applications, but from a different perspective.

I will be researching web app’s that provide API features and will be demonstrating these in this blog in text and video form.

It’s all about having fun with these technologies, mashing and thinking up new ways to take advantage of the features available.

These web app’s will also be reviewed in terms of the technology used to build them and where they are heading.

Along with all this there will be a new web site design and community features.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated and you can contact me via email or iChat at funcoder@gmail.com.

Here’s to the future….

The Ubuntu community is a vibrant one, and it is easy to lose track of what is going on. But not anymore! This site displays all updates coming from various sources in real-time. Keep track of Launchpad, the wiki, the forums, news, blog posts and more!

read more | digg story

The Scoop: http://www.apple.com/pr/libbrary/2007/06/14safari.html

I was very surprised to read that the browser has been downloaded this many times. My cynical self is telling me that these are Mac users downloading at the Windows centric offices.

We will see… 

Here’s a cool way to use your Google Notebook while searching the web.

Just been listening to an interesting webcast from NASA where people submitted questions to one of the STS-117 Astronaut’s.

One question was about what they use to relax and listen on during missions. They can’t use a standard iPOD as there is no way to charge the device on the shuttle. NASA have created a mod to the iPOD so that the Astronauts can use standard batteries to power it.

Cool!

It’s been a few days now and I have had time to listen to podcasts and watch they keynote speech.

The new Leopard release looks fantastic to me. The new finder is something that was desperately needed and they have done a great job with this.

Being a .NET developer as well as Cocoa, I tend to compare the conference to Microsoft’s and I always find it strange that the keynote is not primarily about developer features (being that it’s a developers conference).

I think they should have demonstrated the new XCode 3.0 and Object-C 2.0 features. Also show more powerful app’s created for Leopard, not just their own but 3rd parties. This is what Microsoft tend to do when they release new features to the .NET framework.

The JavaOne conference is a great example, where almost everything is about Java and not about new Sun hardware.

I realize that a lot of tech stuff is provided in the sessions after the keynote, but I think the whole idea of the keynote should be to excite developers from other platforms to join us. Show the world how cool it is to develop app’s in XCode.

I love being a convert to Mac and I could never see myself going back to PC, so lets show those PC developers how fun it is in the Mac world.

Finally I was hoping to see a cool tool to develop on the iPhone but the solution of developing web app’s for the phone just seemed lame to me.

Saying all that, I am planning to go next year.