Once you explore the power of NoteTab Light, you may find this text editor beautiful despite its hectic interface. At its core, NoteTab Light is to Windows' Notepad as a smart phone is to a rotary phone. The program incorporates top-level tabs similar to most Web browsers, so that you can manage several different projects at once, and it can automatically replace Notepad so that Notepad's icon opens NoteTab instead.
As part of its Open Content Platform, CNET Networks has created a variety of HTML widgets from five of its Web properties--CNET, GameSpot, Chow, BNET, and TV.com--that anyone can stick on his or her own Web site. After completing a short registration form, publishers can get CNET technology videos (widget), GameSpot game reviews (widget), TV.com interviews and features (widget), business-oriented arcticles and videos from BNET (widget), and food-oriented features from Chow (widget).
The HTML widgets come in a variety of shapes and flavors. Some widgets, such as CNET Personal Tech, TV.com, and Gamespot, serve their content in a standard 300x550 size. BNET provides articles and videos for business managers in three sizes--160x800, 300x500, and 500x360. Most prolifically, there are two different shapes (160x800 and 300x550) of four types of widgets from the food-focused Web site Chow--recipes, stories, videos, and message boards, including localized message board widgets for New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.… Read more
Microsoft's Live Labs, a standalone product research group, released on Wednesday Volta (download it from CNET Download.com), a development tool designed to make it easier to partition an application's component pieces across a network.
The problem that Microsoft researchers are trying to address is the difficulty of deciding which part of the application runs under which tier--either the client or server.
Typically, developers need to write code to handle the communication between those tiers. And they need to decide during development on how to best architect their applications for optimal performance.
With Volta, developers can make "… Read more
It's a good time for talented developers. Architects of Web and client-side apps have their choice of dazzling users on not one, but three cutting-edge mobile platforms. There's no shortage of opportunities to create custom Safari apps for the iPhone, and add them to our growing collection of iPhone apps, of course. Developers can also now download the Android SDK (for Mac or Windows) to start measuring and mixing an app for Google's new mobile platform. Inspired developers have a chance to earn a share of the $10 million in prizes offered in the Android Developer Challenge.… Read more
We don't often give a lot of attention to WordPress (for Windows or Mac), Movable Type and other self-publishing blogging systems. They often require a bit more determination than merely creating a Blogger or Livejournal username, password, and some pithy-kitschy title to show the world how witty you truly are.
WordPress has two very strong aspects: The installation really does take about 5 minutes, and it's highly customizable with plug-ins that absolve the user of having to be a CSS expert. OneClick is a two-part plug-in for WordPress and Firefox that simplifies the plug-in experience even further.
OK, this is a stretch, but we know that CNET Download.com users like to post their work to Facebook too.
That's why, even though Widgetbox's new online tool to publish widgets to Facebook isn't strictly the stuff of downloads, we're bringing you this hands-on review.
Widgetbox's (blandly named) App Accelerator is a step-by-step guide and tool for creating Facebook applications from Widgetbox widgets. Yet it shrewdly connects the community developers of Widgetbox's widget marketplace (this could be you) with Facebook's burgeoning user community. Talk about viral marketing.
The conversion works by adapting Widgetbox's Flash and HTML/JavaScript code for Facebook compatibility. There's a lot of link-swapping involved, and much of App Accelerator's ease-of-use can be attributed to Widgetbox's assumption of several routing URLs.… Read more
Inspiration for a blog can come from anywhere--at any time--so you'd best be prepared. Lighter than your Wi-Fi-enabled laptop and more immediate than jotting journal notes is TypePad Mobile (for Symbian, Palm, and Windows Mobile,) a blog-updating app offered by TypePad for its paid subscribers.
I evaluated TypePad Mobile on a gleaming HTC Vox S710 (watch Bonnie Cha's video review) running Windows Mobile 6. The smart phone's nice slider QWERTY keyboard and motion-sensitive vertical-to-horizontal display made for favorable testing conditions.… Read more
Taking digital pictures is simple; transforming them into a constructive project is a whole 'nother story. Web services like Flickr, Picasa, Shutterfly, Webshots, Snapfish, and countless others let you create photo galleries that are hosted on their servers, but what if you want to create a gallery for your own Web site?
Personally, I'm the sort of guy who wants to start with my raw images and my trusty NoteTab Light text editor, but I seem to have lost my patience for HTML and CSS (not to mention JavaScript and XML) over the last five years.… Read more
"Google Maps is changing the way we see the world," journalist Evan Ratliff declares in a June article for Wired magazine. I couldn't agree more. Google's universal mapping project isn't just changing the portals for viewing the world online, it's also changing offline understandings of how the world is best viewed--from Google's services, of course. Google has gained influence fast, by ambitiously developing innovative, interactive mapping software; integrating multiple online services into the majority of desktop and online apps; and familiarizing users with a particular Google-branded aesthetic.
In creating a suite of map apps to encourage users to contribute to Google's greater project and personalize locally-stored versions of a map, Google is not just bringing cartography to the masses, Ratliff points out, but is getting users to help build out its universe. This, of course, makes complete sense. With Google Earth, Google SketchUp, and MyMaps (watch the CNET News.com "how-to" video,) Google's mapping software has surpassed competitors like NASA in digitizing the world. In so doing, Google has captivated the imagination of loyal users who will return to the company's Earth and maps programs to find business listings, explore culturally significant architecture, and plant personal photos and videos.… Read more
The math is incontrovertible: at $2,500, Adobe's Creative Suite 3 Master Collection non-upgrade is extremely expensive. However, once you start looking at the cost of the individual pieces of the suite, getting more than two of the major components--say, Photoshop and Illustrator--on their own isn't cost effective, either.
Just those two applications together cost $1,600 for their non-upgrade editions, and that same chunk of change will get you the CS3 Web Premium, which contains Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Acrobat Pro and all the little ancillary apps that Adobe has been giving away.
But let's say you're only interested in editing photos, or you think your copy of Illustrator CS2 will work just fine with Flash CS3, but you need that Flash upgrade? Is there more going on than a new palette layout? Let's break down Adobe's powerhouse gestalt and take a look at the more popular parts that make up the whole: Photoshop for image manipulating and printing, Illustrator for drawing, Flash for animating, and Dreamweaver for designing Web pages.
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