type

Color your typing skills

I remember learning how to type a long time ago with a fake keyboard sketched on a piece of paper. It was fun trying to imagine and remember all the keys' position, though I would never want to have to repeat that exercise. Good news is you don't have to, at least not the imagining part.

The color-blind need not apply, but KeyRight just recently introduced what is arguably the most colorful keyboard in the world. It's a part of the company's Look & Learn typing solution for those who want to quickly and accurately use a … Read more

Movable Type goes virtual with JumpBox

Six Apart announced this week that it is partnering with virtual-appliance vendor JumpBox to deliver a virtualized instance of Movable Type, its open-source blogging platform. No more configuration problems as your organization strives to get up and blogging.

Ed Anuff, executive vice president and general manager of the Movable Type division of Six Apart, declared:

You can get up and running immediately, while reducing the cost of configuration and maintenance. And it's a snap for anyone who wants to evaluate the platform to get started, whether that's on a desktop, running VMWare or Parallels, a large-scale deployment on … Read more

Reports: TypePad unblocked in China

Various TypePad-hosted bloggers are rejoicing as their blogs become visible again in China.

As with any such event, we're not sure how long this will last, and we're not sure why it happened. Tim Johnson, a McClatchy Newspapers correspondent based in China, writes:

I'm celebrating, of sorts. For the first time in maybe a year, this blog and others on the typepad.com host can now be seen within China. They are no longer blocked.

Why did the blocking suddenly end? I have no idea. Someone just flicked a switch.

The last sentence gave me an idea. … Read more

Biggest Vaio yet: Sony unveils 18.4-inch Vaio type A

Sony is rolling out its biggest laptop yet. Tuesday, the company shared details on the Vaio type A, an 18.4-inch laptop targeting graphics pros. The Vaio type A will trump the current 17-inch Vaio AR as the largest Vaio in the land. It's scheduled to be released in Japan at the end of the month; no word yet on if and when it'll come to the U.S.

Now, on to the specs. The Sony Vaio type A features a full HD (1920x1080), LED backlit display. It's powered by a 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo … Read more

TypePad responds to criticism from blogger

There are a number of recent postings on this blog about companies coping with computer problems - the theme being that the way a company handles problems tells you something that you could not otherwise learn, how reliable they are in a pinch. The TypePad story came from blogger Alan Shimel who wrote about his experience trying to recover his account after bad guys learned his password and defaced his blog.

The unedited comments* below are from Anil Dash a Vice President at Six Apart, the company behind TypePad.

Michael, I work with the team at TypePad, and wanted to … Read more

Movable Type, Wordpress becoming social platforms

Six Apart is announcing Tuesday night the launch of Movable Type 4.2 (download from CNET) and Movable Type Pro. The 4.2 platform gives blog publishers better performance, according to Six Apart. But the really interesting thing about this launch is the new social features in MT Pro.

Movable Type Pro will enable "social publishing," which is a fancy way of saying readers of MT blogs will now be able to do much more than just reply to posts in the comments. Readers will get profiles pages with "walls," and the capability to rate other … Read more

New Review: Typinator

Do you make the same typing mistakes over and over? A lot of people have trouble with certain words, and even though they know the correct spelling, just can't seem to train themselves to type those words correctly.

Typinator for Mac automatically corrects your most often-made mistakes, and works system-wide so you'll never have to worry about those pesky words again. What's more, Typinator can autofill e-mail addresses and other frequently used phrases using user-designated abbreviations.

Check out our new review of Typinator to see why it just might be the time-saving typing tool you've been … Read more

Movable Type users get Seesmic plug-in

Movable Type users looking to get simple video comments on their blogs have access to a new plug-in from the folks at Seesmic. Once installed, commenters can add text and/or video underneath someone's blog post, similar to what's been available for WordPress users since late April. The plug-in joins similar ones for Disqus, DotClear, and Cocomment. One for Drupal is also right around the corner.

Personally I've never been a big fan of video comments on blog posts solely for attention's sake. I just can't tell if a comment is worth viewing from the … Read more

Six Apart's handy Blog It service hits the iPhone

This morning, Six Apart unveiled its newest iPhone creation, a very svelte-looking port of Blog It, which the company introduced back in April. The simple tool lets you write and cross-blog a post or status update to several services at once. The company is hoping people will use it as a home base to manage all their updates. It's also a somewhat early look at some of the features users will be getting in the upcoming native blogging application announced on Monday.

The tool started out as a Facebook app and has since pulled in about 10,000 users. … Read more

SixApart introduces native app for pocket TypePad blogging

Next month, among the slew of third-party apps hitting the iPhone's App Store, blogging tool TypePad will be giving its users a new way to blog on the go. The native application was just announced at Apple's WWDC Monday morning, but I got a sneak peek at it last week. I think it's going to be a lifesaver for bloggers who want to monitor and administrate their blogs while away from a laptop or home PC.

The app will let you write and edit posts on your phone and save them for later, helping people avoid that … Read more