I am not so much of a fanatic of web social platform but I am kinda gaining a lot of interest in Facebook. Ofcourse, my interest isn’t in anything else rather than porting or developing facebook applications. Today, I was quite amazing how fast I could get to playing around with building a facebook application after watching the experience of Facebook | Lab Builder was built in a week. I am particularly gaining mob interest and I should be able to build a facebook application sooner than later.

However, Facebook is also bringing new changes on board including the News Feed, which appears on your homepage, and Mini-Feed, which appears in each person’s profile. More of this can be obtained at their blog.

I was particularly interested in the Facebook Redesign which I guess isn’t yet finally released to the public. Of course, this is because part of my interests lies in website design and development which I have been passionately doing for awhile to revamp Uganda’s website industry.

Looking at their redesign, I was really fascinated as it looks more clean, usable and less crowded than never before. There is a new main tabbed menu at the top and small tabs which you can customize to whatever you wish. All the applications are now in a drop down menu making it more easier to find them and also taking more control taken over to the user. The user can now determine what he wants to see in the different components.

Try it out this redesign at http://www.new.facebook.com/

For WordPress users, fanatics and well-wishers, you got more reason to smile. WordPress 2.6. has finally been released one month ahead of the schedule date and many new more features and improvements to WordPress 2.5. have been included and it seems WordPress is growing more to the CMS side, ofcourse, it conquered the blogging engine platform.

This time round, a brief virtual tour has been compiled which is another great move and so you can have a grasp of what’s new and cooking in this new release.

Among what is featured in this release include:

• Post Revisions: which enables you to go back and forth in the different post drafts (edits) which are manually or automatically saved. You can also make comparisons between the different saved drafts and know who made which draft for posts and pages made by many authors. It is more or less like a version control system and enables you to switch between these drafts.
• Press This!: enables you to post from wherever you are on the web by adding a Press This bookmark to your toolbar that provides a fast and smart popup to do posts to your blog
• Shift Gears: For this version, it just helps to cache or keep a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer to speed up the loading of some pages but WP works fine without it.
• Theme Previews: A great feature allowing you to preview the theme before making it public.
• Ability to change location of wp-config file which is a great security measure.
• Bulk management of plugins
• and more other small features and improvements like image captions, customised default avatars, word count, etc…

Great thanks to the WordPress team for their hard work. Get the download at WordPress.org and more about the new and improved features from the official release post at WordPress Development Blog.

Yesterday, I wrote about a web application which was built within four days and I was and am kinda perturbed by some of the stuff discussed like the costings, the roles of some people on the team and why the team had to be that big for a simple application like this (especially that I presume that these are experienced developers, designers etc.). However, I greatly think that the gesture of the whole matter is about team collaboration as it is not really simple to get work done easily in a team rather than as an individual.

However, as I continued traversing some reachable corners of the internet, I found a great facebook application, Facebook | Lab builder which was built by a team of a developer, designer from concept to reality. Amazingly, the application has a lot of features including showing the progress of the project in terms of how far the building has reached and a time line of how much has been collected against the overall project budget.

Well, you can actually jump over to A Startup A Week which came up with this idea and view how the whole process went along. From their website,

The concept of the show is to bring together a few of Seattle’s top developers and designers, pitch them an idea for a startup, and give them just one week to take the idea from concept to reality.

Interesting, you will also find more interesting ventures which are being tried at the A Startup A Week website.

By the way, don’t forget the real cause of the Facebook | Lab Builder application. Make your contribution if you can.

For Twitter users, more so those with multiple accounts possibly for the different projects you are running, there is a new web application, Multiple account twitter tweeting (Matt), which has been developed by Carsonified team. Matt makes it easy to post to multiple Twitter accounts without having to log into each one every time.

Of course, there are some many really great desktop and web applications which have been developed around this great micro blogging platform, however, what is particularly interesting about this application is how it was designed and developed in a record time of four (4) days right from scratch.

From Matt’s official website:

The Carsonified team built Matt to see if it was possible to launch a simple web app in four days - everything from design, to development to marketing. We also wanted to play around with Django, Git, the Twitter API and some other nifty tools.

We blogged and filmed the whole week in hopes that the experience would be useful for all of you.

You can read about their experiences at Tech Crunch at How To Build A Web App in Four Days For $10,000 (Say Hello To Matt).

There are so many lessons you can pick from there. However, I am still perturbed at the costings of this web application and whether it really required all the people on the team.

The determination and inventions of free and open source community are incredibly amazing and really shows the power of the open source philosophy and community. For instance, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has a lot it can benefit third world countries especially cutting down on the licenses to paid for each application someone has to run and the limited-ness of closed software as it can be customized for individual use. Personally, I attended the Africa Source II workshop in Kalangala, Uganda where I met a lot of FOSS gurus and I was particularly impressed by how they are willing to make a difference in different communities and their attitude towards sharing information.

However, though Africa could benefit much from the FOSS community especially in terms of software, content, etc., it faces major challenges especially limited bandwidth to the internet which would help download this software and other open content.

Incredibly, the Shuttleworth Foundation founded by Mark Shutterworth (I also met him in the Africa Source II workshop) invented a Freedom Toaster. From the Freedom Toaster website:

The Freedom Toaster is a self-contained computer kiosk that allows anyone to burn open source software and operating systems onto blank CDs. It makes use of specialized software that allows users to burn multiple CDs at once; so one could, for example, burn the four CDs needed for a Mandriva Linux installation in the few minutes that would be required to burn one CD conventionally.

The user makes their selection on The Freedom Toaster’s touch-screen and then inserts the required amount of blank CDs to burn their selection.

With The Freedom Toaster, a lot of users especially here in Africa are saved from downloading a lot of Open Source Software and Applications including those running on Ms Windows; content, music, etc. all for free. All you need is to insert in blank CDs and then after a few minutes, you get your software available to you. These toasters are moved around to convenient places and events for people to toast any FOSS software and applications free of charge.

The Freedom Toaster project has also put up documents which could help anyone, anywhere build a freedom toaster of their own and also they will soon allow uploading information from users using USB slots.

I really think that this will help a lot here in Africa. Great thanks to the Shuttleworth Foundation and the Open Source Community at large. Though they are still very few and we hope to see more of them around Africa and the world at large.

So what do you think? Have you ever used this or have you seen them around? I think this idea can be borrowed by many organizations e.g. NGOs distributing content, etc.

Yesterday I wrote about my Multiple Internet Explorer-Single PC Dilemma and so far, I have found a solution to my dilemma. Before you can get a grasp of why I am suggesting this as a solution, I would like to get into some further analysis of the problem and why it fits in very well.

As a web developer and designer, we are always tempted to add some many features and flashy functionalities to our websites. However, the most important bit of any professional web designer and developer is that in whatever he does, he should always ensure that web standards are followed. However, this comes with a challenge as not all web browsers abide by the web standards. After ensuring that standards are followed, many are particularly interested in ensuring that the website renders properly in Microsoft Internet Explorer which doesn’t abide by the web standards and yet a lot of people use it because it is shipped with Microsoft Windows operating systems. The most versions people are currently worried about are Ms IE7, IE6 and possibly IE5.5. You can’t just ignore this problem as many of your clients or even web surfers are using these versions and so you need to ensure that your website is rendered properly in these browsers even if they don’t abide by the web standards thus making browser testing are significant task being making any website go public.

With that said, there are some many solutions are available with Browsershots being one of the very potential candidates. With this, you can test your website in most of the web browsers across the different operating systems including Linux, Windows, Mac and BSD. You enter the URL of the website you would like to test, wait for a few minutes or even ages and then you get screen-shots of how the website looks like in the different browsers. Though this looks to be great, people with little bandwidth or who don’t have reliable internet access are kinda flown out because it can take ages before you get the screen-shots.

Then there are other alternatives of, for example, using Multiple IE from Tredosoft if you are still using XP or using a Virtual PC for some versions of Vista. This helps as it is an offline solution to doing browser testing, however, with these alternatives, the amount of resources like memory, space etc taken to do browser testing is also significantly costly.

Thats where IETester comes in,

IETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process.

Though IETester is still in its alpha release, it is a great tool to solve the problem as you can browser test in IE 5.5, IE 6, IE 7 and IE 8 beta 1 in just a single browser and websites can be opened in different tabs providing great flexible. However, it has some problems and limitations including:

• When resizing, the content may disappear. I am working to correct it on the next version.
• The Previous/Next buttons are not working properly
• Focus is not working properly
• Java applets are not working
• Flash is not working on IE6 instance.

Of course, this has been a preliminary research, I still think that there are other tools which can help in browser testing. If any or anything else, please free feel to leave a comment below