Continue reading »]]> Google provides many keyboard shortcuts to move around and work with Google Chrome. For a complete list, you can always jump over to the Google Chrome Keyboard Shortcuts page. In the mean time, read on to see a list of the keyboard shortcuts….

Here is a list of most of Google Chrome keyboard shortcuts:

Window and tab shortcuts Window and tab shortcuts

Address bar shortcuts

Webpage shortcuts

Text shortcuts

Continue reading »]]> This is a really subtle one, but Google Chrome improves nicely on the “find” function for finding text within an open page. As in other browsers, pressing <ctrl><f> brings up a find box, however its overall functionality is just a bit different. Read on to see the differences….

First, the find box is integrated unobtrusively in the upper right corner of the page into which you type your search text. It’s clean and looks good. I never liked how Internet Explorer pops up a dialog box. It just gets in the way. Firefox, Safari, and now Google Chrome implement this well with Google Chrome behaving similarly to how Safari does it.

As you type your search text, hits are highlighted in real time and the number of occurrences is displayed in the box. Clicking the Up and Down arrows in the find box will step you through all occurrences highlighting the current one in a bolder highlight.

So far, this is all pretty standard, but look at the scrollbar on the right of the page. The relative locations of the hits is visually indicated by little lines in scrollbar in the same color as the highlight color within the text. This makes it quick and easy to tell at a glance where within the page you will find all of the occurrences.

Its subtle, but surprisingly useful!

Continue reading »]]> Having quick and easy access to information is one of the strong points of the iPhone and the iPod Touch. With their online capabilities, the Internet is at your fingertips, and just about any piece of information is just a few taps away. One group of applications that provides news information is the “RSS Reader” category. These programs provide news feeds in a (typically) organized and concise manner, allowing you to catch up news from your favorite sites wherever you are. But what if you are not online? What if an iPhone user is on a subway or in an area that has marginal or no coverage. What about an iPod Touch user who is not within range of a WiFi connection? Providing offline access to RSS feeds is a worthy endeavor, and AppStore has a dozen or so RSS readers that may fit your needs, however they all currently miss the mark in providing a complete offline reading experience. Read on to find out why….

All of the RSS Reader apps in AppStore provide pretty much the same content, however their method of presentation and execution spans a wide spectrum. Some apps require a network connection to display anything. With these apps, news feeds are loaded in real-time so you are always up-to-date, however if you are offline, you simply will not see any content. (I personally question this approach as I may as well just use a decent WebApp.) Others provide excellent offline reading capabilities with articles organized by feed, folders, date, etc.

The feature set is growing in this line of apps. Some have lots of eye candy (at least one uses the CoverFlow concept in presenting the feed list) and some provide synchronization to online accounts such as Google Reader and NewsGator ensuring that regardless of how you access these accounts, they will always be up-to-date. But despite the host of features and ease-of-use, there’s still one key feature that is missing from every application in this category: The ability to pre-fetch and cache embedded images within articles.

As an iPod Touch user, I don’t always have network connectivity, so offline functionality is essential. AppStore applications like WeDict, Acro Bible, and Bookshelf, and Jailbreak applications like Wiki2Touch provide incredible acces to amazing content that is always available online or offline. As of this writing, every RSS reader in AppStore lacks the ability to provide full offline content–both article text and associated embedded images. There are excellent applications that provide an intuitive, fast, and comprehensive reading experience, but if you want to see embeded images in articles, you must be online, or you must have at least viewed the article once while online. Omitting the images removes a significant part of the reading experience.

Now I do realize that syncing dozens, if not hundreds of images could amount to a much longer sync session, but that’s a tradeoff I would welcome if I could have offline access to all of the content. So here is my plea to all developers of RSS Reader applications for the iPhone/iPod Touch: Please add the option to pre-fetch and cache embeded images for offline reading. And to stand out ahead of the competition, provide more granular control so that the user can really tailor what gets updated. For example, let the user toggle pre-fetching on a feed-by-feed basis. Have a setting to only pre-fetch images for the n-number of articles or articles received within the last n-days, etc.

Most of the current AppStore RSS Readers are very well thought-out, well executed, and provide great information both online and offline. Just don’t stop short when the user goes offline.

Continue reading »]]>

Text entry on the iPod Touch's on-screen keyboard is surprisingly easy, but sometimes, it can be tedious to enter numbers, symbols, or special characters. But did you know that there are a few "shortcuts" that you can use to make this kind of entry quicker and easier? Read on for some tips on "shifting" letters, inserting numbers, symbols, and International characters, and making a quick entry correction….

Quick Shift

While typing on the Alphabetic keyboard, press and hold the Shift key, then slide your finger over to the letter you want to shift then release. The letter will be shifted.

Quick Number and Symbol Entry

While typing letters on the Alphabetic keyboard, sometimes you want to quickly insert a number or a symbol such as a comma or period. Just press and hold the Symbol/Number key (.?123) then slide your finger over to the symbol or number you want to insert then release your finger. The symbol or number will then be inserted and the keyboard will revert back to the Alphabetic keyboard for you to continue typing.

International Characters

If you want to enter special letter characters such as those with an accent or grave, press and hold the Alphabetic key you want to accent and a popup showing all the available choices will display. Slide your finger over to the desired choice, release, and the special character will be inserted.

Quick Correction

While typing, if you find that you have entered an incorrect letter but have not yet released the key, you can always slide your finger over to the correct character and then release. The correct character will be inserted.

I hope you find this tip useful in improving your keyboard entry!

Continue reading »]]> Arguably, one of the greatest current contributions to the Internet is Wikipedia, a solid encyclopedic resource for general knowledge of topics spanning literally millions of articles. Though the accuracy of some of its articles is questionable, overall, Wikipedia does an excellent job of presenting generally reliable content. A point of note that any researcher, student, or general Internet user should know, is that because of its susceptibility to error and vandalism, Wikipedia, should not be used as a difinitive research resource, it should be considered a great starting point for researching a topic.)

Like searching on Google, Wikipedia is fast and intuitive to use. On the iPod Touch, the Safari Web browser renders Wikipedia pages very well. But accessing Wikipedia from the iPod Touch has one major drawback: you must be online. Recently, however, there have been several sfforts to provide Wikipedia content in an offline format. This article covers two such offerings:

Wikipedia.app

Wiki2Touch  (My Pick!)

I review what I like about them, what I dislike, and which I like best, so read on for a full review of these two applications….

Generally speaking, offline Wikipedia implementaions require several components to work including a huge data file containing the text content of Wikipedia’s articles, some supporting files, and an application that handles the searching and displaying of the article content. Fortunately, getting Wikipedia’s data isn’t that difficult because Wikipedia makes this English languave data readily available in the form of a downloadable XML file. (If you require foreign versions, a number of foreign languages are available as well.) Currently, the data weighs in at about 3GB, so it may take a while to download the data. But downloading this 3GB+ file is just the start. You then need to convert the file into a format that the offline applications can manage. Fortunately, this is not a difficult process–time-consuming, but not difficult.

Wikipedia.app

The first application in this review is Wikipedia.app . This was the first offline implementation I tried, and it was simply amazing! It provided quick access to almost all Wikipedia text content. Entering search after search revealed just how much data could be packed onto an iPod Touch.

Unfortunately, Wikipedia.app is not without its issues as it’s not too hard to crash the application, particularly when following links from redirects. There are some simple workarounds, but this is still a drawback. The display is very simple, providing a nice scrollable display, but that’s about it. There are no bells and whistles, so if you are looking for a small, lean application, this is it.

On the positive side, Wikipedia.app gave me my first taste of using Wiklipedia offline, and it provided adequate access to its articles. Searching was quick, and the display layout, while spartan, looked great. Many articles include internal links referencing other articles, so tapping any of the links displays that new article. Other than the occasional crash, it did work well.

Another positive is in setup. Setting up Wikipedia.app was very straight forward. The first thing you need is the Wikipedia text data. Wikipedia.app provides a large pre-built data file that weighs in at just over 2GB in size. It’s an English language snapshot of Wikipedia text content from October, 2007–a few other lanugage versions are also available. Instructions are provided to manually build a more recent version, but the currently available version is fairly recent, so using the pre-built file makes isntallation much easier. You also need to download some supporting files and the Wikipedia.app application. Installation was as simple as downloading everything (which took a while because of the size), uploading everything to the iPod Touch, setting some file permissions, and restarting Springboard. It was very easy.

Once set up, you end up with a new icon on your Home page that launches a simple Search application. Enter your search text, and Wikipedia.app displays results in real-time as you type. This is great, because you get immediate feedback. Tapping any of the results will do wone of two things: Display the article, or display a redrect page. In most cases, tapping the redirect will either display the article, or display a new redirect. Occasionally, this crashes.

Here is the Wikipedia.app start page:

Here is the results page that displays results as you type:

Here is an example of a rendered article:

The articles display in a nice scrollable page with embeded internal links, and there is a button at the top to take you back to the search page. And at the top of the search page is a button to take upi back to the last-viewed article. There is no history, so if you follow internal links, going back will take you to the search page. And when you exit and relaunch the application, no history is saved.

I’d love to see the Wikipedia.app program be stabilized and some features added, but for now, it works well enough. Features I’d like to see added include saving search result history, retention of articles between sessions, and the ability to save “favorite” articles for quick reference. Despite its quirks, it’s an excellent solution.

Wiki2Touch

Wiki2Touch takes a different approach in implementation. You still have a huge article data file, but instead of using a custom client application to search and display the articles, it includes a local Web server application that runs in the background, providing access to the local data directly from Safari. When you point Safari to the local Web server address, it displays a Wikipedia search page. Entering a search request searches the local Wikipedia data file and returns the article results in a nicely-formatted, iPod Touch-friendly page. It’s quick and reliable, and if a result is not found or a link is broken, you simply get an “Article not found” error page–no crashes, no hassels.

Setup is not quite as easy as with Wikipedia.app because you must build the indexed data file yourself. While this may sound daunting, it’s actually very easy–it just takes lots of time. And one advantage to manually building the file is that you can build it using the latest snapshot ensuring that your data will be as current as Wikipedia provides. To build the file, you first have to download the 3GB+ XML data file from Wikipedia. Depending on the speed of yout Internet connection, this could take a while. Next, download the Wiki2Touch program distribution. It’s a small package, so it will be a quick download. You then build the “articles.bin” data file (the actual data file that will be uploaded to your iPod Touch) from the downloaded Wikipedia XML data using a simple “indexer” application. (For Windows users, the process is done by issuing a single DOS command.) The indexer.exe program converts and repackages the XML data into a format usable by the Wiki2Touch se
rver application.

When indexer.exe completes, you upload the new data file and the application files to your iPod Touch (this can take a long time over WiFi) set some file permissions, restart Springboard, launch the Wiki2Touch app, start the server, launch Safari, then point Safari to http://127.0.0.1:8080/index.html. If everything went as expected, you should see a nice Wikipedia search page.

Using Safari to access the local Wikipedia data has several advantages over Wikipedia.app. Because articles are displayed through Safari, you use Safari’s User Interface features such as zooming and screen rotation to your advantage. This makes reading articles more consistent with reading other Web-based content. Second, if you enter s search request that does not find any results, or if a link or redirect happens to be bad, you simply get an “Article not found” error instead of a potential crash. And because articles are returned by Wiki2Touch as a “valid” URL within Safari, you can use Safari’s history, Bookmark, and Web Clip features to better manage and organize your searches and search results. (Oh, and get this: if you have the Wiki2Touch server running, and have WiFi turned on, PC’s on your local network can connect to your Wiki2Touch server via a Web Browser to your iPod Touch and submit queries! While this might potentially cause some security concerns, it’s still pretty cool.)

This is the “start” page:

This is an example of the real-time search page that displays search results as you type:

This is the resullting article. Note that though there is no image displayed, it is formatted to accommodate images:

A potential drawback to Wiki2Touch is that overall, you will be using up to 50% more memory (3GB+ compared to 2GB+) than with Wikipedia.app. If you are using an 8GB iPod Touch and want to also carry lots of music and video with you, you may be out of luck. But for me, it’s not an issue, because I’m using my iPod Touch more as a PDA than a media player. You just may need to make some choioces to prioritize what content gets loaded.

Conclusion

So which do I recommend? They are both great implementations, but in the end, I have to recommend using Wiki2Touch. For a quick install and easy-to-use offline access, Wikipedia.app shines. Though it’s not without its quirks, and it occasionally crashes, it was simple to install, and it provided the content I was looking for. On the other hand, while Wiki2Touch required more up-front time to get things set up, once installed, it was so easy and stable to use. And the fact that it leverages Safari’s additional features makes it stand out as my offline Wikipedia search tool of choice.

In either case, once you get the taste of having Wikipedia articles accessible and available anywhere, any time, you begin to see just how exciting this really is. Being able to have pocketable, offline access to Wikipedia content alone, for me, justifies what I paid for my iPod Touch.

Continue reading »]]> Here's a simple, yet not always intuitive tip. Have you ever been using Safari while lying down in bed or on a couch? You get comfortable, and as you tilt your iPod Touch, does the screen auto-rotate the wrong way? You then go through the delecate balancing act of finding that "sweet spot" just before it rotates, then you cock your head uncomfortably, just to view Safari in widescreen mode? Well, the solution is so simple, if you follow Apple's intuitive UD design. Because the iPod Touch only rotates 90° in either direction, once it is rotated, it will not rotate further. So when rotating yout iPod Touch, simply rotate it in direction you are lying. For example, if you lye down on your right side, rotate it clockwise. If you turn over to your left side, rotate it counter-clockwise.

Continue reading »]]> Like any PDA or pocket-sized electronic device, the iPod Touch is prone to scratches and dings, so on eof the first accessories you should consider is a case to protect it. Cases come in all sizes and shapes, so what is best for you is a very personal and subjective decision. I found the Griffin Elan Convertible case at my local Circuit City, and I find it to be a solid choice for the money. Read on for a full review….

The Griffin Elan Convertible Case is a sleek leather case that houses the iPod Touch. It has a removable flip-over cover and a removable belt-clip it provides excellent screen and body protection.

The inside of the case is lined with what feels like suede, providing soft, scratch-free protection of the screen, while also slightly gripping the device in place. There are cutouts for the Home button, the Universal Connector, Headphones, and the auto-brightness sensor, and the top poer button is accessible.

The flip-over cover has two small magnets that keep the case closed, and the cover is removable. Reversing the cover provides a sort of "stand" arrangement. The belt-clip is removable also. Given the size of the iPod Touch, I personally prefer to carry it in my pocket instead of on my belt. (Lowers the Geek Factor a bit.) The looks and protection of this case does come at a small price in that it just about doubles the thickness of the iPod Touch, but not too much to the length and width. Still,l it's very compact overall compared to other PDA cases I've used.

One word of note about carrying this or any similar device is that I never carry these in my back pocket. To me, it's just too risky. But with this case, the iPod Touch is very "front-pocketable", and if you carry change or keys in the same pocket, you really don't need to worry as the protection is great.

My only real complaint, and it is minor, is that over time, leather stretches, so my iPod Touch didn't seem to be gripped as tightly as it was when the case was new. It did slide a bit, but it wasn't a problem, and I never felt like it would inadvertently slip out.

Overall, the Griffin Elan Convertible Case provides compact, nice-looking protection for yout iPod Touch. Though at present, I am using a different case, I still highly recommended this one. It is a great-looking case with great features at a price that won't break the bank.

Continue reading »]]> Gmail has finally rolled out its long-awaited IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) compatibility enabling users of such email clients as Outlook, Lotus Notes, Thunderbird, a host of others, and even Apple’s iPhone to now take advantage of IMAP instead of the more limited POP connection.

Continue reading »]]> Stephen Swire, a GmailTips.com visitor, sent me some information on how he uses Gmail with his Blackberry. Though I do not use a Blackberry, I thought I’d pass this along as Blackberries are becoming more and more popular. If you have similar experiences, or other suggestions, let me know, and I’ll post ‘em!

(Note: Stephen uses his blackberry with a personal email account, not an enterprise server. -Jim)

"Here are two ways I’ve just started using Gmail to enhance my Blackberry:

(1) in order to have a running record of all sent messages, (a good business practice for me) I set up a BCC of all sent messages to a Gmail address.

(2) I find that there are some attachments which can’t be opened on the blackberry (for example, some .PDF files download but fail to open.) Also, if I want to forward an attachment, it usually arrives "corrupted" in the recipient’s mailbox.

My solution to both issues is to direct my domain and personal email addresses to a second Gmail address, place the Gmail quick access icon on my blackberry desktop, and use this on an as-needed basis either to forward an attachment directly from my Gmail account, or as a reader for some attachments."

Thank you Stephen for your input! ]]> http://jimstips.com/gmail-tips/gmail-tip-63-gmail-and-your-blackberry/feed 0 http://jimstips.com/masonic-tips/but-its-more-than-that http://jimstips.com/masonic-tips/but-its-more-than-that#comments Tue, 22 May 2007 09:42:29 +0000 Jim http://www.barrweb.com/blogtest/?p=261

Continue reading »]]> When I started looking into Freemasonry, I was overwhelmed by all of the information and varied views about just what it is all about. So I read and read, I talked with Masons, and I thought about just what Freemasonry is. And this is what I came up with:

It’s a club.
You join it. You attend meetings. Business is conducted at the meetings. You gather socially. You do fundraisers. But it’s more than that…

It’s a fraternity.
You join in brotherhood. You pledge your loyalty to it. You help your fellow brothers, and you receive help from them. But it’s more than that…

It’s philanthropic.
It uses your money and time to help others. It helps the poor. It helps the needy. But it’s more than that…

It’s a mystery.
You seek it, it doesn’t seek you. Its secrets are held in high regard. It imparts timeless wisdom. It uses symbols and allegory to explain itself. It has secret signs and words. But it’s more than that…

It’s open and visible.
Its secrets are published. It’s secrets are known. Its buildings are prominent and visible. Its members often wear identifiable pins and rings. But it’s more than that…

It’s a system of morality.
It teaches good morals. It instructs good ethics. It promotes integrity. It despises falsehood. But it’s more than that…

It believes in God.
It finds God in nature. It finds God in Science. It finds God in Mathematics. It finds evidence of God everywhere. But it’s more than that…

It’s selective.
It requires belief in God. It investigates you. It votes on you. It decides if you are worthy for it. But it’s more than that…

It sets aside differences and breaks down walls.
It doesn’t discuss religion. It doesn’t discuss politics. It accepts men of all God-believing theologies. It is open to all denominations. But it’s more than that…

It’s theater.
Its rituals and ceremonies rival many local theater groups. But it’s more than that…

So what is it? It’s Freemasonry! But it’s so much more…