There’s a new kid on the block when it comes to web-based applications for creatives. It’s called Aviary and I don’t believe I have ever seen anything like it. Aviary is soon to become a powerful brand. They are developing a massive suite of such Adobe Flex-based applications. I first heard about Aviary through a Skribit suggestion on my blog many months ago. Continue Reading »

Back in May I did a bit of traveling and became somewhat paranoid about the Internet connections I found at various hotels. I began using SSH tunnels to protect my web traffic when using Internet connections I did not trust. While setting up an SSH tunnel is a fairly trivial matter for those familiar to the command line, it’s not the same for everyone. Continue Reading »

When Firefox 3.0 was officially launched last Tuesday, I updated my copy of Firefox and installed a few select browser add-ons. This included my normal batch of add-ons like Firebug, YSlow, Delicious Bookmarks, and a recently discovered Quartz inline PDF plugin (nifty!). Then I found out about Feedly. Continue Reading »

In the first part of this Going HD series I discussed the arrival of a 50-inch Samsung plasma HDTV as the core of my new HD setup. I’ve spent almost two weeks with the HDTV and I have no complaints thus far; it’s a stellar display. The only problem has been getting 1080p HD content on the display to really use it. Continue Reading »

Go back to 1998 and remember when you had your shiny new Palm III PDA. It was the first of its kind to sport an infrared port. At the time, the killer feature of the Palm infrared port was not turning off walls of televisions at Best Buy but rather exchanging vCards with other Palm users - wireless business Continue Reading »

If you have a MacBook Air or recent MacBook Pro with a multitouch trackpad, you have probably already fallen in love with the “swipe” gesture. Three fingers swiped across the trackpad to the left or right take you back or forward a page, respectively, in your browsing history. Only native apps like Finder and Safari have built-in Continue Reading »

This post suggestion has been sitting in my Skribit account for a while so I thought I would finally address it. S3 is Amazon’s developer-aimed online storage solution. In recent years, consumer-friendly applications and tools have added support for Amazon S3, Continue Reading »

Back when I wrote Startup 101: Tools for the Job, I had briefly mentioned Campfire by 37signals but had not gotten around to using it for Skribit. In the last month or two, things have changed completely as we have not only begun using Campfire but made it our primary form of communication and how we work. I’m not alone either. Telecommuting web professionals such as those involved with ENTP Continue Reading »

By the time most people read this post I will have stayed in three different hotels in New York, New Jersey and Maryland while trekking along with Challenge X teams for their final competition. That means I have had a chance to glance through several terms of service agreements for various hotel internet Continue Reading »

Macbook Air owners know what I’m talking about - the dreaded core shutdown. When the MacBook Air gets too hot, there is a built-in thermal shutdown feature that turns off one of the two cores in the Core 2 Duo Intel processor found in the MacBook Air. The problem is that one of the cores often shuts down at temperatures Continue Reading »

Amazon EC2 is among the more potent items in Amazon’s web services arsenal. You’ve probably heard of many of the other services such as S3 for storage and FPS for payments. EC2 is all about the “elastic compute cloud.” In layman’s terms, it’s a server. In slightly less layman’s terms, EC2 lets you easily run Continue Reading »

WordPress 2.5 came out earlier today. I just updated and am going to give the gallery features a whirl with this test post. I have actually been tinkering a lot with customizing a gallery for this site a while ago Continue Reading »

After working on Skribit for the last 4 months, I have gotten a grip on my workflow and the tools I as well as the other co-founders use. The scope of this post is to give potential starter-uppers an idea of how to get work done collaboratively with others Continue Reading »

Last September Yahoo! announced they had acquired Zimbra, a leader in email and collaboration software focused towards businesses, ISPs and universities. It was with that same announcement that Yahoo! said Georgia Tech would be one of the first universities to adopt Zimbra’s webmail application. Georgia Tech’s Continue Reading »

Today Mozilla, the company behind your favorite open source web browser and email client, has launched a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, focused entirely on email and Internet communications. Mozilla Messaging is the name and ignoring prevalent Continue Reading »

So you’ve built a nifty file server running Linux after following your favorite blogger’s series of DIY 200 Dollar PC articles (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Now what? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could turn that server into a speedy downloading machine? Continue Reading »

John Ratcliffe-Lee writes in with a question about how to use Subversion to easily keep tabs on a frequently updated software CMS he wants to use. First off, what is Subversion? It’s a widely used version control system, or in Continue Reading »

I’ve been at the airport and on a flight home for the most of the day and missed most of the Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta buzz. Now that I’ve had a chance to glance over it, I must say I’m optimistic about where Firefox is going. Firefox 3 seems to be addressing the user experience more than anything else. There’s Continue Reading »

I’ve been using Mac OS X Leopard for a few weeks now and have started to form my thoughts about it. For the first few days, I really didn’t think Leopard was all that different than Tiger. Yeah, it had little things here and there, but none of them changed the way I interacted with the OS in general. That’s starting to change. Continue Reading »

From the not-sure-how-useful-this-is department comes a simple method of changing the default desktop wallpaper shown when logging into OS X Leopard if space and stars aren’t your cup o’ tea. All you need to do is replace the file DefaultDesktop.jpg located Continue Reading »

Just tonight Erica Sadun, a well-known iPhone tinkerer and TUAW blogger, announced the launch of jailbreakme.com. The site enables its iPhone/iPod Touch visitors to “jailbreak” their units in mere minutes, with a single touch. Jailbreaking is a term for opening Continue Reading »

By now you’ve no doubt heard that the latest Mac OS X version dubbed 10.5 Leopard will be dropping on Friday, October 26th at 6pm. Usually I don’t need convincing when new software comes out, and I upgrade regardless. However, when reading through the new Leopard features list on Apple’s site, one thing became apparent - I could care less about every single Leopard feature with the exception of Continue Reading »

People have been saying that DRM is going to die for a long time. Steve Jobs went out on a limb last February and urged record companies to cease using the crippling technology. It’s been quite some time since then and the music industry is still relatively reluctant to comply with every end user’s request to ditch DRM. Apple’s DRM-free success Continue Reading »

I recently discovered RefactorMyCode, a developer-oriented site aimed at letting others critique, or refactor, your code snippets. Up until now, it seemed that the only communities based around helping others with their code were mundane programming forums. Continue Reading »

Media Temple hosting recently launched a beta test of a new GridContainer for their (gs) hosting service that supports Python and the Django framework right out of the box. Django is an increasingly popular framework as of late, quite possibly all from web designer Jeff Croft’s Django evangelism. Continue Reading »