Leslie Franke

I have began putting the source files, for all Palm skins and icons, in a directory on this site. The path to the source will be stated in the readme file of each download. I believe this complies with the GPL which states that the soure must be in the same place as the skin itself. The source will not be offered as part of the download in an attempt to keep small file sizes for each download.

As to what should be included as source, I do not believe this has always been clear for images under the GPL. I am operating under the assumption that it is the preferred form for making modifications to the image. Thus if the image files being created use layers, those layers will be included as the source. If the image file is only a BMP or JPEG image, that file will be included as the source.

The site is being redesigned to fit into a xhtml and css 3 column tableless based website. Please forgive me for anything that is not currently working at the moment.

The Firefox web browser is fast becoming known as an excellent browser, but it is not as well recognized as a great web developer tool. Though not an exhaustive list, the following Firefox extensions allow a web developer to more easily create and manage a web site. Obviously some extensions will be more valuable to some developers than to others, but the Aardvark, Colorzilla, and Web Developer extensions should be considered an essential part of any developer’s toolbox.

• Aardvark is an excellent CSS debugger with a bunch of keyboard modifiers. Shows things such as the element name and id or class name of a selected element.
• Colorzilla is an eyedropper tool with several other useful functions. Hovering over an element will show color info, DOM path info, and X,Y offset from the previous click. In addition, Colorzilla provides a magnifying tool and a color mixer.
• Fangs presents a textual representation of a web page, similar to the way it would be read by a screen reader.
• Fireftp is a FTP client which allows for easy access to a FTP server.
• LinkChecker checks every link on a web page to find bad links. LinkChecker’s simple color coding scheme makes it easy to spot a bad link, quickly, on any page.
• Live HTTP Headers displays information about the HTTP headers on a page.
• MeasureIt draws a ruler across a web page to display the width, height, or alignment of any page element.
• User Agent Switcher allows FireFox to identify itself as a different web browser, such as IE or Opera, to a web server.
• View Rendered Source is another way to view the source of a web page in a color-coded and/or nested mode.
• The Web Developer extension adds a toolbar to the browser which contains various
  web developer tools designed to allow for easy viewing of various information about a web page. It will outline elements on a page, display the size of images, give CSS and form information, disable certain elements on a page, and much more.

Note: I have omitted some extensions, such as the Edit CSS extension, that an extension in the list provides much of the same functionality as. Secondly, the links point to the developer’s page not the Mozilla Firefox extension page.

After several months a Mozilla Firebird & Thunderbird ZLauncher theme, called Thunderfox, is finally ready for public consumption. If you had downloaded the beta version of the theme in the past there was two themes in the download. Those themes have been combined together into one. As usual download the ZLauncher theme from the ZLauncher themes download page at PDA Shine.

One of the things you will notice with the new design is many 80×15 bi-coloured buttons on many of the pages. There are zillions of these buttons on the web, here are some Palm based ones to throw into the mix. These images are based on the design by Jeremy Hedley. They were created with the help of the button maker. Feel free to do with them what you like.

Check out the interview with Lightning developer Mike Shaver. It looks like Palm syncing will not be available in version 1.0, due this summer. The good news is, though, “Michiel van Leeuwen (mvl) and Dan Mosedale (dmose) have been working hard on it, though, and have made sure that sync issues have been considered at all points in our architecture decisions, so I’m hopeful that we’ll end up with a very good sync story when the time comes”.

Lightning is the project name for an extension to tightly integrate calendar functionality (see Outlook) into Thunderbird.

The New Google Blog is reporting that Blogger Mobile is about to be launched.

“Blogger is to launch a new service that allows users to post new contents (text and photos) from their mobile devices. You most only send via MMS the subject, your pic and a caption to the email address ‘go@blogger.com’.”

In addition there is an editoral about Blogger Mobile entitled “On the Go with Blogger Mobile” at the site.