As part of their 10th birthday celebration Opera, for today only, is giving away free registration keys to the Opera browser. If you want to run Opera without the ads go to Opera Birthday page and request a key. Works as advertised. I got a free key and my version of Opera is now registered.
For anyone interested, I’ve converted my Palm bookmarks into del.icio.us bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/palm. Of note to many may be the Palm freeware part of this collection, available by drilling down into the links or available directly here.
For those who have not heard of del.icio.us, think of it has a social bookmark manager. You can create a personal collection of links, categorize these links with keywords (tags) and then share these links with others. In addition, you can view the links collected by others and subscribe to their link collections by RSS.
Navigating through del.icio.us is easy. When you first come into the page you will see in the right-hand column a listing of categories, such as Desktop, DeviceSpecific, or EyeCandy. Clicking on an arrow will open the category up to reveal a list of sub-categories (tags). Clicking on a tag will bring up a list of links to choose from. Additionally, a second column of related tags will appear on the screen allowing you to further drill down into a sub-catergory.
Note: An RSS feed of these del.icio.us links is available here. In addition, you can get a RSS feed to any of the subcatergories by clicking on the little, orange RSS feed button at the bottom of the screen.
Audiolicious is a new way to turn any RSS feed into a podcast. It will convert a feed’s webpages into MP3 files. I have created a sample podcast from this site and PalmInfocenter’s RSS feed and listened to it. In addition, I tried but could not get Palm Addict’s RDF feed to work (appears to be a current limitation of the tool).
Overall, an intriguing way to keep up to date with a web site. In the program’s current state it is probably a little too technical for the average user to set up and use (requires the user to install Ruby on their machine and does not have a GUI interface). In addition, though not the fault of Jonathan, I find the current quality of TTS voices very limiting. All things considered, Audiolicious, is a very innovative tool that could have a promising future. Check it out.
See this post for information on an update to the presentation.
As an aside to some beginning web development training sessions I have been working on, I have created a “Rapid Web Development and Testing with Mozilla Firefox” presentation. It is a given that successful web development requires certain essential tools. One of the best tools, I know of, available for web development and testing is the Mozilla Firefox web browser.
The slide show is a basic overview of Firefox’s built-in web development tools, as well as some useful web developer extensions that are available. The idea is not to explain how to use these tools and extensions, but to make you aware that such tools are out there and what their basic purposes are. It is up to you to explore whichever one of these tools you may choose to use.
You can view the presentation here on my website. I hope that you find the presentation of some use.
Update (08/31/05): I have started a thread at MozillaZine for any feedback on the subject. Please post all comments and/or suggestions there.
Update 2 (09/06/05): For an additional perspective to the “Rapid Web Development and Testing with Mozilla Firefox” presentation Fini Alring has written a short article about the same subject.
Note: The presentation was created using Eric Meyer’s S5 (A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System) slide show format. Further information on how to design and use this format can be found at the link. The presentation is licensed under the Creative Commons licence: Attribution – No Commercial – Share Alike.
The latest hot topic in the Palm community seems to be getting Opera Mini to run on Palm-powered devices. I believe Timothy Luoma first described how to get Opera Mini running on a Palm device using the Treo 650. Some people have had questions on how to get Opera Mini to run on a T3. This can be accomplished by basically following Timothy’s steps but below are the steps, in a little more detail, of how I got Opera Mini to run on my T3.
Opera Mini Installation Instructions for a Palm T3.
1. Go to Palm’s WebSphere Everyplace Micro Environment Download page and download the WEME571.zip file (Direct Download Link). The link is in step 1 of the Windows installation
2. Extract the contents in the zip file using a unzip utility, like Winzip (make sure you extract using the folder names).
3. Navigate to the WEME571JVM folder that was created when you unzipped the file and install five .prc files to be hotsynced.
A. Open the JVM folder.
B. Open the ARM4T folder.
C. Select and install J9JavaVMMidp20.prc and JavaVMCheck_enUS.prc
D. Go back to the WEME571JVM folder that was unzipped.
E. Open the JSR75 folder.
F. Select and install PIMPrefs.prc, fileconnect.prc, and pimop.prc
4. Install the Opera Mini.prc file
5. Hotsync your T3.
6. On your Palm select the Preferencs application. At the bottom of the screen, under the Other group, you should see an IBM Java VM preference. Open this up.
7. This will bring up an IBM Java Preferences screen. At the top is a drop down box. Make sure Gobal preferences is selected. When it is put a check in the Use high resolution coordinates check box and then click done.
8. Connect to the Web using your Wifi connection.
9. Go back into your launcher and launch the Opera Mini application.
10. The first thing you need to do is change the default language of Opera Mini to English in the Settings window. To to this select “Meny”, then “Verktoy” then “Innstillinger” (as shown below).
11. In the setting menu, at the bottom of the screen (as shown below) select the “Sprak” drop down box (currently says “Norsk”) and choose “English”. Then click the word “Lagre” to save your settings.
12. Opera Mini should now be in English. You can go back into the settings screen and play around with the options but should probably not check the “Smooth font” checkbox. On my T3, at least, this caused all kinds of bad things to happen.
You should now be ready to browse the Internet using Opera Mini. Enjoy.
Leslie Franke:[les-lee fran-key]; 1. Husband and proud dogowner; 2. Seventh-day Adventist; 3. Web Designer; 4. Atlanta Braves Fan; 5. Northeast Ohio Native; 6. Bottle Caps Lover; 7. Certified 'Freakonomic';