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Showing posts with label WebApps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WebApps. Show all posts
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HTML5 at work

I plan to look out for & compile interesting, practical, real-world examples of HTML5 features that popular websites have started implementing. I hope all the browser manufacturers quickly agree on a common minimum set of HTML5 features & get HTML5 rolling.

* Google Docs now supports uploading an entire folder.

There is a nice explanation on StackOverflow about how this is achieved  by setting up an attribute "webkitdirectory" on a file input element.

Unfortunately as this attribute is proprietary, this feature doesn't work on all browsers.

* The Windows Live team recently released a faster new version of SkyDrive that incorporates HTML5 features.
"We’re using HTML5 for CSS animations, reflow animations and other features. We’re using local storage for various parts of our caching support. We’ve also worked on making our HTML more standards compliant, so that everything you see works in as many modern browsers as possible."

HTML5 versions of Hotmail & Bing are believed to be on the cards

* 6 of the world's top 10 websites currently use LocalStorage on the mobile while Bing & Google use it on the desktop browser as well. Twitter uses App cache.

(to be continued....)
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Discover public transport in India with Google Transit

I first tried Google Transit in Seattle in 2008 for help with bus routes and wished it came to India as well. I was happy when it started covering local trains of the Hyderabad Multi Modal Transit System (MMTS) in 2010(it seems to discontinued now) and then wished it worked with bus routes as well. Being a believer in public transport as a way to protect the environment, I was glad to find out that Google Transit provides help with bus routes in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi.

It'll be great if they also show the cost & distance involved in different bus routes and bus types (buses in Bangalore & Hyderabad have multiple types of services with varying ticket costs)
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India - Know your elected government representatives
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India - Know your elected government representatives

Who says India is a poor country? Did you know 315 of the 545 MPs (Members of Parliament) in the current Lok Sabha or Lower House of Parliament are crorepatis (have assets greater than 10 million Indian rupees)? Out of 543 MPs (Lok Sabha), 153 are facing criminal charges. Fifty-four are facing charges of very serious nature, including murder. Who says having 35 criminal cases filed against an individual can stop that person from becoming a law-maker?


The Association for Democratic Reforms' National Election Watch is a web-based application that has collated details about India's elected government representatives, both at the state & national level, from their own sworn affidavits. It lists details like their constituency, Party, involvement (if any) in criminal cases, education, assets and liabilities. Find out how the representative for your region stacks up against the rest and be better informed while voting at the next election.

This website is the winner of the 2011 NASSCOM Social Innovation Honours in the ICT led Innovation by Multi-stakeholder Partnerships category.

Also see:
BigTech/NASSCOM Foundation offers NGOs software titles at huge discounts
Indian software product start-ups that are making news
Judicial Orders that changed the nation 
When grassroots innovation goes global
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Free WebApp Security Testing tools
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Free WebApp Security Testing tools

Performance & Security are non-functional requirements which cannot be taken for granted.

Here's a compilation of Security testing tools for Web apps, drawn from an answer on the Pro WebMasters StackExchange forum & other sources -
Also see:
Web Performance Analysis & Optimization tools
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Comparison of URL Shortener services

SearchEngineLand & NotLong have compared popular URL Shortener services.

Google offers its own URL Shortener service called goo.gl (gl is the country-code top-level domain designated for Gibraltar). It now also has an API.

Pingdom, the uptime & performance monitoring service, has found goo.gl to be one of the fastest and with 100% uptime.

For spam, security or legal reasons, the goo.gl service can disable some short URLs

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How Tynt Insight works

If you are looking for tips on a range of useful topics, head to Dummies.com (never mind the name). It is the website for the For Dummies series of plain English reference books. The site features interesting topics from it's books on varied & complex subjects.

If you copy & paste any content from there, it will add a link of the URL from where it was copied, at the end of the pasted content. This is achieved by a 12KB JavaScript utility library called Tynt Insight.

There is a nice explanation on StackOverflow about how Tynt Insight works -
  • the code activates on events like mouseup, mousedown, and copy (in the startListeningForTraces function)
  • if the user selected a range of text, then it:
    • creates the HTML for an attribution link, plus optional CC license URL
    • appends this HTML to the selection, placing it inside a zero-size <div> (to keep it invisible on-screen)
    • reports what was copied back to Tynt's servers
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HOW TO make Gmail Labels act like Hotmail Folders

If you apply a Label to an email in Gmail, it will appear under both the Inbox & the Label category chosen. This is unlike in Hotmail where an email can appear only under one Folder category.

To address this issue, Gmail introduced a "Move to" option that will place an email under a single Label or category. This option can help in maintaining a clutter-free, cleaner Gmail Inbox but requires manual intervention. A poster on the StackExchange Web Apps forum wanted to know how he can automatically filter emails on arrival so that they are placed under a single category as in Hotmail.

Here are the steps -
1. Click on the "Create a Filter" link that's next to search box in Gmail

2. As we want the filter to act upon ALL emails that are recieved, set the To: textbox to your own email address & click on the "Next Step" button


3. Choose the first option to Skip the Inbox alongwith "Apply the label:" option to move an incoming email to a specific label/category. This way every mail that you get will be automatically categorized, thereby simulating Hotmail Folders.


If you want to view all your emails uncategorized at any point of time,  click on the "All Mail" option in the left menu
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Hotmail tip - Move, Delete, Find emails originating from a specific sender with a single click

Did you know, a context menu will pop-up after two seconds if you place your mouse on any email within Hotmail




With just one click on the context menu, you can then ...

  • reply to that email without explicitly opening it
  • find all emails which have originated from the same email address as that of the selected email
  • move all emails from the same sender to a specified folder
  • delete all emails which have originated from the same email address at once

This a pretty neat & thoughtful shortcut!


If you right click on that email, it opens up a context menu that will let you perform operations on that email alone




Also see:
Hotmail lets you download attachments as a zip file
The One Click GMail Help Layer UI Pattern
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Prevent identity theft with HTTPS browsing

The grave risk of Internet users unwittingly letting out their private & sometimes confidential details while using unencrypted networks has been brought to focus by at least two startling incidents.

Back in May, Google candidly admitted that its Street View data collection cars inadvertently collected and stored "payload data from unencrypted WiFi networks, but not from networks that were encrypted". More recently a Firefox extension called Firesheep exposed the vulnerability of HTTP browsing in aiding identity spoofing.

Analyzing the Firesheep extension, Jeff Atwood makes the following recommendations to protect yourself -
  • We should be very careful how we browse on unencrypted wireless networks.
  • Get in the habit of accessing your web mail through HTTPS
  • Lobby the websites you use to offer HTTPS browsing.
Gmail enabled default HTTPS access for everyone in January this year. Hotmail lets you turn it on from your Account settings (go to Hotmail Options > Managing your account > Account details & in the Account overview page, choose the "Connect with HTTPS" link under Other options)


Also see: Protect your Twitter and Facebook accounts! How to do it…
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HOW TO view size of files in Google Docs

Google Docs has some amazing features but there is one small detail thats conspicuous by its absence. File sizes are not shown in the summary view. If you are running out of space, there is no easy way to know which are the bulky files in case you wanted to remove some of them.

Thankfully, there is at least a roundabout way that a nice person on the forums has identified & shared -
  • Create a folder for the files whose size you want to know or better still, cultivate the habit of saving files into specific folders (at least till Google adds a Size column to the file listing in the tabular view)
  • Right click on the folder and select Show Details to view a column with the file sizes

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Find a bug on Google Web Apps, win up to $3,133.7
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Find a bug on Google Web Apps, win up to $3,133.7

Based on the success of their vulnerability reward program for Chromium open source project, Google has now announced a discretionary (Google Security Team decides if a bug is eligible), experimental (can be cancelled at any time) new vulnerability reward program that applies to Google web properties like -
  • *.google.com
  • *.youtube.com
  • *.blogger.com
  • *.orkut.com
More info in the FAQ

Also see:
Crowdsource your supplemental learning with Stack Overflow
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Hotmail lets you download attachments as a zip file

Did you know, you can download attachments faster in Hotmail as it packs individual files into a single zip?


If the attachments are images, there is an option to view them as a slideshow without having to download those images locally. The slideshow runs using a Silverlight viewer that can also present the images in a full-screen format. Pretty cool!

In its last make-over, Hotmail also introduced the Conversation threading feature which can be toggled. This flexibility also probably prompted Gmail to have the facility of switching views.
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HOW TO use Google Reader for bookmarking useful pages

Social bookmarking sites & online bookmarking sites serve a good purpose but require logging into an additional site. Wouldn't it be good if your Feed Reader (supposing it is Google Reader) doubles as a bookmarker to preserve your favorite pages as well?

This tip requires some familiarity with the Google Reader interface.

While you can pick the special posts from the feeds you already subscribe to by specifically marking them with the "Add Star" and "Add Tags" features to differentiate them from the rest, how do we add web pages that are not provided as a RSS feed to Google Reader?

The tutorial Create RSS Feeds for your Website shows us how to get any web page into Google Reader as if it were a RSS feed. The following are the steps adapted from that tutorial to suit our purpose.

1. Login to your Google Reader account. From the menu on the top left, select Notes. You will find a label titled "Note in reader" in the right frame. Drag & drop the "Note in reader" link from the web page into the bookmarks toolbar (Favorites Bar in IE) of your web browser.

2. Manually open your favorite web page which is not available through RSS.

3. On that page, optionally select some content that describes what the page is about with your mouse and then press the "Note in Reader" button.

4. An inline pop-up dialog opens on top of the web page you want to bookmark in your browser. Click on the "Add tags" link and assign some tag to this page (let's say "Tips & Tricks" or "A1").

Thats it! Assuming you are fond of compiling "Tips & Tricks" in your area of interest, you can now catalog any web page that you find with that tag in Google Reader whether or not they are available through RSS. Next time when you wish to see all posts that you tagged as "Tips & Tricks", select the tag from the menu on the left or using the Search feature.

Screenshots will be posted shortly.

Also see: Google Reader for Beginners
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