Reviews – J~venue Publishing

RIM warns of operating loss, layoffs to come [R]

Jamal Cromity — Wed, 30 May 2012 03:31:46 +0000

RIM warns of operating loss, layoffs to come http://hmark.us/3817278C225

I think this outcome is inevitable. RIM has seen better days. Apple and Andriod are dominating the industry.

Post NCCU SLIS 2012 Spring Colloquium – Tips for grant writing [R]

Jamal Cromity — Wed, 02 May 2012 08:29:55 +0000

The NCCU SLIS 2012 Spring Colloquium held this past Friday, April 27th, was a great event. At the 2012 Institute of Museum and Library Services Research Colloquium, hosted by Dr. Irene Owens at North Carolina Central University, the keynote speaker Rebecca Renard spoke about her experiences while working with the youth at the DC Public library. Ms. Renard has been fortunate to have the opportunity to develop a number of outreach activities which she enables the youth to help develop programs they’re interested in maintaining. As a skilled grant writer, Ms. Renard was successfully able to solicit funds to help keep these student programs going. Just recently #youth202 was named the official Twitter hashtag for following DC youth activities by the Mayor of the city.

Some very practical tips she gave for writing grants were:

Be sure to name and clearly state the problem that your program is intended to resolve
Make sure that your outcome of the program is also clearly stated and it is measurable
Take time to thoroughly put together your proposal. Don’t rush it! Do the research as needed and be sure to explain in detail your ideas

While these tips are common sense bullet points, it is important to remember and apply.

New css features added [R]

Jamal Cromity — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 08:48:48 +0000

Good post…

WordPress.com News

Heads up, Custom Design users! The Custom CSS feature on WordPress.com now supports all of the new features of CSS3. This means that you can use gradients, animation, multiple backgrounds, @media queries, and many more new features in your custom CSS.

If you want to make your images pop and tilt, give your post titles a polished letterpress embossed look, or add high-dpi graphics for retina displays—you can do that. If you’ve just got to have a Machu Picchu color palette complete with linear gradients to show off your lovely llama, you can do that too. CSS3 opens the doors to all the latest cutting edge things going on in the web design world today. If you can dream it, you can do it.^TM

The CSS editor itself has been upgraded too! Now that we’re using Ace, it’s just like having a desktop…

View original post 67 more words

Midsized Companies Say Goodbye BlackBerry, Hello Apple [R]

Jamal Cromity — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:16:29 +0000

Your peers have spoken…Demand for Apple and Android devices in the enterprise may have started as a trickle, but over the past year we’ve seen a dramatic shift away from BlackBerry towards new consumer devices. Whether the source of this demand comes from end users or the executive team, IT needs to be prepared to deal with the cost, complexity, and risk challenges associated with consumerization.

Review survey results from 60 midsized company CIOs to gain insight on:
● The rapid decline of BlackBerry devices
● Access to E-mail and corporate applications on personal devices
● Mobile device management and risk mitigation solutions

For more, go to IT Leadership Exchange:
Consumer Device Usage Survey Findings
Note: Userid and password required

Create your own mobile website [R]

Jamal Cromity — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 19:30:29 +0000

Today, developing a mobile presence is easier than ever. There is really no excuse why some web-based businesses do not have one. There are tones of sites with information on how to create mobile sites on the web and there are also a number of services that offer templates for mobile sites, e,g. Zinadoo, Mofuse, Wapple, etc. Yet, what I do not like about sites that “tell you how to build a mobile site” is that they have limited illustrations, template designs, and links to resources.

So, I decided to develop my own post about developing quick and easy mobile sites in 5 steps. Keep in mind, you do not have to be a guru of “all things web”, but you should know standard HTML JavaScript, and CSS coding…Oh, it would not hurt to have access to high vector images/graphics or editor too.

Step 1: This is not really a step, but more a common understanding that you should have while developing a mobile site. Basic mobile sites are ‘centered’ and are made to have visibility within a 250 to 300 pixel or 100 percent of the screen. The image below is a picture illustrated by Google at their Mobile Templates site which I manipulated to show how an example of what the site can look like from a mobile web browser.

Step 2: Whether you are using a web editor such as Adobe Dreamweaver or my favorite non-proprietary Notepad app, you can use the following code as a standard to develop your site:

http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd”>
xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>

–>

Note: If your copying this, remember to remove the hide brackets around the code.

Much like any other website, your CSS, JavaScript, etc. generally go in between the ‘header’ code. The text, forms, and other graphics go in between the ‘body’ code. Essentially, with exception of Flash content (.swf), just about anything you put in a website is visible via a smart phone. So design away!

Step 3: In your standard site, you will need to add a good device detection script like this one below:

You will need to add this code to your main web site header in an external ‘js’ folder and name the file something like, “detectmobilebrowser.js”. So it should look like this in between your main site header code:

script type=”text/javascript” src=”js/detectmobilebrowser.js”

Note: If you’re copying this, remember to add closing brackets <> to the code above.

You can get other external code in various web languages to detect scripts at: http://detectmobilebrowsers.com/

Step 4: Upload your site to your FTP server, along with your other external folders, e.g. js, images, css, etc.

Step 5: Go to your mobile phone, e.g. iPhone, Android, etc. and go to the browser and check out your site.

Another use for Evernote [R]

Jamal Cromity — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 08:30:00 +0000

I read a recent review that gave a pretty good assessment of the book, Evernote Essentials. If you are not familiar with the Evernote site and app, there are one of a dozen ways to use this web application to help you improve your productivity. What I like best about Evernote is that you can organize, retrieve, and continue your notes so fluently from wherever you have web access.

Among other good uses of this web app, it is an excellent tool for sales representatives that take notes on clients. You can make notebooks of prospects and continue adding notes over time. It is definitely becoming one of my favorite applications from my mobile devices.

The appeal of Yelp [R]

Jamal Cromity — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:30:07 +0000

What is really interesting about Yelp from a business perspective is that it provides feedback about places, services, and even products in a very personal way. In Yelp, the more opinions shared, the better. So it is a great way to find information about services/products by sentiment and tone. Images also help to find the brick and mortar, while adding a touch of personality to post. In addition, images viewed from Yelp apps for the iPad and tablets really make surfing fun.

A few ways to improve your Yelp experience:

Get your friends or acquaintances to join and post. It is always better to find opinions from people you know
Keep your post short and to the point
Take pics of the store front or interior when possible

Ports and tablets: The need for ports depends on your workflow [R]

Jamal Cromity — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:06:13 +0000

One of the primary reasons consumers might prefer to purchase a tablet versus the iPad is for extended port capability. For those who prefer to store their work on jump drives or pictures and videos on SD cards, a tablet such as the Toshiba Thrive is an excellent choice. As one of the last tablets to arrive on the US market, the Thrive offers almost every type of port.

In addition, the Thrive has one of the better keypads that can seriously revival the iPad. It even offers the option of removing the preview spell check which is really useful on most Android mobile phones, but it is more of an obstacle while using a tablet. While I cannot say the Thrive keyboard is better than the iPad, it can compete adequately.

The Kindle fire – What info pros need to know [R]

Jamal Cromity — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 13:17:28 +0000

Here is the good and bad…

Good

Kindle Fire, is $199 tablet with a 7″, full-color LCD screen, a 1-GHz, dual-core processor, and access, the company says, to 18 million pieces of purchasable content in the form of movies, TV programs, music, books, periodicals, games, and apps.
Also has new browsing technology called Silk, which works only on that platform. CEO Jeff Bezos introduced it by showing a screen shot of Amazon’s first Web page from 15 years ago-a bare-bones, 10-kb layout containing only a sliver of the content delivered by most Web pages today.
Subscribers to the Amazon Prime delivery service will be able to stream 11,000 movies and TV programs, according to the company. At $199-a price $300 below that of Apple’s least expensive iPad-Kindle Fire is “an unbelievable value,” Bezos said.

Bad

The Kindle Fire doesn’t come with a built-in camera or a microphone
It has a smaller screen (7″ vs. the iPad’s 9.7″) a
limited to 8GB of on-board memory.

For more, see…
http://whattheythink.com/articles/54481-low-prices-new-features-mark-new-kindle-devices-amazon/

Anotating bookmarks – Diigo, Delicious competition [R]

Jamal Cromity — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 16:57:50 +0000

A few months ago, a friend of mine and college professor was telling me about this bookmarking service called Diigo that can increase your productivity on the web. The site clearly rivals Delicious.com by allowing you to annotate, archive, and organize sites you visit for yourself or within a group or community.

So far, in my experience using the tool, I like the highlight and capture features, which allows you to manipulate sections of text or images on websites. However, I did find adding actual bookmarks to list a bit cumbersome. From the Diigo toolbar (you can download to your browser), as indicated in the image to the right, you have to check a box under the “more options” area from a pop-up window to add the new bookmark to a “Created list” to organize sites.