One of the tools that I use daily is the Firefox add-on Firebug. If you’re dealing with web development in any way, Firebug will give you an enormous wealth of information and tools:

• monitor how long it takes for each component of your web page to load;
• edit css and html with a live preview;
• debug javascript errors;
• analyze DOM, and more.

Although this is a plug-in, it has its own environment of extensions to add even more to the fun.

Although it has been a round for quite some time, I’m not a coder so my experience with text editors and IDEs is very limited. To give you an example, I’ve been using on the command line the good-ol’ simple nano. But, since I’m starting to need a bit more powerful features, my search began for a more powerful program.

Emacs was my first try since it has been highly rated and praised. For me, there was a bit of a learning curve for the simple operations of navigating through a file (keyboard shortcuts are awesome) but nothing overly complicated and there is a nice tour accessible when you open the program.

My usage so far has been to compare and diff a file, but soon I’ll also encounter tasks such as merge and simple code debugging. Again, I’m not a coder so this tool right now might be an overkill but who knows in the future… better get myself familiar from the start with a nice program than having to learn again something new later.

For those who like ebooks, Calibre is a great program that was created to manage pretty much any aspect of your reading files.

The list of features is pretty extensive:

• convert files from and to epub, mobi, LRF and supports input of several other formats including PDF, html, odt, rtf amongst others;
• syncs to mobile reader devices (seems to work well with the iPhone/Stanza and the Kindle);
• convert a news feed to an ebook;
• scans your computer to check for all supported ebook formats so you can keep them organized, download cover art and meta data;
• runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS X.

At the present moment the app is on version 0.5.3 and seems to be under heavy development. For me, file conversion from PDF to epub format went without any hitches and I was finally able to organize my ebook library under one program.

For quite a while now OpenOffice has been promising the ability to import and edit PDF files. Although not released with the program itself, you can grab the Sun PDF Import extension to do just that.

This extension is in beta and is available multi-platform for Windows, Linux and MacOS X systems.

Tests that I ran were pretty good. The text in the PDF file is imported well and in a way I could edit the text, font settings and images. There was a small problem in that the document that was shown to me had colors inverted (black background with white font). But, don’t ask me why, the imported file actually contained 2 layers. Deleting the one on top will show you the layer with correct colors and fully editable.

The extension is in beta but it is sure worth a try and beats editing the PDF through an image software like I used to do.

Finally a SIP/VoIP program for the Android OS!

Sipdroid is a great GPL licensed program that allows you to make and receive SIP and make VoIP from your mobile. The app is incredibly simple to use, which just requires you to enter your SIP credentials (server, login and password).

Once it is on, you will see a little green bubble on the status bar indicating that you’re online. After that, just enter the phone number you’d like or use the phone numbers on your contact list, remembering to enter the country code.

The only detriment for now is that it connects only through wifi, so no 3G data connections while you’re out-and-about.

The last time there was an Android upgrade, I had to wait over 1 month to get mine. Fortunately this time it appears Europe had Android 1.5 launch date before users in the U.S. This is a much expected release because of the extensive list of new features.

Without further delay, here is the tour of what is new in Android Cupcake.

First, here is my home screen where you can add shortcuts, widgets and live folders:

We now have the new widgets Calendar and Music. In the “shortcuts” category, to be honest I had never used it before but here also goes a screenshot of what is offered:

I really enjoyed the calendar widget although I wish I could expand it a bit more to display more event information. Your music widget will display a cute little bar with the song currently playing or the option for you to select a playlist to start playing on your device.

Next cool feature is video recording!

The videos you record on the Android can be pushed directly to YouTube now with 2 simple clicks. A nice way for Google to tie its services well.

Next comes the soft-keyboard! I’m still struggling to get used to this new keyboard, it is so tiny compared to the ‘full sized’ one on the G1.

But, there is a very nice feature of suggested words. So, as you type the system tries to identify the word you wish to write and even if you get lost typing incorrect keys it still picks up misspellings quite well to suggest the correct word.

A nice little extra is automatic screen orientation. On the G1 you were able to get landscape view only once the keyboard was open. But, with new Android devices coming out soon without a keyboard, orientation was adjusted to how you’re holding the phone.

Last but not least, a few cosmetic changes were made. The background of the app menu is no longer transparent and the pull-down status menu had some minor visual improvements as well.

Unfortunately I couldn’t test the stereo bluetooth since the headset I used with my Nokia N96 was still not recognized.

Like mentioned, a whole lot of new things and that is not all, there is still:

• browser improvements (latest Webkit browser & Squirrelfish Javascript engines);
• Linux kernel (version 2.6.27);
• Upload photos on Picasa;
• native video playback (MPEG-4 & 3GP formats).

The complete change log can be found here.

Unfortunately not everything is perfect… Loading some apps and going back to my home screen takes a bit longer than before.  Plus, for some reason at times the app list gets loaded on-the-fly and I have to wait a few seconds for everything to get loaded and sorted alphabetically.

Overall, Cupcake is an awesome release and Android is now in a much better position to be released on more mobile phones and (rumors have it) netbooks!

Doing a basic screencast in Linux is pretty easy. The package recordMyDesktop can be found easily on the repository of many Linux distros (including Ubuntu 9.04 that I use).

With this package you’re actually getting the backend recordMyDesktop which is written in C and the frontend developed in Python (gtk-recordMyDesktop or qt-recordMyDesktop).

The feature list is simple but that is all I needed for a quick screencast demo I had to prepare this afternoon:

• record the entire screen or just a specific window;
• record audio (with channel and frequency settings);
• adjust fps;
• include mouse pointer, “follow the mouse” recording, include window decoration (or not), and tooltips.

The closing added bonus, it records directly in theora / vorbis!

Recording is done with a simple click on the “record” button and than on the panel you’ll see an icon where you can quickly pause, resume and stop the recording. Easy and simple.

The eco-system around Pidgin is fantastic, below is yet another cool plug-in tip for it.

Pidgin-Twitter plug-in works with Linux and Windows for you to get back into posting to and receiving notes from Twitter (also works well with Identi.ca too!). Steps to get it working:

1. download and install the plug-in the plug-in;
2. go to Pidgin menu under Tools > Plug-ins you’ll find Pidgin-Twitter to activate and configure;
3. place your username / password and define a couple of other options (such as show users’ avatars)
4. Add a buddy to your GTalk account called twitter@twitter.com and choose to display it even when it is offline.

You’re good to go! Open the chat window for the buddy you just created and instantly it’ll display your messages.

After a recent exchange of ideas about Abiword on identi.ca, I decided to take a closer look at it again. Although OpenOffice is currently my office suite of choice, it is a bit bloated and slow. So, what does Abiword have to offer?

• It is blazing fast;
• works in Windows and Linux;
• has all the main text editing and formatting functions one needs;
• saves and imports documents in multiple formats (Abiword’s own formats, .doc, .odf, .html, .rtf, .pdf, .docx, LaTeX, Kword and xml);
• has revision control;
• has spell checker and thesaurus built-in;
• and, has a plug-in architecture to improve its list of features even more!

It even has a collaboration function so you can share your document through Jabber or TCP connection (I haven’t tested it).

I have tried Abiword before but to be honest I didn’t know it had this many features. For this review I can say there are a couple of tools I might miss when collaborating a document with others, such as being able to track and manage document changes and notes.

Overall I really liked Abiword and will seriously think about using it more often.

The newest version of our beloved Linux distro Ubuntu was released on April 21st. Code named Jaunty Jackalope, Ubuntu 9.04 desktop edition brings some nice features:

• finally OpenOffice 3.0.1 installed;
• Gnome 2.26 with some improvements for multiple monitors setups, Empathy (multi-protocol instant messenger), Evolution (email client now with MS Exchange support), Volume manager (now integrated with PulseAudio);
• X.Org server 1.6 to improve support for some 3D video cards;
• new notification alert system specially designed for Ubuntu;
• Linux kernel 2.6.28 with ext4 file system support;

I’ve been using Ubuntu almost exclusively for about 2 years now. The improvements made since that time have been enormous and this release although not ground breaking has brought some very nice improvements.

On my desktop (the computer I’m using now to write this post) I just did a distro upgrade and with one click of a button the entire system took care of the entire procedure by itself. I left the computer on overnight but the reason it took so long was that most likely the Ubuntu servers and mirrors are extremely busy.

Now I’m already looking forward to Ubuntu 9.10 in October