Digital Media Minute

Django On App Engine

In case you hadn’t heard, there’s now a patch that lets most of Django work on Google App Engine without modifications. Having said that, here’s a little background from Stackoverflow.

Google Chrome OS

Those Google guys are something else. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought the rallying cry was “The Web is the platform of the future”. Yes, I just googled it– it was! Nice head fake. Here comes Google Chrome OS. It’s all about ’speed, simplicity and security’, not surprisingly, as well as open-source and aimed [...]

The iPhone Video Booster

The guys from OWLE are trying to get the Qik app in the App Store and would like you to help them. It’s a very cool live video app but it’s not their app, so why is Harold from this clip giving us a demo? In the middle of this clip they unhook the iPhone (on [...]

MySQL ERD Tool

A self-proclaimed ‘old school database guy’, Cal Evans gives us an honest and pretty thorough review of the latest version of MySQL Workbench –worth your time if you’re not happy with the MySQL ERD tool you use now, or even if you are. If this interests you, check out Digital Media Minute’s review of another visual [...]

Reformat Thumb Drive

I’d forgotten how to reformat a thumb drive, so in case I forget again I’m making it the Digital Media Minute tip for the day! Chances are someone else will find it handy. In OSX, go to Disk Utilities in the Utilities folder (in Applications). Insert the thumb drive into a USB port. Click [...]

Marketing Help For Developers

Think you’ve got a great idea for an application and the coding chops to realize your vision? Some developers are missing one piece in the puzzle, namely a marketing strategy, or even place to start for marketing help. I’ll bet it keeps some people from pushing forward with an idea they might otherwise attempt. Check [...]

GUI Mockup

Have you seen or used Balsamiq Mockups? Looks like a very cool and easy-to-use tool for creating mockups of GUIs, fast. I’m going to have fun playing with the demo this weekend.

Best Online Chess

A small detour from all things Ruby, PHP and Twitter today. Recently I’ve formed an opinion about who has the Best Online Chess site. For years I endured the rudeness, the primitive interface, and the time spent wasted just trying to find a game with the Yahoo chess experience. No more. Chesscube made online chess [...]

Twitter: Help For The Overwhelmed

Someone said that part of Twitter’s success is the ‘ambient intimacy‘ that it conveys. If you find yourself drowning in all that ambience, you might try Twitter For Busy People. Magnificent simplicity. Up to 500 people you follow are represented as thumbnails on a single page; hover over a thumbnail and you see their latest [...]

Flex Performance

Over at the Flex Cookbook at Adobe.com, Greg Lafrance walks us through a little Flex Performance tip on improving the functioning of custom classes by returning early in setter functions. While we’re at it, I’d be very interested in your opinions of a couple of load testing applications for Flex: WebLOAD Flex Add-On and NeoLoad. They [...]

Your Twitter Economy

How does a semi-famous musician make 19 grand while drinking wine in a kimono and making no music at all? From Amanda Palmer’s blog: we hung out for two hours, came up with a list of things that the government should do for us, created a t-shirt (thank god sean was awake and being a loser [...]

Coldfusion Vs Rails

I ran across what seems to me to be a very even-handed evaluation of Coldfusion vs Rails from Neil Middleton. Lots of good value in the comments too. We’ve posted on the Rails vs Coldfusion debate before, but Neil’s post is recent, from May 2009.

19 Tools For A Faster Web

Google has gathered a bunch of tools to help you find and fix problems that negatively impact a site’s performance. OK maybe everybody has Firebug, but I did find Google’s own Page Speed tool interesting.

Post-Materialism And You

If you are engaged in building out the web by creating applications, content, whatever, you’re making the recession worse, and we should all thank you for it. Tyler Cowen, who is no slouch, gives us the idea of the “human capital dividend,” which threatens to kill GDP and give us much better lives. This is [...]

Twitter Feedback Loops

Will Twitter feedback loops affect live events in the future? Audience feedback hasn’t evolved a whole lot from the clapping/whistling/screaming that I imagine used to occur when the hunters returned to the cave with a T-Rex or whatever else they were able to subdue. Oh sure, there was a great leap forward when the um, cigarette [...]