redemption in a blog
Rails, Firefox, Anime, Mac
Stop and Reload buttons merged in Firefox
14 Jan 2010A minor UI improvement to Firefox has been made to Firefox and it’s currently only available on nightly builds of Firefox: the Stop and Reload buttons have been merged into a single button. This change should make it into Firefox 3.6.
While a page is loading, the button acts as a Stop button:
When it’s done loading, it becomes a Reload button.
I’m always up for 1 less unnecessary button. I think this feature is copied from Safari (I might be wrong).
A mini-tip on viewing images quickly in a new tab in Firefox. Useful for web devs who want to look at the URL of an image quickly.
As an example, here’s the Youtube webpage of the owner of Maru the Cat:
To open the thumbnail image of Maru in a new tab, right-click the image, and then middle-click the View Image item from the context menu:
It should open up in a new tab:
You can also do the same for background images (middle-click View Background Image from the right-click context menu).
Slightly more than a month back I wrote this little iPhone app (App Store link), almost a toy app really, to check the usage of my data plan with my local telco (Singtel). I wanted to scratch an itch and I also really didn’t want to exceed my data plan – the fees are excessive.
Anyway, I submitted it to the iPhone App Store for approval as a free app and named it Singtel Data Usage. No points for creativity with the name but I thought it’d be nice to know exactly what the app did from just reading its name. After one keyword rejection (which was unfounded but I wasn’t going to argue with the app reviewers), it finally got approved a few days ago.
Yeah that’s what it looks like. I stole part of the design from another iPhone app – can anyone guess which one? I think I spent 80% of development time changing the design over and over again, tweaking font sizes, and agonizing over which icons to use.
Thanks to folks on Twitter (I’m @chuyeow – do follow me if you’re reading my blog), word got around and by the 3rd day of it being approved, my app was the Top Free app on the Singapore App Store. Going to take a time out for the vanity shot:
A similar app, iBBOM, was approved around the same time but I believe I got a head start because of all the awesome people on Twitter who retweeted my tweet and the kind folks who gave glowing reviews on the App Store (thanks especially to Andy Croll for the 1st review). iBBOM actually looks much better than my app (I can’t help tweeting about it) and works perfectly (only thing I don’t like are the ads). I believe I couldn’t have gotten to the top of the App Store without the guys and gals who spread the word on Twitter.
On to the not so fun part of this post. Yet another similar app, SG BBOM, was pulled from the App Store by Singtel (the telco) recently so I’m expecting to hear from Singtel really soon. We shall see.
In the meantime, if you own an iPhone and have a Singtel data plan, do check out my app (App Store link) and give an honest review on the App Store. If you’ve already downloaded it, I’d like to know what you think in a review as well. Thanks!
Blog redesigned
5 Jul 2009After 5 long years of using the same old blog theme, which I’d handcrafted from scratch way back in 2004, I’ve finally got down to refreshing it to a more contemporary look. I’ve also updated the woefully outdated About page.
Here’s a before and after shot:
I think it’s much better, definitely more modern and minimalist.
The new blog theme is basically a heavily modified version of the
wonderful and free Compositio WordPress theme –
you can check out a demo of Compositio here to see how different it is.
The only thing I kept from my old theme, which I affectionately called “Clover”, was the same clover logo. I did that with the shape tool in Photoshop – it’s a simple logo and no skill was required to create it, obviously!
If you’re reading this in a feed reader or one of those aggreggator-type sites, you can help me out by checking out the blog itself and giving me some good old constructive criticism.
Upgraded to iPhone OS 3.0 and running out of battery fast?
In: iPhone
22 Jun 2009After upgrading my girlfriend’s iPhone 3G to OS 3.0 recently, I noticed that the iPhone’s battery was getting depleted really quickly. I’d left it overnight with Wifi, 3G, Bluetooth, Push Notifications all off, and the battery went from 80% to a jaw-dropping OMGWTFBBQ 10%.
I attributed it to the recent jailbreak (I’ve already removed the jailbreak trying to figure out this problem) at first. I only realized something was really wrong when the iPhone’s battery started draining while it was charging via USB!
Looking around on teh interwebs, I managed to solve it (easily!) by following the suggestions from this thread at the Apple support forums. Here’s what worked for me:
- Go to Settings on your iPhone.
- Turn Notifications off. I’m not sure if this is necessary but did so just in case.
- Go to Mail, Contacts, Calendars and delete all your accounts (I deleted even Calendar accounts just in case). You may want to write down or backup your account settings first.
- Go to Fetch New Data (also in the same Mail, Contacts, Calendars settings) and make sure Push is Off.
- It’s probably not necessary but you may want to restart your iPhone (power it on and off) here.
- Add back all your accounts. You can turn Push back on Fetch New Data now.
- You can also turn Notifications back on if you wish.
It seems like the iPhone 3.0 OS update has a bug where email accounts with active push notifications were set to keep fetching new email even if push is turned off explicitly. Hopefully this post will help solve your battery problems, if not, you’ve gotta keep looking – the Apple iPhone Support forums is a good place to start.
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