Apache POI quick guide

Working on Java POI, CSV, xls formats. This link is very handy

Apache POI quick guide

Prototype tools for iPhone / iPad

Just playing around a little bit of iOS prototyping tools, found Keynotopia application quite useful.

Keynotopia costs $0.99 on the app store and the templates cost around $9 each. Most of the buttons, scrollable menu, pop-up text box designs etc. are readily available which makes it easier to design. The app itself opens the prototype as a PDF. So A PDF builder such as Keynote or OpenOffice.org will help in building the prototype. All the UI elements are linked together as a hyperlink. So every object or page can be linked to the next resulting slide using a hyperlink. This is all saved as a PDF and you can add this PDF to the app on iTunes. I just loved the simplicity and design of creating prototypes. Quite a useful tool.

As I was going through some prototyping tools, found another tool called Interface which seems very easy. No hassle of PDFs , hyperlinks or slides and costs $9.99. This tools lets you create iPhone prototypes on iPhone. The Interface demo video is worth a watch. They say the ‘Live Preview’ feature shown in video is no longer available due to Apple’s SDK restriction, so not sure about what part of it you can build using only iPhone.

Some more useful tools here -
21 prototyping tools for iPhone app development

Letter press effect using CSS

Line 25 link on letter press effect using css

Unzip in Java


File file = new File("file.zip");
ZipInputStream zin = new ZipInputStream(new FileInputStream(file));
ZipEntry ze = null;
while ((ze = zin.getNextEntry()) != null) {
String filename = ze.getName();
if (!ze.isDirectory()) {
// Read file contents from 'zin'
// For example you could read from zin and write it to a FileOutputStream
}
zin.closeEntry();
}
zin.close();


Thread Synchronization and monitors in Java

Very good article on Thread synchronization in Java.

“One of the strengths of the Java programming language is its support for multithreading at the language level. Much of this support centers on synchronization: coordinating activities and data access among multiple threads. The mechanism that Java uses to support synchronization is the monitor.”

Multi threading article on artima

schema.org

Schema.org provides a collection of shared vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages in ways that can be understood by the major search engines: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!

Your web pages have an underlying meaning that people understand when they read the web pages. But search engines have a limited understanding of what is being discussed on those pages. By adding additional tags to the HTML of your web pages—tags that say, “Hey search engine, this information describes this specific movie, or place, or person, or video”—you can help search engines and other applications better understand your content and display it in a useful, relevant way. Microdata is a set of tags, introduced with HTML5, that allows you to do this.

Complete schema at – http://schema.org/docs/full.html

http://schema.org/docs/gs.html

Planetary iPad app

Planetary (voiceover) from Bloom Studio, Inc. on Vimeo.

This app would be on my iPad right now, if I had one. Visual music player that makes your music collection look like Planetary objects.

The most useless image sharing app on Appstore

Color iPhone app

I have been playing around with couple of good photo sharing applications like Instagram, PicPlz and even Path for that matter seems to fall into the same category. Have to tell you I love the interface on Path. One day I get to hear about this new app called Color everywhere, it did make the top stories on – CNN and on Wired

So I downloaded it from the Appstore in all hope to play around with the coolest photo sharing app. But it was really disappointing. I wanted to rate it 1 star or even less when I deleted this app from my iPhone, but it never asked me for the ratings. One of the reviewer almost speaks about my first reaction of this app and I think it still holds good ( the 5 star rating, I am sure is sarcastic ) -

Best review of this app

Node js and express

Found this great article about node js and express. I always wanted to get started on Node js, but could not find enough basic resources. howtonode.org seemed a bit advanced in JS programming to me. So started off learning node js from this -

http://shapeshed.com/journal/creating-a-basic-site-with-node-and-express

Unix console for xkcd

I love xkcd and make sure that I do a pit-stop by that site, in case I need to refuel the lighter side of my day. The unix version of their site http://uni.xkcd.com/ totally cracked me up.

Some of the routinely used commands produce funny results

guest@xkcd:/$ pwd
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
guest@xkcd:/$ whoami
You are Richard Stallman.
guest@xkcd:/$ finger
Mmmmmm…
guest@xkcd:/$ man
Oh, I’m sure you can figure it out.
guest@xkcd:/$ vim
You should really use emacs.
guest@xkcd:/$ emacs
You should really use vim.