iPhone development and Apple Tech Day

Tomorrow on campus will be our annual Apple Tech Day. This is a nice day with workshops and the like. I've been looking forward for this for a long time because I'm in the middle of developing a Mobile Safari Web App for the Merrill-Cazier Library. I chose to do this, because it will be easier to program as a web app and then program it in Objective-C for the iPhone.
The SDK I'll be using is Dashcode. This is a really neat development tool that Apple developers use everyday. To program in Dashcode, all you need to know is HTML, Javascript, and CSS. Once you have that, you're ready to program for it.
Tomorrow, one of the seminars is on iPhone development. I'm excited to get people on campus involved in developing for mobile devices. Here's my iPhone app so far. You'll notice that it already looks like an app, but it's actually a web page. There are some CSS libraries and Javascript code specific for iPhone that one can implement to give users the feeling that the app is a standalone application. This is one of the topics that I'll be posting a lot about because this is what I really like to do. Stay tuned.

Merrill-Cazier Google Gadget

The Google Gadget I have been working on is now up and running. It was pretty fun learning how to get it to work. Basically, it's an XML document that has to have certain things in the Module Preference headers with contact information as well as screen-shots and such. There is some JavaScript required as well. Basically, once you've made the gadget how you want, you simply submit the XML document to http://www.google.com/ig/submit. Once you've done that, you can distribute the gadget around on people's personalized web pages (such as iGoogle) or embed the code directly in your websites. So... without further adeiu, here it is:


Coming soon, Mobile-Cazier Library iPhone app.

CJ

GetHuman.com. Never wait on stupid telephone menus again

This is one of my favorite sites on the internet. I recently switched carriers from T-Mobile to Verizon and had to talk to an actual human to get what I wanted. The way I did it was with GetHuman.com. On this site, you can get instructions about how to bypass/hack through the caller menus to get to a human immediately. You can also add to it (I've done this and loved it) so if we get everyone doing this, we can save lots of time.

Check attachments for viruses against 40 different anti-virus programs

Ever get an email from someone you know, but are still a little nervous about opening the attachment they sent? There is an easy solution to that. One of the cool things I learned about at Computers in Libraries was www.virustotal.com. This is a website where you can upload a file that you downloaded and it checks it with several different anti-virus and anit-malware products. Once the checks are complete, it shows you a report of any suspicious files found. It's really cool. So... easy steps, when you click on the attachment in question, click "Save" not "Open." Once it's saved, go to VirusTotal and upload the file to their servers and run it. If it finds nothing, it's probably safe. I use this site all the time.

Google Gadget for Merrill-Cazier Library

Back in April, I attended a Computers in Libraries conference in Washington DC. It was a really cool experience and I had a lot of fun with it. One of the seminars that attended was on mobile development. This comprised of Gadgets, Widgets, and Apps. Gadgets are small little programs that run in someone's personal webpage like my.yahoo.com or iGoogle.com. Widgets are the same thing, but they run on your PC's desktop or Dashboard on your mac. Some good examples of these include weather and stock tickers.

One of the things I've been working on is developing a Google Gadget for the library catalog, serials/journals, and Google Scholar. Eventually, this will be available for download to people's personal webpages as well as embedded in useful pages throughout USU's websites.
It's been really fun working on developing something like this. It's basically an XML document with XHTML elements for retreive the information from the website. Now, once a user puts in the search terms, it will automatically forward it, perform the search, and redirect to the search results page.

Upgrading to Mac Snow Leopard

First of all, I have a few things that I needed to move from a journal to this blog so I could include screenshot. This will be explained in a minute. I work at the library and most of the computers I manage are Macs. Since the release of Snow Leopard, our department has been installing it our our iMacs and MacBook Pros. It seems really nice and faster at opening applications. One of the things I use my Mac for is for mobile development for the library. I've been working on an iPhone app for a couple months now, but since I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I can't get my apps to build in my iPhone simulator. I'm working on getting that up and running again.

Chuck Norris

So, I saw this and had to share.

Go to Google, search "find chuck norris"
and then click the "I feel lucky" button.

The results are so true.