Watch out for Santa...

Don't miss him on christmas eve.

Merry Christmas

How To: Turn your iPhone into a Digital Photo Frame

Just before Christmas it's almost impossible to oversee the digital photo frames in the shops. They work like standard photo frames but allow you show slideshows of your pictures and just one.

But did you know, if you own an Apple iPhone (or iPod Touch) you already have a device which you can turn into a photo frame while you are at home? The iPhone comes with a clear, bright and not to small display which makes it perfect to display your photos. There is only one change you will have to do:

• Just go to Settings, the General and and change the Auto-Lock setting to Never

That's it. It keeps the background light on all the time and doesn't put the phone to sleep. Now you can go to the Photos application and start a slideshow of your photos and there you have the digital photo frame. Of course you will want to put the iPhone into the dock or at least connect the cable to not use your battery.

The nice thing about using the iPhone as a photo frame is the built in internet connection. Means you are not restricted to your own photos on the phone but you can load and display content from the internet. Here are some ideas:

• Get photos from Picasa by running slideshows from Googles Mobile Picasa Webalbums
  


• Have a look around the world by watching webcams from WorldWatchr
  

Of course you aren't restricted to photos at all:

• Display the latest news by running an RSS reader.
  


• Don't miss new mails coming in.
  


• See world clocks from WorldClockr or countdowns from CountDownr.
  

This way your iPhone becomes a much better (but of course more expensive) digital photo frames than most devices you can buy today.

New iPhone Project: Charts

Create and manage charts of everything. E.g. monitor and track your weight, your expenses, your mileage, temperatures or whatever your want.

You can choose between line, bar and pie charts. The charts are created by the new chart service from Google.

GMaps Wall Calendar

Do you look for a personal and unique gift for your friends or beloved ones on Christmas or birthdays? What about a wall calendars made out of Google Maps?

My new web site GMaps Wall Calendar makes it easy to create the calendar sheets. You only have pan and zoom to the map location you want to have on the sheet. Choose the month and year and whether your week should start with a Sunday or Monday. Optionally add a title, caption, a calendar footer and then open a new browser window with your calendar ready for printing. It can't be easier!

http://calendar.speedymarks.com

New Project: WorldWatchr

I just started my new WorldWatchr project (http://www.worldwatchr.com).

This application makes it easy to monitor web images which are continuously updated (like web camera pictures). Now you can stay in touch with your home, famous places of the world, the current traffic conditions and much more by watching your favorite web cams. It can cycle through all your cameras and updates the images periodically.

The images don't have to be produced by web cams. You can monitor any image which is updated over time like weather radars, traffic maps and so on.

You can link from your web site to WorldWatchr so that your web cam can be easily added. Just use

http://www.worldwatchr.com?add=URL&title=TITLE

with your web cam URL and an optional TITLE as parameters (make sure it's properly encoded).

WorldWatchr - iPhone version

WorldWatchr has a special iPhone version:



Please open http://m.worldwatchr.com on your iPhone and take your web cams with you.

Hint: Send your web camera URLs by email to get them easily on the phone.

New iPhone Project: Mileage

I just released my new iPhone Application: Mileage. It makes it quick and easy to calculate the fuel consumption of your car. In addition to the mileage it can give you the cost per mile and the maximum range.

http://mileage.speedymarks.com

WorldClockr: Missing Timezones added

WorldClockr now contains a complete list of all timezones to choose from (please shout if I missed another one). Especially all non 1 hour time zones like Indias +5:30 have been added.

You can now have these timezones for your embedded clocks and in the iPhone version as well.

Servers are up again

Thanks for your patience.

Why Apple made Safari so fast

Apple claims that Safari is the fastest browser on any platform, and they seem to be right. Since I read that news I have been asking myself:

Why on earth did they put so much engineering effort into such a feature? Does anybody think Firefox, Opera or even IE are too slow? Compared to the network imposed waiting times the rendering doesn't matter. All browsers seem to be fast enough, so putting in more development time to optimize the rendering speed even further doesn't make any sense, right?

This is what I thought until I got the new iPod Touch in my hands. And now I understood. The Safari browser on the iPod (and the iPhone) is fast, by far the fasted browser I ever saw on a handheld device. I feels like a desktop browser and this must be the reason why Apple optimized Safaris rendering speed. Well done.

New iPhone Project: SpeedoMeter

I just started a new iPhone Application: SpeedoMeter. Point your iphone to:


http://speedometer.iphonemarks.com

This site helps to calculate the average velocity over a given distance. Use this to measure e.g. your walking and running speed or to calibrate your car speedometer.


Check it out:

New Project: SpeedyMarks

On SpeedyMarks you can create visual bookmarks for your favourite websites. It is insprired by Operas Speed Dial feature and uses thumbnails from WebSnapr. This makes it the perfect startpage for your browser. The background color of the page and the size of the speedymarks can be changed.



You can add a button to your website to make the addition to SpeedyMarks very easy.

Example:  (SpeedyMark for this blog)

Please check the iPhone version iPhoneMarks as well.

New iPhone Project: iPhoneMarks

I started a new iPhone website: iPhoneMarks

iPhoneMarks makes it easy to open web sites on the iPhone, because you don't have to type the full URL. For your favourite web sites you can create visual bookmarks which are stored locally on your phone (not on a server).

iPhone versions of WorldClockr and CountDownr

Both projects now have a special Apple iPhone optimized version (which works on other phones with the WebKit browser like the Symbian S60 3rd platform as well). Please check out:

• 
  WorldClockr for iPhone: http://m.worldclockr.com
  
  


• 
  CountDownr for iPhone: http://m.countdownr.com
  
  

Firefox on Apple TV - Anybody?

For quite a while now I'm looking a for a decent surf box for my living room. I think all the Media-Center-PCs aren't good enough; they are way to big. The other option would be to use one of the new game consoles. But:

• the Wii doesn't do HDTV (at least until now)


• the XBox is too loud


• the PS3 too expensive and consumes too much energy (180 Watts on standby!)

Now there is the new Apple TV box. Actually the perfect hardware for a surf box. Small, quiet and with HDTV support. Fortunately it's running a stripped down version of OSX so it should be no problem to install and run Firefox on it. OK, I can hear the question already, why not Safari? Wait a minute: an unmodified desktop browser (either Safari or Firefox or any other) will be of almost no use. In order to be a perfect surf box there have to be certain modifications:

• Usage of the Apple Remote because nobody wants to use a mouse in the living room. Sorry Safari but I can't see the support for that (except Apple is doing it them self). It will be hard enough to come up with a good usage scheme to allow page scrolling, link following, bookmark access and so on with the limited keys of the Apple Remote.


• Running in full screen kiosk mode and get rid of unnessary toolbars.


• A basic onscreen keyboard will be necessary to enter a URL and fill in forms (but in the beginning a local customizable start page will do).


• Integration into the Apple TV menu. That should be easy, because this RSS extension already did it.

So in summary Firefox seems to be the perfect browser to try because it can be customized to almost any extent, can be enhanced by a huge collection of extensions and almost all websites support it.

Is anybody working on that? Please let me know.

DST support in WorldClockr

WorldClockr now supports the toggle of daylight saving time (DST) for each clock (just about in time for the DST change this Sunday in Europe).
Click the little icon in the lower right corner of the clock:

indicates that DST is used (+1 hour)
indicates no DST

Compare

I added a new section to World Clockr where you can compare the Paris world clock directly with the Eiffel Tower web cam. Most interesting will be the times around sunset and sunrise, make sure you don't miss it.

If you want to have the same on your web site, just check the syndication page on how to embed a world clock into your web page.

New Project: CountDownr

Today I started my new project: CountDownr.

CountDownr is a little Ajax project which gives everybody his own collection of countdown counters. Each counter is customized to its own time and date when it goes off. There are two types of counters:

• Counters for a specific date and time. These counters can be repeated daily, weekly, monthly or yearly which advance automatically when the alert goes off. They are perfect for reminders on single events, lunchbreaks, weekends, paying your monthly bills or birthdays and holidays.
  Example: Midnight
  


• Counters which read the upcoming events from public Google Calendars. Any public calendar can be the source for a counter. It advances automatically to the next event after each alert.
  Example: Google Developer Calendar
  

WorldClockr: More Timezones added

I added the +12, +13 and -13 timezones to Worldclockr.

WorldClockr Bug Fixed

I fixed a little bug in WorldClockr which lead to slightly wrong sunrise and sunset times. As well the sunset/sunrise times haven't been updated properly over several days.

The same bugs have been fixed in the Dashboard widget.

New Project: Ajax Live Search

Please visit my new Ajax project site. The Ajax Live Search page uses Googles Ajax Search API and HTML frames to create a more convenient search experience than traditional search frontends.

Features include search while you type, open search results in a separate frame, keep search results and a search word history.

More cities added

Santiago de Chile, Dubai, Helsinki, Lisboa, Casablanca, Nassau and Rio de Janeiro have been added to the list of predefined cities on World Clockr.

World Clocks for everybody

Put your own clock from World Clockr on your homepage. This page explains how.

Alternatively you can just place a link to add your favourite clock to other peoples collection. E.g. this will put a link to a clock for Berlin, my hometown:

Berlin