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| Power FireFox |
| Thursday, August 10, 2006 |
| -Apurva |
The web is taking over the desktop! So say industry analysts and gurus. Well maybe thats why NEOBinaries is so much more active than uZable!
Coming back to the point of this post, The browser is where the web meets the desktop. Firefox has become the browser of choice of most power users. How about some advice on how to turbocharge your web browser? Dhiraj just posted an excellent article called 5 Firefox extensions you can't live without @ NEOBinaries
It was a huge debate between uZable and NEOBinaries on which site should actually publish this article, but i guess NEOBinaries just won due to its sheer muscle and team strength :(
Its a great read, and will help you get started with powerpacking Firefox. Why do you need to do such a thing? well I am sure most of you spend half your computing time staring at you web browser. Why not make it more uZable?
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| Makeover: White is the new black! |
| Wednesday, June 28, 2006 |
| -Dhiraj |
Last weekend we revamped the CYNAPSE corporate website to be a bit less uncorporate than it earlier was.
We've got a whole new design, yes, a cool white
one this time. A lot of our new design is extensively white. I think it
really keeps the focus on what the viewer should be looking at, in the
foreground.
This time, with CYNAPSE.com, we decided to come up with a new, unconventional way of presenting everything.
Starting from the company logo itself, we thought philosophically about
what the logo meant to us, and how important it was on the CYNAPSE
website.
Why?
Just about everything we invent typically ends up with a brand of it's
own. Yes, it does get quite funny sometimes (and not so funny all too
often) when the first thing one does if one is building a product
concept in CYNAPSE is to go and think up a name and get it booked. The
point that I'm trying to make here is that we really don't need to talk
about any of our products on the CYNAPSE website - the products pretty
much handle their own.
So we decided that the CYNAPSE logo is pretty much the most important
thing on the CYNAPSE website. In fact, we decided we could just about
ignore everything else there.
Heck, we got by so many years on a completely black site with pretty
much nothing on it except for the news updates of our launches and a
little philosophical text, didn’t we? ;)
We decided to place the CYAPSE logo in the center of the page rather
than push it away to the top left corner. Things pretty much flowed
from that point with content, graphics and animations all being placed
around the logo.
I think it's one of our coolest looking sites, yet. Make sure you check it out and tell us what you think.
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| I am so upset with Stardock... |
| Tuesday, May 30, 2006 |
| -Apurva |
Stardock is probably that one company that I have been loyal to,
the longest. Ever since WindowBlinds launched, and i shifted to the
windows platform (after using Kaleidoscope on the mac), I have been
following Stardock.
I have always thought that Stardock is a
great company with really good products. What they have always lacked
are good skinners and programmers who would take full advantage of the
stardock products (apart from WindowBlinds) to create great interfaces
or software. Even though the biggest skinners in the world are creating
mind blowing themes for WindowBlinds, there are doing little to create
other interfaces and widgets that better the usability of the PC in
general. Take the example of ObjectBar. ObjectBar is a great tool to
create bars and menus and meters and can give a whole new look and
functionality. But the most of the themes that people made using object
bar were the ones that mimicked the Windows XP Start menu on older
systems. So what is the point that I am trying to make? The point is
that Stardock needs to further encourage skinners to build better
stuff.
And at least from my personal point of view, they are
anything but encouraging. I have tried messaging, mailing and
commenting on posts just to get in touch with Brad Wardell (Frogboy)
and/or other people from Stardock, so that i could get some help from
their team while we were building the uZable Flick Gadget, but I got no
response. I even created the whole content page with screenshots way
before we released the gadget, and send out the links so that we can
catch some attention of the Stardock guys, no response yet. We
submitted the Flickr Gadget to Desktopgadgets.com (a stardock site
meant to showcase gadgets) and it took about a month to even get it up
there! Frankly i would expect the guys to jump at the submission of the
Flickr Gadget as 90% of the gadgets submitted there are crappy pieces
of code. For example, one of the popular RSS widgets there actually
manually parses the XML file to get the content of the feed! It really
looked like 18th century code!
I agree that I am no major
contributor towards the themes and skins library, and hence
insignificant. I also agree that people like Frogboy are really, really
busy people and cant respond to every mail they receive and need to run
a growing software company. (I could contest that though, I run a
software company too, and have always made sure that people interested
in contributing are catered to). Maybe it was just my tuff luck that I
had a bad experience. Considering all of these, I still think that
Stardock is doing a pathetic job in encouraging newcomers into the
skinning scene, as they are focused towards catering to and 'featuring'
a few handpicked skinners.
So I guess its time to move on for
me.... in search of clearer skies. I finally decided to go back to my
long time favorite platform, Samurize. Does this mean that there wont
be any new uZable Gadgets any more? Or the flickr Gadget ends right
here? Not at all.... It just means you guys can expect a high quality
uZable offering for the samurize platform (while the rest of the uZable
team continues their work on the gadgets). Will post some preview
screens here as soon as i can.
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| NEOBinaries likes the uZable Flickr Gadget |
| Monday, May 15, 2006 |
| -Dhiraj |
Recently, NEO Binaries featured us on their News Blog and even called our uZable Flickr gadget “…good enough to eat..” !
The Flickr gadget is all about letting users enjoy pictures from flickr without having to pay a dime or a dollar and have fun while they're doing it too. I've been using for various esoteric purposes myself, including looking up pictures that are there on various topics - as research material! When you don't really have the time to go and check out each and every photo page on Flickr but still would be (at least a little) interested in them, our flickr gadget works brilliantly.
Thanks for listing us finally, NEO Binaries. :-)
Go and get the uZable Flickr Gadget now |
| Get the Gadget! |
| Saturday, March 11, 2006 |
| -Dhiraj |
Finally announcing, the release of the Flickr Gadget!
We're ready to launch with the v1.0 of the Flickr Gadget, check it out, tell us what you like and what you don't.
Download it from our Get Gadgets page.
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| Of uZable.com, Blackbox, and whatever happened here. |
| Tuesday, February 28, 2006 |
| -Apurva |
I guess there is some explaination to do here. We started uZable.com to support a community of desktop enhancers. BlackBox was (and still is) our tool of choice, to hack and enhance desktops. We built a comprehensive platform for everything BlackBox, and it was pretty much satisfying the needs of a small but faithful set of users, but soon, there was nothing much left to do. While people did release a lot of BlackBox themes, and updates to the plugins, nothing much really happened in the community. There was not much that we could do. Hence we decided to move on. the BlackBox community continues @ blackbox.uzable.com, while uZable.com has been transformed to a blog / playground where we will distribute and talk about our hacks, tools, apps and our crusades with user interface enhancements.
Lately we have been totally hooked on to the concept of desktop gadgets. What are desktop gadgets? well, stick around and you shall find out. to start with we are going to release a free desktop gadget, which you can already see us talking about all over the place. |
| Release: Flickr Gadget - v0.9 beta |
| Tuesday, February 28, 2006 |
| -Dhiraj |
This is still an internal release. I'm now making an installer for the thing.
We've got the beast in as-good-as-RC stage now. It's just a matter of getting it to you. You're just gonna have to wait for it.
More details on the features and fixes inside. Go have a look...
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| Release: Flickr Gadget - v0.8 beta |
| Friday, February 24, 2006 |
| -Apurva |
This is probably the last (or the second last) internal release version. All of you who have been eagerly waiting for the gadget, hold your horses. Yes this means you still don't get to play with this release. But it doesn't mean you can't read about its progress. So here is a detailed release report. Expect similar posts for every release of the Flickr Gadget in the future.
Update on release date: Dhiraj tells me the bugs listed here can be done over with by Sunday night. So expect a 0.9b build by Monday morning. Yeah you can get your hopes high, 0.9b will be available for download. I plan to release 1.0 Final before the 1st of March 2006. |
| Hello World! |
| Wednesday, February 22, 2006 |
| -Apurva |
| A big hello to the world! Its 6:45am and we have been at it since a few
nights now. Dhiraj is finishing his last few lines of code for the
beta of the Flicker Gadget, and I am posting stuff here. A big shout to
Sarfaraz for setting up Amieo for us, and to Romasha for her pretty face ;) |
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