Double tapping the home button while on a Emergency call screen showed all the previously used apps, you could easily switch between them but not go to the home screen; so I tried the other method. Call the iPhone from your other phone if you know the number, answer it, tap the “contacts” button and now hit the home button; that’s it! You’re on a home screen with full control over device. Don’t forget this only works on jailbroken devices, I have tested it on iOS 4.2.1 and iOS 5.01.

Check the video:

Don’t hope to be in those 5% of startups that succeed with little to no trouble. Startups can be really hard! I can just tell you to brace yourself because you learn only with your own failures. Good advices can only prepare you for a good hit, be it a good or a bad one.

What do you think is the Ultimate question somebody can ask you as a startup?

The problem:

Actualy two of them. I have a hosting account in Slovenia, they block all foreign IP’s to connect to FTP, so It’s pain in the but to make some changes on the script there. My other problem (while working on WhoAPI); if you have let’s say 20 hosting accounts all over the world and you need to update the same script that’s on all of them, how would you do it? (no control of the server modules, so no automatic deployment)

 
The research:

I found no scripts that can solve these problems. I’m sure that they exists, but I lost two (if not more) hours trying to find a finished and a working one.

 
The solution:

I made a script (one file) that you upload to your server, change two lines of code, set the Bitbucket settings to ping the script as soon as you make the change to your files on your repository (30sec. job) and you’re done! What this script does is it download’s your script from the Bitbucket repository and extracts it, so you have the latest version of your script always live.

No FTP, no drag&dropping files or scp-ing to the server directly. Out of the box solution for easy automatic script deployment. And yes, It’s in PHP :/ I would like to write the same thing in Python, and Node.js version would be cool as well.

Check it out here: https://bitbucket.org/edifreak/autopullrepo
 

The app we’re making is all about our existing web service on http://crodns.com. It’s a domain availability checker with whois information on demand. We’ve already created the WebApp that works on all smartphones (at least we like to think so) which you can try here: http://m.crodns.com

Here are some screenshots of the icons we made. You may notice which icon we decided to go with on the Loading screen:

In-app screenshots and videos are coming after the release. My estimate is we’ll submit the app to the AppStore before this month ends. I don’t expect any problems with Apple’s approval :)

This version is intentionally made for regional market, that means it’s localized. But we didn’t forget the Global market, no! We’re planning to release the English version right after this one, as a separate project. We haven’t yet decided which domain to use for it, but we’re sure to find out using our first app ;)

It’s very interesting to see how the words are generated by a software. This whole article was fully composed using Google Scribe. It’s a word suggestion text writer. I would like to see this implemented in WordPress or just to see it as a javascript plugin. It’s not only good for writing the content faster but also for those times when you’re trying to find the right word in your head. And yes, instant spellcheck ;)

I’ve tested their engine by writing “I like it” and accepted all the suggested words after that:
“I like it and I’ma let you finish but Beyonce had one of these days I’ll bet your life..” :)

Go ahead, try it: http://scribe.googlelabs.com

Future of screen technology:

Microsoft’s Vision of the Future:

The Future of Mobile:

• AJAX calls everywhere, the most important part we use it – is main content. Every click to a page you want to open loads the content directly into the content part without reloading and thus saving bandwidth and loading time.
• HTML5 tags like <article><header><footer> and so on. This may be useful to future developments of search engine and other crawlers so they know exactly where’s the expected duplicate content like Menu options and  content location.
• CSS3 styles all around, shadows, rounded corners (like in the pic on the right), etc. Internet Explorer gave us some headache but we’re managing it with CSS2.1 and MS Filter effects to come as close as we can to CSS3 result in other browsers.
• Goodbye Internet Explorer 6, no support for you. What this means for us is more coding freedom :) but still fighting with IE7.
• WordPress Blog integrated in main design/within website, no /blog directory.
• Social integration like Facebook Like on all content, FB comments on all articles, standard share options via Twitter and other networks, our tweets always in the sidebar with important news and hosting servers notifications.
• Better integration of Live Support chat with Client control panel.
• Killer Ajaxed domain availability checking, supporting over 350 (cc)TLD’s including Croatian ccTLD (.hr and .com.hr).

And much more! We hope you like what we’re doing and expecting your feedback as soon as we publish the website.

I was dismissing Google algorithm changes at first, until I saw the stats for one of our websites; http://webimenik.biz to be exact. Website visits fell to over year and a half old averages. When I checked loading time it was obvious, WebImenik load time was over 5 sec. and first 3 was taken by CPU getting necessary data to show the front page.

So I’ve sat down and built Caching support which made our website faster by 50% and with few other tweaks like merging css files, minifying and compressing javascript it got to 60% improvement in speed. I could do it much more better but that requires too much time. Your visitors and Google will be thankful just with the basic tweaks (15min job), now get to work! ;)

Great online tool for checking website speed: http://tools.pingdom.com

I on the other hand have a great idea that’s stupid simple, works for Googlebot and browsers with disabled Javascript. Isn’t that great!? :)
Even dough I came up with this idea myself, someone elase in the world had the same idea before me and it’s called Hijax. So what is Hijax in definition?

Hijax is combination of words Ajax and Hijack and that’s it’s core functionality. Hijax uses both Ajax and Javascript when available (to create those magical effects that Desktop apps had for decades). Hijax is using Javascript when available to hijack HTTP request (when website visitor makes a click on a link to another page) and enables Ajax magic to happen. But, when you open the page in a browser that doesn’t have Javascript enabled, the website functions as it should (without fancy effects that Ajax can provide), it opens the page with preloaded content. Hijax method is a great time and bandwidth saviour.

And finally the interesting part.
The example, dead simple:

<a href="page-2.html" onclick="AjaxCall('page-2'); return false;">

* Use this method on all links intended to work with Ajax calls.

That’s it! So simple! We are already using this method on our new company website that’s currently in development.