Monday, September 13, 2010

Experience the most out of Twitter...

Twitter is the biggest microblogging service in the world. It offers a big variety of information and with Twitter you can easily and rapidly spread news, information and other stuff. But there is a problem, it's not always easy to follow the status updates of all of the people you are following, cause there are so many status updates that you just can't keep up! So, to facilitate our lives there are plenty of tools to facilitate our lives! I'm gonna show you two which in my opinion are essential to keep up with the people you are following.

Paper.li is a Twitter tool which creates an everyday "newspaper" with the tweets of the people you follow. After you sign in with your Twitter account, you can either choose between many issues and interests to read from Twitter or create your own newspaper. In your newspaper you can include twitter users, hash tags (#) or lists (@) you want to keep up with. You can create multiple newspapers and also, you can have paper.li notify you by e-mail when a newspaper is released.


Spindex
Spindex is an experimental product released by Microsoft FUSE Labs. You can use it to search throughout social networks and microblogging services such as Facebook or Twitter. It shows you recent activity in your prefered social networks and in addition with Spindex you can search content in social networks or the web and (re)share it. After you log on with your Windows Live ID you need to make an invitation request, cause it's an experimental project. For me it took around three days to receive my invitation. The whole site is based on Microsoft Silverlight.


TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a Windows application based on Adobe AIR. It has a wonderful interface and it's very easy to use. After the installation, you sign in on your favourite services such as Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn and you have real time notifications of new posts, tweets and other stuff! Also, you can search with hash tags (#), users or lists (@) on which you take real time notifications, too. The whole interface is organized on columns according to your search, users, social network and others. One significant drawback is that when you have signed in on multiple networks, you may get frustrated by the mass of notifications, also due to many posts, it would not be easy for you to keep up with all of your news. 

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Book Review: Sams Teach Yourself Visual Basic 2008 in 24 Hours

Programming languages is a taboo for the common computer users. This book shows you the way to your first steps in programming and software developing with Visual Basic 2008. It has an easy language and it doesn't bothers you with difficult programming terms. It focuses in Windows application development with .NET Framework 3.2 so that it doesn't gives you the opportunity for developing software for other operating system or platforms but for a start it's over-sufficient.


It starts by explaining you the basics around Visual Basic and it continues showing you the Visual Basic's syntax, vocabulary and grammar by creating a small but usefull application to preview images (PictureViewer). In this way, it keeps your interest and it doesn't let you get bored. It covers a wide-variety of things around Visual Basic such as; form designing, registry functions, communication with Microsoft Office and MySQL etc.

About the time the book says you 'll need to finish it, in my opinion it is insufficient and you can't master Visual Basic in only 24 hours. Although this book drives you through developing an application I think that the best way to master the things that book says, is to create your own small and simple application after you have read the book. In my case, I created a simple click-counter application (ClickMania). The book comes with a DVD including Microsoft Visual Basic Express 2008 but you can download the new version (2010) from Microsoft's website.    It has photos and tips facilitating your life and an illustrated cover. 

I'd strongly recommend that book to anyone who wants to get introduced to programming and Visual Basic.