I’ve been looking at some javascript graphing libraries recently and noticed that this is still an area that’s in heavy development. The development of CSS3, SVG, and other new HTML technologies have given rise to a new breed of libraries. Here are some of the interesting ones I bumped into. I haven’t tested any of them yet, and most are badly documented, but it’s still interesting enough to give a first look.

gRaphaël

So I had never heard of the Raphaël JavaScript library until today but it seems to be pretty cool and powerful when it comes to doing visual things. It also has a graphics library which seems to be perfect for what I need, but I have to look into it as it’s fairly undocumented.

Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library.

Kilian’s ico

Made by my Dutch friend Kilian at Wakoopa, a fork of Alex Young’s ico, based on the RaphaelJS library. It’s almost as powerful as gRaphael but just as undocumented. Luckily I know the guy so i guess I can hunt him down for advise.

Flot

Flot is probably the best JQuery graphing plugin. It’s not as flashy as some of the others but definitely as functional. Plus it has the added benefit of being written as a JQuery plugin which makes it so much easier to fit in with existing code.

I have a Three 3G Dongle that I occasionally use when on the road. Now that I have a NetBook with Mac OS X I plan to use it even more. The problem with this Three 3G dongle (Huawei E156G) is the software that comes with it. It’s bloated, replicates standard Mac OS X behaviour, and worst of all it disables your WiFi when you’re on 3G (because God forbid that you share your already slow 3G with another).

So a while ago I figured out how to use the 3G dongle without using the Three Mobile Manager software, but instead using the Mac OS X network manager. I decided to write it up now because I noticed a few more people with the same issues. This tutorial is based on a Mac Mini and Dell Mini running Mac OS X 10.6.2 and 10.6.1.

Step 1: Install the Mobile Manager

We’re not going to use the Mobile Manager, but this is the easiest way to install the drivers for the dongle.

• Just stick in your dongle into your Mac and wait for the 3Connect disc to show up.
• Run the 3Connect Installer.app
• When the installer is done, ignore any “new network adapters found” for now.
• Instead go to your Applications folder, and trash the 3Connect folder

Your drivers have now been installed but your OS X doesn’t know what to do with the dongle yet.

Step 2: Setup your network preferences

• Go to the Network panel in your System Preferences
• You should have a HUAWEI Mobile device in the list on the left, if it is not unplug and plug in your dongle until it does
• Click Advanced, and in the modem pane set the details to:
  • Vendor: Generic
  • Model: GPRS (GSM/3G)
  • APN: Three.co.uk
  • CID: 1
• Under DNS set the following two DNS servers:
  • 4.2.2.4
  • 4.2.2.3
• Then (I’m not sure if this is essential) go to the PPP tab:
  • Uncheck Send PPP echo packets
  • Check Use verbose logging
• Click OK to save your changes
• Finally, set the telephone number to *99#
• Hit Apply

Now when you hit Connect you should be able to connect to the network. Tick the Show modem status in menu bar to have a handy little menu in the menu bar that allows you to see how long you’ve been connected and much more.

Caveats

There are some downsides to this method. The main one being that you loose the ability to check how much data you’ve sent/received this month. I guess you can use My3 for that instead. You also lose the ability to sent SMS messages, which is why it might be wise to leave the 3 Mobile Manager in your applications if you ever use that function.

Finally I have to note that this hasn’t been thoroughly tested. I used to run this same method under Leopard and it worked fine, it now works fine under Snow Leopard too, but any weird hardware or software upgrade might break it, I’m just not sure.

In the last few weeks I’ve slowly fallen in love with this little application called TwoUp. I recently got a new 24″ monitor and realized that I can easily run multiple windows side-by-side. The problem is trying to make 2 windows not overlap but take up as much space as possible: it’s impossible by hand!

In comes TwoUp, which gives you a few little keyboard shortcuts to move a window to take the left, right, top, or bottom half of the screen. It’s a free product and has become part of my every day use. I can’t live without it anymore on a big monitor.

Irradiated Software – TwoUp.

There is also a more advanced version called SizeUp that gives you more positions (quarters of the screen, multi monitor support) which is not free. It’s only $13 so I might be buying this soon to thank the guy who made both apps for his great work.

What if Panic’s software wasn’t made for the Mac, but for the Atari?

Panic’s lost 1982 artwork. Found. « Panic Blog.

Ever since I got my iPhone I had been wanting to get a really good PDF reader. Quickly after the launch of the AppStore there were quite a few of them, but none of them seemed to be able to handle a 750 page tech manual that well. For a while though there has been an app called GoodReader, and it just got better.

GoodReader PDF RefLow

GoodReader costs £0.59 and was already able to read really large PDFs with some neat tricks. Now, in version 2.3 they have added a lot more cool options. The coolest one I think is PDF Reflow which will reflow the text in a PDF to be larger and easier to read, without having to do a weird zoom around the page margins. The new version also supports USB file transfer (Mac only) to the iPhone and a load of other new features and optimisations.

Overall I’m extremely happy with this app and it’s one of the few apps for the iPhone that really show what good software engineering is all about. Get it now at discounted price (£0.59) in the App Store.

So I’m a big supporter of OpenID and oAuth, but sometimes I have to agree with big companies like Google in the fact that these technologies are really confusing to end users. The problem is that people don’t understand these technologies and while they shouldn’t it does allow for some people to take advantage of the less tech savvy amongst us.

Take Twitter for example, who fairly recently finally added oAuth to their product so that we now don’t have to give out our username and password to every funny little Twitter tool. Twitter’s implementation has no granularity in the oAuth authorisation which leads to people signing away full read/write permission to their account when they use their Twitter to log in to a game.

Yes, you read that right: developers use Twitter’s oAuth to let people authenticate themselves. It seems not everyone understand the difference between authentication and authorisation. This obviously leads to some developers abusing this new found power to do evil, much like the early Facebook App developers used the permissions they got from you to spam all your friends with invites to come and join that app you looked at once.

I agree that oAuth is a great technology, but inherently it’s going to get a bad name when companies like Twitter don’t implement it correctly. We could go and educate the user, but I think that’s an impossible undertaking that would better be avoided. oAuth (and actually OpenID similarly) faces a real problem when it comes to user experience that needs to be solved. I guess I’m not the first one talking about this but I’m wondering if there even is a solution.

Time for a new installment of my ever so irregular Appdate segment. Today I want to introduce you to Choosy, a little app created by the friendly London based developer George Brocklehurst

As you can see, Choosy is a handy little tool for us that have more than one main browser, are web developers, have site specific browsers, or have any other need of forcing a link to open in a very specific browser. The app is very customizable when it comes to its behavior, which makes it even cooler. It only costs $12, which I think is a bargain, but you can also try it out for a demo period if you want.

I knew that someone must have made a video of my presentation on ShouldIBackupMy.com, and this is the first one I found. It only shows a little bit, but I think it’s the best part probably.

For those who don’t get the joke regarding GeoCities: read and shiver.