Category: Cool software

Convert your reception area into an Interactive Kiosk with this nice little iPad App

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My Friend Michal has developed a really cool app LoungePad for turning your reception area into an interactive Kiosk. You should really check out this app. Very interesting one.

If you have a Dental / Medical / Cosmetic Practice, Hair / Beauty Salon or even a Health spa, then Loungepad will allow you to turn your iPad into an innovative waiting room/reception area kiosk.

GO TO www.loungepad.com TO REGISTER FOR DEMO ACCESS + FREE 30 DAY TRIAL

** IMPORTANT: LOUNGEPAD IS NOT A STANDALONE APP (APART FROM THE DEMO) AND YOU WILL NEED A PC OR APPLE MAC TO INITALLY SETUP THE SYSTEM AND UPLOAD YOUR FILES **

WHAT CAN LOUNGEPAD DO FOR YOU AND YOUR BUSINESS?
– Markets your services whilst your customer is waiting in your reception area and keeps them entertained.
– Saves staff admin hours by automating all form-filling tasks.
– Tracks what your customer is interested in.
– Formatted and branded to have the look and feel of your business.

LOUNGEPAD ADMIN SECTION (SERVER SIDE)
– Setup your LoungePad on our server
– Choose layout from 4 pre-defined templates and then configure to make your own
– Configure background colour/image, text size/colour, upload your logo
– Select pre-defined icons, change their colour or upload your own icon designs
– Setup and save multiple layouts, and then downloaded to your iPad
– Preview your setup just as if it is on your iPad, allowing you to tweaks & changes

SELECTABLE FEATURES:
Setup as little or as many features as you need on our server then just download to your iPad.

a. UPLOAD VIDEOS and IMAGES
– Upload and store your MP4 videos.
– Upload your photos (jpeg and png) e.g. ‘Before and After’ pictures for Dentists or different hairstyle for your salon.

b. QUESTIONNAIRES and SURVEYS
– Create simple or complex survey and questionnaires such as medical or dental patient questionnaires or a hotel guest survey. Even use your created forms as a standalone feature. Create:
Simple Text Areas** Calendar**Radio Buttons** Check boxes**Yes/No answers** Drop down lists
– Survey/Questionnaire answers are emailed to you or multiple email addresses.
– A ‘CSV’ file is attached with each email allowing data to be imported into a database.
– Data stored on our server for up to 30 days allowing you to download all information in one go and then export to Excel or a database.

c. BROCHURES / PRICE LISTS
– Upload brochures and price lists (pdf format). Any ‘PDF’ document can be uploaded allowing users to see your brochure, price lists or even special offers.

d. WEBLINKS
– Create and direct users to your own website or websites that you choose, without customers leaving LoungePad.

e. UPLOAD YOUR HTML FILE
– Create/design an external HTML page (yourpage.html) and upload it to LoungePad e.g. upload a mini web page specifically designed for your Loungepad and incorporate linked images and videos from other websites or your own existing website.

F. ‘JOIN OUR MAILING LIST Feature
– Quickly setup and collect user name, address and emails and save it on LoungePad server for you to download as a CSV file. Generate Customer/client Loyalty.

G. STATISTICS
– Track what has been looked at on your LoungePad and for how long.
– Use statistics to Improve customer experience and more importantly improve your in-house marketing technique.

LOUNGEPAD – IPad ADMIN AREA
– Change the look and feel of your LoungePad at anytime by downloading any of your pre-configured setups, keeping your LoungePad looking fresh and new.

FREE 30 DAY TRIAL of full system (server side and iPad) +DEMO ACCESS
– Download Loungepad
– Go to www.loungepad.com to register
– Access to Demo site will also be provided

what is your favorite IDE/editor for writing code?

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hmm, tough question for me. i have (had actually) so many favorites depending on context. but definitely it’s interesting to write here about them

1. notepad – i am a notepad fan, for a very long time since 98 to 2006 and still i like it very much. but well, after that i’d found notepad++ and i liked it for it’s outstanding syntax highlighting features. if by any chance, i have to use windows these days, i work in notepad++

2. visual studio 6: yup, i must agree it is one of the best ide i’ve ever came in touch with. i have worked on visual basic for a long time (99 to 2006) and i was simply in love with visual studio ide. and it’s awesome intellisense + gui designer was the center of the attraction.

3. zend studio: i still use it. its one of my most favorite ide because of it’s os independent distribution. i like most of the features in it (SQL editor, subversion support, FTP etc) and ofcourse the feature to check the output of yourcode inside it. the object inspector is really a very cool feature. and i also use “find in files” feature very often to find the file i am particularly looking to edit. oh by the way – i use the old version (the non-eclipse version) and still use the 5.5.1 version for my everyday development.

4. phped: its a good editor for windows (never tried it’s linux version) but for some unknown reason i’ve failed to get used to with it.

5. netbeans: its superb 🙂 i like it very much. but as i am used to with zend studio i dont use it much. but i always suggest netbeans to someone who is looking for a decent and powerful ide for php (well, yeah also for java specially for the outstanding GUI designer for swing based apps)

6. aptana studio and spket ide : both of them are very very good for editing javascript. i use spket in linux for it’s small footprint. and aptana studio in my regular home and office machines.

6. nano – yeah it is the latest editor that i use almost everyday. you know it is available in both linux and mac. so i use it frequently in my local dev platform (mac osx based) and remote machines (linux based). and it is much more easier than vi – i know vi(m) is a very good editor and there are millions of user of vi(m), so what? if i can’t find it useful then i wont use it 🙂 – i find nano is very handy and easy to use. i have enabled php syntax highlighting in nano (via nanoarc) and it works really cool in shell 🙂

i dont like eclipse. there is no particular reason but for some unknown reason (i remember one, extremely resource hungriness and large footprint) i never feel comfortable with it. i use only one eclipse based ide (aptana) becoz there is no other good alternative to it. and only for this reason i also don’t use the new zend studio.

so hey, what is your favorite ide?

Nusphere PHPEd 5.0 Review

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I am using PHPEd for couple of months and I’ve recently upgraded to their latest edition, 5.0. So I cant resist myself from writing a review of this product.

Best features
Latest edition of PHPEd (Version 5.0, build 5019) comes with many new exciting features, a splashing look-n-feel and improved debugging functionalities for professional PHP developers. PHPEd is available in the market for quite a long time and it is popular with handful of its useful features. The latest release of PHPEd improves their editor at next level where you will really find yourself flexible to develop PHP application. Let’s look at the best feature of PHPEd that always excites me.

Browser style code navigation
Splitable edit window
Fully Unicode compatible
Excellent debugging with DBG
Excellent Code-Insight facility
Embedded Firefox
Quick HTML Objects
DB Form wizard
Embedded NuSOAP Tool
Smart Full screen Coding
Integration with Shell Menu
Built in profiler

Drawbacks
Distribution of old libMySQL (Well, just because of new licensing scheme of MySQL)
Old Help Files
Absence of old code completion for some libraries

phped.png

Splittable Editing Window
This is one of the coolest features which come to my everyday use. By splitting the code window in two parts I can simultaneously work on two portion of the same file, keeping anyone as a reference.

Unicode compatibility
PHPEd comes with Unicode compatibility, this is one of the major featured I was looking in PHP editors for years. You can switch to your desired encoding anytime from tools menu->IDE Settings

Debugging with DBG
The debugging in PHPEd is cool with DBG as the backend debugger. You can set break points, watch variables and do other things with it.

Excellent code Navigation
Another feature I really liked is the different way of “code insight” – You can see the methods and variables inside your project. You can view all the classes, or all the methods under all the classes or even the methods from a single file. This thing helped a lot. And you can also search for any function inside your project using this code explorer tool.

Embedded Firefox
Yeah it’s true; it was so much fun having Firefox as the embedded browser. In PHPEd recent version you can use Firefox as embedded browser.

DB Form wizard
PHPEd can write PHP code to interact with your tables. It creates the HTML form and PHP code for CRUD operation.

Embedded support for NuSOAP
PHPEd has built-in support for NuSOAP library for creating soap servers and clients.

Smart Full screen Coding
That’s another thing I really like!! Hit the Alt+F10 and just coding!!! – Very nice feature for me!

Integration with Shell Menu
That’s another very useful feature I agree, it comes very handy to perform shell operations. PHPEd interacts with shell directly from the project explorer.

And beside these, yeah, code folding is also available.

Built in profiler
Yes, and that’s really nice. You can profile your application directly from inside PHPEd instead of setting up xdebug and WinCacheGrind. This is a very cool feature for PHP developers.


Drawbacks
Some drawbacks are there, too. One major problem that I face with PHPEd is that it has some problem with intellisense for some libraries like SPL and others. But they provide you some workaround to quick fix that. Another problem I found is old help files for Smarty, PHP and MySQL. But that won’t be a big problem if you have your own.

Installing subversion server

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Most of subversion users are familier with Tortoise SVN which removes the need of using svn command line tool. Tortoise is a great tool. It helps a lot as a visual replacement of svn client. What if you want to setup a subversion server in your machine so that developers can work remotely? follow these steps

Before that, download the SVNService from http://gda.utp.edu.co/pub/svn/

1. Create the subversion working directoty by svnadmin tool
Example : svnadmin create “c:\projects\myproject”

2. add authentication setings in your project
open your working directory, such as “c:\projects\myproject” and open the conf/svnserve.conf file. Add the following lines

[general]
anon-access = read
auth-access = write
password-db = passwd

for the settings above, anonymous users will get the read-only access to the repository. If you want authenticated read access, make it as shown below.

[general]
auth-access = read
auth-access = write
password-db = passwd

3. add credentials
open conf/passwd file with notepad and add the username and password in following format

[users]
user1 = pass1
user2 = pass2

4. Install the subversion service and run it
svnservice -install -d -r “c:\projects\myproject”

OR

4. run the server simply
svnserve -d -r “c:\projects\myproject”

Now you can access your subversion repository remotely as “svn://your_server_ip/”

Thats it.