Instant messaging, email and social networks all in one

I have friends using different IM (instant messaging) clients. Some use MSN, others use Yahoo, and a few use Google Talk. So one night, I was chatting online with A and B on MSN, when suddenly an old friend of mine, C, showed up on Yahoo. I switched to Yahoo, while still chatting with A and B on MSN of course. Before long, my dear showed up on Google (I only kept my Google for my dears), ok, now I’ve got A and B on MSN, C on Yahoo, and my dear on Google Talk.

You got the picture.

That was in the past though. Digsby has come to the rescue. I reckon Digsby is the current leader in the multi-protocol IM industry. Why? You’ll find out soon enough.

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Cuil takes on Google

“Search 121,617,892,992 web pages” – That’s the one liner that caught my eyes when I found out about Cuil. Cuil is a brand new search engine developed by an ex Googlers, Anna Patterson.

Cuil

Anna is not on her own though, along with her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineer, Russell Power and Louis Monier, they created Cuil which is trying to upstage Google. Cuil adopts a new way to search, produce a better result, and along the way, take a shot at the Gigantic Search Engine ever known, Google.

Cuil claims to produce better, far more accurate result than Google, since it uses a different page ranking system than what Google has. It is said that Cuil digs even deeper into websites, making sure it’s the most relevant to your search term, before serving it to you fresh from the web. And not only that, Cuil also provides pictures whenever possible, giving you a far better picture of what that particular websites is about.

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Best Beijing Olympic 2008 wallpapers

Beijing Olympic 2008 is just around the corner… in fact it’s just one more week to go. If you couldn’t make it to Beijing this time… blame it on your busy work… don’t get upset. You can join this biggest sports event in the world by decorating your computer with a nice Beijing Olympic 2008 wallpaper!

Come, join the Beijing spirit by downloading one of the following beautiful wallpapers.

Freddy

The most stunning pictures for the Beijing Olympic 2008 are these creative advertising campaign pictures done by 1861 United, an ad agency for Freddy, who is the official sponsor for the Italian team in Beijing. Look at the above stunning Volleyball stunt!

Download and use those stunning and creative pictures as your wallpaper.

Beijing Olympic Photo

Of course, some of the best Beijing Olympic 2008 wallpapers have to come from the official website. They don’t stock a lot of them, but the quality is undeniably good.

I like the above Huanhuan wallpaper. 🙂

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WordPress Corporate Theme – Update

Since releasing our Corporate Theme earlier this year, we have received some positive feedback and we are pleased to release Version 2.0 with some minor enhancements:

  • Bottom Navigation
    Drop-downs are included to cater for long archive lists so the page will look neater.
  • Top Menu
    Font size is reduced to create more space for more menu items.
  • Content Area
    Overall font size is increased to improve readability.

Main/Header Picture

WordPress Corporate Theme

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First Flash Tutorial

A popular form of web media today is interactivity Flash. Flash not only allows you to add interactivity into otherwise static and boring websites, it also allows web designers and programmers to express unlimited creativity in creating Flash games, or other forms of interesting gadgets. Flash is very common these days because almost all computers in the world has the Flash player installed.

A couple of months ago, I started playing with Flash 8 because I would like to make my very own flash game of my dream. Sadly, I learned that Flash is not easy to use. However, I’ll share all my knowledge with you as much as I can. We’re going to start off simple. Today, we’re going to learn how to move our character with the arrow keys, while playing a different animation when a certain key is pressed using Actionscript.

Before we start, here are some key terms to know:

  • Actionscript
    Flash’s programing language.

  • Blank Key Frame
    A frame that has nothing in it.

  • Frame
    A placeholder for movie clips, actionscript codes, etc.

  • Instance Name
    The name of a movie clip. This name is used so Actionscript can recognize the object.

  • Key Frame
    A frame that has something in it.

  • Movie Clip
    Objects in flash. Movie Clips often have a timeline inside itself.

  • Timeline
    Basically the area on the screen where you will be working with layers and frames to alter your movie’s content and animation.

Oh yeah, before we start this tutorial, I would like to recommend Actionscript: The Definitive Guide by Colin Moock. Although the book is some what old and it doesn’t talk about Actionscript 3, it’s a great book to pick up if you’re a flash newbie like me.

Let’s start making some animation… follow tight.

1) Start Macromedia Flash

Probably will be the easiest thing to do in this tutorial. Simply double click on the Flash program icon on your desktop to run the program. Good job!

2) Check

Flash size

For this tutorial, our document size will be 550px (pixels) by 400px. If your document isn’t this size, simply open the properties bar located at the bottom, and click on the size button.

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How to prevent printing a webpage’s URL

If you are like me who likes to print long web pages and blog entries for offline reading, then you certainly have wondered how could you prevent the printing of the webpage’s URL on every page. It’s so irritating to see the URL at the top/bottom of every page… it’s a waste of precious ink as well!

Today, let me show you how to easily prevent this from happening. Oh this depends on which browser you are using.

Internet Explorer

Page Setup

Click on the drop down arrow next to the Printer icon on the toolbar. Select the Page Setup menu item.

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Free and cheap commercial software

There times when you spend a lot of money on something because you think it’s the “number one” item available right now. This is especially true for software such as Microsoft Office, MS SQL Server, Adobe Photoshop, or AutoCad. What if I told you that you don’t need to spend unnecessary money on them? What if I told you that there’s other free alternatives out there? Today, I’ll share with you 3 terrific freeware programs that will make you fall off your chair. Also, if you’re not convinced, I’ll show you a website that allows you to buy programs like Photoshop, Maya for a very low price.

So let’s get started.

1) Open Office

Open Office

Whenever I see someone use Microsoft Office, I can’t help but laugh at them. They wasted $150 on a program which they can get a better alternative for free! Of course, I’m talking about Open Office. Open Office is what I consider to be the freeware version of Microsoft Office. In fact, they look pretty identical. Open Office has a word processing program like Microsoft Word, it has a presentation slides program like Microsoft Powerpoint, it even has a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel!

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Smooth anchor links

This post should be useful for designers or webmasters, but it should be informational for all readers too I guess. We will talk about “smooth anchor links”. Anchor links, are links which send you directly to the line you marked on a web page. This is used to jump within the same page and is especially useful for long pages where we can use a “top” anchor to move to the top of the page, saving the user tonnes of scrolling.

Smooth scrolling

Now, the conventional anchor links always zip you to the marked lines immediately. I have always found this to be somewhat jumpy. So, when I recently stumbled upon this excellent smooth anchor links script at david walsh blog, which demonstrated the ability to smoothly take a user to a specific portion of a page, aka the anchor, I was totally amazed!

This is definitely one of the cooler scripts I have seen in a long time, and I can’t think of a reason to not share it with you! I hope you like the smooth scrolling effect and will use it in your web pages or blogs! Happy smooth-scrolling!

Nintendo Wii latest innovations

Nintendo Wii is such a revolutionary gaming console. It not only appeals to hard-core gamers and the whole family, it’s also very multipurpose. Some smart people find that Wii can do a lot of things with a little imagination and modifications to the console. Check out the following latest Wii modifications.

Wii light

Wii light. Now you can use Wii as a torch light when you want to answer nature’s call in the night. Cool?

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