Elements for webOS.

Elements is more of a personal application that it is for the community. I’m the type of person that carries around a pocket periodic table in my wallet (because you never know when you’ll need to know the Atomic Weight of Lithium). I’ve had my pocket periodic table for 10 years now and over time the ink has started to fade making a lot of the values difficult to read.

My answer to this problem was to make an application for my phone. I always have my phone with me so it works out. Because it’s just bytes on the phone I was able to add information that wouldn’t fit on a credit card sized periodic table. I am charging $0.99 for Elements on webOS, I don’t expect to make a lot of money with Elements. But I like to think that it’s a handy reference tool for people that need it or like to have one handy. See the screen shots for more detail.

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My GPS started out as kind of an accident for me.  I stumbled across the API for this while working on another application.  After tinkering around with it for a few hours I decided that it couldn’t hurt to make an app based around these API calls and My GPS was born.

My GPS started out as just a simple get location/get speed app but as I worked more and more on it I have been able to add some different features.  My GPS allows the user to see heading/speed/altitude/latitude longitude and the user can see the margin of error as well.  I’ve done my own calculations to let the user decide if they want the speed in MPH or KPH and they can turn top speed for the current session on as well.

In addition to these setting I have added the ability to search for nearby locations and included a list of common things that people would want to search for: gas station, restaurant, hotel etc.  They can also enter their own search term if what they want is not in the list.

There’s also the ability to ask for directions, if you have gotten your current location recently it will prepopulate the ‘from’ address with that one.  Of course you can change that if you want.

Update: some people have been having issues with My GPS not returning information when requested.  I believe that this is because they don’t have a very good signal and that when I created the application I decided to conserve battery life which would cause long delays in getting information (or it possibly wouldn’t be returned).  I have hopefully fixed this issue with an update that should be approved in the next couple of weeks.

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Recently a friend of mine had their contract come up for renewal with Verizon.  They had seen the commercial for the Palm Pre (finally, a good commercial) and were really interested in buying the Pre on for Verizon.  This friend asked me to go with because they knew that I had some pretty good knowledge of cell phones in general and definitely know about the Pre.  I didn’t think it was necessary for me to come with since they had already decided what phone to get it would just be a matter of them going in and asking for it.

I was wrong.  It started out well enough.  We get in the Verizon store and asked the salesperson to show us the Palm phones.  But the salesperson didn’t know much about the Pre (or seemingly any other phone really).  They didn’t have a working Pre (or Pixi) on display, though every other phone they had on display was a working phone, so I had to do the demonstration for my friend on how it works and what you can do etc.

Not having a working Palm was kind of odd considering every other phone had a working floor model, but I didn’t think it would matter for this particular sale because I had my phone with me and could answer any questions.  This is where the whole experience went bad.  Every time my friend asked if the Pre had some feature or function (which it did have almost all of them) the salesman would pipe in with a ‘Yeah, you can do that on the Droid/Storm’ kind of comment.

Now, I have done my homework, and yes the Droid and Storm did have a lot of the same function as the Pre – but he flat out made up a lot of things that were not true.  When my friend noted that the keyboard on the Pre was a bit small (give us an on screen keyboard Palm) the salesman was very quick to point out the size on the Droid and Storm.  He even touted the Storms ability to restore all of your settings if you have to replace the phone, something I pointed out that the Pre did also – at which point he said ‘no it doesn’t’.

At this point I’m trying to be polite with the salesman and trying to not sound combative with him.  But I really do hate it when sales people start spewing bullshit.  I used to be one of these slimy salesmen while in college, so ’sales speak’ is pretty easy for me to pick out whether it’s buying a car/phone/computer, they all come off the same.

Now my friend was much more confused than when we first showed up and decided that a Droid or Storm was too expensive and that she didn’t know about the Pre any more.  So she left without buying any phone.  Verizon and Palm could’ve made a sale there, but the salesman essentially talked my friend out of the Pre.

My point in all of this is that Palm is going about selling these devices the wrong way.  Recently Palm announced weaker than expected sales for webOS devices (again).  The response: we need better marketing (which is sooooooooooooo true) and we need to educate the salesmen better.

Educating the sales people that sell a webOS phone might do some good, but my guess is that the vast majority of the sales people don’t care about any features of any of their phones.  They care about their spiffs, and my guess is that the spiff on selling a Storm or Droid was higher than on a Pre or Pixi.  So Palm should save the money that they were going to spend on education and spend it on kick backs to the sales force instead.  Sales people go where the money is, and if the money is in webOS phones that’s what will be pushed.  If they need to educate themselves to help them sell the Pre/Pixi they will do that with or without the assistance of Palm.

Short of copying Apple and opening up Palm stores around the country Palm is going to have to rely on sales at third party stores.  And there’s a lot of competition sitting on the shelves of those third party stores.  Palm needs to show them the money if they want the sales force to push Palm over Droid or Blackberry.

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My second try at an app for the Palm webOS platform. UberCalc simply contains a bunch of calculators and conversions. Calculators include: loan, sale price, sale tax, tip calculator, date, leasing, and tire size (yes I incorporated the tire size calc into this app). The converters include: temperature, speed, volume, weight, and length. It’s not all that sophisticated but it does what it says it does without fail. I have some ideas for future features if I ever get the time to implement them.

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My first attempt at a Palm Pre application (and mobile application for that matter).  I created an application like this for one of my car oriented websites so I figured this would be a good place to start.  This app lets you calculate how far off your speedometer will be if you change your tire size.  Your cars computer calculates a lot of different things based on your tire height; including speedometer, miles traveled, rpms etc.  It’s a rough app but it’s free, so be kind

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It used to be the case that search engines would figure out what sites to display for a given search based on keywords from each site compared to the words in the search. But then Google came on the scene. Google indexes your entire site, not just the keywords. That’s why content is so important, you could stuff a thousand keywords onto your site but if you don’t have the content to back them up Google doesn’t care. So are keywords still that important to use?

Google may look at them to try to figure out what category your site will go into for some regular expression matching based on a users search, but it probably won’t matter unless you have a high pagerank with a ton of backlinks.

Having said all that I wouldn’t just abandon keywords on your page. No one knows how the algorithms work for search engines so it’s better to be safe than sorry. Keep using them, but focus on content and linking.

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In the early days of Adsense/Adwords some webmasters figured out that you could buy cheap Adwords to drive traffic to your site so that the traffic would click on their expensive adwords.  This practice is commonly called arbitrage.  The word fits, arbitrage means to take advantage of the difference in price on nearly identical items in different markets.  The markets are adsense/adwords, the items here are the adwords that are bought and sold.

To do this you would have to research high paying keywords (finance, medical) and create a site that has *some* useful information about that.  The idea being that you want those to be the ads that appear on your site while providing useless information to the user creating a desire in the user to click your ads.  Then comes the harder part, you would need to setup your adwords campaign.

For this you need to find keywords that are similar to the ones you are targeting with your adsense site, but are much cheaper.  It has to be similar because your target audience needs to be already interested in what the ads on your site will display.  They need to be cheaper because you will only earn a fraction of the money that is paid for the clicks on your site (while you pay for the entire click on the adword you buy) and you need to make a profit.

There are many stories of people on the web spending thousands of dollars on adwords to make substantially more than they spent with adsense.  For a while this worked, but Google being a company that likes profit shut this down.  They’ve adjusted their algorithms now to the point where making money using arbitrage is very difficult.  You can try it but very few people succeed at it.  And if you get shut down one month you’ll be left with paying for your adwords bill with no adsense income.

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Too often when viewing file names on websites I notice that the owner decided to put_underscores_between_all_of_the_words in the name of the file.  This is a common programming practice and since many website owners have experience with programming they do the same with all the file names on their sites.

The pitfall of this practice is that Google will treat the name of the file as one word.  Meaning that if you upload a file with the name of ‘foo_bar’ when someone does a google search for ‘foo bar’ your page will not appear anywhere near the top of the results.  If the user instead had searched for ‘foo_bar’ they will find your page towards the top.

The two best places you can fix this issue is with image names and URLs.  If you have an image that you want people to find through a Google image search do not put underscores between the words in the file name.  If the URLs on your site describe the page that the user is viewing and would like a Google search for the words in your URL to display your URL (I.E. you have a page with URL of help_with_cats and someone searches for ‘help with cats’ you want your page with the same title to appear in the results) you need to remove the underscores.

That’s great, you say, but what do I replace the underscores with?  You can get away with filenames that have spaces in them, but you can’t do the same with a URL.  The interwebs does not permit this.  The answer to your question is the same key on your keyboard.  Google treats the hyphen character as a space.  So files and URLs with hyphens in them are treated as separate words.  So if you have a file on your site named ‘foo-bar’ and someone does a search for ‘foo bar’ your page will display in the results.  The same is true for URLs.  Your page titled ‘help-with-cats’ will show up higher in search results for the search ‘help with cats’.

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There are two different possibilities as to why you have a click worth $0.00.  The first is the most common, the big G has determined that the click is invalid and therefore does not pay out for it (they also don’t charge the person that bought the advertisement).  If you see a lot of clicks worth zero you should be concerned about your adsense account.  If Google suspects you of fraudulently clicking on your own ads they will suspend your account.  Either you need to stop clicking on your own ads or you need to inform Google that someone else is clicking on your ads in a manner that looks fraudulent (you do this so you have a paper trail to at least fight an upcoming ban).

If you aren’t the culprit of the fraudulent clicks the best thing you can do is take down all of your adsense ads immediately.  You won’t be making any money while your ads are down but it’s better to not make any money for a few days than to have your adsense account banned.  Before you decide to put the ads back up check your logs and make sure that none of the IP addresses that were clicking your ads have been to your site recently.  When you do decide to put the ads back up take a couple hours and watch your IP logs and check your adsense account often.  If you see any fraudulent clicks take them down again.

Make sure you are detailing all of this so that you can eventually send a letter off to Google with all the information you have gathered.  Google does not like fraudulent clicks, it wastes their time and resources and defrauds their adwords customers of money if not caught.  The more information you can give to Google the better.  This will also help you if they decide that your adsense account is a risk to their customers and ban it.

The second possibility is much less common.  The ad clicked on your site was worth less than $0.01 to you.

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So you’ve seen Vista on the computers at your local retailer. You also decide that you like the way it looks and feels. But you don’t want to spend the money to buy a whole new computer, plus you’d have to move all of your files over and that can be a pain.

The question becomes, can your computer run the new Windows Vista? Lets take a look at the requirements, straight from Microsoft:

For Home Basic:

1. 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
2. 512 MB of system memory
3. 20 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
4. Support for DirectX 9 graphics and 32 MB of graphics memory
5. DVD-ROM drive Audio Output Internet access (fees may apply)

Windows Home Premium:

1. 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
2. 1 GB of system memory
3. 40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
4. DVD-ROM drive Audio Output Internet access (fees may apply)
5. Support for DirectX 9 graphics with:

• WDDM Driver
• 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)
• Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware
• 32 bits per pixel

So now you’re thinking, did I see Vista home basic or Vista home premium?  This is an easy quesiton to answer.  Home basic is almost never sold.  The differences between Vista home basic and Windows XP are security settings and a few other things.  It looks and feels just like XP when you use it, and no one buys Vista for anything but the look and feel.  So the version you saw at the store that looked really fancy and had cool graphics when tabbing through programs was Vista home premium.

Now that you know what you need minimally you need to decide how much above the minimum specs you need to go (don’t run Vista with a 40 Gb hard drive and a 1 Ghz processor, it’ll be way too slow).

I have two laptops, one runs windows XP, the other runs Vista.  Both have a 2 Ghz AMD processor, and both have 1 Gb of memory.  The XP machine has a graphics card that shares 64 Mb of memory, and the Vista machine has 128 Mb of shared memory for graphics.

Both are similar in specs, and both run the OS they have pretty well.  Where Vista will hurt you is on graphics.  It needs a lot of graphical performance if to show you all that cool stuff it does.  If you don’t plan on doing too much photo or video editing, and don’t play games, then a 128 card with shared memory should work fine for you.

I don’t have much issue with 1 Gb of total memory, but my computer really slows down if I’m doing too many things at once.  Each program you have open uses up a chunk of your memory, so the more windows you have open the more is used up.  When too much memory gets used up your computer will slow down quite a bit.  So if you really like to have a lot of different windows open you’ll want to get 2Gb or more.

If you do plan on doing a lot of graphically intense stuff you should get a dedicated graphics card with either 128 or 256 Mb of memory.

Vista eats up hard drive space pretty quick with indexes and other things.  I would recommend an 80 Gb hard drive minimum with most of it unused.

To recap, don’t upgrade if you’re right at the minimum specs for Vista home premium.  If you don’t want to do lots of graphically intense stuff you should be fine with a 128 Mb shared memory, and if you’re willing to keep the number of windows open to a few 1 Gb should be ok for total memory, otherwise you’ll need to upgrade.

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