In less than 12 hours (since activating Swype), typing emails and text messages on my cell phone has gone from a chore to more enjoyable than typing on a full size keyboard. This might be the only true productivity app on your phone, and the best part is that you won’t have to keep up with any lists or be bothered by any reminders.

How to Get and Install a Swype Keyboard

1. Register at Swype Beta. You’ll need this user name & password to install the app.
2. Click the link in your confirmation email to download the Swype installer (took about an hour to get my email).
3. Once your download completes, click the .apk file.
• You may be prompted to allow installation of third party apps in your settings (do this! really, it’s ok)
4. Now enter your info from step 1 and click download.
5. Click “enable Swype” and leave the default settings (you can change them later in your settings and they make this claim to ease any fears: We don’t collect
   information you type.).
6. Now press and hold in any text input area. Choose “Input Method” > “Swype”
7. Enjoy your new keyboard (give it a day) and note that these steps look more difficult than they are, it’s really quite straight forward.

Your fingers are welcome.

Questions or problems? Check the bottom of this webpage. You can also get some handy video tutorials on their site.

P.S. iPhone owners will need to wait on this.

First, take note of the body classes called when your site is viewed in IE (you can see this by viewing the source code in the right-click context menu when you’re on the page with the problems). In IE8, my about page looks something like this:
body class=”custom about ie ie8″

While in Firefox 3.5, my about page looks like this:
body class=”custom about”

This will enable you to create CSS rule(s) which will apply to your site only when users view it in an IE browser.

Second, in IE8 you can tweak your pages (much like Firebug for Firefox) with the built in Developer Tools (Navigate to the ‘Tools’ menu and you should see it beneath there).

The developer tools will open up in another window. Select the CSS tab at the top and then you should be able to select your custom.css style sheet from the drop down menu. As you un-check/check the boxes next to the different CSS rules, you will be able to see the changes made live to your webpage in the other window. You will also be able to change the current styles and add new ones (right-clicking in the developer tools window has some useful functions for adding rules to your style sheet).

Finally, changing your custom.css in developer tools won’t make your changes permanent, so once I get things right, I usually just make the changes manually to my custom.css (there may be a better way, but this is what works for me).

Good luck!

P.S.
Just to be clear, the information above refers to my setup which includes:

• Firefox 3.5
• IE8 (Thesis will apparently read which version of IE the site is viewed in and will display the appropriate body classes – IE6/IE7/etc. – allowing even more specific CSS rules)
• WordPress 2.8
• Thesis 1.5.1

When identifying the IE specific rules in your custom.css file, it is not necessary to include the .custom class specification. Instead, use the appropriate IE body class. For instance:

.ie #header { border-top: 1px; }

Some Related Resources

• http://diythemes.com/answers/custom-css-classes-posts-pages/
• http://diythemes.com/forums/customization/4838-how-do-i-link-custom-stylesheet-ie-browsers.html (members only)

Google Reader does not play well with feeds requiring authentication (Following Your Friends on Twitter with Google Reader doesn’t work; luckily this tweak fixes that!). Here is the straight forward and secure way to resolve the problem of adding your authenticated Twitter feed to Google Reader or any other feed reader you use.

NOTE: A Google Feedburner Account is Required (if you have a Google Account, you probably already have access to Feedburner)

1. Open Your Feedburner Account

   Simply open your existing Feedburner account and when you see the space to add a new feed, enter this (replace “myusername” and “mypassword” with your Twitter account information):

   http://myusername:mypassword@twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/9999999.rss

2. Create Your Feed

   The on screen step-by-step process will guide you through, it’s really easy. You can add stats if you want, but that’s really unnecessary unless you are planning to publish your feed publicly.

3. Add Your New Feed URL to Google Reader

   Your original Twitter RSS feed (http://twitter.com/user-name/with_friends) now looks something like this:

   http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Twitter/Enter Whatever You Want

Congrats on removing that annoying Twitter DRM!

Hope that helps; I had to search through some comments until I found this great workaround and didn’t see any solutions that were safe/private enough in the Google search results for “twitter feed google reader“.

Not much to say on Twitter, but if you’re interested: @joelhaus

The Basic Idea:
Allow users to create and publish spreadsheets with dynamically updating data online to their own websites. The method used to cull the data is quite easy -a little too easy if you have a desire to publish complex data results- and has the potential to make any Joe Shmoe an instant RSS expert (Not sure about this, but typically, RSS feeds allow for very little customization by the end user; this is unlike Google’s new dynamic cell formulas).
Here are the formulas users will apply in Google Spreadsheets:

GoogleLookup function
Syntax: =GoogleLookup(“entity”, “attribute”)

GoogleFinance function
Syntax: =GoogleFinance(“symbol”, “attribute”)

In The Past:
Only VB programmers and businesses wealthy enough to subscribe to Bloomberg and Reuters data services have been able to harness the vast amounts of dynamic data available over the internet. Today, they still are pretty much the only ones who can do this – Although, Google Spreadsheets has integrated these very interesting functions which at least takes a step in that direction.

The following is a live example embedded into this post:
(This was super easy)

Publishing your own dynamic spreadsheet:

1) If you haven’t already, sign up for a Google account. Play around with the above formulas until you’re happy with what the spreadsheet looks like (you’ll see the data dynamically populate the cell once you enter a “proper” attribute, entity and/or symbol – this wan’t so easy for me while messing with different LookUp function).

2) Click the “Publish” tab on the top right. Change the “Automatically update every 5 minutes?” option to YES. Now click on the “Re-Publish” button to save your settings.

3) Look further down in this section and click on “More publishing options”

4) For “File format” choose: HTML to embed in a webpage – adjust the other settings as desired.

5) Now, simply Generate URL and copy the HTML into your webpage (note: WordPress users should go into their options and revert from the RTF editor to avoid any problems).

Get examples & read more about these functions here:

This slick little service has gotten me out of a pinch on numerous occasions. Just last night I was able to send a text message to GOOGL (46645) – leave off the ‘E’ – to get the address for a local bar. The response time was less than 30 seconds (this has been a typical wait time in my experience). Then, all I had to do was forward it on to my friends who were all meeting there, that’s it! And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Here are some other things Google says you can do with this very cool service:

“get phone listings, weather conditions, question answering, movie showtimes, sports scores, and more.

Requirements: A text messaging plan from your mobile service provider; any old mobile phone should work.

Here’s the comprehensive list of cool things you can do:

There’s also a useful ‘help’/'tips’ message you can receive from Google that includes brief instructions on the various ways to use the service. Due to inbox limits on most phones, this instruction message may get deleted. You can prevent this by using the lock feature on your phone…if not, you can always send a text with the word ‘help’ or ‘tips’ to get another copy.

Some Final Thoughts:
As far as I can tell, there are no restrictions on your service carrier, type of phone or location within the lower 48 states. If there’s more data than will fit in a single message, you’ll recieve multiple text messages that are numbered accordingly.

One of the nicest things about this service is the minimal demand it puts on the hardware (cell phone) you’re carrying around. Take the Google SMS service for a spin at their website to get a feel for how it works with their very real demo. So shelve that expensive data plan and ramp up your monthly text message limit.

NOTE: This service has been available for awhile now, but it’s so useful that I felt it deserved this entry.