kag's tech blog

Here’s a list of my favorite applications:

• Road Trip ($4.99) keep track of your car’s fuel economy and maintenance expenses. The reason why I bought this one was because you can import and export all of your data. I was able to import my Excel data from the last 4 years!
• Skype (free) I used it to call my girlfriend home on a trip to UK last summer. I would connect to some random WiFi network and call home. It worked much better than I expected!!! And best of all, the calls were free since my girlfriend was also on Skype at home.
• WordPress (free) I used it to update my personal/travel blog while I was on my trip to the UK. Unfortunately at the time OS 3.0 wasn’t out yet, so you couldn’t cut/copy/paste so sometimes it was annoying.
• Kijiji (free) a front-end to the Kijiji classified. Works really well.
• eBay (free) also a front-end to eBay, it works well too.
• Facebook (free) how could I live without this one! The new version that came out a few weeks ago really kicks ass. Can’t wait for video support.
• FlightControl ($0.99) cool little game where the goal is to route planes to the correct landing zones. Sounds easy but when you have 10 planes to manage on the screen at the same time, it’s stressful.
• Bejeweled 2 ($2.99) I think I bought this one on nostalgia alone. You can play for free on the web site, but the application lets you play offline. Truly a classic in its genre.
• Boxed In (free for a limited time) one very cool logic-based puzzle game with 50 different levels. The goal is extremely simple, yet it takes so much thinking. I was really addicted, but it took a few nights to complete it.
• YP.ca (free) the canadian version of the Yellow Pages application. It works really well and you can even run a reverse lookup, which you can’t even do on the website!

And now a list of nice/useful applications that need improvement:

• eBuddy (free) I use this application to connect to MSN. I think the interface needs a bit more work. But I really wish it would support connecting from multiple locations, that way my computer woudln’t get disconnected from MSN when eBuddy goes online.
• craigsphone (free) it’s a useful application but it’s so slow. It seems that it does not cache the results, each time you open an item it loads for a few seconds. It seems to me that they could prefetch the items to open more quickly.

What are your favorite applications?

This new version fixes one very minor bug, one minor CSS annoyance and is a little bit more flexible with those with very custom installations:

• Was not using the PHP function defined() correctly. But this is more of a cosmetic bug fix, as this wasn’t causing any trouble;
• Removed « !important » from one of the CSS rules, as requested by Ted Thompson;
• For those using WordPress 2.6 and higher, it now tries to use the WP_PLUGIN_URL constant, instead of hard-coding the plugins directory path. This allows people who moved the plugins directory somewhere else to use kPicasa Gallery. No impact on people who are already using kPicasa Gallery. Requested by Martin.

Hello everyone,

I just released a new version of kPicasa Gallery. This new version brings a much requested feature, video support.

For this first release, selecting the Highslide engine will integrate the video on your site. Other engines will open a new window to the video on your Picasa account. This is because only Highslide provides an easy way to play videos in a popup.

For an example, check out the « Expérimentations » album in the demo. The last thumbnail on the page is a video.

Don’t forget to rate kPicasa Gallery on its WordPress page!