Extempore

Another quick one, phonegap is a tool for your iPhone which will allow you to talk to your local API’s. Currently it holds the following:

• Accelerometer
• Geo Location
• Camera (pending)
• Vibration (pending)

This means that the iPhone portion of places.ae will support Phonegap also. But seriously, if you’re an iPhone user, this is just a must have.

iThanks,
Michael

Suggested by a friend of mine, Tinysong allows you to share any song with your friends.

A simple web application. I wish more web apps were like this, simple and straight to the point.

Multiple banks issues SMS messages and emails for UAE customers to change their PIN codes. Some banks even disabled international ATM cash withdrawal (which would suck if you’re on a holiday and need cash).

So, if you are living in the UAE; it never hurts to change your pin. Which is something you should do on a regular basis anyways.

CSS Optimizer is a tool that will shrink your CSS files and shave off a few kilobytes. I tested a few CSS files on places.ae and, shamefully, saw an average of 33% improvement that’s possible. (Though not as bad as some other sites: salik (49%) and dubai police (62%)).

Very useful tool, especially on mobile sites or sites where bandwidth is an important factor.

Google came out with a new browser, called Chrome. A company that pushes so much into a browser, made their own browser with minimalistic design (as usually done by google) multiple features, such as the incognito windows (wont leave traces in your sites’s history), the built in javascript console, V8 Javascript engine.

See it as a firefox with your necesarry plugins, in a new jacket.

Very interesting product. And it seems that places.ae renders correctly in it, which is probably due to the borrowed Firefox code.

I am afraid that IE(8)’s days are counted.

Thank you,
Michael

An Egyptian secretary guessed the password of a yahoo account of an Emirati UN employee, and was sentenced to three months in jail and deportation.

The “hacker” emailed the victim that he broke into her email account, and was going to release pictures and “other secrets” of her, according to GulfNews.

Not the cybercrime caliber of russian extremist webmasters being “accidentially” executed, but still.