I am, as of today, an official developer on the YMail.app project. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks you’ll see the app moving forward, with at the very least, a version that works with the latest version of Yahoo! Mail.
To make things more interesting, this is not an official Yahoo! product 
Received some rather good news from O2 today: the £35 per month tariff that I’m currently on is being upgraded in February:
Free minutes: from 200 to 600
Free texts: from 200 to 500
Pleasing!
I recently found out that Yahoo! have launched an anti-phishing mechanism called The Personalized Sign-In Seal. This simple system protects your login details from fraudsters by applying an image of your choice to login pages. After applying an image, you essentially have a login page unique to you that cannot be spoofed.
A very simple idea, but very effective. I’d like to see this introduced to other systems, particularly online banking sites, which phishers target frequently.
One of the things that I find difficult about using my Mac for study is the amount of distractions. Simply by being connected to the internet means there is a whole world of procrastination waiting for me.
When I need to focus on writing an essay, there is a very simple little tool that helps me out. It’s called Backdrop and, like all the best productivity tools, is incredibly simple: Run it, and it covers your screen with a single colour. In my case, it’s black. After that, you can bring your most essential apps to the front and focus on just them. I simply have my editor, and nothing else. All ready for me to bang out text, and because I can’t see my desktop, dock, or other open apps, I feel more focused on my primary task.
If you click on a URL pointing to a PDF document in a Word document, a progress bar appears at the bottom of the application. It says “Word is preparing to load this document:”. The bar then takes a few seconds to fill up, during which you are thinking “okay, so Word is going to load the PDF inside an actual document, right?”. No. Because after the progress meter is completed, up pops the PDF document in your browser.
What on earth is happening in between the time you click a link and when the browser opens? What is Word actually doing that requires a progress bar?
I’m getting involved in an open source Mac project, YMail, and as part of my research I’ve been checking out Lua. From the Lua homepage,
“Lua is a powerful, fast, light-weight, embeddable scripting language.”
The project is a Mac interface to Yahoo! Mail, and we need a nice way to deal with the mainly text-based interactions between the desktop and web application. Objective C, unfortunately, is not particularly suited to text-processing, hence the need for a hybrid solution.
It’s still very early days yet, but I’ll post progress updates on this blog.
Why are classic computer texts so expensive?
So, today at Yahoo! we had the Hack Social, a chance for engineers to meet with product managers in order to brainstorm ideas for mini-projects. In particular, the project, or hack, must be put together in a 24 hour period that runs 7th-8th February: Hack Day. It’s the fifth time such an event has run in Europe.
It’s a great idea as it allows us engineers to work on something completely different from our typical projects. At the Social today were representatives of Yahoo! properties including Mail, Travel and Search. I personally have a particular idea I’d like to try out in the area of Sports…. if all goes well, I’ll be posting the completed hack on here in a few weeks!
Well, here we go. Another day, another blog.