Common Paradox Tech Blog

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber suggests that bigger, iPad versions of the built-in iPhone Stocks, Calculator, Weather, Clock and Voice Memo were scrapped by Steve Jobs:

It’s not that Apple couldn’t just create bigger versions of these apps and have them run on the iPad. It wasn’t a technical problem, it was a design problem. [...]

DF: iPad Stocks, Calculator, Weather, Clock, Voice Memo Apps Scrapped by Steve Jobs is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb – The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Are you checking out the iPad’s big, mostly empty Home Screen and wondering where the iPhone’s Weather, Stocks, Clock, and Calculator apps have all gone? Are they missing in action, simply unfinished for now, or like Kevin Fox of Fury.com seems to think, could Apple be planning on turning them into Dashboard-style Widgets?

Imagine that a [...]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Could Missing iPad Apps Reappear as Dashboard Widgets?

Sony has announced yet another product at CES. This one is a bit of a head-scratcher for us, though. The Dash Internet Viewer is a sort of touchscreen widget station. Think Chumby, but with a larger (and frankly, beautiful) 7 inch screen and sleeker design. As it turns out, that’s exactly what it is; the Dash runs the Chumby OS.

Sony is pushing the app angle hard, because well, isn’t everyone? The Chumby OS already has over 1000 apps available, and Sony will be making some new ones of its own. The Dash will have Wi-Fi so you can use it to pull down data for those data-hungry apps. There is no internal battery, so don’t confuse this with a tablet device as some already have.  Is this something you need? If so, the Dash will be shipping in April for $199.

Death Note

Two column theme for fans of Japanese animation

Lumiere

Lumiere is the first theme released by the newly created SlackrThemes. It has a bright color scheme with a clean and easy-to-read layout that’s optimized for SEO, has paginated posts and comments, widgetized sidebars, and all of the amenities that you would expect from a theme.

Shofi

Shofi Theme is grid based wordpress theme, powered by 960.gs framework 24 columns with features including Autograbbed Image and resize on the fly, Extra Ordinary Recent Post and Recent Comment, Widgets, Magazine style

Ready2Launch

A WordPress theme, with admin options page for customization, or as simple HTML/CSS page (No PHP/MySQL needed). Includes 6 themes and notes on customization.

Techrey

Three column theme with a widgetized left sidebar and a widgetized footer that you can customize to your hearts content. With gravatars on the front page, and all of the features you love. It’s very minimal too, everything is packed into a small little package for you to enjoy.

Last month we wrote about Trefis, a new financial site that lets you tweak your stock predictions by adjusting variables in a company’s business model, depending on how you think different segments of the company will perform. These predictions are plotted out on attractive interactive charts, but until now those charts were all housed on the site’s homepage. Today, Trefis is launching support for widgets, giving bloggers and financial experts the chance to share their adjusted stock predictions with the world.

CEO Manish Jhunjhunwala says that the early adopters for the widget will likely be bloggers, freelance writers, and columnists who regularly write about business and financial content. He also notes that the site has gotten requests from a broader audiecne of writers who often write about a particular company (e.g. an Apple fan site).

Despite being generally unnecessary, we couldn’t help loving the little Chumby One WiFi widget machine. Speaking of love, a secret message revealed after iFixit’s teardown reveals that it is adorable inside and out.

iFixit’s teardown didn’t reveal anything totally unexpected, with the exception of an inscription on the logic board from the designer that reads: “with love,—bunnie.” However, modders might be interested in the following highlights:

* Notable components found inside the chumby one:
* Freescale i.MX233 CPU, running at 454 MHz
* MMA7455 3-axis accelerometer
* Hynix 923E 64MB DDR DRAM
* QN8005B FM Radio chip
* An inscription that reads “with love, bunnie”

* The MicroSD socket contains a 2GB Kingston MicroSD firmware card,
which can easily be pulled out once the device is opened. Users can
load custom firmware and upgrade chumby one’s storage in a snap.

* There are plenty of ventilation holes in the top and rear outer
cases. Such a Swiss cheese case design allows the chumby to stay
cool without the need for a fan.

* Volume control commands are sent via a rotary encoder that
translates angular degrees of rotation into binary code recognized by
the board.

* The wireless card is attached to a small interconnect board,
converting the four-pin connector found on the logic board into the
USB connector used by the wireless card. This could potentially mean
hacking/upgrading the chumby to 802.11n in the future, were you able
to find a USB Wi-Fi card of similar size.

* You can also unplug the USB Wi-Fi card and plug in regular ethernet
using a USB-to-ethernet dongle.

* The 2W mono speaker is mounted onto a resonance box which occupies
precious interior space, which could be used to stuff more awesome
hacking stuff into the chumby. Alternatively, it could be used as a
secret stash for narcotics.

Hit the following link for full details on the teardown. [iFixit]

New Plugins

Thesis Style Box

Make Styled Note box, Alert box, Help box, Tip Box, Important Box in your posts using classes for Thesis Users.

Style CommentLuv

Style commentators last blog post as displayed by the CommentLuv plugin. This plugin is also compatible with Thesis.

Add Categories to Menu

If you’re using WordPress as a CMS, you may have set up static pages for both a front page (e.g. “Home”) and a page to list your latest blog posts (e.g. “Blog”). The plugin allows you to add categories as links in a submenu.

Taxonomy List Shortcode

The Taxonomy List Shortcode plugin adds a shortcode to your WordPress installation which enables you to display multiple unordered lists containing every term of a given taxonomy. The list can be displayed in one to 5 columns – custom styles are provided.

Revisionary

With Revisionary in place, the meaning of the “edit_others” capability shifts to grant revision submission rights if the owner lacks the corresponding “edit_published” / “edit_private” capability.

Web Worth Blog Value Calculator

Web Worth Blog Value Calculator is a plug-in that gives you a nice tidy widget to display your blog’s current estimated value in dollars. This information is displayed to you and your visitors to demonstrate just how much hard work you have put into your blog

Enable oEmbed Discovery

Website owners can add a bit of HTML to their head that says where their oEmbed provider is located. This allows consumers such as WordPress to embed things from their website without WordPress specifically knowing about their website before hand.

Updated Plugins

scbFramework

This is a plugin toolkit that helps developers write plugins faster. It consists of several classes which handle common tasks:

Tabbed Widgets

Tabbed interfaces are the most common on newspaper type website where they can save a lot of vertical space and make it look less cluttered.

Online Leaf

Provides an interface with Online Leaf, which helps to reduce the amount of energy required to browse the internet, by making websites greener.

WP Geo

Add geocoding and Google maps to your WordPress blog

All in One Webmaster

The plugin has option to add Google, Bing, Yahoo’s Webmaster and Analytics code. Single click sitemap submission to Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.

Store Locator

The Google Maps Store Locator Plugin for WordPress empowers web developers & web site owners to easily manage and display any set of important stores, products, or other locations on their website in an easily searchable manner. Uses Google Maps.

Twitter Goodies

Twitter style Twitter Goodies Profile Widget + Twitter Goodies Search Widget + Twitter Integration (wp to twitter) plugin. All in One plugin for Twitter Goodies.

Back in March 2009 a trio of MySpace execs -COO Amit Kapur, SVP Steve Pearman and SVP Jim Benedetto – left to begin working on a new startup.

In May we learned that the company, then called Blue Rover Labs, had raised $10 million in funding. We also heard a few details about what the startup might be about: <em "The company is supposedly targeting the message board/Internet forum space with technology that aggregates content and serves advertising against it. Real time search (bingo! fundable!) may be part of the business plan as well."

Today the company, now called Gravity, is launching into private beta. At a high level Gravity is an evolution on forums (vBulletin, phpBB, etc.) and groups (Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, etc.) services, which haven’t evolved much over the last decade.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Gravity is available both as a website service at Gravity.com as well as distributed via widgets and an API. They are also offering compelling analytics services for any service that hosts conversations (think broadly – Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Wave, etc.). That service, called Insights, is arguably a startup in itself.

And, finally, Gravity has created a new way of thinking about and exploiting conversational data. They call the way they track and predict the relationships between people and things the Interest Graph (a play on Social Graph, a popular way of describing online relationships between people).

I go into more detail on the products below. And here’s a video I took of the team in their Santa Monica offices yesterday:

TuneWiki, an app that brings music streaming, a lyrics database and music videos from YouTube to one social, customizable media player (iTunes link) has been pretty popular on the iPhone. And now it’s just gone live on the Nokia Ovi store.

Of note is the addition of a ‘Follow’ feature which is only in the Nokia app.

In addition FlyScreen, the customisable lockscreen which features any kind of content widgets, has completed TuneWiki integration into its for Android app.

Sunflower Bloom

Two column theme based on the default WordPress theme. Also available are four other themes on the page.

Punchcut

A clean and versatile theme featuring two gorgeous fonts, hand crafted social icons, and a theme options page.

Patagonia

Patagonia is a clean and seo optimized wordpress theme with Theme Options. Patagonia Theme supports Tag clouds, categories, dynamic widgets, gravatars.

Tandil

Tandil is a very good looking WordPress theme with theme options.

ScrapBook

ScrapBook is a WordPress Theme with two Sidebars, 120 and 200 pixel wide, ideal for Adsense. There is also an Option Page to populate the Footer. Page in German