From Lifehacker today they outline the new Google Maps with turn by turn navigation which will be available on all Android powered phones. This is really cool and should help me find my way quite nicely. If it works as well as shown in the video then it'll be better than the built in GPS in my Wife's vehicle, as long as you stay in a service area for your phone I assume. Hopefully this was thought of when developing it to at least keep giving directions while disconnected by storing the data on your phone somewhere.

One of my customers tasked me with what I thought would be a simple little addition to the iNotes mail template. He wanted to add a link to the iNotesOutline that opened in a new window to his company intranet. Sounds simple right? Think again. For the life of me I can't get this to work. I've tried all sorts of stuff to no avail. Here's what I've done so far:

• Added an URL outline entry to the iNotesOutline with the URL to the intranet site (http://intranet.company.com) in the "Value" field of the outline entry properties
• In the "Frame" field of the outline entry properties tried the following _blank, "_blank", target="_blank", "target=\"_blank\"" along with a few other variations

The results:
This tries to redirect the current window to a URL like "http://intranet.company.com&presetfields=s_viewlabel;company%20intranet,s_viewname;intranet.company.com&kic&unh=qr3mi4kevl6cnv50k2reecdm21c&f8/"

I've also tried:

• Adding a new frame to the WebInteriorMailFS Frameset with a page that contains an HTML link
  • This frame doesn't show up on the web
• Modifying the "Webmail Picker" page with an HTML link
  • This modification doesn't show up on the web

Now, all of this really returns no results towards the desired goal what-so-ever. It doesn't even break something else, which going by my luck of late, is odd. This task is really starting to use up quite a bit of time to resolve, more time than I am comfortable charging the client so that means it's becoming expensive also. I've done this before in other applications and from my understanding you define a frame that doesn't exist to the "Frame" field of the outline entry properties and that should open the URL in a new window, not the case here. Also, if I try and view the source of the frame which contains the iNotesOutline "Company Intranet" doesn't show up anywhere and I also believe this may be rendered by a JAR file but I'm not 100% certain of that.

So, is there anyone out there dear reader that may have a solution to this issue? I'm all out of options, have a lot of wasted time and money and not to mention the frustration of something that should seemingly be simple and quick to implement taking forever and still not working.

From LifeHacker :

Over the weekend someone stumbled onto a Chrome browser build for Chrome OS on Google's servers. We've seen several false-alarm looks at Chrome OS, and while it is only the browser, it provides a glimpse into the direction Google's going.

the Chrome browser would likely be the main, basic windowing system for Chrome OS.

Here's the link for the entire post. I thought this was interesting, plus I think what is said about Google Chrome being the basic windowing system for Chrome OS is a new approach, though I'm not sure how well it would work if you needed to do something that you couldn't/wouldn't normally do on the web. I guess for your basic household chores of paying bills online, reading your online email and basic document editing, Chrome OS would be fine, if the statement above is accurate. But I guess that's probably a big IF.

While working on a request for a customer the other day he had the need for a drop down menu in one of the products I developed for him. Now, I've attempted to do these menus before without much success. I can get it to work in Firefox, Opera and Safari with no problems, but can never get it to work in IE. So, I started searching the web and came across the CSS Menu Generator. This is a very cool tool to use to come up with a CSS driven drop down menu. You pick your template by clicking the customize link underneath the menu you desire to modify and a UI comes up that will allow you to change everything about the menu and even include some pretty cool effects.

For people like me, this is a great tool and cuts out all the crap about trying to get all this to work with IE.

I had been looking for a different software keyboard for my new Android powered phone I spoke about the other day. As I mentioned, the delete key was giving me some problems, actually all the keys along the edge of the screen were giving me issues, which is why I was looking for a replacement keyboard. I just happened across TouchPal while browsing the market and I started reading about it. All the reviews I read were positive so I decided to give it a try. I've been playing with the differences between TouchPal and the default keyboard and I must say that the TouchPal soft keyboard is great. It's predicative word engine is excellent and knows the correct context, plus you can misspell an entire word and it'll still pick up what the word should be. Also, you can choose between 3 different keyboard layouts and many different languages.

Some other features.... You can change the keyboard layout while typing by just doing a horizontal swipe across the keyboard. On the keyboard itself all of the keys also have a symbol underneath the letter/number of which when you press that letter and swipe down, it will enter the alternate symbol or swipe up to capitalize the letter, which is way cool. If you're like me and work with a lot of acronyms you can turn off the dictionary which will allow you to enter those acronyms without the predicative dictionary changing them. If you're not like me and know many different languages, you can switch languages mid sentence with ease, which is also cool.

TouchPal is currently on version 1.0 for Android, but it seems this app has been around a while on palm and windows based devices and is currently in version 4.0 for those devices. This caused me a little bit of confusion at first because I was reading about version 4.0 and the version I had was 1.0. TouchPal is supposed to be free until 9/30/2009, that was yesterday, however as of a few hours ago the app was still free. How long it will be like that is anybody's guess, but if you're interested in this sort of thing you might want to take a look rather quickly. Also if you want to see it in action visit this YouTube video demoing all the features.