Marketcircle has just announced that its iPhone simulator, iPhoney, is going open source. Hooray. That means this cool applet will stay free and current.

iPhoney is a free, Mac-only app that lets web designers see their sites with pixel-perfect accuracy, according to Marketcircle. While this isn’t a full-blown iPhone simulator, it does let you preview your work via its Safari-based browser.

Looking for a way to see how your web creations will look on iPhone? Look no further. iPhoney gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment—powered by Safari—that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone. It’s the perfect 320 by 480-pixel canvas for your iPhone development. And it’s free.

Since I don’t have an iPhone, nor do I anticipate getting one any time soon, this is the best way I have to test my sites for the newest kid on the block.

In my own experimentation with iPhoney, the product worked as promised. Zoom to fit works (though the pinch-zoom doesn’t…yet), as does rotating the phone to go into landscape mode.

Links:

• iPhoney site
• SourceForge home (currently does not have a download package)

I was using The Google to find a little more lorem ipsum text than my standard 4 paragraphs when I came across Lorips.com.

http://www.lorips.com/

Very clever.

GoDaddy offers an SSL Certificate product for $20 called a TurboSSL. I’ve used this certificate on several occasions, but not without difficulties. Before you buy one thinking this is a great deal, remember that there’s a Dark Side to this product, which is why I would recommend staying away from them for your mainline projects.

Typically, a certificate from a trusted source will set you back $120-$250 bones a year. That’s a lot for what is ostensibly a hash of numbers. But this is an industry that is not quite commoditized yet. For one, you want to use a certificate from a trusted source such as Thawte, Verisign, or GeoTrust. These companies have root certificates installed in every shipping browser and the products you buy from them work out of the box, so to speak.

Secondly, the importance of solid customer service shouldn’t be underestimated. This is a concern especially around renewal time or if you change servers.

For these two reasons, I do not recommend TurboSSL from GoDaddy. The product is actually resold and managed by a company by Starfield Tech. Never heard of them? Neither had I until I had to deal with some technical issues. I’ll spare you the details, but their customer service is among the worst I’ve encountered and could be summed up by “you’re on your own, buddy.” I guess you get what you pay for.

The other concern with TurboSSL is that it is not based on a root certificate. It depends, instead, on something called an Intermediate Certificate. This dependency means that in almost every circumstance, installation is going to involve some difficulty. Now, most of the hosting companies I’ve come across will install this intermediate certificate free of charge, but this is a big pain in the ass for all involved and should be something to consider.

[For detailed installation instructions of a GoDaddy TurboSSL certificate, click here].

Are there circumstances in which the TurboSSL cert makes sense? Sure. If you have a low-budget or low-traffic application, it makes sense. The certificate, once installed, is perfectly fine. It’s a 256-bit AES encrypted cert as good as any of the others. It also makes sense if you’re in a prolonged development cycle and want to hold off on an expensive cert. And if you have root access to your own server, this product is relatively easy to install.

But the customer service issues and difficulty in dealing with the intermediate certificate are big ones. Big enough that I recommend that you stay away from the TurboSSL certificate in most circumstances.

[Note: As surprising as this may be, Danica Patrick, to my knowledge, has never visited StringFoo.com, nor does she endorse this site or condone my rantings. Danica, if I'm wrong, please leave a comment below...]

I recently had a need to create a ton of fake users to test a system I’m building for a client. This required more than your average “tuser1″ type one-offs. I need to stress the system, so I dusted off an old post over on the most excellent Signal vs. Noise blog written by the 37 Signals guys who recently went through a similar need when building their Highrise contact manager. A Google search and some good, old fashioned hunting revealed the post I was looking for.

For demo purposes, we’ve had to populate Highrise with a bunch of fake people. Here are some of the sites we used to save time and increase randomness while creating these make-believe contacts:

The Random Name Generator pulls first and last names from a couple of genealogy sites. Some fun ones that turned up: Garfield Morland, Juniper Pinney, Keaton Dimsdale, and Seymour Zeal.

A search for “John Smith” at whitepages.com provides addresses and phone numbers (we change the street and phone numbers by a couple of digits).

Plambeck.org has a company name generator that serves up choices like Sems Research, Cadridium, Nated Design, etc. 2robots.com also offers a Random Business Name Generator.

For job titles, The Economic Research institute has a huge list. And there’s also GigantaMegaCorp’s Job Title Generator which spits out random ones like Inter Purchasing Planner, Senior Engineering Associate, and Foreign Information Processor.

[via Making Random Contacts by Matt Linderman]

I found the White Pages method unusable for bulk-applications, so I turned up an ancient app for The Windows called RandomData 2.3 by Geoff Phillips. The trial version cranked out fake addresses like nobody’s business and I was off to the races.

I’ll also throw in some custom PHP functions for good measure:

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function generateFakeIP()
{

    return rand(12,97).’.’.rand(1,255).’.’.rand(0,255).’.’.rand(1,255);
}

function genFakeEmail($username,$company)
{

    $retStr = strtolower($username.’@’.$company);
    $retStr = str_replace(’ ‘,”,$retStr);

    $domain = array(’com’,'com’,'com’,'com’,'net’,'edu’,'org’);

    $thisDomain = array_rand($domain);

    $retStr .= ‘.’.$domain[$thisDomain];

    return $retStr;

}

function genPhoneNums()
{

    $parenSet = array(array(’(',’) ‘,’-'),
                      array(’(',’) ‘,’-'),
                      array(’(',’) ‘,’-'),
                      array(’(',’) ‘,’-'),
                                        array(”,’ ‘,’-'),
                                        array(”,’ ‘,’-'),
                                        array(”,”,”),
                                        array(”,’.',’.'),
                                        array(”,’.',’.'),
                                        array(”,’.',’.'));

    $whichArr = array_rand($parenSet);
    $punctSet = $parenSet[$whichArr];

    $thisPhoneNum  = $punctSet[0];
    $thisPhoneNum .= getRandNums(3, false);
    $thisPhoneNum .= $punctSet[1];
    $thisPhoneNum .= getRandNums(3, true);
    $thisPhoneNum .= $punctSet[2];

    $thisCellNum   = $thisPhoneNum;

    $thisPhoneNum .= getRandNums(4, true);
    $thisCellNum  .= getRandNums(4, true);

    return array($thisPhoneNum, $thisCellNum);

}

function getRandNums($charCount, $canBeZero=true)
{
    $retStr = “;
    for($i=0; $i<$charCount; $i++)
    {
        if($canBeZero && $i==0)
        {
            $retStr .= rand(0,9);
        } else {
            $retStr .= rand(1,9);
        }
    }

    return $retStr;
}

Enjoy!

Review: Path Finder for OS X

PathfinderIf you’re an experienced Mac user, you have no doubt wanted to pull your hair out over the inadequacies of the Finder. I mean, clicking through hierarchical folders is so 20th century.

This is where QuickSilver (which may rank as the greatest “how did I ever live without this app?” app ever. (If you haven’t experienced QuickSilver, run, don’t walk, to Blacktree.com and download a free copy immediately. I’ll wait…Done? Good. Welcome to The Clubb.)

Experienced QuickSilver users already know the joy of rarely having to hunt and click for a file. (In my mind, Apple is seriously missing the boat by failing to integrate QuickSilver as-is directly into Leopard. However, that’s a post for another day.) There are rare occasions, however, when one must wander deep into the jungle of the Finder. This is where Path Finder comes in.

Path Finder is ostensibly a Finder replacement, although I don’t recommend this all-or-nothing approach. At its most basic, Path Finder can pretty much look and act just like any Finder window. But you have to try really hard to make it this simple. With a few clicks and a few minutes of exploration, you realize that Path Finder does far more than the Finder ever does.

Things I like about Path Finder:

* The “Drag Stack.” This alone is worth the price of admission. The Drag Stack is a handy little holding bin that holds any number of files from any number of sources. You can then act upon these en masse or one at a time once you navigate to your destination.
* The Breadcrumb Bar lets you traverse the entire path your selected file or folder
* Tabs. My god, how did we ever live without these? Just like Firefox, you can open separate tabs that allow you to hop from folder to folder with ease.
* Integrated file commands that allow you do act upon a selected file with ease. Want to compress and email a folder? Take your choice of compression algorithms.
* Taps into the power of OS X. Your stock Mac does a good job of hiding its Unix underpinnings, but Path Finder exposes the power of Unix with an integrated terminal, scripting, and any number of tools and services.

Pathfinder

Path Finder is not a perfect app. Far from it. For one, by exposing the innards of your Mac, it’s very technical. This means that Path Finder is not for everyone.

It’s also an acquired taste, even for power users. I, for one, had a difficult time getting used to switching to the app instead of just popping out to the desktop.

For another, it boasts a UI that only a Cocoa developer could love. Every edge except the top one has a pop-out window making the Swiss Army knife analogy even more apt. To make room for all the windows and features, the designers to using tiny icons and microscopic text. You can enlarge these, of course, but out of the box, Path Finder may very well make your eyes bleed.

Another ding against Path Finder is that it’s an app. This may sound strange, but I would expect a Finder replacement to live at a level of integration deeper than an app. So to use Path Finder, you have to switch to it like any other full app. For instance, it would be handy if F11 revealed Path Finder instead of the desktop. I would prefer to see Path Finder embedded in the system to the extent that QuickSilver is, meaning you can get at it from any number of directions and it’s always there when you need it. To be fair, it’s not strictly true that Path Finder doesn’t have system-level roots, but for the most part it works and behaves like a high-level app.

On the whole, however, Path Finder is an app to be appreciated. While I’m not as passionate about Path Finder as I am QuickSilver, I recommend Path Finder to power users who are frustrated by the shortcomings of the Finder.

Path Finder is $39.95 but comes with a fully-functional 30-day trial. Download it from CocoaTech’s web site.

[FUI = Frequently Used Items]

I just discovered this tip myself. Did you know that you can drag items into the toolbar at the top of every finder window? This is highly useful for things like Path Finder’s “Reveal in Path Finder” AppleScript, or frequently used application icons like QuickSilver.

This is as simple as dragging your desired item up to the toolbar, pausing a moment, and dropping the item. The pause is necessary as it takes a moment for the Finder to recognize that you want to change the toolbar (as opposed to simply dragging an item over the toolbar on your way to somewhere else).

I woudn’t recommend cluttering your toolbar with every application on your machine. Rather use this area judiciously for scripts or apps that you need to access in the context of the Finder window.

Seems like you can’t swing a dead cat without having iPhone “news” jackhammered into your skull. Yes, it’s coming out on the 29th. Yes, it looks cool. Yes, Apple has done a superb job of whipping the world into a frenzy of anticipation. But, <omg> I’m sick of the coverage. Egregious examples include the Apple Phone Show, MacBreak Weekly, and, oh, let’s say every Mac rumor site on the net.

Now, I’m not a hater. I love Apple stuff as much as the next guy. But for christsake, shaddup already, folks. The coverage has reached such a fevered pitch, you’d think this was the second coming of The Beatles featuring Elvis (the skinny Elvis, not an incarnation of the mayonnaise-and-banana-sandwich-eating-uppers-and-downers-popping version). I, for one, am about to vomit (especially after the mayonnaise-and-banana reference).

Reality check: this is a $600+ device before an incredibly overpriced and slow EDGE data plan and a 2 year contract ($1k+ without a contract, supposedly…good luck on finding one). Don’t forget that you’re shackled in the US to ATT, the fine, upstanding folks that helped the NSA spy on you.

Anyhoo, there’s no chance in hell my little rant here will shake some sense into the press and bloggers out there, but at least it let me vent a little. Now, move along. Nothing to see here…

Safari has an excellent set of debug tools in a hidden Debug menu. To reveal this menu, type the following into Terminal:

l337_d3v$ defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

Restart Safari and you’ll see the newly revealed menu to the right of the Help menu. There are quite a few esoteric functions in this menu, but among the more useful are the “Open page with…” options that throw your current page over to any other browser installed on your system and the JavaScript Console which makes debugging JavaScript a little easier.

A little-publicized feature in the recent release of Parallels Desktop 3.0 is the inclusion of a 6-month free trial of Kaspersky Internet Security right there in the Actions menu. This includes both a firewall and a virus scanner.

It’s always a good idea to run a virus scanner on a Windows installation, and Kaspersky is one of the better ones out there. This is especially true in light of how tightly integrated Parallels 3.0 is with the host Mac OS. While it’s unlikely that you’ll get hit by most trojans and malware, anything that does file manipulation or deletion and that can see the host OS from Parallels is a potential vector for problems.

Better safe than sorry. And it’s free (for 6 months, at least).

Amazon is taking pre-orders for Leopard for $129.00. As with all pre-orders on Amazon, it comes with a lowest-price guarantee, so if the price drops any time after you’ve placed the pre-order, you get the product at that lower price.

If you haven’t yet seen the updated Leopard site, there’s a lot there to soak in. Notably new are new details on Desktop upgrades including Stacks, integrated Cover Flow, and Quick Look, as well as other new features throughout the OS. Check it out on Apple’s site.

[EOP]