Firefox 3 is awesome we all know that, but there are some things that that would just be nice to have. One of those things would be the ability to control what appears for the auto suggest when you type in the URL bar.

Most of the time FireFox does a very good job of figuring out what you want to do, but when it goes bad, it goes really bad and gets annoying fast.

The other day I accidentally typed in “google.com/a”, and from that moment time on, everytime I wanted to go to “google.com”, it would auto complete to “google.com/a”, and i would end up going there. Very annoying.

I searched the Firefox menus but couldn’t find anything to help. I didn’t want to wipe out all of the auto complete entries, I find most of them helpful. I did some research and realized that you can remove these entries manually, but you have to do it in an unconventional way.

How remove those unwanted auto suggest entries

1. The list appears as you type something.
2. Select an entry by pointing you mouse at the item in the list, it will highlight.
3. Press Shift + Delete from your keyboard to delete the entry.

That’s all! You can remove entries from the address bar.  This trick works on any Firefox auto complete list, including text fields and other dropdown suggestions.

This also works on windows, mac and linux machines

Click here to view the embedded video.

Things I was right about:

• Apple will announce a tablet device
• new version of the iPhone OS, 3.2.2
• iPad will run on the iPhone OS
• iPad will run iPhone applications
• The iPad will have a 10 inch screen (9.7 inches is close enough)
• 16, 32, 64 gig versions
• Verizon will not be involved

Things I was wrong about:

• There will be a new iPhone
• The new iPhone will have a new camera. The iPad doesnt have any cameras!

“RotoPhoto” is my first iPhone app. It’s a simple tool that allows you to rotate the orientation of a photo taken with the iPhone. The internal sensors of the iPhone are designed to know what direction is up at all times and auto rotate the iPhone camera for you, so no matter the angle you take the picture they are facing up. If you have owned an iPhone for an extended period of time, then you know that the iPhone can get confused when you take a picture when the camera is pointed down or up, and your picture comes out sideways. The iPhone doesnt have any built in facilities for adjusting your photos. RotoPhoto is a tool that fills that gap.

With RotoPhoto you can fix your photos orientation before sharing them with friends.

RotoPhoto is avaliable for $0.99 USD on the iTunes store.

You can check out http://RotoPhotoApp.com for more information

Click here to view the embedded video.

A few months ago I bought a Mac mini so I could start to develop iPhone applications. I must say that I am growing to be more of a Mac user then I thought i would be. I purposly bought a cheap Mac to get started with, but I’m starting to regret it. One of the downsides of buying a low end computer is the lack of RAM. RAM is the area of the computer where th.e work gets done. Think of RAM as a work bench. The larger the work bench you have, the more things you can be working on at the same time. It boils down to this, more ram, more speed due to less reading and writing to the hard drive. My Mac had 1 Gig of RAM, no where near enough RAM for a power user/programmer.

Coming from a PC and Linux world, I have build all of my own computers since 1996. I’m comfortable working with computer hardware and the Mac mini is just another computer, except its wrapped up in a tiny package. I did some research and realized that it wouldn’t be hard to upgrade the RAM in my Mac. I found that MacSales.com had some great prices on RAM so I went for it and got 4 gigs worth.

I documented the whole upgrade process, and launched a new website, MacMiniRamUpgrade.com. It’s a Do-It-Yourself site to help inspire and walk people through the upgrade process.

Adding the RAM to my Mac mini is one of the best upgrades I have ever done. So much bang for buck. You should do it also! http://macminiramupgrade.com

I have been keeping my ears open for rumors about the new iPhone. Earlier this week, the above image was leaked onto a mac rumors website from a chinese source.

The image above shows a new iPhone model number “MB717LL” with 32GB of Storage. If the poster’s claims are to be believed, the new iPhone will contain the following features:

• 600MHz CPU Speed (up from 400MHz)
• 256MB RAM (up from 128MB)
• Digital Compass and FM
• 3.2 megapixel camera with auto focus
• 32GB size
• No major changes in battery, screen and external casing.

There is no way of telling if this information is correct, but the leaked photos and  information on the unibody MacBook and MacBook Pro also came from the same Chinese website, to they have some merit in my mind.

It’s no suprise that the screen and the physical shape of the device hasnt changed, if it did, us iPhone application developers would be screwed. I think its going to be nice to have a better camera and an FM tuner.

If this is all true, its not a major leap ahead, but I will still be inline to get one. I am guessing that the device will be announced and possibly released at the WWDC (Apple Worldwide Developers Conference) in June.

I never noticed how often I use the “home” and “end” keys when I type until they were taken away from me. I am a programmer by trade, and as a result, I type code all day long. On a PC the end key will take you to the end of a line, and the home key will bring you to the beginning of a line. On a mac, this functionality doesn’t exist. It’s simple missing! It just makes a “ding” at me

Maybe it would be different if I was using a mac keyboard with my mac mini. Right now I am using a KVM switch to share my microsoft mouse and keyboard with my PC and my Mini. As a result, My mind and hands continue to type and work just like I was coding using a PC. “DING DING DING” damn its annoying. I had no idea i hit those keys so often, but the mini does a good job at reminding me

I tried to live with it but it got old fast. I decided to do a google search for “home end keys mac” to see if there was a fix for this. The first result was a God send. keyfixer is a tiny application for pc-to-mac switchers like me, that remaps your keyboard and adds back the functionality of the home and end keys.

It’s amazing how much more productive I feel just by having those 2 keys back. I guess after 15+ years of typing/programing for a living, the home and end keys are a perminiate part of my arsenal and I will never underestimate their power ever again.

As part of my 2009 new years resolutions, I’m going to write an iPhone application and launch it this year. I realized that the first quarter of the year is almost over and I haven’t made any progress on this. The biggest hurdle was the development platform. I’ve tried to install Mac OS X onto my PC several times but it never worked right, so I decided to bite the bullet and get the ball rolling, I spend my hard earned american cash dollars and bought a mac.

I weighted out all my options and decided that the lowest barrier to entry would be the mac mini. I’m not looking to completely switch to mac (yet), I’m planning on keeping my PC going strong and using the mac mini as a development platform.

I was really impressed with the packaging of the mac mini, and the form factor of the actual machine, it’s well…. mini.

It’s going to take a bit if time for me to get the full swing of OS X. I’ve been using windows and ubuntu for so long now that I have an expectation for application behavior, and OS X is throwing some curve balls at me  that I need to get used to. The good thing is that most of my friends, and google are helping me cope and deal with it.

I think it would help if I actually got an apply keyboard to go with it. instead of using my PC keyboard. Too bad that apple doesnt make an ergonomic keyboard like the one I use.

I’m going keep this blog updated with my switching experiance as I slowly easy into the fan boy soaked world that is Apple. iPhone app development, here I come!

There was a new feature introduced with the iPhone 2.1 firmware update that is driving me crazy and making me curse apple an my iPhone daily. I am talking about the SMS multi reminder.

The SMS multi reminder is designed to notify you with an alert if you have an unread SMS (text) message. Sounds good in theory, but trust me, it horrible in practice.

When you receive a new SMS message to your iPhone, the first few lines are displayed in what I can best describe as a pop up box. Often if the message is short, “hey I’m running late”, you see the entire message. This is where the trouble lies. If you get an SMS message and you don’t unlock the phone, open the SMS app, then open the specific SMS thread, the iPhone thinks you haven’t gotten the message, so it will remind you 5 minutes later, and 10 minutes later that you have an unread message, for a total of 3 alerts in 10 minutes for a message you might have already seen.

Example of why this is annoying:
I’m sitting here working on my blog, “PING!”, ah I have a new SMS message on my iPhone, the screen is lit up and the preview box is showing. “From TWITTER: xFLORIDAx – I look like a shaved ape”. Ok, no response needed, I set my phone down. 5 minutes later “PING!” ah! I must have a new SMS message… strange my screen isnt lit up, turn on the screen. no new SMS messages, weird. 5 minutes after that, “PING!”…. so in 10 minutes, I have been alerted 3 times for a message I have already read. ANNOYING! I don’t want to unlock my phone for every little message that is sent to me.

I understand how this could be useful for someone who gets 1-5 text message a day… I average over 200 a day. Most messages come from twitter and don’t require a response. I would disable the multi reminder if I could, but apple doesn’t allow you to change the setting for it. It’s just on, like it or not. The only way to prevent the SMS multi reminder is to disable text notifications all together, and I’m not going to do that. I like getting one and only one notification when I get a new message.

If im in a meeting, should my pocket buzz 6 times in 20 minutes to let me know I have 2 text messages? GTFO! I should only be notified two times.

I really hope that Apple allows people to turn the SMS multi reminder on and off in the next update. I can’t imagine it’s to hard to do.

I have blogged about it before, I have a HTPC (home theatre pc) running in my living room, hooked to my TV. I started off with MythTV, but settled on Window Media Center 2005.

When I first built the Media Center machine, I had basic cable, with no DVR, so I let the media center handle all of that. Now I have Verizon FIOS with HD, and one of their HD DVR Boxes, and I rarely use my media center pc, but its always nice to be able to flip the input over to it and watch youtube and browse the web. I also like the fact that I can download all sorts of movies and tv from the darkside of the web and watch them on the tv. That was a huge plus.

For a while now, the Media Center has been acting funny. I built it on a shoe string budget with some questionable parts I had laying around, so I didn’t expect it to live forever. The other day it stopped working all together.

Today I took it apart to see what the problem was. After some investigation, I found the cheap power supply was dead, and it took the mother board/processor with it. FAIL!

Well, here I am at a cross roads. Before it was a matter of software, now I need new hardware. What do you think I should build or buy?

The main things I’m looking for in a HTPC

• Ability to browse the web
• Watch Videos I download form the internet, mostly divX files
• Small form factor
• Doesn’t really look like a computer
• Blu-ray is a bonus

Should I build another Window xp MCE machine, Windows Vista Ultimate, mac Mini, apple TV, myth TV? I don’t even know where to start.

I’ll blog my research as I go. Lets see what you think I should do.