Needed this today and I know I’m on the only one who will Thanks to ozgrid.com for the hookup. “The hookup”, that was so 90′s wasn’t it!
The Code
Function GetAddress(HyperlinkCell As Range)
GetAddress = Replace(HyperlinkCell.Hyperlinks(1).Address, "mailto:", "")
End Function
To use this UDF push Alt+F11 and go Insert>Module and paste in the code. Push Alt+Q and save. The Function will appear under “User Defined” in the Paste Function dialog box (Shift+F3). Use the Function in any cell as shown below.
Looks like Saturday I’ll be playing with LW’s newest toy, the Apple Ipad Contact me if you’d like to stop by and play with them, I’ll be receiving 2 on Saturday! I have a feeling our expertise offerings are going to expand after Saturday…
A couple of years ago when we went to the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami, we came across a company called Wufoo which just does web forms. Very simple concept, but they do it very, very well and are headed but a couple of brilliant guys. They got off the ground with their company in conjunction with Y Combinator which is an early stage start-up incubator which exchanges start-up money for a small percentage of equity in the company. It’s awesome to see the companies that come out of Y Combinator every year as they’re very inventive and are changing the tech sector every year. Some of the better known companies to come out of Y Combinator are dropbox, reddit, Loopt, Justin.tv, and airbnb. Check out some of the companies they’ve got coming out this year:
“Over the past few years, Y Combinator has helped to launch over 100 successful startups by investing a small amount of money and providing hands-on help to young entrepreneurs. Successful companies include the likes of Reddit, Justin.tv and Loopt among others.
Last year, YC launched around 40 companies, some of which have taken off while others are poised to break out in 2010. With the recent 2010 Demo Day complete, we take a look at current YC companies that are poised to break out this year:
Launched in August of 2009 and dubbed the “eBay for free stuff” by TechCrunch, Listia has revolutionized the way people give and get free stuff online. Craigslist leads to unwanted email spam, no customer support and online scams, while Listia removes all the headaches and makes giving and getting free stuff fun again.
Listia makes it easy to give away the things you no longer want and get free stuff you need in return. The more stuff you give away, the more stuff you get. And by the way, the entire site is free, much like Craigslist. When you give stuff away, you get credits; the more credits you get, the more stuff you can get using an auction system like eBay. Listia does a good job on standing out and offers advantages over Craigslist, Freecycle or eBay.
This site is very addictive and has become a passion for many of it’s users as they have found ways to clean out their closet while managing to get a free iPhone or Xbox in return. To date, Listia has given away a Pool Table, Plama TVs, and even an iPad.
So far Listia.com has raised a healthy round of funding, become a top 10,000 US website (Alexa Rankings) and continues to see strong growth.”
Here are some old commercials of your favorite game systems from the not-so-distant past. Some of these are funny and other are just out there. But all were staples of their time.
1978 Atari Commercial
Colecovison Commercial
Atari 7800 Commercial – The Choice of the Experts
Turbo Grafix 16 Video Game Commercial
Nintendo Game System – Now Your Playing with Power!!!
There is a thin line we must walk between form and function. We’ll always have a bit of both.
If we had a scale from bare-bones utility versus over-the-top flashterbation, we’d be somewhere in the middle everytime. Sometimes we’ll lean towards the utility side and other times we’ll lean towards the experiential side. Usually this is a page-level decision depending on the page’s purpose.
Some examples of when we lean to the experiential side include: when we need to evoke emotion, display complex information, facilitate decisions, or guide through a flow.
We’ll lean to the utility side when we need to people to do something repeatedly, when delivering serious or sensitive information, or when we want to focus attention.
So there’s finally an app that allows you to get around AT&T. It’s called Line2 . It’s only a dollar for the app. It works over WIFI and gives you another line to make and receive calls right on your iPhone or iTouch. There is a $15 monthly charge after the trial period.
Could this be a game changer or just a provoker. Take a read through the entire article below and make your own judgement call.
IPhone App to Sidestep AT&T
For a little $1 iPhone app, Line2 sure has the potential to shake up an entire industry.
It can save you money. It can make calls where AT&T‘s signal is weak, like indoors. It can turn an iPod Touch into a full-blown cellphone.
And it can ruin the sleep of cellphone executives everywhere.
Line2 gives your iPhone a second phone number — a second phone line, complete with its own contacts list, voice mail, and so on. The company behind it, Toktumi (get it?), imagines that you’ll distribute the Line2 number to business contacts, and your regular iPhone number to friends and family. Your second line can be an 800 number, if you wish, or you can transfer an existing number.
To that end, Toktumi offers, on its Web site, a raft of Google (GOOG) Voice-ish features that are intended to help a small businesses look bigger: call screening, Do Not Disturb hours and voice mail messages sent to you as e-mail. You can create an “automated attendant” — “Press 1 for sales,” “Press 2 for accounting,” and so on — that routes incoming calls to other phone numbers. Or, if you’re pretending to be a bigger business than you are, route them all to yourself.
The Line2 app is a carbon copy, a visual clone, of the iPhone’s own phone software. The dialing pad, your iPhone Contacts list, your recent calls list and visual voice mail all look just like the iPhone’s.
(Let’s pause for a moment here to blink, dumbfounded, at that point. Apple‘s (AAPL) rules prohibit App Store programs that look or work too much like the iPhone’s own built-in apps. For example, Apple rejected the Google Voice app because, as Apple explained to the Federal Communications Commission, it works “by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls.” That is exactly what Line2 does. Oh well — the Jobs works in mysterious ways.)
So you have a second line on your iPhone. But that’s not the best part.
Line2 also turns the iPhone into a dual-mode phone. That is, it can make and receive calls either using either the AT&T airwaves as usual, or — now this is the best part — over the Internet. Any time you’re in a wireless hot spot, Line2 places its calls over Wi-Fi instead of AT&T’s network.
That’s a game-changer. Where, after all, is cellphone reception generally the worst? Right — indoors. In your house or your office building, precisely where you have Wi-Fi. Line2 in Wi-Fi means rock-solid, confident reception indoors.
Line2 also runs on the iPod Touch. When you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, your Touch is now a full-blown cellphone, and you don’t owe AT&T a penny.
But wait, there’s more.
Turns out Wi-Fi calls don’t use up any AT&T minutes. You can talk all day long, without ever worrying about going over your monthly allotment of minutes. Wi-Fi calls are free forever.
Well, not quite free; Line2 service costs $15 a month (after a 30-day free trial).
But here’s one of those cases where spending more could save you money. If you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot most of the time (at work, for example), that’s an awful lot of calling you can do in Wi-Fi — probably enough to downgrade your AT&T plan to one that gives you fewer minutes. If you’re on the 900-minute or unlimited plan ($90 or $100 a month), for example, you might be able to get away with the 450-minute plan ($70). Even with Line2′s fee, you’re saving $5 or $15 a month.
Line2 also lets you call overseas phone numbers for Skype-like rates: 2 to 5 cents a minute to most countries. (A full table of rates is available at toktumi.com.) As a handy globetrotters’ bonus, calls home to numbers in the United States from overseas hot spots are free.
All of these benefits come to you when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, because your calls are carried by the Internet instead of by AT&T. Interestingly enough, though, Line2 can also make Internet calls even when you’re not in a hot spot.
It can, at your option, place calls over AT&T’s 3G data network, where it’s available. Every iPhone plan includes unlimited use of this 3G network — it’s how your iPhone sends e-mail and surfs the Web. So once again, Line2 calls don’t use up any of your monthly voice minutes.
Unfortunately, voice connections on the 3G network aren’t as strong and reliable as the voice or Wi-Fi methods. Cellular data networks aren’t made for seamless handoffs from cell tower to tower as you drive, for example — there’s not much need for it if you’re just doing e-mail and Web — so dropped calls are more likely. Fortunately, if you’re on a 3G data-network call and you walk into a hot spot, Line2 switches to the more reliable Wi-Fi network seamlessly, in midcall.
Whenever you do have an Internet connection — either Wi-Fi or a strong 3G area — you’re in for a startling treat. If you and your calling partner are both Line2 subscribers, Line2 kicks you into superhigh audio-quality mode (16-bit mode, as the techies call it).
Your calling partners sound as if they’re speaking right into the mike at an FM radio station. It’s almost too clear; you hear the other person’s breathing, lip smacks, clothing rustling and so on. After years of suffering through awful cellphone audio, it’s quite a revelation to hear what you’ve been missing.
Now, this all sounds wonderful, and Line2 generally is wonderful. But there’s room for improvement.
First, as you’ve no doubt already concluded, understanding Line2 is complicated. You have three different ways to make calls, each with pros and cons.
You miss a certain degree of refinement, too. The dialing pad doesn’t make touch-tone sounds as you tap the keys. There’s no Favorites list within the Line2 app. You can’t get or send text messages on your Line2 line. (The company says it will fix all this soon.)
There’s a faint hiss on Line2 calls, as if you’re on a long-distance call in 1970. The company says that it deliberately introduces this “comfort noise” to reassure you that you’re still connected, but it’s unnecessary. And sometimes there’s a voice delay of a half-second or so (of course, you sometimes get that on regular cellphone calls, too).
Finally, a note about incoming calls. If the Line2 app is open at the time, you’re connected via Wi-Fi, if available. If it’s not running, the call comes in through AT&T, so you lose the benefits of Wi-Fi calling. In short, until Apple blesses the iPhone with multitasking software, you have to leave Line2 open whenever you put the phone to sleep. That’s awkward.
Still, Line2 is the first app that can receive incoming calls via either Wi-Fi or cellular voice, so you get the call even if the app isn’t running. That’s one of several advantages that distinguish it from other voice-over-Internet apps like Skype and TruPhone.
Another example: If you’re on a Wi-Fi call using those other programs, and someone calls your regular iPhone number, your first call is unceremoniously disconnected. Line2, on the other hand, offers you the chance to decline the incoming call without losing your Wi-Fi call.
Those rival apps also lack Line2′s call-management features, visual voice mail and conference calling with up to 20 other people. And Line2 is the only app that gives you a choice of call methods for incoming and outgoing calls.
All of this should rattle cell industry executives, because let’s face it: the Internet tends to make things free. Cell carriers go through life hoping nobody notices the cellephant in the room: that once everybody starts making free calls over the Internet, it’s Game Over for the dollars-for-minutes model.
Line2, however, brings us one big step closer to that very future. It’s going to be a wild ride.
A new challenge came up while redoing the code for our new Company page (to be released soon!). In Company page, employees can add their own background images, which each vary in size and dimensions. These were our requirements for the background image:
It must take up the entire browser size (width and height) on initial load
It must resize with the browser
The image proportions must stay the same as the original
After hours of research, code integration, testing and getting closer to our final product, we found code that integrated perfectly with our needs and is pretty light weight. As I’ve done in the past, I want to share this code so that you can utilize it on your own projects.
The Javascript
First things first, we need to put the javascript code in the <head> of the document. This includes a link to the jQuery library and the code to resize the image. In the example, I am linking to Google’s jQuery library.
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
(function($){
var origDiv = '#origDiv';
var origImg = '#origDiv img';
//resize the image on brower load
$(document).ready(function() {
$(origDiv).resizeImg();
});
//resize the image on browser resize
$(window).bind("resize", function() {
$(origDiv).resizeImg();
});
$.fn.resizeImg = function() {
//define original width and height of the image
var imgWidth = $(origImg).attr('width');
var imgHeight = $(origImg).attr('height');
//define image ratio
var ratio = imgHeight/imgWidth;
//get browser dimensions
var winWidth = $(window).width();
var winHeight = $(window).height();
var winRatio = winHeight/winWidth;
//resize the image
if (winRatio > ratio) {
$(origDiv).height(winHeight);
$(origDiv).width(winHeight / ratio);
$(origImg).height(winHeight);
$(origImg).width(winHeight / ratio);
} else {
$(origDiv).width(winWidth);
$(origDiv).height(winWidth * ratio);
$(origImg).width(winWidth);
$(origImg).height(winWidth * ratio);
}
};
})(jQuery);
</script>
The only part of this code you may want to change is the container div that your image is placed in (highlighted in red)
The CSS
The CSS below accompanies the script that I am using – my main div is fixed so any content above it will scroll without the image scrolling. The script does work 100% without the CSS provided. You may want to change the positioning based on your own needs (depending on if you have content that will go over the image).
If you change the ID of the div, do not forget to change it in all other parts of the code that are highlighted in red.
What It All Means
If you want to know what each section of the javascript code does, here are some quick explanations:
The code begins with opening a function where we will place all of our javascript in and ends with its closing curly brackets. This function makes it possible to use this code along with other javascript libraries
(function($){
...
})(jQuery);
The variables used throughout the script are defined once in the beginning of the function. This way if the class or ID of the div changes, it only has be changed in one place within the javascript.
var origDiv = '#origDiv';
var origImg = '#origDiv img';
The next code resizes the image on the initial page load by calling the resizeImg function used later on in the script:
Now we have the start and close of the resizeImg function that is called in the previous functions.
$.fn.resizeImg = function() {
...
}
Within this function, the dimensions of the image are defined and we determine the image’s ratio by dividing the height and width:
var imgWidth = $(origImg).attr('width');
var imgHeight = $(origImg).attr('height');
var ratio = imgHeight/imgWidth;
The browser height and width are also defined, along with their ratio:
var winWidth = $(window).width();
var winHeight = $(window).height();
var winRatio = winHeight/winWidth;
The final part of the javascript resizes the image based on the ration of the image to the ratio of the browser. The first part of the conditional statement checks to see if the browser ratio is greater than the image ratio. If is it greater, then the image height is determined by the height of the browser while the width is automatic based on the browser height divided by the image ratio. If it is smaller, then the image width is determined by the width of the browser while the height is automatic based on the browser width multiplied by the image ratio.
This was shown to me by Tim Carter over at Pedrera as a way to streamline design into development and create efficiency between the two by using a simple system around both. Here’s a short description:
“The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem. The premise of the system is ideally suited to rapid prototyping, but it would work equally well when integrated into a production environment. There are printable sketch sheets, design layouts, and a CSS file that have identical measurements.”
When used by both the design and development teams, it will lead to much more accurate positioning of objects on the page which should lead to faster turnaround times.
Thanks to ozgrid.com for the hookup. “The hookup”, that was so 90′s wasn’t it!
