Since the release of a direct-boot utility for the HD2 there has been a flurry of activity on the XDA forums to get Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) working on the HTC HD2 smartphone. I recently switched from dual-booting Android and WinMo to a Gingerbread direct boot method and am pleased with the improvement in boot speed and battery life. But as with the dual-boot method, there are still a few hiccups here and there. Read on to learn how to replace WinMo with a Nandroid version of Android Gingerbread on the HTC HD2.

During two recent trips to Central and South America I needed a way to call back to the States without spending a lot of money. After a little research I found a competitive rate: free. Using an Android-powered smartphone it’s possible to make and receive calls free of charge from any Wi-Fi hotspot worldwide. In this post I’ll explain how to do this for US-based mobile devices.

Using an Android-powered smartphone it’s possible to make and receive calls free of charge from any Wi-Fi hotspot worldwide.

After recently losing a USB flash drive with all my passwords on it, I was grateful for the precaution I took by storing my password data encrypted using Brad Greenlee’s PassKeeper password manager.

PassKeeper is a Windows utility that allows you to keep a list of accounts with usernames, passwords, and notes. This list is stored encrypted.

passkeeper.com

After spending a few weeks on the HD2 Android Development forums at XDA I learned how to coerce my T-Mobile HTC HD2 into dual-booting Android and WinMo. As of today I’ve got Android Froyo running with few issues and reasonable battery life. In this post I’ll explain how how you can dual-boot Android and WinMo on your HD2 as well.

Web applications concatenate CSS files to improve performance, which can result in large numbers of style rules in a single file. Enter the 4095 selector limitation for IE browsers. An IE bug whereby the browser will only apply style for the first 4095 selectors declared per file. Impacted browsers include IE6, IE7, IE8 and IE9.

Recently while Googling Olla de Carne (Costa Rican beef stew) my browser was  hijacked after taking a search results link. Rather than receiving a list of ingredients, the link redirected the browser to a bogus antivirus site that mimicked Windows and faked an integrated Explorer virus scan. Let’s examine how it happened.

The user agent string, a piece of data transmitted in the HTTP header during a web request, contains information valuable in determining browser type and often basic system information.

Example user agent string sent from a web browser during an HTTP request:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.89 Safari/532.5

The above example, for instance, provides information such as browser and browser version, user locale (language), OS, system architecture and the layout engine used. When authoring documents for the Web, information from the user agent string can be valuable in determining how best to mark-up documents.

Getting the information is easy.

Though modal dialogs are not a new concept in UI design, the number of homegrown  Lightbox clones ( source) appearing on the Web since major JavaScript libraries like Prototype and jQuery hit the scene has been staggering. Unfortunately, many of the clones developed leave some key usability considerations unaddressed, and struggle with common problems in accessibility.

Some key usability features that should be considered during creation of a Web-based modal dialog include (1) manage focus and allow tab navigation (2) disable elements outside the modal dialog (3) give users an out and (4) provide graceful error recovery.

iTunes users opting not to allow the program to automatically keep their folders organized (the default setting) may be well aware that iTunes does not respond well after changing locations of or renaming files. In fact, any change in the file name or path renders the item inaccessible from within iTunes, almost as if your iTunes library disappeared. To make matters worse, there’s no easy way to have iTunes relocate files moved. iTunes prompts the user to relocate missing files but only one at a time with a dialog that says:

The [type] [name] could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?

Not so useful when a lot of files are moved at once. But if a directory containing hundreds of files needs to be moved, to a larger hard drive for example, locating files individually becomes too much work.