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iPad Sexy Video

While the iPad has it flaws, it has the best marketing video. There is a lot of potential with build apps. I think I might buy one for the tax offset and develop some new apps for it.

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Does the iPad = biggest disappointment ever?

So the iPad looks to be the biggest disappointment, ever. I didn’t know what to expect, though with all the hype I was expecting a little more. I was thinking something si-fi where you could do so many cool screen flicking, resizing and all that sort of stuff. Something revolutionary was the expectation. What we got was a larger iPhone without phone.

It is basically an 10″ iPhone. It is meant to be the half way between the iPhone and MacBook but I think it is more towards the iPhone end of the spectrum. Apple is marketing at the crowd who own both a smart-phone (hopefully the iPhone) and a laptop (hopefully a MacBook). Hopefully it will be powerful enough and adequate to haul around all day instead of your laptop.

There doesn’t appear to be multitasking, which is a big annoyance with the iPhone. This would of made it more on the PC side of things.

MortgageBot – Finding You the Best Loans

MortgageBot will help you find the prefect loan for you. It takes in your details and in real-time provides a feed of the loans which best suit you. Online mortgages is the next steps in mortgages. The big banks are saying they want to get into this area. Mortgage Corp already have.

The traditional mortgage broker model is broken:

• A mortgage broker visits your home
• They try to use software which is meant to find you the best loan
• Truth is they know 10 pretty good loans for you already and the software is too complicated
• They suggest to you three of the good loans though not the prefect loan
• They know that you have already invited them into your home and are more acceptable to pushy sales techniques
• Once they close the sale they collect the commission (I would not be surprise if the 10 good loans also have the best commissions)

The tool Create My created allows Mortgage Corp to provide an unique online experience that allows customers full control over the loans they choose. There is no broker coming into your house at late, there is no pushy sales person, and you can do everything online. This is a game changing application.

We used:

• PHP – to build the backend engine which powers the site and finds you loans
• MySQL – to store the data
• AJAX methods – to provide the real-time results from the database
• CSS – to style the application
• XHTML – to structure the layout
• JavaScript and jQuery – to power the AJAX methods
• XML – for the daily loan data feed
• SugarCRM – to store the leads

The Ultimate Domain Name Generator

Toolnames.com & Toolnames.com.au are two domain generators Create My made initially for internal use and thought it was so good that the world should have access to them.

Coming up with a new domain name is usually quite difficult. Making it very hard is that most of the good domains have been taken already.

The traditional process:

• You come up with something catchy, memorable, and preferably short
• You see if it is available for registration
• You find it isn’t
• You try to work out something similar and start all over again

Quickly you are wasting hours.

ToolNames are domain name generators with a difference. They use a thesaurus to find related words to your site so you get a greater choice in choosing a domain prefect for your site. The domain name generators only produces .com and .com.au top level domains.

Create My created the solution out of frustration. Since then the results have been amazing.

Create My used the following technologies:

• PHP
• MySQL
• WordPress

Connecting cPanel to GMail

GMail kicks the cPanel mail apps butt. So I always recommend that clients to use the free Google Apps to manage their email. This is a big bonus for clients as they get to use the simple GMail interface with their own domain.

The big benefits to using GMail is the:

• 7GB storage per a user,
• ability to access multiple email accounts from one GMail,
• easy to configure your iPhone to access it,
• looks really nice,
• plays nice with mail clients such as Apple Mail, and
• it is a lot easier for users to use.

Outputing PHP to Excel

A few people have recently asked me about outputting data to Excel. This is a very simple thing to do from PHP with two lines of code.

[cc lang=”PHP”]header(“Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel”);
header(“Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=webbased.xls”);[/cc]