Just finished a scary but successful procedure on my iPhone 3G, Alhamdulillah. When iOS4 was launched, I upgraded, jailbroke and unlocked it. In hindsight this wasn’t a good decision. My phone got slow and sluggish. I knew I had to go back to the previous version of the software as the iPhone 3G specs are just not worthy of iOS4. What I needed to do was:
1. downgrade from jailbroken iOS4 to iPhone OS 3.1.3
2. jailbreak iPhone OS 3.1.3
3. unlock my iPhone

A quick glance on the internet returned nothing. So I took a stab at it and the effort was fruitful in the end. Leave a comment if you want to know the details.

You type verses from the Quran all the time, in Arabic? Yes. How about doing it in less than a second? No? Read on then.
What I’m talking about are text expansion softwares. These are small utilities that run in the background and look for what you type. When you type a pre-configured sequence of characters, magic happens. So no matter what application I’m using, as soon as I type the letters ‘w b r’, this utility auto expands right at that place into ‘with best regards’. This is a huge time saver for people who do a lot of typing on their computers. It’s even useful to us software developers. For the code snippets you might need on a regular basis, these utilities can make you more productive.
It’s east to imagine the benefits of this amazing utility. You don’t type often used word or phrases over and over, you save time, type faster etc etc. To me this utility presented another idea. Before I talk about that, let me briefly mention my project so you’ll understand what I’m doing.
As an active seeker of Islamic knowledge I often find the need to include Quranic verses in my notes. The most naive way us to start typing it. It not only is painstakingly slow, you can make mistakes unintentionally. Another and most common way is to copy paste. That too can take some time. Since you have to first search or navigate to the ayah and then copy paste. So to ease this task I came up with the following idea(mind you this is all for mac users. Sorry I don’t develop for windows).

Develop a software utility that is capable of

1. Being called from anywhere via clicking on its icon in the dock or menu bar icon
2. Must be launched by a keyboard shortcut
3. when launched, a search box should appear allowing to search for a verse by
   1. either surah name and verse number
   2. surah number and verse name
   3. if none of the above then at least being able to do a regular search (least desired feature for v 1.0)
4. Once the software is able to pull up the verse, any one of the following should be possible
   1. copy the verse to the clipboard
   2. paste it into the current cursor position of the application
   3. provide an English or any desired translation of that verse

The above is only a glimpse of my initial thoughts on this project. While I procrastinate ;) on this idea, I wanted something right now. Enter text expander utilities. I realized that I could use one of these tools and get a partial result of what I truly wanted. So I spent a little time working on plugins for both Typinator and TextExpander. Why these two is not the subject here. That I’ll discuss some place else. Take a look at the small video below.

Excited yet? To learn more about how you can do this head on over to my project page.

These days who doesn’t have multiple gmail accounts. The popularity of gmail has skyrocketed in the last couple of years. As for me, I not only have multiple gmail accounts but also use the Google apps to manage multiple domains. Managing all these account efficiently can really be a challenge. Add to that if you have multiple machines, you are talking about possible serious lack of synchronization. I’ll share a couple of ways I have tried overcome this challenge.

1. Use a mail application

One way to solve this issue is to have IMAP enabled on your gmail accounts and then use a mail app like Mail.app that comes with your mac. Another good app is Thunderbird, from Mozilla. I’ve used both but my personal favourite is Mail.app. To enable IMAP on your gmail account

1. Navigate to ‘Settings’ on gmail’s inbox page.
2. Look for the ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’ tab 
3. Scroll to the ‘IMAP Access’ section on that tab, select the ‘Enable IMAP’ radio button, save changes and you are done.
4. To configure you mail application follow the instructions from gmail.

Note: The above will also work on windows.

2. Use a mail notifier

I have Mail.app configured with all my gmail and other POP/IMAP accounts setup on my home mac. But at work I didn’t want to do that. I just needed some way to get notified of a new mail and I was happy to check it in gmail’s web interface. I tried using an extention for firefox, but it wasn’t practical. For one thing, I to manually click on the icon in the status bar and switch between various accounts to see if there was a new mail. Nope, that is just not how I wanted it. That led me re-visit an application I had used in the past, Google Notifier. This application provided by Google and is available for Mac and windows. But the trick was to make it work with multiple account. A little search for that on google itself, turned up a few answers. Below I’ve detailed what I’ve done.

1. Download the mac version of the notifier.
2. After installing it, do a ‘secondary click’ (i’ve configured my mac to do this by tapping with two fingers) on the application icon and then click ‘Duplicate’.
3. Repeat step 2 for as many accounts you want. Then rename all of them for each account, so that it’s easy to remember.
4. Do a secondary click again , but this time chose ‘Show Package contents’.
5. Navigate to ‘Contents’, and open Info.plist in your favorite text editor.
6. Search for the key CFBundleIdentifier and change the value from the default, com.google.GmailNotifier, append your own identifier to the value. I’ve just called it com.google.GmailNotifier2.
7. For each of the duplicates you created in 3, repeate 4-6.
8. Thats it. Lauch each application now and enter your login credentials.

After doing this you will find that the notifiers icons in the menu bar. If you have emails in your accounts, you will see that all the icons look the same, the default red envelope. It can be hard to say in an instant which account has a new mail. This can easily be changed. Have a look at my menu bar.

I have simply changed the icons used by each account. You can use any image. Just name in unread.png (it should be in a PNG format). Be sure to make the image 24×24 pixel in resolution. Now drop this image file in your Google Notifier > Contents > Resources folder. Relaunch the application and enjoy !

UPDATE: I’m adding the icons you can use like I did. Click this link to download a zip file – Icons for gmail notifier