The Boxee team reported a little over a week ago that, while at CES, they were approached by a few hardward manufacturers about potentially integrating boxee into various types of hardware.

I’m curious; would you like to see an all-in-one media player like boxee (similar to Windows Media Center, but with more integration of Web-based technologies like YouTube, Hulu and more) available as a set-top box? If so, what features would you expect to see in that device?

Earlier this week, Smashing Magazine put together a fantastic resource for PHP developers. The post is a list of “50 Extremely Useful PHP Tools.” The categories covered in the post are:

• Debugging Tools
• Testing and Optimization Tools
• Documentation Tools
• Security Tools
• Image Manipulation and Graphs
• PHP Code Beautifier
• Version-Control Systems (though, according to the comments, the tools listed in this section arguably do not belong there)
• Useful Extensions, Utilities and Classes
• PHP Online Tools and Resources
• In-Browser Tools (Firefox Add-Ons)
• Frameworks for PHP
• PHP IDEs and Editors
• Sources and Resources

The descriptions of some of the tools in the article could have been a little better, as I don’t even understand what some of the tools are designed to do. However, there are quite a few interesting items in the list. I will definitely be trying some of them over the next few months to see how they work and what they might be able to do for me.

Every once in a while, I find the desire to put together a nice slideshow of photographs and package them on a DVD. In fact, for the last five or six years, I have done just that as a Christmas present for my family and friends.

I have found no better program to accomplish this than Nero Vision, which, unfortunately is not available by itself. You have to purchase the whole Nero package in order to get Nero Vision. Nero Vision is an amazing program that makes it incredibly easy and painless to put together really nice photo slideshows with narration and/or music in the background.

As the semantics of the markup we use in the back end of our Web sites becomes more and more important, it seems that semantics in the language of our content is becoming less and less important. I see so many examples of Web sites using terms in non-traditional ways.

One of the most recent examples I’ve come across is the use of the word “calendar” throughout the Web. I don’t know about you, but for me, the word “calendar” evokes thoughts of a tabular display of dates.

Unfortunately, throughout the Web, the term “calendar” has begun to mean a simple list of events with no tabular representation to be found. Is this a false representation? Shouldn’t these be known as “event lists” rather than “calendars”?

What do you think? What other examples have you found of elements of the Web that are frequently misrepresented?

Last week I was looking for good examples of HTML table layouts. Not for the code, but for the style… the colors, the borders, etc. After some searching, I found a site from Chris Heilmann in the UK. He put together a really nice list of CSS styles for HTML tables. He links out to each of the styles so you can download the ones you like. But what really makes his gallery special is that you can click a style and the gallery table changes to that style so you can see a preview instantly.

Check it out here: http://icant.co.uk/csstablegallery/index.php

In a somewhat shocking and depressing press release from the Circuit City headquarters in Richmond, VA yesterday, it was announced that the electronics retailer was officially going out of business and liquidating all of its assets.

The Web site is already offline, displaying nothing but a message about the closing. I’m not sure if the Web site will come back to be part of the liquidation process, or if it is truly gone.

I’m not sure how many people are aware of this amazing tool, as I just heard about it today. However, I came across an article discussing font replacement, and it mentioned a utility called “sIFR”. I quickly did a Google search and found out exactly what that is.

sIFR is a Flash/ActionScript/Javascript implementation that allows you to use any font you choose on your Web site. Rather than being confined to using the standard Web fonts that are available on all systems (or specifying a series of fonts from which the browser can choose), you can use specialty fonts without having to go through the hassle of converting them from TrueType Fonts (TTF) to GDF (the graphically-based font format that can be embedded within Web-based documents), you can simply use sIFR to use your favorite TTF.

While checking my Yahoo! page yesterday, I noticed a news article about a girl sending 14,528 text messages in one month. At first, I was somewhat impressed; until I read the story. She didn’t send that many text messages, that’s how many messages were sent and received on her account in one month.

So what? My 13-year-old daughter does close to that every month, and she’s not even the heaviest texter out of her friends. Is this really newsworthy? I don’t think so, but apparently somebody does. It’s been reposted on Yahoo! News, the New York Post and a few thousand other Web sites (and here I am posting it again). Seriously, try Googling “14,528 text messages” and see how many results pop up (at the time I wrote this post, there were around 10,700).

Back in the mid-to-late ’90s, the general rule was never to pop a window on an external link. During the early 2000s, my company decided on a policy that opened a new window on any external links but not for internal links. The reasoning was that we didn’t want users to lose their place when we pointed to an additional resource on a topic.

It seems like today we are back to the 90s regarding external linking. Blogs almost never open a new window and most websites also seem to stay in the same window when opening external websites.

What’s your take on opening new browser windows – yes or no? If yes, in what circumstances? If no, why not?

Using the WYSIWYG and Source Editor in Split mode with QuantaPlus

Okay, admittedly, it would be nigh impossible to find a Web development application with the same list of features Dreamweaver has. However, QuantaPlus (and the rest of the KDE Web Dev suite) still offers a great deal of functionality. While the WYSIWYG portion of QuantaPlus isn’t nearly as reliable as Dreamweaver nor are the code completion and hints quite as nice as those in Dreamweaver; Quanta does offer a lot of other features that you won’t find anywhere else.

Through the QuantaPlus interface (using some of the default plugins), you can work directly with a concurrent versioning system (CVS), you can search and replace text within all files in a specific directory and much more.

Also, QuantaPlus offers the ability to check your spelling within the document you are creating, which is another feature you won’t find in Dreamweaver.

There are many other features built into this application. In addition, you can find a bunch of additional extensions created by users. You can either download the extensions from the QuantaPlus Web site and install them manually or you can download and install them automatically through the program.

Because QuantaPlus is dependent upon KDE, it’s only available in Linux. However, it is free and open-source, so if you are a Linux user and a Web developer (or a coder of any sort, as QuantaPlus is actually designed to work with many languages other than those used in Web development), you should definitely give it a spin.