Abhijeet Maharana

Google Chat

It once happened that I did not recollect adding someone on GTalk and yet the contact showed up in my buddy list. I thought maybe the other guy did and that I forgot about it after accepting the request. Then it started happening very frequently and I had no clue.

Well, it turns out that if you communicate frequently with some people, GMail automatically allows them to chat with you and see when you are online. Its great to make new friends and learn from new people but sometimes, its just better to know who is on your buddy list! To turn this otherwise helpful feature off, log into your Gmail account and go to Settings >> Chat. Select “Only allow people that I’ve explicitly approved to chat with me and see when I’m online.”

FoxClocks

If you work across timezones, you will probably agree that having to remember / calculate the time at your client’s end isn’t always a fun thing to do. I had a couple of Timezone widgets added to my iGoogle page but I didn’t find them compelling. Just last week, I noticed Andy McDonald’s FoxClocks as a recommended extension on the Firefox add-on page. One look at the screenshot and I blinked only after it was installed. Needless to say, its a very well-made, unobtrusive extension which sits in the statusbar / toolbar and is right there when you need it. Highly customizable and highly recommended.

While working with a GWT-Ext application, I found that most of the Combo boxes used are just meant to be readonly drop down lists. Like the style 2 combo boxes we had in VB. A 2D array with display and value fields is all that is needed. Yet, every combo needs 6-7 lines to get going.

This utility method may be handy in such situations:

public static ComboBox getDropDownCombo(Object[][] data, String fieldLabel, String emptyText, int width, int listWidth)
{
	Store store = new SimpleStore(new String[]{"display", "value"}, data);
	ComboBox combo = new ComboBox();
	combo.setEditable(false);
	combo.setStore(store);
	combo.setDisplayField("display");
	combo.setValueField("value");
	combo.setMode(ComboBox.LOCAL);
	combo.setTriggerAction(ComboBox.ALL);
 
	if(fieldLabel != null)
		combo.setFieldLabel(fieldLabel);
	else
		combo.setHideLabel(true);
 
	if(width != -1)
		combo.setWidth(width);
 
	if(listWidth != -1)
		combo.setListWidth(listWidth);
 
	if(emptyText != null)
		combo.setEmptyText(emptyText);
	else
		// if there is no empty text, select the first value by default
		combo.setValue(data[0][1].toString());
 
	return combo;
}

Sample usage could be:

String[][] data = {{ "Mark as read", "1"}, {"Mark as unread", "2"}, {"Add star", "3"}, {"Remove star", "4"}};
ComboBox cmbMin = UIHelper.getDropDownCombo(data, "Actions", "[Select]", 275, -1);