mahesh2k

Corel Draw and Illustrator, both but it depends on the situation. I do sketching on regular basis and for some of the sketches i need to use illustrator more than corel draw. But for logos and banner designs i found that corel draw is much better. In case of illustration, corel has it's own package called essentials. I got the free version of the essentials when i got the CD with bamboo tablet. In that essential version almost everything was there and you can almost any illustration possible that you used to do with adobe illustrator.

For Linux users there is Calligra package with Krita software. It's like corel essentials but with less features as of now. They do have few identical features and is easy to use. But that is for the illustration and for those sketching purpose i have noticed with the krita. I don't know how many are here using Linux.

If it's for banner and logo design then i guess corel draw is much better with cliparts and those brush and easy to use. In case of illustrator, it has lots of brushes and the stuff to do things quickly for sketches and the artistic illustration. I don't know if it is worthy to use it for the banner and the logo design. But who know with what people are comfortable with and it is pretty subjective as most of the formats are pretty much portable between these programs.

Mac has similar IDE options like windows. So most of the IDE's should work. Take case of Eclipse, it works on mac and as macs have enough RAMs with their box, i don't think you'll face any issue with the resources in case of it. Eclipse requires PDT plugin that lets you edit the php files on it. You have to download that plugin on your own from the eclipse repository in order to compile your program. By default eclipse has support for only java and additional languages require their own plugins, so it is obvious that eclipse will need plugin in order to run.

Aptana is new range of IDE's which are made on top of the eclipse. They're reducing the necessary part of the eclipse and making simple IDE to run the essentials. They also support java, ruby and php in their IDE. So for sure aptana will work for you. Note - aptana has paid and free versions so look if you can do witht he free version of the IDE.

Komodo a commercial IDE that lets you run python,php and perl easily. They do have a free version called edit but i don't know how much useful is that. You just have to see if it is that you need on mac. Netbeans is another free IDE that i can recommend to you but it's upto you if you're comfortable with IDE's like eclipse and netbeans for php.

At the end all i can say is that if you can afford mac then it is better to buy an IDE so that you can get your work done quickly instead of hopping from one feature to another. It just saves time and lets you focus on work instead of manaing free software in its alpha behavior. Hope this helps.

In case of content management system you get to use RSS without any issues at all. You just have to either check the feed on feedburner so that you can get the address. I have done this plenty of times and found two rss feed address - one is atom and another xml feed this way. As for the static sites or the custom cms sites where you have to configure the RSS on your own. I think html2rss is one of the site that lets you use the option for the RSS. If you don't know how to create feeds then this is the way to add individual pages or entire sitemap and then making rss feed out of it.

There are some tutorials on google that lets you find the rss feed for any website. As google is broken due to panda update i couldn't come up with any good tutorial. As for now i can only suggest HTML2RSS site for you. Do check feedburner by the way, it will let you find the address of the cms if you have one, if not then manually create one.

I am not much digging into this because i know that both the forums are silent and hardly anyone posting so any reason like mycent script runs slow etc. is not something i am going to believe as they're running it manually or not running at all. I can figure that it all coming down to manual post approval from mods and assigning mycents value to that. So that is why i'm only sticking with asking straight questions like "are mycents updated ?" and leaving it at that. I post when they're updated and don't post when they don't. Opaque said recently that he devalued the mycents in order to bring members back which turned me off so i'm not going to create any drama over here. Just going to post to see if they wish to give me mycent and post on that point else just skim and move on. I don't see points in asking questions like when mycents are going to update, why they're allocated less or why updates on this site are slow etc. I'm past all that.

Coming to meebo toolbar point I guess you're not aware of Meebo for website - http://www.meebo.com/websites/ Wibiya is yet another beast like that-both are annoying. Hope you learned something new today

Apple is too expensive and totally useless considering other phones with lots of featuers at lower costs. Nokia W7 is going to be great and windows will not be that bad. Do check akash tablet and reliance tablet if you're keeping tab on tablets

Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal based forum extensions are not good for large sites. For small groups they're okay but larger sites they not only eat CPU but often cause DB errors and are prone to same attacks like their parent core.

Okay as asta seems to be quite let me post here the bug updates due to no presence from opaque. Mycents on astahost are not working at all. I have tried with lenghty post approach from velma's suggestion. Two posts and more than two days and no update of mycents at all. I can definitely confirm this on my myncents stats over there. I hope notifying about bugs and broken things is okay ? or am i supposed to shut up ? Let me know either way because i don't want to end up in some drama.

Nitin, Yes i remember that. It was meebo or wibya toolbar if i remember correctly. But it was taken down by opaque and things started working. I don't have iPad but yeah i do use asta and some other forums on other android based tablet and smartphones. Old IPB used to work fine and new is taking more time due to heavy ajax. As for bbpress and phpbb, they're totally complicated forums and it takes newbies a lot of time to figure stuff out. Bbpress is not at all suitable for bigger forums. Phpbb is the most ugly in management and for extensions too. So if i got money then choice is between ipb and vb. In case of VB they're simplifying things compared to VB and are much bettter for handling larger forums.