According to USA Today, Southwest Airlines is testing in-flight Wi-Fi scheduled to go live next Monday. It will be using a Satellite based service so it should work over water.

Southwest Airlines is my airline of choice for short flights. I’ve been appreciating the free Wi-Fi in most airports, but in-flight internet access would be great. I’m assuming it will probably be pretty slow, something close to what you get when tethering to a mobile phone. The price seems right if they can get it down to under $10/day. Anything more than that I think I can wait until I land.

I don’t really see myself doing real work on the plane, but it would be nice to be able to access email, surf the internet, update my social networks, and write a quick blog post. I don’t have any trips planned in the near future, but would be interested in hearing responses from those that get a chance to try it out.

Netuts published a screencast tutorial on how to use CSS sprites. It’s a good web optimization technique that I see more and more, but could be adopted throughout a lot more sites. Check out the video below. Make sure you watch in fullscreen mode or go to Netuts site since I’ve scaled the video to fit in the blog post.

I went to login to my Brightkite account and saw that they allow login via Facebook Connect. It’s nice to see that more and more sites are starting to adopt the process.

It will allow more people to join services without having to sign up over and over. It brings OpenID style login to more of the masses. I would say most of my friends that aren’t too tech savvy have a good idea what Facebook is and probably have an account, but those same friends have no idea about OpenID.

Being a big fan of both Brightkite and Facebook it’s nice to see the integration and it works seamlessly as expected. I hope more sites that I use as well as new sites I might use in the future will support Facebook Connect as well.

With that being said I’ve had yet to enable it on any of my sites, but hope that some sort of integration will happen in the future.

Google Mobile sync looks like it’s been updated to work with the iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Windows Mobile phones. That should cover the majority of the major smart phone players in the market.

I have an iPhone and now that MobileMe appears to be working I’ve been using that for the most part. Previously I had been using NuevaSync for push notifications via Google applications. It appears that the new updates allow Google contacts to be exchanged via Microsoft Exchange protocol so now iPhone users have the ability to get push notifications directly from Google.

I’m interested in seeing how this works, but since MobileMe is finally working well, I’m not sure if I want to change anything at this moment. I’m in an “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” situation. I would like to see how others experiences are and see if I can finally ditch MobileMe or not.

For the most part it’s a good idea to use variable sizes like em or percentages when declaring font-size as opposed to using fixed px when a user resizes the text in a browser. Most browsers now resize px, but I found it to be better practice using em or percentages.

Most of the work we do uses the YUI-CSS library which has a handy chart for determining font-size using percentage when using their library. For those not using a grid/font library, Aloe Studios Blog has a small utility EmChart to help calculate ems from pixels.

It’s worth checking out and hopefully it will alleviate some of the headache in trying to determine how to use ems.

While I consider myself proficient in a variety of JavaScript libraries like Prototype, jQuery, and YUI, my library platform of choice at the moment is MooTools. I’ll evaluate each project on a case by case basis and each trial will be different, but I’ve found MooTools to do an adequate job for the type of projects I work on.

Web Design Ledger posted a good collection of user interface enhancements using the MooTools library. It’s got a few good tutorials that could probably be implemented in your next project.

Firescope is a Firefox add-on that allows you to search HTML and CSS reference material directory from Firebug.

After installing you will see a Reference tab in Firebug. From there you can search for HTML Elements, HTML Attributes, and CSS Properties. It shows you what the element is and also it’s compatibility in Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3, Safari 3, and Opera 9.

It’s a pretty simple add-on, but works as intended. For beginning developers I can see it helping quite a bit and for advanced developers as the HTML spec changes it will give a quick view of what works and what doesn’t.

Google has announced multiple inboxes via Gmail Labs add on. It allows you to have you labels in view on your main inbox page. We use Gmail through Google Apps for all of the sites we own and we recommend it to a lot of our clients. While for the most part I use Mail.app or my iPhone to check email, the few times I need to use someone’s equipment it’s nice to have the web app available.

I’ve added Multiple Inboxes to a couple of my accounts and I can see it being beneficial for a lot of users. I can definitely see it helping those with large monitors, but it starts getting hard to read for those carrying small screen laptops. It’s a step in the right direction giving people an option.

I was contacted by Tapinoma to try out their new iPhone application Easycontact (itunes link). Since rebranding my company I had been thinking of creating new business cards and was looking around the web for inspiration. Everything I do deals with digital media and I rarely passed out the old business cards. People already had my contact information or it was just easier to send an email or punch it in my phone.

I still think the act of business cards, pushing information from one to another is still relevant, but not so sure the physical medium is still as efficient as it used to be. I connect with quite a few people digitally through email or sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Having connections through those channels allow me to meet new people and exchange information.

So where does Tapinoma Easycontact come in? Easycontact makes it easy to exchange vCards via email to any user or wifi if another iPhone user is running the software as well. It also allows for transferring via audio, but I was unable to test this feature. Having email and wifi is enough for me and it performed as expected. It takes the traditional sense of business cards into the digital age.

The screen on the left shows the main interface. It’s very clean like most iPhone applications. The method of transport buttons are across the bottom: email, wifi, and audio. Across the top you select what information you would like to send out: your card, another person’s card, a group of cards, or a photo. You are also able to select which vCard information is sent through the settings page.

The application is simple, but clever and it just works. The price point seems to be about right. I’ll have to use it some more and see how it fits into my business. If other iPhone users adopt this application I can see it being very useful, but even without other users it does a good job.

If you have any questions, as always they’re welcome.

Power Twitter users should know all about retweeting, but it’s a feature I find new users don’t ever use because they don’t even know about it. Retweeting is taking someone’s message and reposting it in your own Twitter stream giving recognition to the original user. It’s kind of like a footnote in a book or giving reference to your sources. The purpose of doing this is you think someone else has a good idea and you should share it with your own community. It’s always a good idea to give credit where credit is due.

You’ll want to make efficient use of retweeting. If you were to retweet everything then nothing you tweet is probably important even if you think everything you tweet is beneficial to your followers. You’ll want to tweet interesting content that will provide some use to your followers. It will also help you build better relationships with people because it will connect you with those you have retweeting. It’s been said that those users that get retweeted the most are those that have the most influence on Twitter. Retweeting is the highest form of flattery on Twitter. Retweeting can bring valuable information to your followers as long as you use it correctly. If you don’t abuse the privilege it can bring quality and value to you as a Twitter users.

So now that you have the background about retweeting you’re probably wondering how it’s done. Here are some examples:

• RT @user original message
• RT: @user: original message
• Retweet @user original message
• via @user original message

The @ sign is common syntax to refer to a person on twitter. The retweet syntax can also be anywhere in the message. I think most people put it at the beginning of the message and the client I use (EventBox) uses the syntax in the first example. I hope this helps you build better Twitter relationships. See you on Twitter.