At SXSWi 2008, Grant and I met Jason Reneau, the founder and CEO of MindBites, a platform and marketplace for video lessons. We were really impressed with the MindBites vision last year. When we met up with them this year, it was awesome to see how far the community, the site and the market for quality video tutorials has come.

Today, MindBites is launching the Screencast 4 Cash contest in conjunction with Techsmith's Jing Pro and Download Squad (that's us!). Entrants can submit an original screencast to be eligible to win a Grand Prize of $1000, plus a copy of Snagit/Camtasia Studio. There will also be a People's Choice Prize, determined by popular vote, and the winner will get $500 and a copy of Snagit.

Every vote cast in the contest will yield a $0.10 US donation to the Youth for Technology Foundation, which exposes children in underdeveloped parts of the world to technology through instruction and staffed technology centers. So just by voting, you can help underprivileged kids get access and instruction to technology.

Screencasts are a great way to learn, or teach a specialty. We covered some iPhone-specific screencasts last month and found the medium really, really ripe for learning or supplementing other forms of instruction.

If you've got a great idea for a screencast, enter the contest! Grant and I are two of the judges and we can't wait to see what stuff gets submitted! You can read more details on deadlines and voting dates over at MindBites.

Want to know more about MindBites? Check out this video from SXSWi 2009!

Say what you will about Adobe's licensing fees and whatnot, but at least they're willing to do something to provide a little assistance to developers that have been hit hard by the current economic situation. If you can provide proof that you are currently unemployed, Adobe will provide you a personal use license for Flex Builder at no charge.

Flex Builder Pro 3 is normally $699 to purchase, so this is a pretty generous offer. Yes, Adobe have their own ulterior motives - if you become skilled with Flex, you may land a job somewhere and your employer will need to spring for a license. Who knows, it could lead to some killer new Flex app being developed, and then Adobe wins again because the platform gets a boost.

Whatever the motivation, it's still a nice gesture and could definitely provide jobless developers with a new skill that may just help them find employment again.

[via OS News]

Two weeks ago, Microsoft open sourced the ASP.NET MVC code. Today, they announced that they're dropping the price of Sharepoint Designer 2007 as far as it can go - it's now available as a free download from Office Online.

The page states that Microsoft is "implementing a number of changes to promote and facilitate even more customization efforts on top of the SharePoint platform." One good way to do that is to get more developers to download and use Designer, and making it free should certainly help things along.

In general, the developer community is always slightly aloof when Microsoft announces they're releasing something for free. To ease minds, they put together a Q&A page to shed some light on the hows and whys of the Sharepoint change.

You'll need an MSN passport to sign in, but many of you either had one or created one so you could download the Windows 7 beta.

[via MSDN]

Jason recently wrote on Download Squad about a Facebook group aimed at eliminating Internet Explorer 6 from the web, and Lee even found a script that reminds IE6 users to upgrade when they visit your site. Not everyone is ready to let IE6 go, though. Just ask the folks behind Save IE6, a site dedicated to the preservation of this "powerful and versatile" browser.

Save IE6 features a petition (signed by around 450 people when I checked), quotes from satisfied users, and links to download the browser. Funnily enough, some of the people in favor of keeping IE6 around are web developers, the very group that has been most vocal about being inconvenienced by Microsoft's older model. I'm not sure I buy the "how can IE6 be violating standards when it has essentially BEEN the standard for years?" argument. After all, standards change, and standards have seemingly passed IE6 by.

Updated: Ha! They totally got me. I knew this idea was crazy, but I didn't catch that it was also a really good April Fools' Joke, apparently by Pingdom.

What do you think, Download Squad readers? Should IE6 be saved, or is it time to let go?

Ubiquity is a Firefox extension that pops up a command-line interface that lets users quickly execute common tasks, like searching or emailing something to yourself. It's like an in-browser version of Quicksilver (on a Mac) or Launchy (for Windows). Ubiquity is so useful and powerful that Mozilla is planning to integrate it into a future version of Firefox, in a project called Taskfox.

Taskfox is off to a great start with its list of goals and non-goals. It's going to try to be as natural a part of your workflow as possible, and never interrupt you -- in other words, it will make things easier to do, but it won't be that infernal paperclip from MS Word. Making it a seamless part of the Firefox experience is on the goals list, too, and I think that's the most important part. I don't think of Quicksilver as separate from the OS on my Mac anymore, and I don't see why a really good version of Ubiquity shouldn't be the same way in Firefox. On the non-goals list, Taskfox isn't making any attempt to be a separate platform, although it will have an API so you can code extensions for it, in typical Firefox style.

[via MozillaLinks]

You probably know that installing a copy of the new iPhone 3.0 firmware that you grabbed off a torrent site is illegal, but you should also know that it's a royal pain in the butt. Users on iPhone forums are discovering the hard way that a copy of 3.0 is no good unless you're a registered developer, so it can be unlocked on your device. Otherwise you're in for a world of hurt, with hacky workarounds that require you to turn off your Internet connection every time you want to use your phone with iTunes.

Once you've gone to 3.0 without registering, it turns out to be really hard to go back. Users having trouble downgrading back to the current version of the firmware are all over iPhone forums, annoying legitimate developers (or their friends -- each dev can apparently sign up 100 devices) with questions about restoring to the old version. Meanwhile, the iPhone just throws a bunch of errors at them. I'm sure a way to restore will pop up soon, but if it doesn't, you could be holding a brick until the official release. Is it really worth all this trouble to avoid waiting a few months for copy and paste?

Note: Gizmodo has a step-by-step guide to downgrading.

Last month Grant, Christina and I checked out a couple of screencasts from Pragmatic Programmers' Bill Dudney. Specifically, we watched "Coding in Objective-C 2.0." We took a look at part one mostly, which is an introduction to the Objective-C syntax and structure, culminating in a basic application. Part two covers memory management in depth. Since then they've added a part 3 on debugging, and the plan is to continue adding more. Part one covers classes, objects and messages and, like the other portions in the series, costs $5. One thing I love about Pragmatic Programmers is that they offer a wide choice of formats, including versions tuned for iPhone viewing and Theora Ogg format.

It's important to note that while Objective-C is the language you'll use for iPhone development, these screencasts alone won't make you an iPhone developer. For one, there are differences in memory management on the iPhone versus desktop apps (iPhone apps don't do garbage collection). Also, iPhone interactions require the use of Cocoa Touch, and that isn't covered in these. If you are looking to move from another OOP language to Objective-C, however, this is a great way to get started. Plus, you really need to understand Obj-C to make solid iPhone apps. The side bonus is that you will also be able to write Mac desktop apps.

These screencasts are particularly useful if you are an audio-visual learner and have some background in programming. Don't expect to come up to speed if you have a slight understanding of a basic scripting language. That said, these are very clearly explained and the structure is great. If you watch the videos and do the exercises, I have little doubt you'll be learning the basics of Objective-C in no time. Listen to the audio as we discuss who these are for and what could be done better.

Now that IE8 is here, maybe it's high time that a concerted effort was made to get rid of Internet Explorer 6 once and for all. You'd think by now that most users would have at least upgraded to IE7, but just about every Windows XP system that appears on my workbench is still running the clumsy old oaf-of-a-browser.

@staringispolite has created a simple, open source way that you can help drive the IE6 demon out of our Internet. The Google Code project is called, aptly enough, sevenup. It's inspired by both Google's effort and the movement started by a group of Norweigan websites.

It's a 1k javascript that displays a polite CSS reminder to people who visit your site using IE6 that they should seriously consider upgrading their browser to something a bit more modern. It's respectfully done, though, and includes an option for the user to dismiss the reminder and never be bothered again.

Sure, you could do this on your own from scratch, but sevenup is ready to use and easy to integrate. Do your part to save less tech-savvy web surfers from their browser!

I wrote a while back about Cappuccino, a web app framework that parallels Apple's Cocoa framework for desktop apps. That was back in September, when 280 North had just released an amazing presentation app called 280Slides that essentially brought Apple's Keynote to the web. Cappuccino has evolved a lot since then, and 280 North just made a big leap forward by releasing Atlas, which is roughly the web equivalent of Interface Builder for Mac desktop apps.

What does that mean, exactly? Basically, Atlas enables you to build an entire user interface for your app without coding anything at all. That's great news, because designers who are perfectly capable of planning a good UI might not be competent enough in the coding department to make it a reality. Atlas bridges the gap. If we want to see web apps that are on par with our favorite desktop software, the right tools are important. Kudos to 280 North for developing one of them.

World-renowned Mac developers OmniGroup have announced that they're making a few of their applications available for free. Amongst the four applications which are no longer under active development is OmniWeb, the OmniGroup's long-standing browser that's been around far longer than Apple's recently-upgraded Safari browser. The other three applications, OmniDazzle (which lets you add visual effects on-screen and around your mouse cursor during presentations), OmniDiskSweeper (disk usage utility) and the developer-oriented OmniObjectMeter, are a neat array of tools.

Free versions of all four applications, being made available as the company "make[s] some difficult decisions about where to focus our attention as our business continues to grow" are going up today, and will be available from the relevant product pages.

via TUAW

At a time when a lot of newspapers are shutting down or finding themselves forced to come up with a smarter online strategy, the New York Times is evolving its web content with improvements like the Article Skimmer and an Article Search API. The API can be used to build interesting applications on top of the Times' huge database of articles and information. Taylor Barstow's NYT Explorer is one early example of an app built on Article Search.

When you search for a topic on NYT Explorer, it quickly delivers a list of the relevant articles, sorted by date. For example, a search for software turned up about 40,000 results. That's a lot of articles, but not to worry: NYT Explorer's sidebar has a bunch of quick ways to refine your results and get what you want. You can check a person, a specific column in the paper, a subject, or a location to narrow your results down. All of these categories are sorted by the number of times each item appears in your results. It's an efficient, unfussy way to browse through a mountain of news.

One of the main draws for Firefox is how customizable it is, both in appearance and functionality. We've shown you some of our favorite Firefox themes, but if you're looking for more than a cosmetic change in your browsing experience, you should get to know Greasemonkey.

In case you're not already familiar: Greasemonkey is a Firefox add-on that allows you to apply powerful user-created scripts to the sites you visit. Scripts do everything from drastically changing the layout of a site to adding new menus or doing common tasks automatically. Greasemonkey can change a font that annoys you, or it can change the way you use your browser.

Firefox isn't the only browser that can take advantage of userscripts. For Webkit-based browsers like Safari, check out GreaseKit. Opera is capable of running many userscripts through its own User JavaScript feature. Some of the scripts mentioned in this post might only work in Firefox, though.

Here are ten of my favorite scripts. If you're using some good ones that you don't see here, sound off in the comments.

1. Google Account Multi-login:

If you have more than one Google account, grab this script to replace the "log out" link on most Google services with a menu that lets you quickly switch from one of your accounts to another. A nice time saver for Gmail junkies.

2. Helvetireader:

I love the way Helvetireader cleans up Google Reader. Download it if you're interested in viewing Google Reader in a simple red and white layout, all in Helvetica. It gets everything that's not essential to reading your feeds out of the way.

3. Download YouTube Video as Mp4:

Does just what it says. Causes a download link to appear right under the embed codes to the right of the video on any YouTube page. This definitely beats pasting the URL into one of those YouTube Downloader websites.

Friday night saw myself and our intrepid leader Victor Agreda Jr swing by the Crunchies. In amongst the swathes of free, MySpace-sponsered beer, we rubbed shoulders with many of the stars of Silicon Valley and acknowledge some of the notable services and devices of the last 12 months. Stay tuned for yet more photos from the after-party later today!