Almost nothing that you buy is a one time investment. Most things have follow-up costs for maintenance or just for plain being used. With computers these costs are small and easily neglected, but depending on your needs they can add up to substantial amounts nevertheless.

Since you can’t manage what you don’t measure, let us examine what your computer really costs to run. It will open your eyes and might help you watch out for hidden costs.

Note that I focused on concrete and realistic costs only. There are many more hidden and hard to define costs. However, I have pointed them out along the way, so you can figure out the true costs for yourself if you want.

Calculation Basics

I trust that you can all do basic maths! Just to be sure we are all on the same page, let me explain my method. I multiplied monthly recurring costs (electricity) by 12 to get the yearly costs. To calculate the monthly or yearly total for one-time-investments, I recommend dividing the sum by the number of years or months you intend to use your laptop. You can also add expected one-time-costs for to your calculations.

Hardware

Before you can run a computer, you need to buy one. Whether you invest in a desktop computer, a laptop, or an Ultrabook can make a big difference, not only in terms of the up front investment, but also in terms of maintenance costs. The type of device is a significant factor in your calculations and will obviously influence your end result.

On the one hand a desktop computer is modular and can potentially last you longer than a laptop because it is much easier to upgrade, customize, and repair parts. On the other hand it consumes more energy and isn’t necessarily cheaper to buy. Moreover, it’s not very flexible and you will either invest in a mobile Internet device in the long run or otherwise pay for using a computer or the Internet while out of the house.

In case you are yet to make a purchasing decision, reflect on this point thoroughly. I recommend to get a device only powerful enough to meet your needs for the time you are planning to use it. That said, do not save in terms of memory, CPU, or connectivity (HDMI, USB, etc.), as you will quickly exhaust what is available. However, do save in terms of size, screen resolution, internal drives, and accessories. Buying a more powerful device than what you really need will be more expensive both in the short and long term.

My laptop cost €799 and I intend to use it for a minimum two years.

Intermediate total: €399.50 / year or €33.29 / month.

Software & Services

How much money do you typically spend on software? Don’t forget apps, subscriptions, and upgrades. Note that as you get used to spending money on apps, you are more likely to send ever more. Also note that some of the free apps or services you are using now, might start charging for some features.

Personally, I can hardly remember the last time I spent money on software for personal use. I try to use free alternatives, especially cloud-based services as much as possible. However, I will factor in my recent upgrade to Windows 8, costs for online services, as well as a tiny buffer for apps I might buy. This adds up to €80.

Intermediate total: €439.50 / year or 36.63 / month

Power

Now this is a touchy subject. You can save quite a bit of power if you use your hardware conservatively and it doesn’t have to take great effort. Unfortunately, you won’t save great sums of money on every single device, which this calculation will reveal.

However, if you have many devices that run on electricity, if they are power hungry, and if you have been very wasteful in the way you run them, you can potentially half your electricity bill. Keep in mind that electricity costs are on the rise and at the same time more and more gadgets come with a plug. Thus it’s worth being mindful of power consumption, both when purchasing a new device or running your old ones. You can read more about this topic in my energy saving tips article.

Back to your computer’s power consumption! There isn’t an easy and accurate way to find out how much power your PC is consuming. You can either estimate the power usage or borrow a power meter to get accurate numbers. Unless you want to do a large scale investigation of your power usage, purchasing a power meter is not worth it.

I will go with a super rough estimation. The two main power draining components in my laptop are its Core i5 2.5GHz CPU and the Full HD 15.6″ display. The computer is running for a maximum of 14 hours a day. During that time it may interval between intensive use, moderate use, being idle, standby, and hibernation. I dim the screen towards the evening. Based on these factors I estimate that my laptop needs around 55W on average for a maximum of 420 hours per month. And I think it might actually be less. I presently pay €0.2575 per kWh.

Now here is how you calculate the energy costs:

Intermediate total: €510.90 / year or 42.58 / month

Note that this calculation neglects increasing energy prices.

Internet

What good is a computer if you cannot go online? Exactly! So what do you pay for Internet every month? You could also count your mobile plan if you often tether the Internet to your computer or the obligatory coffee to use the “free” WiFi at your local coffee shop.

Right now I pay €19.90 per month, which includes a landline flat-rate, but I hardly ever use the phone.

Intermediate total: €749.70 / year or 62.48 / month

Hardware Upgrades

Unless you maxed out on hardware when you initially bought your computer, you will likely upgrade parts, for example the hard drive, RAM, or the CPU in case you have a desktop computer. These are significant costs you have to factor in!

I recently upgraded my RAM for €60.98. I’m not planning to upgrade the hard drive. This being a laptop, there is little else I could upgrade.

Intermediate total: €780.19 / year or €64.02 / month

Note that this calculation does not include the potential re-sell value of the hardware you replaced.

Insurance

If you buy an expensive computer that you are intending to use for a long time and that will be subject to an increased risk of damage or theft, it’s worth investing in an insurance. I did not purchase an insurance for my laptop, so my intermediate total remains unchanged.

Repairs

If, like me, you did not opt for an insurance and end up damaging your computer, you will be faced with repair costs. The less you can do yourself, the higher those costs will be. Also note that some repairs are excluded from most warranty and insurance policies, for example laptop batteries.

I damaged my display, but was able to exchange it myself. The costs came down to €85. I’m hoping that I won’t have to replace another part, so I will leave it at that.

Intermediate total: €822.69 / year or 67.56 / month

Note that I didn’t factor in the time it took me to repair the laptop or what I earned for writing about the experience.

Customer Support

If you regularly need help fixing problems on your computer, even if you just invite your friend for dinner for compensation, you have maintenance costs to add to your total. I never had to pay for customer support and usually I’m the one helping out friends, so this position does not affect my total. Note that I’m neglecting the time I spend keeping my computer in shape.

Final Tally

The costs to run my laptop add up to:

• €822.69 per year or €67.56 per month for the whole package vs.
• €184.39 per year or €15.37 per month for just maintenance and energy costs, not including initial purchase or Internet.

As mentioned several times above, this does not factor in the time you have to spend to keep your computer up and running, which would be a complex calculation in its own right.

Conclusion

Computers are anything but one time investments! The monthly costs are not to be neglected, even for someone with a tendency to use free and low cost alternatives like myself. And let me say this once more, time is money and if you took it into account on top of all other costs, you would probably end up with a significant sum! Maybe it’s worth buying a Mac after all.

Image credits: Dollar Button via Shutterstock, Laptop via Shutterstock, Power Meter via Shutterstock

The post How Much Does Your PC Cost To Run? appeared first on MakeUseOf.

A confession up front: Whenever possible, I try to avoid mainstream solutions and go with the lesser-known alternatives. For example, when searching for an Android launcher, I’ll forego something like Nova Launcher in favor of Lightning Launcher. Maybe it’s just my inner hipster talking. But sometimes, the mainstream solutions are mainstream for a reason. Case in point: ADW Launcher for Android.

Another confession: I’ve avoided ADW Launcher for the past two years and I don’t know why. Maybe it was the not-so-catchy name of the app. Maybe I just had a bad day once and decided to shun ADW forever. Nonetheless, I regret avoiding this launcher for so long because it’s absolutely fantastic and deserves a try no matter who you are.

First Impressions

ADW Launcher for Android is packed full of features and concepts that you often don’t see in Android launchers – like app drawers and action gestures – yet it doesn’t feel bloated. The problem with having so many features? It can be intimidating to new users. I’ve been using Android for a while and even I feel a sense of foreboding when I need to slog through a new app with a mountain of features.

But ADW Launcher takes care of you. Upon first launch, you’ll be met with an introductory glimpse at what this launcher can do, but ADW takes it one step further by combining “introduction” with “configuration setup” into one step. Page by page, ADW’s setup introduces you to a feature, then asks how you want it to be configured. Brilliant!

I have to say that my first impression of ADW is extremely good. That was the easiest and most painless initial setup I’ve ever done – and I dare say that it was fun, too. If they put this much effort and thought into the intro, then I believe the developers know what they’re doing.

App Management

Android launchers are all about home screen management and app drawer organization. While ADW Launcher may not be the absolute best in its category (there are paid launchers that perform a bit better), it’s most certainly good enough that I ended up not caring about what other launchers can do.

With ADW home screens, you can play around with the following features:

• Page transitions. Not the most unique feature, of course, but the effects are smooth and run without a hitch even on my terribly old phone (the original Galaxy S for those of you wondering).
• Page indicator styles. Usually a launcher will only have one way of showing you which home screen page you’re on, whether it’s a dot style or a slider or even an explicit number. ADW comes with a bunch and lets you choose which one you like.
• Folder controls. Easily create new folders on your home screen by dragging icons over each other. Folders can have multiple pages within themselves AND they can even be automatically sorted alphabetically (forwards and backwards).
• Gestures. With ADW, you can define specific gestures and then use them to correlate with specific actions, like launching a specific app. Useful for improving your workflow. Take note that these are screen gestures, not per-icon gestures like you might find in Nova Launcher.
• Lock icons. When you’re done with organization and layout, you can lock your home screens so that they can’t be accidentally (or maliciously) altered.

With ADW app drawers, you get a few unique features I haven’t seen elsewhere:

• App drawer styles. ADW lets you pick from a number of different app drawer styles: vertical scrolling, cubed pages, simple side-to-side swipes, etc. In the free version, you only have horizontal pages, ICS-style pages, and vertical scrolling. The remaining seven styles – which are arguably cooler – require the premium version of the app.
• App groups. ADW has a grouping feature which basically splits your app drawer into multiple tabs. Within each app group (which you can name), you can toggle which apps show in the group and which apps are hidden in that group. This is an excellent feature for organization.

Other Features

Having plumbed the depth of what ADW can do, I walk away with this understanding: it’s not about being a power user, it’s not about being the prettiest launcher on the market, but it’s all about letting you, the user, pick and choose how you want your screens and drawers to look. Almost every setting is related to this philosophy in one way or another and that’s what makes ADW beautiful.

• Screen margins. This is a feature that I’ve only elsewhere seen in Nova Launcher. ADW lets you manually change the size of your home screen page margins. I don’t think I’d ever use this feature myself, but it’s really cool regardless.
• Full customization of icon and folder label styles, folder preview styles, app dock styles, icon and dock sizes, icon reflections, awesome widgets, and more.
• Lots of themes. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of skins and themes available for ADW Launcher. You’re bound to find one that you love.
• Compatible with all Android versions starting from 1.6. Absolutely good news for those of you who have outdated phones and outdated ROMs.

The free version of ADW Launcher for Android is feature complete without any limitations that would hinder your daily usage. However, for $3.00 USD, you can upgrade to ADW Launcher EX and unlock even more features.

• More app drawer styles.
• More home screen page transitions.
• Extended icon styling and configuration.
• Save, load, backup, and restore different configuration presets.

Boy, I feel like a fool for waiting this long to give ADW Launcher for Android a chance. It is now the one and only launcher on my phone and I don’t think that will change for many months to come. If you haven’t tried it yet, do yourself a favor and install it.

The post The Tried and True Free Launcher For Android – ADW Launcher appeared first on MakeUseOf.

After two and half years of helping to foster entrepreneurship, the Startup America Partnership has announced they will be rolled into Startup Weekend, which is backed by the Kauffman Foundation. The two brands will live under the new brand, Up Global which according to their announcement is backed by the Kauffman Foundation, the Case Foundation, Microsoft, Google for Entrepreneur and Coca-Cola Company.

Founded in 2011, the Startup America Partnership was blessed by President Obama and initially funded by the Case Foundation and Kauffman Foundation as a three year program to dramatically increase the development, prevalence and success of innovative, high-growth U.S. startups. It was led by Steve Case who appointed Scott Case (no relation) to drive the program. The news of the transition was shared with one hundred regional champions from twenty regions at the fifth Startup America regional summit in Phoenix in mid-April but then reiterated with more details last week.

In Startup America’s first year, the emphasis was on connecting large corporations with startups. It’s second year was about helping to stand-up startup regions and leaders that would drive local initiatives. This year, so far, has involved a few high-profile events (e.g., CES, SXSW) and their Summit, but otherwise has been focused on winding the organization down. Last December the group strategized,  determining the future of Startup America, as Scott Case explained:

“After evaluating the situation, Plan A was to stick to our knitting and wrap things up (as initially communicated and planned) and option B was to find a ‘go forward’ strategy.”

The Startup America board which includes a set of heavy hitters in the startup world, decided on a ‘go forward’ strategy; to merge Startup America into Startup Weekend and create a new brand called UP Global. Scott Case will remain on board as interim president until the end of the summer, but it appears that Marc Nager from Startup Weekend has already stepped in to lead the new Up Global organization as he delivered the news of the merger on the call last week.

As a participant in Startup America as part of the Startup DC regional leadership team here’s what was observed.

The organization absolutely catalyzed some regions, once people could wrap their minds around what Startup America was and stood for. Dozens of community organizers from around the country spent time coming up with strategy and taking action. The report was that 30+ states participated in some way, some much more active than others. Throughout its tenure, the organization was met with some skepticism and some regions did not take it as seriously as the organization had hoped, while others far exceeded the expectations of the group. For example, Startup Tennessee started a state-wide accelerator program lead by Micheal Burcham and backed by the Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam and Commissioner Bill Hagerty of the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development. In Washington, D.C. the 1776 accelerator and campus was created by former Startup America leader Donna Harris and Startup DC regional leader Evan Burfield. There were other examples as well, but these are two of the most publicized.

Startup America also brought together regional leaders by hosting five summits in various locations around the US, where people could exchange notes as they all looked to help foster entrepreneurship. From a regional perspective, Startup America seems like it was a success. While it did not launch in every state, it was able to get 30+ regions going and catalyze numerous regional leaders. In the end, they were also able to rally 12,000+ startups to sign up for the program to get deals and benefits from Startup America’s partners. This data will now be in the hands of Up Global to carry the torch onward.

The post Startup America Winds Down. Rolled Into UP Global With Startup Weekend appeared first on Tech Cocktail

When it comes to online databases and information that can be found inside what is commonly known as the “invisible web“, I’m not your typical user. Sure, I spend a little bit too much of my time sifting through online databases at places like the National Archives and the CIA FOIA reading room, but I have to say nothing makes me more excited than when I find an HTML based table filled with volumes of seemingly complex and unconnected data.

The fact is, data tables are a goldmine of important truths. Data often gets collected by armies of data-collection grunts with boots on the ground. You’ve got people from the U.S. Census traveling the entire country for household and family information. You’ve got non-profit environmental groups collecting all sorts of interesting information about the environment, pollution, global warming and more. And if you’re into the paranormal or Ufology, there are also constantly updated tables of information about sightings of strange objects in the sky above us.

Ironically, you would think that any government in the world would be interested to know what sort of foreign craft are being spotted in the skies over any country, but apparently not – at least not in the U.S. anyway. In America, the collection of unusual sightings of crafts have been relegated to teams of amateur hobbyists who flock to new UFO sightings like moths to a flame. My interest in these sightings actually stems not from a fascination with aliens or crafts from other planets, but from a scientific fascination with patterns – where and why more people are seeing things in the sky, and whether those sightings could reflect something very real and much more down-to-Earth actually going on.

To explore the volumes of data collected by teams of UFO hobbyists, I’ve actually developed a way to import large HTML tables of data into a Google Spreadsheet, and then manipulate and analyze that data to extract and discover meaningful and important information. In this article, I intend to show you how to do the same.

Important HTML Data Into Google Spreadsheet

In this example, I’m going to show you how to import any data that might be stored in a table on any website on the Internet, into your Google Spreadsheet. Think about the enormous volume of data that’s available on the Internet today in the form of HTML tables. Wikipedia alone has data in tables for topics like global warming, the U.S. Census Bureau has tons of population datasets, and a little bit of Googling will land you a whole lot more beyond that.

In my example, I’m starting out with a database on the National UFO Reporting Center that actually looks like it might be a query-style deep-web database, but if you observe the URL structuring, it’s actually a semi-complex web-based reporting system consisting of static web pages and static HTML tables – exactly what we want when looking for data to import. NUForc.org is one of those organizations that serves as one of the biggest reporting centers for UFO sightings. It isn’t the only one, but it’s big enough to find new datasets with current sightings for every month. You choose to view the data sorted by criteria like State or Date, and each of those is provided in the form of a static page. If you sort by date and then click on the most recent date, you’ll see that the table listed there is a static web page named according to the date format. So, we now have a pattern to regularly extract the latest sightings information from this HTML-based database. All you have to do is import the first table, use the most recent entry (the top one) to identify the latest update, and then use the date of that posting to build the URL link where the latest HTML data table exists. Doing this will simply require a couple of instances of the ImportHTML function, and then a few creative uses of text manipulation functions. When you’re done, you’ll have one of the coolest, self-updating reporting spreadsheets of your very own. Let’s get started.

Importing Tables and Manipulating Data

The first step, of course, is to create the new spreadsheet. So, how do you import HTML tables? All you need is the URL where the table is stored, and the number of the table on the page – usually the one first listed is 1, the second is 2, and so on. Since I know the URL of that first table listing dates and counts of sightings listed, it’s possible to import by typing the following function into cell A1.

=importhtml(“http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxpost.html?”&H2,”table”,1)

H2 holds the function “=hour(now())“, so the table will update every hour. This is probably extreme for data that updates this infrequently, so I could probably get away with doing it daily. Anyway, the above ImportHTML function brings in the table as shown below. You’ll need to do a bit of data manipulation on this page before you can piece together the URL for the second table with all of the UFO sightings. But go ahead and create the second sheet on the workbook. Before trying to build that second sheet, it’s time to extract the post date from this first table, in order to build the link to the second table. The problem is that the date is brought in as a date format, not a string. So, first you need to use the TEXT function to convert the report post date into a string:

=text(A2,”mm/dd/yy”)

In the next cell to the right, you need to use the SPLIT function with the “/” delimiter to break the date up into month, day and year.

=split(D2,”/”) Looking good! However, each number needs to be forced to two digits. You do this in the cells right below them using the TEXT command again.

=text(E2,”00″)

A format of “00″ (those are zeroes) forces two digits, or a “0″ as a placeholder. Now you’re ready to rebuild the entire URL to the latest HTML table of new sightings. You can do this by using the CONCATENATE function, and piecing together all of the bits of information you just extracted from the first table.

=concatenate(“http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxp”,G3,E3,F3,”.html”) Now, on the new sheet you created above (the blank sheet), you’re going to do a new “importhtml” function, but this time for the first URL link parameter, so you’re going to navigate back to the first spreadsheet and click on the cell with the URL link you just created. The second parameter is “table” and the last is “1″ (because the sightings table is the first and only on the page). Hit enter, and now you’ve just imported the entire volume of sightings that were posted on that particular date. So, you’re probably thinking this is a nice novelty act and everything – I mean, after all, what you’ve done is extracted existing information from a table on the Internet and migrated it to another table, albeit a private one in your Google Docs account. Yes, that’s true. However, now that it’s in your own private Google Docs account, you have at your fingertips the tools and functions to better analyze that data, and start discovering amazing connections.

Using Pivot Reports to Analyze Imported Data

Just recently, I wrote an article about using Pivot Reports in Google Spreadsheet to perform all sorts of cool data analysis feats. Well, you can do the same amazing data analysis acrobatics on the data that you’ve imported from the Internet – giving you the ability to uncover interesting connections that possibly no one else has uncovered before you.

For example, from the final sightings table, I might decide to use a pivot report to take a look at the number of different unique shapes reported in each state, compared to the overall number of sightings in that particular state. Finally, I also filter out anything mentioning “aliens” in the comments section, to hopefully weed out some of the more wingnut entries. This actually reveals some pretty interesting things right off the bat, such as the fact that California clearly has the highest number of reported sightings of any other State, along with the distinction of reporting the highest number of craft shapes in the country. It also shows that Massachusetts, Florida and Illinois are big hitters in the UFO sightings department as well (at least in the most recent data).

Another cool thing about Google Spreadsheet is the wide array of charts available to you, including a Geo-Map that lets you lay out “hot spots” of data in a graphical format that really stands out and makes those connections within the data quite obvious. If you think about it, this is really only the tip of the iceberg. If you can now import data from data tables on any page on the Internet, just think of the possibilities. Get the latest stock numbers, or the most recent top 10 books and authors on the New York Times bestseller list, or the biggest selling cars in the world. There are HTML tables out there on almost any topic you can imagine, and in many cases those tables are frequently updated.

ImportHtml gives you the ability to plug your Google Spreadsheet into the Internet, and feed off the data that exists out there. It can become your own personal hub of information that you can use to manipulate and massage into a format that you can actually work with. It’s just one more very cool thing to love about Google Spreadsheet.

Have you ever imported data into your spreadsheets? What kind of interesting things did you discover in that data? How did you use the data? Share your experiences and ideas in the comments section below!

Image Credits: Business Graph

The post How I Import Internet UFO Sightings Data Into A Google Spreadsheet appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Aligning itself aesthetically more along the lines of social networks like Facebook and Google+, LinkedIn has introduced a new navigation bar to its website. The aim is in line with the company's simplification efforts, which so far have included redesigns of the homepage and profile pages and as an overhaul of its mobile apps and the discovery news page LinkedIn Today. 

(Read more: With Pulse, LinkedIn Is Becoming The Newspaper Of The Future)

The company released this video that details how users can best use the new navigation addition: 

Popular streaming music service Spotify has launched a new feature designed to showcase the most popular songs. The new feature, called Spotify 50, or Spotify Charts, shows the most played songs on the service according to region. The Social 50, on the other hand, showcases the songs users are sharing across social media the most.

Everything on the charts is divided by region, with the 28 locations where Spotify is offered available for users can switch between on the fly using the button on the top-right of the screen.

Not only is it interesting to see what music is most popular on Spotify, it can also be a useful way to discover some music you may not have heard of. While I think I have a fairly decent finger on the pulse of the music scene, at least in the US, there were plenty of popular artists with which I was not familiar. Going further, exploring music from other parts of the world will help expand musical horizons even more.

In addition to changing regions, users can go back to look at different date ranges. This lets users keep track of what is popular, and for how long it is dominating on Spotify.

Spotify has also set up its charts website to allow users to select the data in which they are interested in, and get an embed code for a widget they can place anywhere on the Web. This is a smart move for Spotify, as it allows its data to penetrate the Web quicker than it would by simply residing on its website.

Will you use Spofity’s new charts feature? What do you think of it?

Source: Spotify Charts

The post Spotify Launches Top Charts For Most Played & Most Shared Songs Worldwide [Updates] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

If it’s about time you purchase a new computer, that computer is probably going to come with Windows 8 (unless you buy a Mac). Microsoft hasn’t included a tutorial with Windows 8 — aside from the cryptic “move your mouse into any corner” line — so you’ll need to do a bit of research to get up to speed with the latest version of Windows.

Ask anyone who uses Windows 8 on a standard laptop or desktop (not a tablet), and they’ll tell you the key to getting along with Windows 8 is ignoring as much of the new interface as possible. The standard desktop is still there under all that “Modern” interface.

Where’s the Desktop?

When you first log in to Windows 8, you’ll see the new full-screen Start screen. New “Modern” apps that you can install from the Windows Store only run in this full-screen environment.

We’ll get to that later, though. For now, the most important thing you need to know is that the traditional Windows desktop is still there and can still run all your old software. To get to the desktop, all you have to do is click the Desktop tile on your Start screen. You can also press Windows key + D to launch the desktop.

Note that, if you purchased a Windows RT device, the desktop can’t run all your old desktop software — but you probably purchased a Windows 8 device. Windows RT devices are very unpopular, with the exception of Microsoft’s Surface RT.

Where’s My Start Button?

Now you’re at the desktop, which should look very familiar. It’s the Windows 7 desktop, but with a variety of improvements like a better task manager, improved file copy dialog, and built-in time machine backup. However, you’ll notice that there’s no Start button anymore.

The Start button is actually present, but hidden. You can make it appear by moving your mouse to the bottom-left corner of the screen and clicking. This opens the Start screen you were at earlier. You can also easily launch the Start screen by pressing the Windows key on your keyboard.

To launch an application from the Start screen, click its shortcut like you normally would — desktop apps appear here, too. You can also start typing at the Start screen to search your installed applications, just like on the Windows 7 start menu. To view all your installed applications, right-click somewhere on the start screen (not on a tile), click All apps at the bottom of the screen, and you’ll see your installed programs.

The Start screen is essentially the successor to the Start menu — think of it as a full-screen start menu. Applications you install will gain shortcuts on your Start screen, so you can arrange these shortcuts as you like. You can also use the search feature to quickly launch apps.

To make things easier, you should pin applications you use to the desktop taskbar — when they’re running, right-click their taskbar icons and select the Pin option. You can then easily launch the applications from your taskbar without opening the full-screen Start screen and leaving your desktop.

How Do I Shut Down?

Note that the hidden Start button isn’t the only special “hot corner.” You can also move your mouse cursor to the top or bottom right corners of the screen and then move it towards the center edge of the screen to access the “charms.” For the most part, you shouldn’t need to access these charms unless you use Modern applications. However, the Shut Down and Restart options are located under the Settings charm.

Don’t worry — there are many other ways to shut down your Windows 8 computer, including with its physical power button.

Move your mouse cursor to the top-left corner of your screen and you’ll access an app switcher that only works for “Modern” apps, not desktop ones — you don’t need to use that unless you’re using the new, Modern-style apps.

Do I Have to Use All This New Stuff?

As far as the Start screen and Modern apps go, you only have to see the Start screen when you log in. You can then use your computer normally, avoiding it as much as possible and using desktop applications. Pin application shortcuts to your taskbar and you won’t need to use it for launching apps. Modern apps are more suited to tablets than typical desktops and laptops.

Microsoft doesn’t give us an option to boot to the desktop or use a traditional start menu, but you can do this anyway. Install a third-party Start menu like the popular Start8 and you’ll have a traditional desktop that appears when you log in. There will be a delay before your desktop appears, however. These Start menus can also easily disable the hot corners for you, allowing to have a more traditional-style desktop.

Windows 8 makes much more sense on a touch-enabled computer, but you probably haven’t purchased a touch-enabled machine as they’re much more expensive — most people are still buying computers without touch support. If you have a touch-enabled Windows 8 machine, check out our printable cheat sheet to Windows 8′s touch and mouse gestures.

For more in-depth information on getting to grips with Windows 8 — including how to use the new Modern environment with all those Windows Store apps — check out our free Windows 8 guide.

Do you have any other questions? Feel free to ask! And in case you have already mastered Windows 8, share your own tips for upgrading to Windows 8. what was your greatest challenge?

The post Upgrading to Windows 8? Get Settled In Faster with these Tips appeared first on MakeUseOf.

The Google homepage is intentionally minimalist, with a distinct lack of pointless detritus that would only serve to divert people’s attention away from the main purpose of the page. Which is to provide a kicking off point for exploring the wider Web. There’s the Google logo, a search bar, and a couple of buttons, and that’s it… most of the time.

From 1998 onwards Google has been regularly changing the Google logo up, with the new iterations labeled Google Doodles. These doodles have been used to great effect to mark significant events, the birthdays of important people, and national holidays. They have also become a lot more involved over the years, with interactive elements being added.

We’ve already looked at the best Google Doodles in video form, now it’s time to list the best playable Google Doodles released to date. Good Guy Google doesn’t delete these games, so they remain playable long after they appear on the Google homepage. Which is great for all of us who spend far too long on the Web and who are in constant need of things to occupy our brains.

Zamboni

A Zamboni is an ice-resurfacer, named after its inventor Frank Zamboni. In the same way Hoover has become the generic name for all vacuum cleaners, so Zamboni has become the generic name for all ice resurfacers.

Google released a doodle in honor of Frank Zamboni in January 2013, to commemorate what would have been his 112th birthday. It takes the form of a game which sees you driving an ice resurfacer around an ice rink after skaters have scuffed up the ice.

This game is very simple. You use the arrow keys on your keyboard to control the vehicle, cleaning up all of the scuff marks as quickly as possible without running out of fuel. There are also power-ups and obstacles left behind on the ice.

Snake

Released in February 2013 this version of the classic mobile game Snake was released to commemorate Chinese New Year 2013. Why Snake? Because 2013 is the year of the snake. Clever ol’ Google.

You start playing by clicking the coin slot in the middle of the logo. Then you simply use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move the snake left, right, up, and down. You don’t have to worry about hitting the edges of the playing area, instead you just need to collect the power-ups while avoiding the sticks of dynamite.

Pac-Man

This was the first playable Google Doodle, and it arguably remains the best one released so far. Pac-Man turned 30 in May 2010, and to celebrate Google released its own version of the arcade classic featuring a maze inspired by the Google lettering.

After clicking ‘Insert Coin’ you control Pac-Man with the arrow keys on your keyboard, eating the pills while avoiding the ghosts. The gameplay remains true to the original, which means it’s just as frustrating as it ever was.

If this puts you in the mood for more Pac-Man then you’ll love The World’s Biggest Pac-Man.

London 2012 Olympics

Google truly outdid itself to commemorate the London 2012 Olympic Games. As well as different static doodles for the opening and closing ceremonies, it released four playable Google Doodles for four of the sports included in the Olympics. All of these doodles are competitive, and you will be awarded up to three medals depending on your performance.

Slalom Canoe

In the Slalom Canoe Google Doodle game you need to guide your canoeist down the rapids, making sure he travels between each set of gates. The canoe is controlled by the left and right arrow keys, one for each of the two oars. You need to concentrate on getting into a fluid rhythm and hitting each gate in turn.

Soccer

In the Soccer Google Doodle game you play the part of the goalkeeper who needs to save as many shots from the striker as possible. The arrow keys move you left and right, and the spacebar makes you jump. The more shots you save the more difficult the game becomes… until you’ve let three goals in and it’s Game Over.

Hurdles

In the Hurdles Google Doodle game you need to both run fast and make it over each hurdle that is put in your way. It’s a tough combination to get right, with each hurdle you run into slowing you down and ensuring you get a poor time. The left and right arrow keys pressed in turn build speed, with the spacebar pressed to clear the hurdles.

Basketball

In the Basketball Google Doodle game you have 24 seconds to score as many basketballs as possible. All you need to do is hold down the spacebar to build up power, letting it go to release the ball. It’s a lot harder than it sounds, especially as your standing position moves back after so many balls are played.

Conclusions

These are the best playable Google Doodles I have ever seen, but I suspect there are many more out there waiting to be discovered. Google takes its doodles so seriously now that it features different sets for different countries, so it could be that there is a playable gem that is only available in your territory lurking away unseen by the masses.

If this is the case then please let us know so that we can build another list of playable Google Doodles in the future. After all, MakeUseOf is a global effort, both in terms of the writers and editors, and the readership.

Beyond that request, do you have a favorite amongst the playable Google Doodles featured here? Or any other thoughts to add to the article? If so please let us know in the comments section below. Otherwise read about different ways to explore Google Doodles on the Web.

The post Keep Boredom At Bay With Playable Google Doodles appeared first on MakeUseOf.

With more and more research showing the importance of proper education in the formative years of adolescence, early education providers have focused on increasing the technology used in their classrooms. High schools and universities rely on technology-driven curriculums, so why shouldn’t early education providers, as well?

KinderReader is one such offering that wants to bring pre-schools and similar education providers into the tech age. Through the device-based program, students aged four to seven will learn to read through 80 lessons. KinderReader will utilize assessment tools and communication platforms for teachers and parents to monitor a child’s development and remain on the same page. The device will also be programmable for foreign languages, like Spanish and Chinese, for secondary language education or international distribution.

All-in-one devices that leverage the communicative and analytical power of today’s technology for educational purposes are not unique. SMART Boards and other devices and software have contributed to higher education over the past decade. It is only recently that this approach to education has translated to early education.

As companies use data mining to better tailor their products or services to their customers, early educational tools should benefit from the same approach. With the biggest opportunity for mental development occurring in the preschool years, it makes sense for the education community to focus their technology into providing the best service possible. KinderReader addresses this need through their comprehensive solution.

KinderReader was a showcased startup at our Tech Cocktail Kansas City mixer.

The post KinderReader Uses Technology to Teach Young Students to Read appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Hey, developers! Do you feel like you're in demand? Apparently you should.

HubSpot, a Cambridge-based marketing software-as-a-service venture, has started a new initiative to handsomely compensate anyone who can refer a developer friend. “If you do, and we end up hiring them, we’ll thank you with a big, fat check for $30,000,” its Refer A Dev program promises. 

HubSpot’s solution may seem like an extreme one, but not if you’ve been looking at the numbers. In 2010, there were 913,000 U.S. jobs for software developers, and that number is expected to grow by 30% from 2012 to 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Expected job growth across all U.S. occupations over that time? Just 14%.

Heck, see for yourself:

Even just compared to the rest of the growing tech industry, developers are among the most wanted. According to Wanted Analytics, a data firm that analyzes help-wanted ads:

[a]pplication [d]evelopers were the most in-demand technology occupation in April, reaching a new high in the number of job ads. Demand for this talent has grown 16% from April of 2012 and more than 190% from 4 years ago.

Irvine, Calif.-based IT recruiting firm CyberCoders conducted a study of 10,000 tech companies and their hiring requirements. Their findings revealed that out of all their recruits, those who had development skills — especially mobile, front-end, and open source development skills — were most in demand in today’s job market. 

“Everyday we see the engineers with these skills getting an average of four to five job offers,” the CEO and founder of CyberCoders, Heidi Golledge, wrote in the company blog post.

If the ratio of offer to engineer is indeed five to one, that means a lot of engineers are being paid well, and a lot of companies are going home empty handed. 

With a growing glut of learn-to-code companies eager to teach customers the requisite skills, it’s hard to say how long developers will remain the golden geese of the job market. But if you’re a mobile, front-end, or open-source developer working today, maybe it’s time to reconsider your options.

Just tell me first, so I can make $30,000 when you get hired at HubSpot.

Image via Flickr user Moyan_Brenn, CC 2.0

Productivity pros swear by multiple monitors, but we don’t all have the luxury of carrying around huge screens and endless wallets. On the other hand, the iPad has become pretty ubiquitous, and it can really help you be more productive.

What if I told you there was a way you could use your iPad as a second monitor, extending your desktop with precious extra inches? That would be pretty amazing right?

Well here are three apps that let you do just that.

Splashtop XDisplay ($4.99 In-App Purchase, Mac & Windows)

Ease of Setup: Poor

SplashTop is already the brand leader in high-performance remote control software for your PC or Mac via an iPad (you can even watch movies), so a second display app is a natural fit. In fact, the same Splashtop Streamer app is used on the PC/Mac side as the display driver.

Software installation is pretty basic, but I was a little perturbed to see permission required for an app called itself Kextinstaller; from my hackintosh days, I know kexts (key extension?) are core system files, and messing around with them incorrectly is one of the few things you can do to break a Mac. The things I do in the name of testing…

Once installed, you’re asked to create a username and password, but these are only needed for the remote control Splashtop 2 app.

However, you will need to click on the Security tab and create a security code, which isn’t obvious; as well as install the virtual display driver under Settings > Advanced. A restart is also required.

When youre finished with all that, switch over to the iPad, launch XDisplay and you should see that your computer has been automatically discovered. Tap on it and it should connect, though it took a few refreshes for me and looked like the computer was breaking in the process. Eventually though, the screen will be extended and a helpful hint system displayed.

Performance: Great

A three-finger tap will open the app settings, one of which is to switch between smooth and sharp. In smooth mode, video playback was great, but text is fuzzy.

In sharp mode, video was still playable, but mouse response took a nosedive. Most text was easy to read, but clearly not “retina” grade. It’s also worth noting that touch controls mouse movement, so you should be able to draw into desktop applications with this app if you wanted. And because the app is resolution independent, you can also zoom in.

Splashtop XDisplay is free to download with a 10 minute limitation, and is currently on 50% sale at $4.99 to unlock the full app. It’s a pain to setup and the required steps aren’t obvious or documented in any central place, but it does work exactly as it says on the tin, and being able to switch between sharp text or smoother graphics makes it suitable for a wide range of applications.

Mini-Display ($9.99, Mac only)

$9.99 might seem like a high price to pay for an app which is rated 2 stars average and only Mac compatible, but I had no specific issues using this, so can only assume the ratings came form previous buggy versions.

Ease of setup: Great

Install the connector software and restart – that’s it. No passwords, no hidden driver installs. It just works. The interface on MiniDisplay for the iPad is simple, with a nice image of any recognized machines. Select the machine, and a few seconds later you have an extended desktop. If your Mac has a user password set, you’ll need to enter that.

Performance: Atrociously slow but crystal clear

The lag is unbearably slow – it would take a few seconds or so to drag a window onto the extended desktop and have it appear. Just writing text into an email or Evernote is acceptable. The text however, is crystal clear – it’s obviously using the native retina resolution of the iPad, which explains the lag. Video playback is impossible, but if writing emails or reading small chat displays is your main use case, you might appreciate the retina graphics.

Mouse movement is performed using a single tap, so no drawing is possible.

Mini Display is a universal app, so you can also run it on your iPhone – though only one device can be connected at the same time which means no lining up every iDevice you own for fun. It’s also worth pointing out that the higher resolution of the iPhone makes it completely unusable for, well, anything.

AirDisplay ($9.99, Mac & Windows)

Ease of setup: Great

Again, a single install and no passwords to set or additional steps required. If there was any confusion about what to do, launching Air Display on the iPad explains exactly what you need to do for either Mac or Windows, including how to setup an ad-hoc Wi-Fi network if needed.

To actually start using the display, activate and select the second device from the menu bar in the Mac or Windows AirDisplay host.

Note: there used to be a free version of this app that has since been withdrawn – the developers found it was butchering sales of the full app.

Performance: Reasonable

Again, Air Display uses the full resolution of an iPad – which is approximately the same as my iMac, so the pixel density renders a lot of apps unusable, though with incredibly clear detail. Here’s some tiny Photoshop menus, for example.

Video and general usage is very laggy, though subjectively didn’t feel as bad as Mini-Display. You can even draw directly into Photoshop, smoothly but albeit with a noticeable second delay between touching and having the line appear. Significantly, AirDisplay also includes the option to not use retina resolutions – it’s tucked away in the preferences. Disabling this puts it on par with XDisplay’s sharp setting, and makes everything more responsive and UI elements more reasonably sized.

The Winner

To be honest, trying to use the iPad as a second screen just made me squint an awful lot no matter what the app. Then again, my main work machine is a 27″ iMac – if you were to place the iPad alongside a 13″ MacBook Air, you might be more appreciative of any extra inches you could get your hands on.

For basic tasks like keeping a chat window open, checking a mail client or perhaps as a status monitor – the iPad works admirably. The clear winner for me in this round-up though has to Splashtop XDisplay. Yes, it doesn’t display at retina resolution, but in practice this is actually better than the other apps which ended up displaying windows at incredible detail, but so tiny as to be useless.

XDisplay lets you switch between a higher quality (though not retina) resolution, and something more than acceptable for smooth video playback. It’s sadly let down by the complex and somewhat daunting install process. AirDisplay comes an admirable second once you disable retina graphics, and the setup is far friendlier. It’s a tough call between the two.

Have you found a better solution to use your use iPad as a second monitor? Let us know in the comments if you have, or if you use your iPad as a second monitor often – we’d love to hear your experiences and what kind of apps you dock there.

Intro image: ShutterStock – multiple monitors

The post How To Use Your iPad (or iPhone!) As A Second Monitor [iOS] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

In a pure case of closing the barn doors after the horses have come home (and so many corporate Twitter accounts have been hacked), Twitter has announced today the option to implement two-factor authentication. If users opt-in, any sign-on from a new computer will require a code texted to their phone. 

The feature hasn't been made universally available yet, so keep checking your settings if you want this added security feature.

(See Two-Factor Authorization Is Awesome - Until You Lose the Damn Token.)

Zachary Seward, writing for Quartz:

The emails have mostly been viewed in the context of the lawsuit, but they also provide an extraordinary view of high-stakes negotiation between the leaders of two powerful firms, Apple and News Corp. They start far apart, but over the course of five days, Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs successfully pulls the son of News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch over to his side.

Interesting too, that the negotiations came so close to the debut of the iPad.

One of my fondest gaming memories is Wings, a World War I fighter plane arcade simulator released on the Amiga back in 1991. It was the first game in which I was able to create a profile, it offered three different gaming options within the pilot’s career and most of all it was hugely playable and addictive. Sadly over the years I’ve never been able to find a game that comes close.

Rise of Glory is a Windows Phone game with a similar premise. Complete with tutorials and missions to shoot up the enemy in long-winded dogfights, this Xbox Live game evokes the spirit of Wings (just as it does those brave heroes who took to the skies in machines made of wood and steel). But can it replace that old 16-bit game in my affections?

The Setting For Rise Of Glory

For the younger among you, from 1914-1918 there was a devastating war in Europe. Known at the time as The Great War but now alternatively as the First World War or World War I, the full, horrific details of the conflict (including cause, outcome and tactics used) can be found on Wikipedia. What is notable about the conflict is that several new types of warfare were borne out of it.

On the ground, tanks, heavy artillery and machine guns were employed for the first time, while the recent invention of the aeroplane by the Wright Brothers was adopted by a new division of the British Army, the Royal Flying Corp. Similarly, Britain’s enemy in this war, Germany, was equipped with its own aircraft, and while the gun battles and artillery bombardments raged across the fields of France and Belgium, one-on-one combat ensued in the air.

You Are an Airman

We look back on these airmen – on both sides – with some romance. One of Germany’s most successful pilots was The Red Baron, and in the majority of cases these were daring, officer-class recruits who signed up to their respective fledgling air forces out of patriotism and reckless derring-do.

This spirit isn’t present when you first open Rise of Glory. The game forces you into a rather dull tutorial, forcing you to learn to fly and reach way points successfully before giving you the chance to destroy some sheds and barrage balloons in your rickety airplane before progressing to real action.

To this end, all you have is an accelerator and decelerator, a gun and a rudder control – along with the gyroscopic capabilities of your Windows Phone 8 device. Don’t worry about sensitivity, as this can be adjusted in the game settings.

Fly Into Battle

Different planes are available as you proceed through the game, usually locked to specific levels, so you should check the details of the craft before engaging so you can alter your tactics accordingly. Some craft have better armour than others, for instance.

Gameplay is fun and engaging, especially when the enemy attacks! This is the moment that you need to take full advantage of the plane’s strengths, which usually involves a lot of spins and weaving while firing your gun whenever the enemy is in your sights – but not before! Overuse of your single mounted machine gun can cause the weapon to overheat and lock up (a genuine challenge faced by those pilots nearly 100 years ago) so this should be used sparingly.

Beyond the gun, the only other real challenges are avoiding crashing (it’s easy to hit the ground in the middle of intense combat) and the increasing difficulty of the missions. A huge selection of achievements are available (the credit for doing so added to your Xbox Live Gamerscore) but you’ll need to put in a heck of a lot of game time to complete them all…

Graphics & Sound

From propeller sounds when starting the biplane in the training mission to the sounds of bullets in combat, Rise of Glory is also accompanied by a music soundtrack with typically triumphant military overtones. Audio levels can be adjusted in the settings, while the theme tune can also be set as your ringtone.

Other than the gameplay, however, the real pleasure in Rise of Glory is work put into the graphics. The aircraft are detailed, while the landscape moves in such a way as to create the sort of motion you would expect. Acceleration is impressive too (the plane moves away from the camera in the main third person view) and all of these elements are the icing on the cake of an impressive game.

Flight of Fantasy!

Easily one of the best Windows Phone games I’ve played, Rise of Glory marries the bravery of the era in which it is set with the solitude, the lack of communication and exposure to the elements that would have been experienced by pilots in the First World War. A good selection of different achievements can be earned (excellent for your Xbox Live Gamerscore!) from Rookie (three kills while surviving battle) to 10,000 kills throughout the game, with plenty in between (Flawless, Ace, Clean Match, etc.).

The difficulty level is well-balanced, the graphics evocative and the user interface perfect.

If you own a Windows Phone, Rise of Glory should be installed already – if it’s not, make it a game that you plan to buy. To give you an idea of its quality, we’ve added Rise of Glory to our Best of Windows Phone Apps page.

Rise of Glory can be purchased from the Windows Phone Store for $2.99 (£2.29 in the UK).

The post World War I Aircraft Action In Rise Of Glory for Windows Phone appeared first on MakeUseOf.

You have just finished building an epic new website, but there seems to be a little voice inside your head telling you it amounts to nothing and will get no traffic. When it comes to a new website, it can be tricky to be sure of what is going on without the proper data analytics.

Brian Gruber, owner and founder, created Lucky Orange to fill the void of understanding how people are actually interacting with a website and to shut that nagging voice up once and for all.

Designed as a usage and customer feedback tool for website owners, Lucky Orange provides succinct data to increase the return on investment for website-based businesses and services by identifying key areas in customer abandonment.

“No need for a PhD in data analytics or pesky Excel documents anymore,” says Gruber.

Lucky Orange works behind the scenes and offers website owners a multitude of features to monitor their user base. The suite is comprised of real-time analytics, visitor polls, visitor recordings, live sessions, heatmaps, live chat software, and live visitor maps.

• Real-time analytics inform a website owner of anything happening on their site at any specific moment, while compiling top keywords and holding a running visitor count.
• Visitor polls can be added or deleted immediately from a site without any coding hassle and give users a chance to rate their experience.
• Recordings and live sessions allow site owners to watch real-time use of their site or record user sessions for future study.
• Heatmaps aggregate mouse movement and scroll depth data for the site owner and presents it in a sci-fi-esque visual representation of the hottest parts of the site.
• Live chat integrates seamlessly to give users an outlet to voice any concerns from anywhere on the site, while live visitor maps provide a real-time map of all visitors to the website.

“We get a lot of people who want to know how to effectively drive traffic to their site,” says Gruber. “We are able to show them exactly how to drive traffic while showing them exactly what their current user base is doing.”

If a user gets stuck filling out a bugged form, cannot contact you, or misses crucial parts of your website, Luck Orange can track, diagnose, and fix these issues. That is, not only does Lucky Orange provide a diagnosis, it also provides a solution.

“Every day, thousands of people create their own website and hold their breath hoping things work out,” explains Gruber. “I say: Why not take steps to make current traffic work better for you?”

Lucky Orange was featured at Tech Cocktail’s Kansas City Mixer & Startup Showcase and also won the live SMS poll for the hottest featured startup. 

The post Optimize Website Traffic With Lucky Orange’s Powerhouse Data Analytics appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Connie Guglielmo, reporting for Forbes:

Michael Gartenberg, a longtime industry analyst known for covering digital media technologies and companies including Microsoft and Apple, has left his post as an analyst at Gartner Inc. to take a job with Apple.

Gartenberg didn’t immediately reply to a voicemail message left at his office at Apple asking him to talk about his new role for the Cupertino, California-based company. He is working on the marketing team under Apple’s global marketing chief Phil Schiller, according to sources.

Smart hire. Going to be weird seeing him on the other side of the line at Apple press events.

Reuters headline three weeks ago: “Intel Picks Insider as CEO, Dashing Hopes for Shakeup”.

Dashed, indeed.

If using keyboard shortcuts is not your forté but you spend a lot of time working in workhorse applications like Photoshop, GarageBand, Pages or Word, Numbers, Adobe InDesign, iMovie, or PowerPoint, or you simply want a faster way to execute menu items on your computer, you might want to check an app called Actions for iPad ($3.99).

Actions enables you to set up commands to control your Mac or Windows PC from your iPad. It works in similar fashion to Keyboard Maestro, an automator application I recently reviewed. Actions is like having a personalised menu on your iPad which can be used to access a variety of individual commands, like opening and closing windows, zooming in and out on a webpage, controlling media playback, navigating via web browsers, or when creating new documents — basically any menu bar item for an application can be executed in Actions.

The User Interface

Though Actions for iPad does require some setup to get started, its user interface is very well designed, especially for an automation application. Actions is sort of like Automator, but it’s ten times more attractive. The main palette of Actions consists of multicolor buttons with professionally designed icons that send assigned commands to your computer.

Tapping on an action is like clicking on a menu bar item or issuing a keyboard shortcut command. You can divide the Actions palette into different presets, one for each of your most used applications, including the Finder. When you switch to a preset application in Actions, that application will automatically come to the forefront on your Mac or PC. Likewise, when you switch to a different preset application on your computer, it will automatically switch to the corresponding preset on Actions, so you can start using the preset commands.

Actions also includes universal finger gestures on the iPad for copying and pasting text and images, and for undoing and redoing actions on your computer.

Setting Up Actions

I must admit I didn’t find Actions easy to set up at first. To get started, you will need to download and install the Mac or PC client for Actions. Next open Actions on your iPad and the client on your computer, and pair them over your network. This part of the setup is easy enough and the app walks you through the process.

I believe the Actions app for iPad comes installed with a preset application for controlling iTunes, but you still will need to take some time to set up personalized presets for your own computer. If you overlook the tutorial when first opening Actions, you can re-open it by tapping on the tiny “i” icon on the top-left of Actions, accessed by swiping down on the palette with three fingers.

The resulting page will explain the four main buttons to create or load presets, and edit actions in the app.

Fortunately, Actions comes installed with presets for a wide variety of applications including Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, Chrome and Safari, iMovie, Word, Windows Vista and XP, and Garageband. Tap the pencil icon in the top-right to create a new preset or load the preset application.

When the Create new preset button is tapped Actions will load all of the supporting applications on your computer. You can then scroll and select the one you want to load – iPhoto for instance.

Type a label for the set and then tap on the tick confirmation icon on the top-right side. After the new set or application is created, tap on the confirmation button again, and then tap the Load button, which presents all the applications that include default preset commands in Actions.

So if you tap on the iPhoto application presets, you can select the actions that you want to load in the palette for controlling that application on your Mac. You probably should only select the actions you perform the most in iPhoto, such as Copy Adjustments, Paste Adjustments, Full Screen View, Batch Change, Flag Photo, Move to Trash or Rate 5 Stars for example

Next, tap the confirmation button, and Actions will load your selection of actions for iPhoto. You can re-arrange the actions on the palette, and when you’re done, tap the confirmation button to save those actions. Notice that you can always edit or load more actions for the application set by tapping on the edit icon.

You can also tap the edit button, and then tap on an individual action to edit and change the color of a button, or add or change its icon or name.

Create an Action

Though Actions has over 900 pre-installed actions and commands, there will be applications in which you will have to create actions from scratch. So for instance, since Actions doesn’t have preset actions for the text editor, MarsEdit, they will need to be manually created. To do this, tap on the Edit button, followed by the Create button.

Actions are created based on keyboard shortcuts. To create a Paste Link action, for example, I tap on the key command buttons in Actions that match the keyboard shortcut for that menu item in MarsEdit. You can apply a color and icon to represent that action and after tapping the confirmation button, it’s good to go.

With Actions open and setting next to my keyboard, I can tap on actions as I write articles in MarsEdit.

Bottom Line

The above instructions I’ve given for Actions cover just its basic features. You will have to spend some time to learn all that the app has to offer. The developers probably should create a set of video tutorials for those who are new to automation applications like this.

Is Actions for iPad a highly productive app? Well, it depends on your workflow and whether or not you think it would be faster to issue commands from your iPad’s screen rather than using lots of keyboard shortcuts. I think you do get a lot of functionality for the small price of the app, but as ever let us know what you think of Actions in the comments, below.

Download: Actions for iPad ($3.99) / Actions Host For Mac & PC (Free)

The post Control Any Application On Your Mac Or PC Using Actions for iPad [iOS] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Paul Thurrott:

Microsoft is a devices and services company. The services part is the biggest part. Azure is the king of Microsoft services. Azure is the future of Microsoft.

Azure is so key to Microsoft’s future, in fact, that I’m starting to question the use of the name Windows on that brand. In many ways it doesn’t make sense to call such a thing Windows at all. Azure’s a nice name. (And Azure SQL Database rolls off the tongue a lot more easily than does Windows Azure SQL Database. Just saying.)

I wrote yesterday that “Xbox is Microsoft’s foothold in the post-PC world.” That’s really just thinking about the device side. The cloud side is every bit as important. There is no post-PC world without ubiquitous cloud storage and messaging.

Free up some space on your Mac – delete languages you will never use. Monolingual is a simple Mac app that anyone looking for more hard drive space should check out.

Modern hard drives are big, but sometimes we all need just a little more space on our primary drive. Whether you’ve installed a solid state drive in your Mac or simply filled up your primary one, sometimes a little extra space can help a lot.

Mac OS X includes hundreds of languages, most of which you don’t need. You might well need Spanish, Chinese or even Hebrew on your computer, but do you really need Yiddish? Or Welsh? Or for that matter, invented languages like Esperanto and Klingon, or dead languages like Latin or Sanskrit? All these and more are taking up space on your Mac, right now.

Which languages you need obviously depends on who are – I’m sure at least one person reading this has set Klingon to be their default. More power to you. But next to none of us need every language Apple offers – which isn’t a problem, unless you’re running out of space on your hard drive.

Monolingual removes these languages, and also frees up space by removing PPC-specific files from “Universal” applications.

Removing Languages from Mac

Open this program and you’ll see a complete list of languages included, by default, in OS X. Uncheck any language you want to keep.

Make sure you’re absolutely certain you’re not deleting any languages you need – there’s no real way to get those languages back. The program even warns you:

Again – make certain before going forward. Once you have the removal will begin:

If you’re expecting to save gigs and gigs of space you’ll be disappointed – the languages don’t take up that much. Still, I was able to shed over 100 MB.

You could say it’s not much, but I kept quite a few languages – and any space I can free up on my SSD gives me more room for installing games and apps (not to mention dual-booting).

Removing Architecture-Specific Stuff

Languages aren’t the only trick up this app’s sleeve – it can also delete excess files intended to allow apps to run on multiple architectures.

Confused? Maybe you shouldn’t mess with this, then, but I’ll provide some background. Macs switched from the PowerPC (PPC) processor to Intel back in 2005 – since then a number of apps have been designed to run on both PPC and Intel systems. Such apps are called “Universal”, and were an important part of why Apple’s transition from PPC to Intel was so seamless. In 2013, however, the PPC parts of these Universal apps just take up space on Intel Macs.

So Monolingual can remove the PPC parts of Universal apps. Running this is a bad idea if you plan on using Rosetta to run PPC software, but probably not a problem if you’re using Lion or later – Apple dropped all support for Rosetta with Lion.

Pick which architectures you’re willing to remove from your system:

Monolingual will clean up “Universal” apps, turning them into Intel-only ones. How much space this frees up will obviously depend on how many apps you have installed – and whether they’re Universal – but for me this ended up freeing up more space than the language removal:

Okay, so I probably have more software installed than most – I test software for a living. But again, freeing up 200 MB could be useful for many.

Download Monolingual

Ready to try out Monolingual? Go ahead and download Monolingual from Sourceforge. You’ll need to install it the old fashioned way – dragging an icon. Stop complaining, it’s fun.

Other Ways To Save Space

Do you want to save even more space on your Mac? I highly recommend check out CCleaner for Mac, which cleans up the crap left behind by a wide variety of apps. Mackeeper is also worth looking into, if you’re willing to pay for it. You can also find and delete duplicate files to save space, using Dupe Guru. You might be surprised how many redundant files you have.

Do you have any other space saving tips for Mac users? Please share them in the comments below – your comments could help us build our best of Mac apps page. Or, if you prefer, just share your thoughts about Monolingual.

The post Monolingual – Remove Languages You Don’t Use From Your Mac appeared first on MakeUseOf.

If we needed an event to wake people up to the power of native advertising, it's surely Yahoo's $1.1-billion purchase of Tumblr.

We'll be talking about this a lot at AdNatively, a one-day conference I'm emceeing in New York on Thursday, May 23.

So what is native advertising? A quick, simple definition: It's an ad whose form and delivery is identical to the content environment in which it is served.

The opposite, in other words, of interruptive advertising: billboards, takeovers, and big banners that take up space on the page but don't otherwise relate.

Tumblr's Real Value

So why did Yahoo buy Tumblr? People talk about the hip, cool vibe of Tumblr's network of millions of blogs. Or the younger demographic Tumblr has attracted, which Yahoo desperately needs.

But Yahoo doesn't need blogs and young'uns for their own sake: It needs them because marketers need them. And the only way marketers can reach Tumblr users is through Tumblr posts, which advertisers will pay to feature on Tumblr users' "dashboards" - the stream of posts from accounts they follow.

That's more theory than practice at this point. Yahoo hopes to turbocharge Tumblr's revenues through its large sales force, which has been itching to have more native advertising formats to sell. 

Tumblr investor Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is delivering a keynote address at AdNatively. I'm keenly interested in what he'll have to say.

Wilson is also an investor in Twitter, which has a similar native model: Advertisers can pay to promote a tweet so it's seen by more people, or on Facebook, where sponsored posts get more prominent play in users' News Feeds.

Fuck Yeah, Native Ads

Native advertising is not without its controversies. A big one is the learning curve: Marketers must master each potential advertising environment and learn its intricacies, from Tumblr users' love for animated GIFs and the phrase "fuck yeah," to Twitter's peculiar language of retweets and replies to Facebook's maddening algorithms.

It's no wonder that some give up and just buy banner ads, which can be bought and sold by machine, almost like stocks. Native-ad environments are catching up, opening up their ads to automated buying and selling through application programming interfaces, but there's no question that native ads add complexity.

Native ads seem inevitable, though, as content consumption goes mobile and social. Back in 1994, when Wired's HotWired website sold the first banner ad, that little rectangle was arguably a native format adapted to the new medium of the Web. But Web browsing has evolved. If we're changing how we design interactive experiences for touch interfaces and screens of all sizes, shouldn't we change how marketers fit in, too?

Full disclosure: ReadWrite and its owner and publisher, Say Media, are actively thinking about the native-advertising question. ReadWrite runs ad formats, like sponsored posts, which some observers include in the native-advertising mix. So we're not just curious bystanders. But I promise you that ReadWrite will do its best to cover native advertising objectively and disclose when we have a stake in the game.

The conversation at AdNatively promises to be a rousing debate. If you're in New York for Internet Week, please join me, Fred Wilson, and others - ReadWrite readers get a 50% discount on attendance.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Chris Ziegler, reporting for The Verge:

The Verge has learned that HTC’s Chief Product Officer, Kouji Kodera, left the company last week. Kodera was responsible for HTC’s overall product strategy, which makes the departure especially notable on the heels of the global launch of the make-or-break One.

It’s not just Kodera. In the past three-odd months, HTC has lost a number of employees in rapid succession — most recently Jason Gordon, the company’s vice president of global communications. Other fresh departures include global retail marketing manager Rebecca Rowland, director of digital marketing John Starkweather, and product strategy manager Eric Lin.

Greg Sterling, Marketing Land:

According to the report, 95 percent of teens (12-17) use the internet and 81 percent of them use social media sites. Facebook is by far the most heavily adopted social site, with 94 percent of social media teens reporting they have a profile there.

That’s rather astounding.

Howard Gleckman, writing for the Tax Policy Center:

Because Apple is so profitable, the dollars involved will certainly attract attention (this is a Senate committee after all, so that is the point). The report alleges Apple reduced its U.S. corporate income tax by an average of $10 billion-a-year for the past four years. Since the corporate levy generated only about $240 billion in 2012, $10 billion foregone from one company is a very big number indeed.

But while it added a few interesting twists, Apple cut its taxes with the same tools multinationals have been using for years to minimize their worldwide tax liability. And if there is a scandal, I suppose it is the very ordinariness of these transactions. Apple’s tax avoidance shop, it seems, is a lot less innovative than its phone designers.

Are we underestimating Google+? It certainly seems so because the people around me are still in the Facebook haze. We do so at our peril because feature for feature, I firmly believe that Google+ is a foot ahead of Facebook. Lately, I have been re-discovering the social network which is gradually becoming the center of operations for Google.

If you are starting out, how about some quick Google+ tips…or maybe you can download Get Into Google+: A Guide for Everyone, our free, in-depth guide to Google+. You just might find the present look to be totally different because Google+ got a bit of nip and tuck with a slew of new features. Facebook has become a chaotic mess for me personally. The relative freshness of Google+ and how closely I can tie it in with Google Search and Gmail is making me turn to it for some productivity perks.

Going Full Circles with Google+

Google+ Hangouts may be the standout feature here, but the organizational backbone lies with Google+ Circles. The Circles have got a bit of color now, but the tips Tina put forth in her post on 7 Must-Know Tips About Managing Your Google+ Circles still hold true. Google+ Circles are just that – a circle of friends organized around the way you want to share with them. Think of them as special and specific “drop zones” for stuff. The great thing about Circles is that you can use them in a variety of flexible ways. Another post from Tina showed you some all-purpose uses of Google+ Circles. But the common thread is that you are sharing your activities with groups of people. What if you want to keep the Circles to yourself and use it for your personal productivity?

The ideas for using Google+ Circles for personal productivity aren’t new by any means. Many people have dropped tips as to how they use Circles in offbeat ways. Thanks to them, I am amalgamating some of the tips here.

Using Google+ Circle for Bookmarking Links

Thanks to a commentator (Dave) on the last linked post. An empty Google+ Circle can be used to bookmark and archive read worthy links and web pages you might come across.

1. Create an empty article and give it a descriptive name.

2. Click on the Share button and select your specially created empty Circle. The favorite link or webpage is shared privately with this circle.

3. To retrieve and read your bookmarked pages, go to the Home tab and select the circle. The stream of “shared” posts is displayed.

You can create specific empty circles for specific saving needs. For instance, I have created one for all eye-catching photographs I find on the web and in my Google+ stream. It serves as a nice and easy stepping stone for learning photography through the works of others.

Creating a Private Diary for Personal Thoughts

An empty Circle can be used similarly to jot down notes and keep a personal journal of one’s thoughts (You can also use it as a scratchpad, as an exercise log, a recipe book etc.). What’s better is that you can attach photos, videos, and links to enrich your personal diary. Your entries are timestamped and unlike other journal services, you can be sure Google+ is going to last a lot longer. The new Google+ Pinterest styled card layout also makes for attractive reading. Remember: you can use simple markup to format your posts.

One of the other advantages is that I can enter my thoughts while I am on the go from my mobile device. You can even add photos, an emoticon for your mood and check-in data to specify location. When it comes to photos, you can later selectively share them with other Circles. Also, as Arun Shroff explains, you can even use it to store voice memos.

Yes, before you say it, let me put it out in front that you obviously cannot read your personal diary when offline. So, that’s one of the drawbacks.

Using Circles for Collaborative Projects

An empty Circle is fine to keep your thoughts private. But what’s more interesting is if you can share it with a few others and create a collaborative Circle. Small project teams can use Circles for collaborative interactions. Combining Circles with Google+ Hangouts helps with live interactions. As Google+ is open to everyone with an email ID, you can literally turn a Circle into an instant brainstorming session and enhance group productivity.

Using Google+ Circles as a Blogging Platform

Twitter is just 140 characters. The words fall short when you want to say more. Google+ Circles allow you to segment your audience and address them directly. You can extend your shareable posts to blog like entries and share it with your special Circles. Travel blogging seems like a good idea with Google+ Circles. Sharing original content could help to build up relationships and an audience for your main blog. I follow motivational author Steve Pavlina (among others) and quite often his Google updates are well chalked out, rather than a one line missive.

Save Google+ Content Automatically Into Evernote

If you use Evernote as your primary note taking tool, then rest assured all valuable links can be automatically saved into Evernote. The steps are:

1. Go to Evernote – Tools – Account Info. Copy your Evernote email ID.

2. In Google+, create an empty Circle. Give it a descriptive name (e.g. Evernote Notes) which you can remember while sharing from Google+.

3. Click “Add a new person” and paste your unique Evernote email address into the text field.

A new Circle is created with “one” person represented by the Evernote email ID.

Google+ Circles can be creatively stretched. From creating your own YouTube video playlists to storing photos for recalling something you want to buy, there can be multifarious uses. Remember a Circle can be thought of as an empty container. With imagination, you can fill it any way you want. What creative uses of Google+ Circles can you think of? Fire away in the comments.

The post Stretching A Circle: 5 Ways To Use Google+ Circles For Personal Productivity appeared first on MakeUseOf.

The first time blackjack player Colin Jones went to Vegas, he lost a whopping $40,000 and still got kicked out of the Bellagio for card counting. But he would later win $50,000 in one sitting – a night when he felt he couldn’t lose.

“You remember the losses more than the wins – it’s just so painful when you’re losing,” says Jones.

In many ways, gambling is like entrepreneurship. The odds are stacked against you, unless you cultivate your own unfair advantage or delicious secret sauce. You could have a rousing success one day and an utter failure the next, and your emotions can swing along with them. And the key is staying level-headed and being persistent.

So it’s no surprise that, when Jones began to tire of blackjack, he parlayed his card counting expertise into entrepreneurship. He’s the cofounder of Blackjack Apprenticeship, a community website with resources for card counters. They’re the creators of the popular iOS app Blackjack Card Counting Trainer, and today they announced plans to develop a card counting training app for Google Glass.

Like many entrepreneurs, Jones is motivated by something other than money. In 2003, he read some card counting books, took $2,000 of his savings (with his wife’s permission), and tried his luck at blackjack. Within six months, he and his partner Ben Crawford were making over $100 per hour on average and had turned an initial $11,000 into $100,000.

But something funny happens when you carry around tens of thousands of dollars in your pocket, losing and winning just as much in a single day – you start to care less about money. Instead, expert blackjack players care about “EV,” or expected value: the amount of money you expect to make in a given time period. By card counting, players can shift the odds slightly in their favor and create a positive EV (say, a few hundred dollars an hour).

“Before, work was something that I clock in and clock out to do, to make the money that I need to live off of. Now, I view work as more like farming – I go and I plough the fields. I go and I work, and I don’t know when I’ll get paid for it. . . . And I don’t care if I get paid today, tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year,” says Jones.

“I’ll live off of ramen everyday to create value because I know that’ll pay off, and I want to see the fruit of what I’m doing.”

Jones found his deeper motivation around 2006, when he and Crawford started a group of card counters who shared profits. Interestingly, the group was mostly Christian and became the subject of a documentary called Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians. They found a noble purpose for what might seem like an un-Christian activity: they were taking money from a corrupt institution.

“There’s something satisfying about taking money out of a business that really preys on people’s naiveté or sells false hopes to usually the most disenfranchised,” says Jones. “All their advertising says, ‘Come win, get lucky!’ They never say, ‘Come play a game where you’re guaranteed to lose if you play long enough.’”

Instead of speaking the word of God, they were speaking the truth about casinos: educating people that card counting is not illegal, and that the jackpot dreams propagated by casinos are mostly an illusion.

In the end, Jones’ group ended up making over $4 million in total profits, which helped him fund his startup. Even more than resources and education, his goal is to provide a community to help card counters deal with losses – which still occur about 45 percent of the time.

“I feel like entrepreneurs can relate,” he says.

The post Startup Lessons from the Blackjack Table: Meet Card Counter Colin Jones appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Sony went first with the announcement of the PlayStation 4, and now, Microsoft has taken center stage to reveal its next generation video-game console, which we now know is called the Xbox One. While Sony’s announcement focused on games, Microsoft was far more focused on the message of delivering an “all-in-one experience.”

The Xbox One runs a x86, 8-core CPU with 8 GB RAM, and 500 GB internal storage. The key thing to mention about the RAM is that Microsoft did not explicitly mention whether the system would include GDDR5 or GDDR3 RAM. The lack of mention leads us the believe that it will be using the slower GDDR3 RAM, but time will tell.

The Kinect has been completely revamped, and will now feature a 1080p HD RGB camera and a 250,000-pixel infrared depth sensor. It will also come with every Xbox release and will be a required component for the Xbox One to function.

A big part of Microsoft’s announcement was the new, heavy TV integration. The demo showed using Kinect to change the TV channel, search for specific content, and more. Microsoft is clearly hoping to make the console more than a gaming machine, instead trying to build a living0room system from scratch.

Microsoft also announced Skype integration into the system, as well as a snap feature that allows users to run programs on the side of the screen while playing games or watching TV.

The Xbox One will not have any backwards compatibility. Not only are disc-based games not supported, neither are those downloaded from the Xbox Live Arcade.

The controller has been given a small revamp, but the overall design looks incredibly similar to the Xbox 360′s. The D-Pad will receive an overhaul, which is a welcome change.

While much of the announcement was focused on non-gaming items, Microsoft did show a suite of EA Sports games, Forza 5, Quantum Break, and Call of Duty: Ghosts.

It’s clear that Microsoft is holding back plenty of information for E3. It did not announce a final release date, only saying that the console will arrive “later this year.” It also did not reveal a price for the console, which will obviously be a deciding factor for most gamers in whether they purchase the console or not. Still, at least they showed what the console looks like, which is more than Sony did at its event.

What do you think of the new Xbox One?

Source: Microsoft

The post Microsoft Announces Its Next Generation Console – The Xbox One [Updates] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

In early July, Seattle programming bootcamp Code Fellows will hold a Ruby on Rails session for women only.

“We really want to highlight that only around 26 percent of software engineers in the US are women,” says managing director Will Little. “As much as we can bring attention to that to encourage more women, we think would be great.”

Students have a choice between three-week introductory or advanced sessions. Throughout, they’ll get to learn from and connect with local female speakers and mentors.

Code Fellows programs are unique because they guarantee a $60,000 tech job after graduation: the tuition of $4,000-$5,000 is refunded if you don’t have a job in six months. So this women-only program should almost immediately start increasing Seattle’s female programming population.

The three-week courses include teaching from 9 am to 12 pm and coworking from 1 to 4 pm. In classes of 20 people or fewer, students may work in groups, listen to lectures, and get interview training.

Cofounded by TechStars Seattle cofounder Andy Sack, Code Fellows and its women-only program join a host of other tech-education initiatives for women. Hackbright Academy is a 10-week programming bootcamp for women in San Francisco; Girl Develop It offers workshops for female programmers around the United States, Canada, and Australia; and Women Innovate Mobile is an accelerator in New York for startups who have a female founder. Also, Startup Weekend held a special women’s edition in Seattle last July.

This course for women was the brainchild of Jenny Chynoweth, recruiting evangelist at Whitepages. She worked previously on Amazon’s diversity initiative, trying to hire more women and minorities. But at Whitepages, she was having trouble recruiting female engineers. Their company, founded in 1999, has around seven women among 35-40 technical employees. So she reached out to her friends at Code Fellows to change that.

Below, Chynoweth and Little explain their hopes for the program.

Tech Cocktail: Why aren’t there more women who code? 

Will Little: I think it’s just been a male-dominated field for a variety of factors. Back in 1987, when it was 42 percent [women], I think it basically became cooler for men to get into the industry. And so the pendulum swung too far in that direction.

In the classic issue with the STEM industry, we’ve just seen this trend of being more male-oriented. There may be influences there, social pressures there, that would be prohibitive or a hindrance to women to getting into science and mathematics and coding in general. And we’re seeing that start to shift, and we just want to encourage that shift to happen.

There’s this “brogramming” conversation. Somebody gave a talk about this concept of not treating women equitably, and there’s this culture that needs to change, and it’s just an unhealthy culture. There may be some of that pressure on women that we just need to rally together and change to go from brogramming to equality in programming.

Jenny Chynoweth: I just don’t think that many women are as interested in it as of yet. I believe that there will be a growth in that interest as more women enter the field and more women start to feel more comfortable in the field.

We went to RailsConf two weeks ago, and there was a much larger percentage of women at that conference than when I was there three years ago, so I was thrilled to see that.

Tech Cocktail: Why did you want to do a women-only course? 

Chynoweth: There’s just a sense of camaraderie amongst women when they’re together. You have a sense of comfort being around other women. The pressure is not there that is there normally when you’re not only  having to prove yourself as a technical person, but a female technical person.

I attended the Grace Hopper Celebration – it’s basically a conference every year where women in technology come together. . . . It’s just so amazing to see these women get together in a conference and there’s a weight that’s lifted while you’re there. There’s no competition, there’s no preconceived ideas about you as a person because you’re female, there’s just nothing. I sit down at a table – I’m not technical myself – and people don’t automatically assume I’m not technical, so it’s a different experience. They don’t automatically assume I’m the recruiter or I’m the marketing person.

Tech Cocktail: Are women becoming more interested in technology?

Chynoweth: I hope so. . . . In our internship program, we’re definitely having more women apply for the positions. This year we participated in the University of Washington’s internship program, and so when we went to the job fair, I saw more women at the job fair for the computer science/engineering department than I had seen in a long time. But also the number of women who were just killing it on our coding problem had dramatically increased. So I’m hoping that it’s starting at a younger age, it’s starting in college, that you don’t have to be male to be in technology.

The post Code Fellows to Hold Ruby on Rails Bootcamp for Women Only appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Google really, really wants us to like Google+. Google is embedding Google+ into each of its products, making it increasingly difficult to use its services without embracing the Google+ borg, whether you want to or not.

Judging by Google+'s still stagnant market share, you generally do not want to use the social service, or whatever it is.

When prodded by complaints that Google is forcing Google+ into its disparate products, despite not necesssarily fitting very well, Vic Gundotra, Google's senior vice president over Google+, rejected the criticism at Google I/O:

I'm not sure that [the integration is] forced. I think there are some people who may have a misunderstanding of what we're trying to accomplish... One of the core insights we had when we started Google+ was that Google itself was deeply fragmented. 

So what did Google do? It invented Google+ as "a way for Google to get to know [its] users," according to David Glazer, director of engineering for the Google+ platform. This is fine, so far as it goes, but this speaks to Google+'s value for Google, not its users. 

For example, I use Zagat, a restaurant rating service that Google acquired in 2011, all the time. And each time that I use it now, I get this obnoxious prompt:

This wouldn't be a huge problem except that it pops up every single time I visit Zagat.com. Including when I'm on my mobile device. See that little X in the top right? That's much harder to see/find on an iPhone.

Even worse, if I click on "Start now" Google takes me away from Zagat entirely and into Google Local, orienting me into whichever city I'm currently sitting in, rather than letting me get back to the location I was actually interested in (often New York, as I experiment with new restaurants). 

Google, in short, is foisting Google+ on me for its good. Not mine.

As Forbes' Robert Hof highlights, Google can't seem to articulate why users should want to use Google+. They seem to have the party line down as to why it's good for Google (see above), but for users? Google draws a blank.

Which is surprising, given how good Google is at convincing us to use its different products. Maps? It's amazing, and much better than Apple's Maps application. Search? Been the gold standard for years. Now? Revolutionary, and is sorely tempting me to dump my iPhone. Even Google+ features like Hangouts are increasingly services that I turn to for quick collaboration with colleagues.

But Google+ as a forced integration between Google's products? It just gets in my way and slows me down. Until Google figures out why I should want to use it, rather than have to use it, Google+ will remain a social also-ran, however much Google tries to force it.

Smartphone manufacturer HTC is in disarray. According to a report from The Verge, the company is hemorrhaging executives from its Seattle-based office amid poor sales, internal turmoil and controversy. Within the last several months, HTC has lost its chief produdct officer Kouji Kodera, VP of global communications Jason Gordon and product strategy manager Eric Lin among several others. 

In a classic "the sky is falling" scenario, everybody is blaming everybody else. Many in HTC blame Facebook for the problems selling the HTC First - "The Facebook Phone" - while others blame erratic snap decisions from CEO and co-founder Peter Chou. 

To all my friends still at @htc - just quit. leave now. it’s tough to do, but you’ll be so much happier, I swear.

— eric L (@ericlin) May 20, 2013

See Also:

• HTC's Financial Woes Put Pressure On Microsoft & Facebook
• HTC's New Smartphones Are Great - Let's Hope The Company Survives
• HTC's Problems Go Way Beyond Marketing
• HTC Earnings Reveal New Foray Into Emerging Markets

The debate about app design largely centers around screen size.

What if designers worried about digit size instead?

Luke Wrobleski, a respected designer who sold a company to Twitter and more recently founded Polar, an app maker, thinks it's time to reconsider mobile design principles. Instead of worrying about questions like whether to upsize smartphone apps for tablets, designers should start by asking how their users will physically interact with their devices when using an app.

The technical term for this is input type—keyboard versus touchscreen, one-handed or two-handed interactions, and the like. This requires designers to think about how a device is held, which fingers are used, and how the app in question can optimize the experience for users' dexterity. 

The Beginning: Start With Responsive Design

For a smartphone, the primary input type has become a single hand with a single finger, typically the thumb. For tablets, it's two hands with two inputs, typically both thumbs. And for desktops, it's still restricted largely to the mouse, trackpad, and keyboard, but can branch out in rare circumstances, in the case of devices like the Chromebook Pixel or Microsoft Surface to touchscreen inputs as well. 

Wrobleski's Polar makes an iOS app that lets users poll friends on any topic and then build communities around these topics. Just last week, Polar launched a desktop Web client that is designed to match not just the look but the functionality of the mobile app versions and the input types taken into account with each one. As you change the size of your window, the app morphs from the desktop version to the tablet/touchscreen computer version, and then down to its smartphone version.

If you resize ReadWrite in a browser window, you'll see a similar transformation. This is known as responsive design, and it's an increasingly popular approach to Web design. Last week, at its I/O conference, Google unveiled tools that promise to make it much easier to build responsive websites.

That way, Polar not only looks the same in-app for the iPhone and iPad as it does on the mobile Web, but it adapts for pretty much every platform for optimal use. It's not about scaling the layout of interface objects up and down; it's about scaling the whole experience up or down. 

Next: Think About How We Hold Our Devices

But responsive design has largely been limited to these screen-size adjustments. Input type may be an even more important concept because it factors in both the physical limitations of the device from a display and functionality standpoint as well as how those limitations translate to our physical interactions with the devices. 

Wroblewski detailed the input-type approach to design in a blog post on May 13 that covered the app's new Web client, which lets users quickly scroll through and vote on topic pages related to everything from Star Wars and Game of Thrones to Web design and photography.

"Topic pages on Polar were designed to adapt to not only different screen sizes but to different input types as well," Wroblewski writes. "The end result is a Web interface that aims to fit into the reality of Web use today. In particular, the human ergonomics of how people interact with different devices ..."

It turns out that thinking about ergonomics on mobile devices and adapting design accordingly is not a widely used approach. Steven Hoober, who Wroblewski cites as his primary source for input-type research, published a report earlier this year on UXmatters, "How Do Users Really Hold Mobile Devices?" that collected two months of observations on how more than 1,300 people used their mobile devices. 

Hoober's report aimed to dispel the myth that designers should follow a "best practices" approach to app design that relies on assumptions that cast the widest net. Instead, Hoober advises that the approach should be far more customized, taking into account the constantly changing nature of mobile use that is contingent on factors like device type and screen size as well as physical location, be it standing or sitting on a bus or in a cafe. 

"The way in which users hold their phone is not a static state," Hoober writes. "Users change the way they’re holding their phone very often—sometimes every few seconds."

While Hoober did verify the assumption that majority of smartphone use is done one-handed with the thumb—49% of the time—he also discovered that designing from that standpoint alone could lead users to alter their behavior and thus deemphasize the very reasons underlying the approach.

"What if a user sees buttons at the top, so switches to cradling his phone to more easily reach all functionality on the screen—or just prefers holding it that way all the time?" he explains.  

Comfort-First Approach

Wroblewski stresses that Polar was designed primarily to be "comfortable to use," incorporating the ideas behind Hoober's findings into the app's design to cover the best input types for every device.  

For instance, Polar's smartphone app contains no left-hand column because users wouldn't typically be able to access it comfortably using one hand and one finger. It does support keyboard use in the event someone is using a large-screen phone-tablet hybrid, also known as a phablet, that's more typically held with two hands.

By contrast, when using Polar on a full tablet, a browsing column is present to take advantage of two-handed use. That's placed strategically on the left edge, with voting options on the right to take advantage of quick thumb access to the left and right sides of the screen. 

The desktop version of Polar mostly matches the mobile app experience. The main difference: When Polar detects a large enough screen, it adds keyboard support.

This type of comfort-first approach has its downsides.

"Looking at the Polar interface on a laptop can be a bit disconcerting because we’ve essentially left the middle of the page 'blank,'" Wroblewski says. This runs contrary to the fill-'et-up instincts of most Web designers, but it's the only way Polar could create something that easily scales down both aesthetically and functionally from a 27-inch monitor to a 4-inch smartphone screen. 

While these methods are very much experimental, they showcase the implementation of a much more sophisticated approach for thinking about mobile app design. We know that the diversity of devices is only increasing. With responsive design, we've scrapped a one-size-fits-all approach to screen size. The next step is to discard one-swipe-fits-all thinking about how we interact with those screens.

Photo by Intel Free Press

This post is part of Tech Cocktail’s “Healthy Entrepreneur” series, bringing you insights on food, exercise, and sleep on Mondays and Wednesdays throughout May. The series is presented by Coromega (more info and a giveaway at the bottom).

In our book, the pursuit of startup “success” at the expense of disease, depression, and/or death is a failure.  That’s why Tech Cocktail has dedicated the month of May to providing you, the entrepreneur, valuable resources, interviews, tips and tricks to lead a happy, healthy life.

We’re also aware that your circumstance may not be conducive to a perfectly healthy lifestyle.  Robb Wolf telling you to get more sleep might sound nice in theory, but in practice, you’re riddled with demanding deadlines, pending payrolls, and inquisitive investors.  Eight hours might not be realistic- but improvement always is.  (But you really should give Wolf’s advice a shot- for performance’s sake.)

That’s why we’ve reached out to a group of fellow entrepreneurs, those who can empathize with your situation, to share some simple tips for how they infuse a bit of good health into their day.  Their responses are below.  Enjoy.

26 Simple Health Tips for Entrepreneurs, From Entrepreneurs

(Click here to Tweet)

1) Schedule Regular Walking Meetings

Each day, I try to make as many meetings as I can walking ones. Not only is it a great way to add in some sneaky exercise but, for the right kind of meeting, getting up and moving can really energize and expand the conversation.

- Derek Flanzraich, ceo & founder of Greatist

2) Meditation and Generating Heat from Inside

I practice vedic meditation, which calls for 20 minutes in the morning and in the afternoon, sitting up with your back supported, since we can’t all be monks in the Himalayas, right? In terms of physical exercise–it’s not about how long or how hard, it’s about how much heat you’re generating from within yourself. Actually, I think this should apply to everything you do–a combination of calm self-reflection plus heat and passion are the recipe for a good life!

- Erica Berger, Co-founder and curator, Mileage Media

3) Commit to races

Nothing inspires entrepreneurial types to get in shape like upcoming competition, so sign up for triathlons, 10ks, bike races, or whatever floats your boat. Lost 50 lbs after signing up for a half ironman despite barely being able to run a 5k.

- Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO at SimmpleRelevance

4) Spinning!!!!

I spin everyday now and not for my body but the disconnect from all things tech and for the clearing of the mind. It’s my meditation and an incredible workout!

- Jen Friel, Creator at Talk Nerdy To Me Lover

5) 5 to 20 Minute Morning Meditation

Even if you only have five minutes, make a point to sit with your eyes closed and breathe. Better still — use the Insight Timer app and set a goal to do 20 minutes, at least three times a week. It’s like building a muscle — it will get easier over time, and you will be amazed at the clarity and creative problem-solving it brings in life and business. Insight Timer will help you build the habit by keeping a log of your sessions, as well as an optional “journal” prompt when you finish to collect insights and ideas.

- Jenny Blake, Author and Founder of Life After College & JennyBlake.me

6) Use the Buddy System

I have a running ‘buddy’ (another founder whose company is in a similar stage as mine). We go on long runs together and swap stories, give/get advice, generally de-stress with each other. It’s a two-fer — we get healthy & keep sane.

- Sonia Sahney Nagar, Co-founder and CEO at Pickie

7) Scotch

Being a startup founder is a surefire way into a superficial life of bipolar ups and downs.  one day you’re the flyswatter the other day you’re the fly. Scotch helps.

- Danny Boice, CTO and Co-founder at Speek

8) Perspective and Reflection

I usually spend a half an hour in the morning reading a travel book.  Right now I’m reading, The Conde Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys: Great Writers on Great Places. It helps put what we are trying to do in perspective.  Every weekend I try to do a “reset” where I think back on the past week (thank the hell out of everyone who helped and everything we accomplished) and center myself on how to do it again next week.  Perseverance is paramount.

- Pete Stam, Co-founder and Managing Director at UrbanBuddy

9) Strategic Workout Scheduling

I don’t have set times that I work out during the day. Instead, I use them strategically to stave off cognitive burnout. If I feel my mind failing to fire as quickly or efficiently as I want, or I feel as though my attention span is shorter and I’m starting to get sidetracked, I go work out. This happens twice a day on average.

- Travis Steffen, Founder at WorkoutBOX.com

10) Frankenstein Smoothie

I usually don’t have time to eat a full breakfast so I grab my “Nutribullet” and throw in vegetables, fruits, quinoa and some water and blend it up to something I can drink before I get to the office.  Gives a natural boost and fills you up for half the day!

- Keval Mehta, Founder at INRFoods

11) Getting-Ready-For-the-Day Moment of Silence

I take my time waking up. I open my eyes, think about my day (sometimes reaching for my phone to look at the calendar) and think about what outcome I want at the end of my day. What will make me happy? And then I briefly plan what pieces I will need to have in placeshift to achieve this sense of happiness. If I am dreading the day or fearing a frog (some task or activity I am not looking forward to) this moment of silence helps me build the strength to launch myself in the day with energy.  It is also really nice to just soak in the silence and still ness of the morning before launching into the flurry of the day’s activities.

- Zainab Zaki, COO at TappedIn

12) Breathe deeply!

Whenever I feel stressed or overwhelmed, I stop and make a conscious effort to breathe deeply, through my diaphragm, for 5-10 breaths to relieve tense muscles and reset to a calmer frame of mind.

- Lea Woodward Founder at Startup Training School

13) Block 1 hour day for exercise

Every Sunday, I schedule an hour/per day of exercise for the next week. I try to sign up for classes, because then I’m committed and have the financial consequence embedded. This helps me stay healthy, positive and by blocking the time in advance, it helps to make it happen.

- Sarah Schupp, CEO and Founder at UniversityParent.com

14) Pull-ups

Install a pull-up bar in your office door way. Every time you come or go, crank out as many pull-ups as you can.

- Shane Adams, Founder and CEO at Sagacious Consultants

15) Cage Fighting

I train MMA every single day at Disciple MMA in Sterling.  It’s the most analogous sport to founding a startup around.    The rules are few and far between.  It’s often boils down to who can hold their breath the longest.   And no matter which way it goes it’s bloody.

- Danny Boice, CTO and Co-founder at Speek

16) Regular Yoga Practice

I started practicing yoga about 1.5 years ago and it’s been life changing.  As entrepreneurs it’s easy to spend endless hours in a chair stooped over a laptop. Regular yoga practice keeps the blood flowing and helps with posture and relieving stress in a huge way.

- Patrick Conley, CEO and Founder at Automation Heroes

17) Afternoon Explosion

After sitting in a chair for 7 hours straight, there is no way I continue to be happy and productive without physical exertion. A run by the east river and 30 minute weight lifting session reenergizes my brain and puts a smile on my face.

- Russell Kommer, Executive Director at ExcelHelp.com

18) Get a dog

Having a dog encourages me to get up and go on a walk several times a day and at routine intervals. If you’re going from not exercising at all to wanting to do something, having a dog practically forces you to start.

- Wade Foster, Co-founder at Zapier

19) Work Hours

I set and stick to hard start and stop times during my work day.  My brain runs 24/7 but my body doesn’t and by setting hours I ensure my body rests enough to keep my brain sharp.

- Mike Hostetler, CEO at appendTo

20) Mind Games

Every morning before I start work I try to spend 15 minutes on Lumosity.com “brain training” through a series of games that are fun and help me feel more alert and focused. Couple this with a good physical exercise and diet routine, and you’ve got a formula to be an entrepreneurial power house!

- Joel Holland, Founder and CEO at Video Blocks

21) Blend!

22) Write Handwritten Thank You Notes

At least once a week, sit down and write a thank you note. Even if nothing especially worthy of a thank you note happened, send a letter telling someone how much you appreciate the work they do or how much they mean to you. It will not only make someone else’s day, but also will help you remain grateful and grounded, both of which are essential for a lifetime of health and happiness.

- Alexis Wolfer, Founder and Editor in Chief at TheBeautyBean.com

23) Reclaim 20-30 minutes per morning

Every morning I reserve 20-30 minutes (minimum) from the day. Check RunKeeper – is there a specific workout reminder? If not, roll the Metolius simulator board into quick circuit session.

- Derek Punsalan, Co-founder and UI designer at 47 Degrees.

24) Daily Endurance Exercise

I awake at 5:00am every morning and do some form of endurance athletic activity, either swimming, biking, running or weight training. Although I don’t have the time to commit to getting back into Ironman triathlon conditioning, I find even just thirty minutes of activity a great way to come into the office refreshed for the day ahead. I also try to put a handful of races on the calendar to give me something to work towards – be it as short as a 5K race with colleagues or my fiancé or as long as a marathon in early summer or late fall.

- Ryan Frankel, Co-founder and CEO at VerbalizeIt

25) Find An Outlet

No, not a power outlet though I do advise keeping your phone charged. Find an outlet to blow off steam whether it be working out in the gym regularly, yoga, playing an instrument or meditation. Find something that makes you happy and  takes your mind off your work. Ideally it also gets some blood flowing to help burn off some calories and releases endorphins.

- Frank Gruber, Co-founder and CEO at Tech Cocktail

26) Resetting the mind

I make sure to get in a good grinder at Crossfit 3-4 times a week to reset the mind and bring my focus to the present.  I am also very protective of my sleep and try to get 7-8 hours a night to allow for good solid restoration.

- David Cohen, VP at Round Table Companies

27) Dump the TV

I avoid the television and everything pumped through it like the plague. It keeps my head clear and focused on what makes me happy and reduces stress.

- Chad Halvorson, CEO at thisCLICKS

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The post 27 Simple Health Tips for Entrepreneurs, From Entrepreneurs appeared first on Tech Cocktail

This post is the first in the ReadWrite series "Making Android Pay," in which we'll explore the opportunities and challenges mobile developers face in trying to make money from Android apps.

In December 2011, Google chairman Eric Schmidt predicted that mobile developers would be building apps for Android first instead of iOS by the middle of 2012. That obviously hasn’t happened. But Google has doubled down on its push for more Android-first apps, largely by making it easier for developers to make money from them.

"It has taken a long time, it is slower than we like, but we are getting there,” Ibrahim Elbouchikhi, a product manager for Google Play Commerce, said during Google I/O last week. 

Up to now, the main sticking point for many app creators has been simple: money. Make that, at least for most Android developers, the lack thereof. Until recently, Google just didn't offer tools that would let developers fully exploit the global Android ecosystem for their own financial advantage.

Developers: Show Us The Money

There's also the fact that, until Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and 4.1 Jelly Bean, Android apps just weren't as good as iOS counterparts. Google first had to give Android feature parity with the iPhone and iPad before it could begin optimizing the ecosystem for money-making.

"Last year was sort of about reaching feature parity with, let’s say, other competitive platforms, where this year it has been all about going up to the next level. Innovating, doing things that are different," Ellie Powers, product manager for Google Play, said in an interview with ReadWrite. "Like now we have the beta testing feature unique to our platform and other sources of analytics coming together."

Google VP of Android Hugo Barra announces new tools at I/O 2013

Such bullishness hasn't yet dispelled doubts remain even among some of Android’s stoutest supporters, including some developers at I/O last week. One grilled Elbouchikhi about how much he could expect to make from a bona fide hit app. There's no easy answer to that question — let's just say that lots of variables are involved in that particular equation — but it's also a sign of just how heavily that question weighs on the minds of developers.

In this series, we'll take a close look at the new tools Google has rolled out to lure developers away from Apple and get them to develop for Android first. Let's just say that the thickness of developer wallets seems to be front and center in Google's thinking.

Aww, What A Cute Widdle Android Baby

Google still thinks of Android as a very young, even though it has been on the market for nearly five years and in development since 2005. "I feel like Android is a baby," said David Burke, engineering director for Android at an I/O session. "I think there is so much more we can do."

If Android itself is a baby, that makes the developer tools and monetization techniques Google has been pushing nearly newborn. The Google Play Developer Console — a suite of tools for publishing and distributing Android apps — was announced at I/O 2012. and the company has only been working on solving developers' biggest issues for about a year and a half.

Google realizes it still has developer issues with Android, from app discovery to user retention to the fundamental act of getting developers paid. But if we learned anything at I/O last week, it is that Google is aware of these problems and working hard to address them. In fact, almost every Android announcement at I/O last week was aimed at boosting Android's standing among developers by addressing its perceived shortcomings vis-a-vis iOS. 

Will that make Android No. 1 in the hearts of mobile developers? We'll see.

"We are still very new. My mother still hasn’t figured out why people would want to buy apps. But most people have. I think there are a lot more business models that are going to develop in the future," Powers said.

What will it take for you to build for Android first? Let us know in the comments. 

Next: New tools in Google Play for getting you paid.

Top image: The Google Android team onstage for a fireside chat at I/O 2013. All photos by Nick Statt for ReadWrite

In one inspiring move, Yahoo! has upped the ante by offering a full 1 Terabyte of space to all Flickr users, and by updating the already-dated Flickr interface. To put things into perspective, 1 TB amounts to over 500,000 original, full-resolution, pixel-perfect, brilliant photos, according to Yahoo!. The free TB offer comes neatly packaged in a completely redone user interface which is bigger, neater, and far more appealing than the old photo stream.

With this revamp, Flickr has practically rebooted the photo sharing application which was starting to lose eyeballs thanks to younger arrivals like Google+ Photos, 500px, and Instagram. Even Facebook cut off a large slice from the photo-sharing pie. The new design has deftly put photographs front and center, with the new photo stream now a seamless scrolling gallery. There is less white space to be seen, with photos taking up almost the entire space on the screen. A full-screen slideshow in a lightbox completes the picture.

The free account carries an ad, but to my eyes, it doesn’t mar the viewing experience in any way. The Flickr redesign follows the path laid down by the iOS app which was revamped last year. The Android app has followed up with a similar look.

The best thing about this update is that you don’t have to worry about space ?in the  least. A bar graphic on top shows the extent of an account’s space usage, but with 1 TB, you’re not likely to exhaust it very soon. You can upgrade ($499.99) to double the space, if 1 TB is not enough, for some reason.

Check out the new Flickr and tell us what you think about it.

Source: Yahoo

The post Yahoo! Overhauls Flickr, Now Offers 1 TB Of Free Storage For All Users [Updates] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

If the Xbox One is the future of gaming, then that future is as grim as everyone feared.

In an event Tuesday morning that felt like a casual bar conversation compared to Sony's brain-exploding extravaganza back in February, Microsoft unveiled the next-gen Xbox — not in a giant conference center, but in a tent set up on a soccer field at its Redmond campus.

With a hard-line focus on the One's television connectivity and a smart decision to actually show off the physical console, Microsoft pulled off a tight one-hour presentation that glazed over the trickier undercurrents at play. But the devil is in the details, and it's now apparent that while the Xbox One will definitely not require a constant Internet connection, as many had feared, it's still the most restrictive console ever made. 

As the event highlighted, the One is an aggressive grab for the living room from the get-go. But for gamers, long the core market for the Xbox, two really important questions remain. How much of the hardware we buy do we really own, and how far can and should a manufacturer go in telling us how to use our console?

Microsoft drew some very serious lines in the sand today. It's up to consumers to decide whether or not to play ball. 

Microsoft's Iron Grip

The rumor of a universal always-online requirement was finally quelled, but even more mysterious news boiled up in its place. Microsoft openly revealed that the One will require users to download all games to the console's hard drive to play, but Wired's Chris Kohler reported that to do this a second time with the same disc will require a player to pay an unspecified fee.

Microsoft quickly responded by saying that the Xbox One will "enable customers to trade in and resell games" and that the company will have more details to share later, likely at the Electronic Entertainment Expo next month. But the same spokesperson also added this ominous note in a comment to the game-news site Polygon:

Xbox One’s support for used games and these other scenarios may not look like they have on previous console generations, and that’s what we’ll be explaining as soon as we’re able.

That's as clear as mud, of course. But tacking on fees for re-using an already-purchased game disk could seriously damage the used game market, or even kill it entirely. Not only would used games get more complicated to rebundle and price, resellers would likely offer less for used games in the first place.

That would antagonize retailers and consumers alike. It would be a giant step backward in an era where a game that provides maybe 8-10 hours of gameplay will still cost $60. Such a policy could even boomerang on game developers themselves, since many gamers finance their purchase of new games by trading in their old ones. If the trade-in market vanishes, so does that source of cash for new purchases.

The good news here is that a used game fee was "a surprise" to GameStop President Tony Bartel when he spoke to Polygon. Bartel went on to call the fee requirement "speculation." In a separate statement to ReadWrite, the company replied, "GameStop is working closely with Microsoft to ensure there is an opportunity for customers to take advantage of our popular buy-sell-trade model and provide a seamless transition for consumers to enjoy the next generation of console gaming." 

While the Xbox One will be able to operate without an Internet connection, the always-online issue won't go away entirely. Microsoft announced that it will be handing that ability over to publishers, who can designate certain game functions that will only work on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform — in other words, effectively requiring an Internet connection to play.

This isn't great news, especially considering Electronic Arts took the stage at the One unveiling. EA, voted the worst company in America two years in a row, recently tried to play nice with its consumer base by discontinuing its insane Online Pass program, which charged gamers a fee to access some online levels or items via a used game disk. But you can bet the company will be near the front of the line when it comes time to bake core game functions into the cloud to make an online-only gaming world an unavoidable, and unpleasant, reality.  

Say Goodbye To Your Current Collection

So what about that huge library of Xbox 360 games you've collected so far? Sorry, those won't work on the One. (PlayStation 3 games won't work on Sony's upcoming console, either, so there's plenty of blame to go around on this front.)

But what about all those awesome indie games you've downloaded through Xbox Live Marketplace or the full 360 titles you bought digitally? Those will carry over, right? Nope. It turns out that only music, movies, and TV shows purchased through Xbox Live will follow you to the One.

Then there's the Kinect. While it sports very impressive voice recognition and motion control, reports quickly surfaced that the updated camera-sensor combo will need to be plugged in at all times to use the One. For starters, that's both annoying and a bit creepy, considering the Kinect will be on all the time watching everything you do. But this bit of news also suggests that the One itself might be pretty pricey, if it comes with the next-generation Kinect bundled.

Your Move, Sony

To be sure, Sony's PlayStation 4 could be equally bad, or even worse; we won't know until Sony really unveils it at E3 next month. For the moment, though, Sony at least stands a chance of offering a more consumer-friendly future for console gaming.

Is it inevitable that both the software and hardware we buy in the gaming realm, be it the new SimCity or the next-gen Xbox, are simply no longer ours to own, let alone to hack and mod and use in the way we're most comfortable?Microsoft may not have come out and said so outright, but it's certainly taken quite a few steps down that gloomy manufacturer- and publisher-dominated road.

Photos by ReadWrite's Taylor Hatmaker for ReadWrite

Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. Most of the listed websites are FREE or come with a decent free account option. If you want to have similar cool website round-ups delivered to your daily email, subscribe here.

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Done Not Done – Because we are so occupied with the tasks that we want to do, we often forget about all the fun tasks that we actually want to do. There are many books, movies, and music artists that your friends might have recommended for you to check out but you simply did not have the time to do so. Here to help is Done Not Done. Read more: Done Not Done: A To-Do List For All The Fun Tasks You Want To Do

		Sitegeist – You might have lived in your city for years without knowing some of the most significant facts about it. These details might seem trivial but they can help you out in unexpected ways. Thus knowing them will only add to your overall knowledge and potentially benefit you in the future. Here to easily provide this information to you is a smartphone app called Sitegeist. Read more: Sitegeist: Find Out Various Interesting Details About Your Location
		Grambacker – There are even Facebook apps and other services that connect with people’s Instagram accounts to better share their photos. What iOS device owners usually not pay attention to though, is creating a backup for their Instagram images. Here to help out in this department is Grambacker. Read more: Grambacker: Make a Backup Of Your Instagram Photos To Your iPhone Or Dropbox [iOS]
		Video Resumer – Unfortunately sometimes you need to leave your computer to complete a task in the middle of a YouTube video. Turning the computer back on, heading on to YouTube, and finding where you had stopped watching the video can be difficult for long videos. Here to help out Google Chrome users in this department is the excellent Video Resumer. Read more: Video Resumer: Resume YouTube Videos From Where You Left Them [Chrome]
		Professor Word – Modern aptitude exams have a special focus on English vocabulary and your knowledge of the meanings of many words is tested. There are various techniques developed to help students learn but if most of your time is spent online, then computer tools will suit your exam preparation best. Read more: Professor Word: A Bookmarklet That Helps You Prepare Vocabulary For SAT, ACT & GRE

These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last couple of days. If you want us to send you daily round-ups of all cool websites we come across, leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed.

The post Cool Websites and Tools [May 21st 2013] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

With Google introducing its Chrome OS, an entirely cloud-based system that leaves nothing on your hard drive, it would seem that one direction today’s gadgets are heading in is a purely cloud-based one. We’re spending less time on our desktops and more time in the cloud – and file storage is certainly no stranger to that concept.

A couple of months ago, we introduced you to Cloudy, a Chrome extension that allows you to upload files to your Gmail account directly from your cloud-based storage accounts like Dropbox, Google Drive, Box and more.  Kloudless is a new Chrome extension that offers the same feature – removing that unnecessary extra step of downloading a file from the cloud only to upload it as an attachment – but takes things one step further, by also allowing you to save files directly from your Gmail account to your cloud storage accounts.

Kloudless closes the gap between email and cloud-storage, creating a link that makes perfect sense, is incredibly convenient, and is one of those features that you won’t know how to live without once you get it set up. Kloudless serves several functions – one of which is to automatically back up your email attachments to cloud-based storage accounts.

When you first install Kloudless you’ll be walked through a series of simple steps to set up your accounts. You’ll first be prompted to connect Kloudless to your email account. At the moment it only works with Gmail, but support for Outlook is also available, but you do have to sign up to get an invite for access.

If you’re logged into more than one Gmail/Google Apps account, you’ll be prompted to select the account you want to use.

The good news is that if you want to use Kloudless simultaneously with more than one Gmail/Google Apps account – you can. Just simply go through the setup process individually for each account, by logging into that account and clicking on the Kloudless Beta link at the top-right hand corner of the page.

The permissions you are granting Kloudless when it comes to your email address include viewing your email address, viewing and managing your mail, and knowing who you are on Google. That may seem like a lot of data to entrust Kloudless with, not to mention data that you have saved in your cloud storage accounts, but all of your files are encrypted while being transferred using Kloudless, and the service has an extensive Privacy Policy worth reading.

Once your Gmail account is connected, you can then connect your cloud storage account. Currently, Kloudless supports Dropbox, Google Drive and Box.

At this point, Kloudless is fully set up and can be used. But there is one final step that brings an interesting and much welcomed-feature that isn’t available in Cloudy. Since Kloudless allows you to save attachments directly to your cloud storage, the service also offers automation features. You can create rules for how to handle certain attachments. So for example, if you want to save all of the attachments sent to you by a specific person, you can create a rule to copy all of those attachments to a specific Dropbox folder. Rules include copying or moving attachments, based on who they were sent from, who they were sent to, or even based on keywords, and more.

While the automation feature is really cool, it does have its limits. Unfortunately, you can only create up to 10 rules.

If you’d rather not automate the process of saving attachments to your cloud-based storage accounts, you can still access this feature manually when opening individual attachments. When you open an email with an attachment, you’ll find a new option alongside ‘Download.’ Hitting the ‘Copy/Move’ link will open up a pop-up window which gives you access to folders in whichever cloud storage account you’ve connected to.

 You can then copy or move individual files, one at a time, directly from your email account to your cloud storage account. If for any reason, space is becoming an issue in your Gmail account, this is a great way to quickly free up space in Gmail by moving large attachments. Even better, if you don’t want to keep the attachments at all but want a record of the email itself, you can also delete individual attachments from your Gmail inbox using Kloudless.

Kloudless is a convenient, handy Chrome extension which will be appreciated by anyone who finds themselves spending more time in the cloud than they do on their desktop. While Cloudy was a step in the right direction, Kloudless  completes the equation by providing two-way access to your files saved in the cloud and to attachments in your email account.

What do you think of Kloudless? Let us know in the comments.

The post Kloudless: Two Way Access To Files In Gmail, Dropbox, Google Drive And More appeared first on MakeUseOf.

New and emerging technology has always been associated with the younger generations. Older people tend to be set in their ways, leaving those under a certain age to discover gadgets and gizmos as they arrive on the scene. Younger people learn more quickly, and that goes for technology in the same way it goes for everything else.

However, how young is too young for kids to be exposed to technology? It’s a question all parents have to answer during their children’s early years, deciding when they should allow their offspring to embrace the future with gadgets such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones. And it’s a question that formed the basis for last week’s ‘We Ask You‘ discussion.

The Results

We asked you, At What Age Should Kids Be Exposed To Technology? We had a great response from the MakeUseOf readership, with a good number of you airing your views on the subject. The range of opinions was huge, with some people declaring that there should be no minimum age restrictions, and others having definite ages in mind for particular gadgets.

There were extreme views on both sides, but the majority of people take a common sense approach to this quandary. They let each child choose their own interests, and that goes for technology as much as anything else. However, some level of control is usually put in place.

This means that kids will be exposed to technology slowly, and then have that exposure moderated by their parents and/or guardians. As the comment of the week demonstrates, a big thing is ensuring your kids have a rounded set of hobbies, which may include technology but not be wholly reliant on it.

Some thought that the question posed ought to have been slightly different, and that it’s more important to ask how kids are exposed to technology rather than at what age they are exposed. We’ve covered this issue in the past by asking, “What steps do you take to protect your children online?”

Comment Of The Week

We had great input from the likes of Alexander Mackenzie, Mel Johnson, and null, to name just a few. Comment Of The Week goes to Schvenn, who, as well as the respect of myself and hopefully everybody reading this, receives 150 points to use for MakeUseOf Rewards.

My son watched me use the computer his entire life. When he was 30 months old I sat him on my lap and went to Bear In The Big Blue House’s website. I clicked on a jigsaw puzzle they had there and was about to tell him what it was when, to my surprise, he took the mouse from my hand and without looking, started moving it over the pieces, clicking, dragging and dropping and putting the puzzle together. Up until this point, he had never touched a computer before. He had only seen his mother and I use them, but never had the opportunity himself. We quickly grabbed our video camera and started capturing the moment on film. He had his own computer at four. We let him online at twelve, albeit with great supervision. We gave him a smartphone at 14. We weren’t going to do so that early, but he’s proven himself very responsible, so we have rewarded him with that trust. He also knows that with my level of technical knowledge and ability to monitor, I can at any point, determine whether or not that trust has been ill-conceived. Yes, he’s a gamer and loves to play inside more than we did as kids. However, he is also a member of our local YMCA, works out every Saturday and volunteers every Saturday evening. He has just been accepted as a member of our city council’s youth advisory board, is joining the local volunteer ambulance service, is a member of a youth engagement squad (involving the city, school board and YMCA) and he has a couple strong possibilities for his first summer job. He’s now in his second year of highschool, an honor roll student and wants to become an architectural engineer. I like to think that his constant exposure to technology has had something to do with his successes. He has excellent communication skills, more opportunities available to him than we had as children and a better CV under his belt already than many people I’ve hired in the many years I’ve spent in management. While it may seem like our son is an over-achiever, he’s really not. He has all the challenges a typical teenager does and we are not the type of parents to push, just to encourage. However, without technology opening up his opportunities to communicate and learn, I doubt he would be doing as well as he is now. So, once again, there is no minimum age. Our children absorb more than we think and we should never underestimate them. We need to trust, encourage and reward them. Technology can be a fantastic tool for parents and children, if we use it responsibly, as well.

We liked this comment because it takes us through a personal experience, with a father recounting how his son got to grips with technology. It also shows how technology isn’t harmful to a child’s education in socializing and being an active member of society when it’s experienced in moderation.

We will be asking a new question tomorrow, so please join us then. We Ask You is a weekly column dedicated to finding out the opinions of MakeUseOf readers. We ask you a question and you tell us what you think. The question is open-ended and is usually open to debate. Some questions will be purely opinion-based, while others will see you sharing tips and advice, or advocating tools and apps for your fellow MakeUseOf readers. This column is nothing without your input, all of which is valued.

Image Credit: Paul Inkles

The post At What Age Should Kids Be Exposed To Technology? [You Told Us] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

So let’s get this out of the way: if you’re a Facebook user, you’re like cattle. To the website, you are not a unique individual. Instead, you’re part of a collective. You are just one of many consumers that other companies want access to in bulk.

However, is it so wrong to graze in the green pastures of social networking? Perhaps not. I’d even go as far to say that, in actuality, the Facebook-to-user system is a symbiotic relationship that strays a bit from our initial livestock analogy. The social network provides us with a means to communicate with our friends and loved ones, and we provide the social network with real, in-depth, accurate market samples that they can sell as a product.

Even still, some businesses will go beyond Facebook’s usual advertising methods in an effort to target their desired market. They use a variety of tactics, and while they are not illegal or against Facebook’s terms and agreements, they might be worth knowing about.

Open Wall Popularity

Facebook presents itself as being all about community, and for us end-users, it is. On the other hand, to businesses, it’s simply a way to put the entire target market under one roof and address it all at once. With that said, businesses are now forgoing traditional customer service routes and using their Facebook walls as their public representatives. By presenting themselves as members of the community, businesses are able to communicate more effectively with consumers.

To be honest, this isn’t a bad idea. However, this offers just one more way for consumers to get sucked into loads of advertised promises. Once they know that a company is personal, they are more inclined to trust this company. In short, it’s the modern day equivalent to the old mom and pop stores where the owner knows everyone’s name. Besides that, certain posts and comments addressing issues by the business are more likely to be shared.

Representation Through Images

Images are a serious tool for getting things done in the Facebook marketing world. In fact, you could consider them to be a bit like billboards on your news feed. However, Facebook has a few guidelines for certain images that businesses post – else, they can get in a bit of trouble. For instance, cover photos on pages can’t feature price or discount information, a call to action, or a request for users to Like and Share (which inherently is a call to action). In other areas, it’s not much of an issue. However, do you really want an advertisement on your news feed when there are already enough on your sidebar?

With that said, non-advert images play a heavy role when it comes to Facebook marketing. How many times have you seen your friends share images of athletes, humorous photos, or classic memes that they didn’t upload? Upon further inspection, you may see who the image was originally posted by, and in many cases, a watermark from a company’s logo may be added. This allows for the company to get the attention of its market and then let its presence be known without using annoying ad-like images.

A Call To Action

Whenever you look at business pages for Facebook (including MakeUseOf), you’ll see loads of “LIKE OR SHARE THIS TO…” posts. This is known as a a “call to action” seeing that it requests that users do something. Typically speaking, traditional calls to action are something along the lines of “Call for more information” or “Shoot us an email” so they can make a connection with you. In this case, the company is connecting with you and using you as a means for free advertising.

Sometimes, as with the case of the images, there may be no call to action. The company may simply share an inspiring status update or a hilarious image, knowing that for some reason some users will feel the need to like or share it. You see, Facebook has already established the call to action for them. It’s right there under every post: Share or Like.

Conclusion

Facebook has changed the face of business, advertising, and marketing forever while also changing how we communicate. It’s a bit peculiar though. While you and I interact using Facebook, there are tons of businesses out there doing the exact same thing, trying to be like us. They are trying to fit into the community – trying to be our friends. In fact, they might even be a bit like other Facebook stalkers.

What other methods have you seen businesses use to target consumers on Facebook? Have you seen these methods yourself?

(By the way, don’t forget to Like and Share this post on Facebook.)

Image Credits: *0ne*, zole-studio, LarimdaME

The post Like And Share Carefully: How Marketers Target You On Facebook appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Google Maps is an essential tool for anyone planning a day trip or holiday, providing a clear yet detailed overview of locations and how to reach them. More than that it provides a simple way for all of us to find our literal place in the world, though it cannot help with the more figurative notion of belonging.

Google Maps was already amazing, and then a few years after its launch Google Street View was added to the mix. At which point the opportunity to take a virtual trip around real towns and cities revealed itself. Google Street View coverage now includes more than 60 countries, with ground-level panoramic views (often containing strange sights) for huge swathes of those locales available to view online.

However, Google Maps, and in particular Google Street View, isn’t only good for planning routes. There have been some fantastic Google Street View mashups created over the years, and there are also websites which use Google Street View to help you do some virtual globetrotting.

And then there are games built on top of Google Maps and Google Street View, five of which are listed here for you to enjoy when you’re bored at work.

Real World Racer

Real World Racer is a simple Google street view game that offers exactly what the title implies it should. While most racing games rely on either completely imaginary routes or rough approximations of real-world locations, Real World Racer lets you race on real roads around the world.

OK, so the visuals aren’t going to win any awards, and the controls are rather limited, but for those people who miss the days when top-down racers were as good as it got, Real World Racer should hit the (nostalgic) spot.

You choose a route — either a pre-existing one from the eight on offer or one chosen by yourself by simply inputting a start and finish point — and then race your car against the computer-controlled opponents. The first to cross the finishing line wins, obviously, though you win nothing more than the satisfaction wrangled from besting poor AI.

Street View Quiz

Street View Quiz is another Google street view game whose title says it all. This is a website full of quiz questions based on Google Maps and Google Street View. Some of the questions make more sense than others, though they can all conceivably be solved by using nothing other than the image presented to you.

Rather than answering any from the homepage you’re better served clicking on individual entries and tackling them one at a time. If you get stuck trying to use the image alone then a simple Google search should suffice in helping you to answer any question posed.

GeoGuessr

GeoGuessr presents you with an image from Google Street View and asks you to locate it on a map of the world. It sounds easy, but it’s actually maddenly difficult. Thankfully it’s also very entertaining and more addictive than it has any right to be.

Each round consists of five destinations. At the end you’re presented with a chart showing how far out your guesses were each time, and the total score acquired. You can then start the process all over again to see if you can improve.

It’s a lot harder than you may imagine to guess which country you’re in just from a single image. Road signs, the terrain, and the weather can all give clues, but you’ll be amazed how far away some of your guesses will be. Or perhaps I’m just geographically dumb.

Pursued

Pursued is very similar to GeoGuessr, with the same basic principles applying. However, rather than dropping you somewhere completely at random and asking you to vaguely point to it on a map, Pursued features pre-approved levels and asks you to name the city or landmark you’re seeing.

This is also more of a complete game, with a plot of sorts — you have been abducted and need to tell your friend where to find you — and level packs, achievements etc. Which all helps add to the intrigue and innate playability of Pursued.

The whole thing comes across as very professional, with the only annoying aspect being the need to jump through social networking hoops in order to play more levels. Still, there are user-submitted levels aplenty for those who aren’t willing to participate.

Streetview Zombie Apocalypse

Streetview Zombie Apocalypse is a clever little Google street view game that works despite its obvious flaws. Especially as the street cred of zombies has never been so clear thanks to The Walking Dead and other zombie-focused fayre.

The premise is simple… you choose a location where you want to get dropped, and as soon as you pitch up in said location the undead hordes start to chase you in order to eat your brains. Which would be a whole lot scarier if the zombies in question weren’t tiny little sprites you could flick away with one finger.

The aim of Streetview Zombie Apocalypse is to stay alive for as long as possible. To do so you need to run from your starting point, avoiding the undead as you go. Choose your location with care, as some will lead you to a premature death thanks to featuring a rat run of narrow alleyways and dead-ends.

Conclusions

These games are not only entertaining they’re also educational, revealing parts of the world perhaps previously unknown to you. Google Maps is a powerful tool in this regard, in the same way Wikipedia is a powerful tool for learning about new people or uncovering previously unsolved mysteries that can actually be easily explained.

What do you think of the Google Street View games on this list? Do you have a favorite? Perhaps you know of another game which utilizes Google Maps; if so, we’d love you to share it with us in the comments section below along with your thoughts on the subject at hand. All comments are read, and most are afforded a reply.

The post Gaming Google Maps With Street View Games appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Today in Redmond, Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One, its vision for the future of home entertainment. The Xbox One will expand Microsoft's Xbox agenda well beyond gaming, blurring the boundaries of gaming and interactive TV further than ever.

Let's take a look.

The Xbox One isn't much of a departure when it comes to design — but the tech under the hood is on steroids and then some.

With integrated Blu-Ray, Kinect and a whole new batch of hyper-responsive voice and gesture controls, Microsoft is angling for casual gamers and the hardcore set alike.

Microsoft's "futureproof" Xbox One features a reimagined (but not wholly reinvented) controller with developer-programmable buttons and "vibrating impulse triggers" that provide tactile feedback.

The Xbox One soaking up the spotlight... literally.

Microsoft hosted its Xbox One event in a tent at the center of at its Redmond, Washington Xbox campus.

Don Mattrick takes the stage for the biggest reveal moment of the day: the name of Microsoft's new console.

If the Today Show is any indication, the Xbox ain't just for l33t gamers these days — it's a console designed for the whole family.

Microsoft's new Xbox Live design takes after the successful formula of its predecessor rather than reinventing the wheel.

The Xbox One's multitasking chops on display, featuring a live Skype video chat demo.

With a demo of Call of Duty: Ghosts for the Xbox One, FPS fans are in understandable throes of ecstasy today. The new shooter will take the hit franchise in a new direction, setting the player up as the underdog in a ragtag team of post-apocalyptic warriors, who are presumably ghost-like in some capacity.

Since we can only assume that a handful of gamers out there won't be so into the Today Show thing, Forza Motorsport 5 will launch with the Xbox One.

The Xbox One may have made its photo op, but one big question remains: price. With so many advanced features on board, it's hard to imagine that the console will be able to match the $299 bill of its predecessor's base model. If Microsoft really wants to stave off the competition when the console becomes available—"later this year," executives said—the Xbox One's price tag needs to be as impressive as its spec sheet.

Photos by Taylor Hatmaker for ReadWrite

Remember Google’s Photovine? No? Well, that’s OK. You’re not expected to remember every single one of Google’s whims, especially not those that lived for less than a year. To refresh your memories, Photovine was a photo-sharing app that launched following Google’s acquisition of a company called Slide, and revolved around photo vines, which are not unlike tags on Instagram or Flickr.

Google’s Photovine died over a year ago, but it seems the brand is not dead. A new iPhone app called Photovine has recently emerged, and while this one doesn’t really have anything to do with Google’s old vines or Twitter’s new Vine, it brings an innovative way to view your Instagram and Facebook photos which involves music, slideshows, and an unusual interface.

Curious? Keep reading for a full hands-on with Photovine.

Photovine Unchained

Photos have been around forever, but the Instagram era brought them to the front and center of our online and social lives. Accordingly, many of today’s apps strip social networks of their “boring” text, and bring us what we really want to see: photos. Twizgrid, a visual Twitter browser I adore, is a great example, and if you haven’t tried it out yet, I highly recommend it.

Photovine, unfortunately, can access only your Facebook and Instagram photos, but it nonetheless offers a pretty unique viewing experience.

Photovine revolves around a photo wheel, where you can choose which photos you wish to view. Your options are your Instagram photos, your friends’ Instagram photos, your Facebook photos (photos you’re tagged in), your friends Facebook photos, popular photos, and all your photos, which is these four options combined.

The photos of your choosing are presented in a dynamic collage, which you can animate and move around by shaking your device. You can also view your photos individually, by tapping on the photos and sliding left and right. An icon on the top shows you which network the photo comes from. You can like and comment on photos from the app, and share them via Facebook, Twitter, email, or text message.

Up until now, Photovine is a pretty standard photo app, but this is where the fun begins. Above your main photo collage, you’ll find several additional buttons. The “play” icon activates slideshow mode, letting you set your preferred transition time, choose which music to play (if at all), and decide whether you’d like a photo-only slideshow, or one with titles and timestamps.

Slideshow mode is not the only way to combine music with your photos. The next button lets you enable background music for the app, and if you prefer to play different music for this occasion, that’s possible too. The right-most button is the refresh button, to refresh your feed — an action that can also be done by pulling the photo-collage down.

Taking, Editing & Posting Photos

Photovine is not only a browser, it’s also a great way to edit and upload photos to Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, as well as share them with your phone’s contacts. To add a photo, tap the camera button at the bottom. You can take a photo with your phone’s camera or use an existing photo from your library.

Photovine comes with a built-in photo editor powered by Aviary, which includes some automatic enhancements, 11 filters and effects, orientation and cropping options, and even a drawing tool.

Once your photo is done, give it a title and choose where you want to upload it to. For some reason, both Twitter and Contacts options have LinkedIn’s logo next to them, but don’t mind that.

Bottom Line

To me, Photovine is a strange bird. On one hand, it brings together an innovative photo browser and a photo editor/uploader, and combines them under a pretty unique interface. On the other hand, this interface, while being interesting and easy to use, is not half as nice to look at as I would have expected from such an app. To be blunt, it’s a bit on the ugly side, and reminds me of Android apps from two years ago.

That being said, Photovine is a fun way to discover and browse your photos and photo streams, and combined with the music and slideshow options, can make a great screensaver for your phone while its idle; one you can always glance it, and see something interesting. It’s ability to take, edit, and upload photos to all three major social networks can be a huge timesaver, and Aviary’s filters and tools could help you stand out from the regular Instagram stock.

Download: Photovine on the App Store (Free)

If you don’t own an iOS device there are plenty of other great ways to view your Facebook, Instagram and Flickr photos under one roof and on the Web.

Did you get a chance to try Photovine? Do you have a similar app you like better Let us know in the comments.

The post Photovine: A Unique Photo Browser, Editor & Slideshow Viewer For Instagram & Facebook [iOS] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

John McCain:  “Why the hell do I have to keep updating the apps on my iPhone all the time?”

I missed this last week, but John Paczkowski has the entire email from Jobs with the “Throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream e-books market at $12.99 and $14.99” line singled out by the DOJ:

Now, this is but one piece of evidence in a much larger case. And the DOJ does claim to have other evidence that reflects poorly on Apple, specifically testimony that suggests it used its prowess in the apps market to push reticent partners into signing its e-books deal. But in this particular case, it does seem to have cherry-picked a quote for maximum effect.

Andrew Leonard, writing for Salon, unmasks a blatantly corrupt Wikipedia editor:

The mind boggles. After years of styling himself as someone who specializes in scrubbing Wikipedia pages clean of “conflicts of interest,” Qworty/Young admitted to editing “the Wikipedia articles of writers with whom I have feuded.” How can Wikipedia possibly allow this man to keep his editing privileges? And how are we, the general public, supposed to trust Wikipedia, when Qworty’s record shows how easy it is to work out personal grudges and real-world vendettas in this great online encyclopedia for years without anyone taking action?

Peter Rubin:

At this point, fewer than 2 million Surface tablets have been sold. Windows Phone has a 3.2 percent share of the smartphone market. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, has sold 77 million units and has been the bestselling game console in the US for 28 straight months. Not to take anything away from Microsoft’s other consumer products, but there’s no longer any question which side the company’s bread is buttered on. And if the Interactive Entertainment Business division gets this right, the Xbox One is going to be a very, very big piece of bread.

Xbox is Microsoft’s foothold in the post-PC world.

Last year, I wrote about the history of online communication and how it has evolved all the way from online bulletin board systems to social media. But what does the future have in store for us in terms of communicating online?

The latest iteration of online communication may indeed be social media, but it seems that the most popular avenue is still the old-fashioned internet forum. It remains today as an excellent way to structure a community on the web. While social media can be somewhat amorphous at times, forums provide order and a sense of home.

I believe that forums will never die out, but forums will evolve and adapt to advancements in web technology. Please join me as I take a look at a few forum software systems that are so innovative that they’ll transform the concept of the forum forever.

Moot

Moot (Beta) is a very interesting project in my eyes because there’s a bit of tension in its design philosophy: it wants to take a step back into the past and recover the lost relevance of meaningful discussion (which they claim have died with social media) while incorporating features of the future (clean and responsive interface).

But more importantly, Moot is entirely embeddable, meaning you don’t need to download a package and upload it to your own web host. Instead, all of the data and control is done through your Moot account and your forum theme; forum content are embedded directly into your site wherever you want it to go. It has been designed from the ground up for complete and easy integration.

Other notable features that Moot is pushing:

• Both forums and comments. Moot is a full-fledged forum embed system AND a comment embed system. Unlike other forum systems where comments are just normal forum threads with their post data molded and displayed differently, Moot lets you embed unique comment threads onto pages using one line of HTML. Each comment thread is unique, dynamic, and separate from your forums.
• No content deletion. Moot is taking a hard stance: deleting posts and comments disrupts the natural progression of a discussion, resulting in an incomplete thread that’s harder to follow. Therefore, once content is older than 2.7 minutes, it cannot be deleted. Also, if a post or comment has received any replies or likes, it can’t be deleted.
• Complete control. Even though Moot is a third-party service that you have to embed onto your site, you will have full control over it. You can alter the design using CSS. You can also alter the behavior and extend Moot functionality using an API that will be released in the near future.

Discourse

The mentality spurring the Discourse team is the desire to “raise the standard of discussion on the web through better forum software.” Core to their actions is the belief that forums are an integral aspect of proper web communities, yet most forum designs are stuck in the 1990s. With Discourse, they want to make forum hosting easy, flexible, and appealing to the 21st Century.

The Discourse interface takes a lot of inspiration from social media: just-in-time loading of content, flat and sleek aesthetics that are indicative of social media design, @replying to users, logging in with social media accounts, real-time stream updates, and more. But unlike Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and the others, Discourse remains faithful to big blocks of text for deeper, more meaningful conversation.

Other notable features that Discourse is pushing:

We took a detailed look at Discourse when it emerged on the scene.

Vanilla

Moot and Discourse are relative newcomers to the forum scene, but Vanilla has been innovating the forum concept for years already. Honestly, ask anyone (who has forum experience, obviously) which forum software is the most non-traditional and I’m willing to bet that most would say Vanilla.

Vanilla has gained a lot of traction over the years. Big name sites, like Penny Arcade, are starting to turn to it for their discussion needs because of its cutting edge design. This is a free, open source project that really is revolutionizing the forum landscape.

Other notable features that Vanilla is pushing:

• Scalability. One major issue in many free forum systems – and some paid systems too – is that they buckle under too much traffic. When it takes over 10 seconds for a thread to load, users are too frustrated to continue a discussion. Vanilla is built for speed and can handle millions of users right out of the box.
• User reactions. With Vanilla, you can set various “reactions” that users can have to content: like, dislike, spam, off topic, insightful, funny, or whatever else you can come up with. These reactions have actions associated with them (e.g. add score to the post). The result of the user reactions system is that users can decide on and promote valuable content.
• Built-in gamification. Gamification describes the addition of game elements in a non-game context for the purpose of engaging users. By participating, users can earn badges (achievements) and reputation (score) which lead to user promotions and access to more features if you choose to set it up that way.

Conclusion

On paper, these systems may not seem like a huge deviation from the usual forum platforms that we typically see. However, paper can be deceiving. Take one look at each of the solutions above and you’ll notice a landslide difference in the end user experience. And in my humble opinion, all three systems are doing a heck of a job in refreshing the boring realm of forums.

Do you use forums? Know of any other forum systems that are revolutionizing the field? Please share with us in the comments!

Image Credits: Chat Bubbles Via Shutterstock

The post Internet Forums Reimagined: The Future Of Online Discussions appeared first on MakeUseOf.

MakerSquare is the kind of idea that inspires ideas. In its simplest form, it is a 10-week, intensive, full-time, full-stack web development program. But if you talk to cofounder Ravi Parikh about the company, the discussion quickly moves from the simple logistics to wider (borderline philosophical) issues about technology, empowerment, community, and innovation. Even Parikh’s simple explanation of the company – “we’re building people who build things” – leads to an exponential visions of builders building builders that spread like some sort of tech version of Pay It Forward, with Parikh and his cofounders in the role of Haley Joel Osment (if slightly less adorable).

But before we run off into the big picture, we’ll hit the details and a little bit of backstory. Parikh has been an active entrepreneur since his early college days. He has started three companies already (with varying levels of success), and, with each of them, he said his biggest pain point was not knowing how to make his own website. Shaan Shah (one of his cofounders on a different project and now with MakerSquare) went through a program called The Starter League in Chicago that taught him the foundation of coding. For a business mind like Parikh’s, it was a few simple steps to go from “the Starter League sounds like something I need” to “why is there not a program like this here in Austin?” to “let’s build one here” to “how much further can we take it?” Fast forward four months and they’ve already sold out their entire summer class and are in the middle of expanding their offering.

MakerSquare is looking to differentiate itself in a few ways from your typical “learn to code” program. First, it emphasizes real-world application above all else. During the program, they essentially recreate the industry setting you will be working in as a coder. Everything is geared towards the workplace, emphasizing team and project-based learning. Students will come out of the program being able to build live websites and database-backed web apps. Second, MakerSquare has a strong internal focus on the actual teaching aspect of their program – which should seem obvious, but is often overlooked, especially in the tech world. Harsh Patel, one of the cofounders, did a Teach For America fellowship. He has meticulously refined the curriculum to optimize absorption and retention and is training the tech masters who teach the actual coding.

Now back to the big ideas. The vision for MakerSquare isn’t just to be a good tech education course. It is to be a “town center” for the community, and a catalyst for technology across the nation. After 5:00 pm, MakerSquare opens its doors to the community for coworking and continuing education classes. They have partnerships with adjunct professors who come in to teach anything from Heroku deployment to Photoshop, and the public can attend all of it for free. Another community benefit they’re providing is an automatic $2,000 scholarship for women to take their course. They see it as essential for more women to be in technology, one of the historically most male-saturated industries in the world. “Just imagine,” says Parikh, “all the innovation that is lost because there’s not a strong female perspective in technology.”

Parikh doesn’t think he’s going to replace college education anytime soon. He sees MakerSquare as a valuable component of a much larger tech-enablement infrastructure that is self-forming right now. The endgame of this process is anyone’s guess, but most versions of it are exciting. As Parikh put it: “There are so many ideas that die because business brains aren’t able to find someone to build out their ideas. That’s a huge loss to society. There would be so much more innovation if businesspeople, creatives, and others had the tools to develop their ideas on their own.”

Think on that for a while. Get excited. Go sign up for MakerSquare.

MakerSquare was a showcased startup at our Tech Cocktail Austin mixer. 

Guest author Austin Rory Hackett is the co-founder and CEO of CrowdHall. He loves karaoke, pinball, and rock climbing. Follow him @austinrory.

The post MakerSquare Produces Industry-Ready Coders in 10 Weeks appeared first on Tech Cocktail

“Everybody’s working for the weekend,” famed poets Loverboy once said. And sometimes on the weekend. We work – too much – and we save what we sow from our weekday grind – not enough – to use to unwind.

We use sports, hiking, or art for an escape. Or music. And as our escape, we pour our passions into this outlet as much as we can. We become “fans” – fans of the opera, fans of the local sports teams, fans of a band that we follow around the country all summer.

As passionate people, we need passionate applications. FanAddict is that passionate app that music lovers can rely on to be as crazed as they are.

FanAddict allows users to track and follow their favorite musical artists as well as discover new artists. Users can search by genre, artist, city, and venue to discover and engage with music. FanAddict takes user engagement one step further by allowing users to create scrapbooks and journals. Photos and notes can be compiled within the application, so users can store their past music experiences in the same application that they can use to search and find their next music experience.

As the name suggests, music fans take their music seriously. It is not just something to do, it is part of our identity. It is something that makes those 40-plus-hour work weeks worth it. If you care that much about music, shouldn’t your music app?

FanAddict was a showcased startup at our Tech Cocktail Kansas City mixer.

The post Create Music Scrapbooks and Journals with FanAddict appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Contest. That word has a charm of its own. Ever since the days of the cavemen right till today’s Olympics, the brave and the meek have gone up against each other. A contest has a simple pull – all of us want to know and show if we are the best. Even on the comparatively egalitarian World Wide Web, it is a barometer for a self-pat on the back. We have online photography contests of all kinds; from the recent best body and fitness contests to regular programming contests. Google contests are used by a big company as part of their promotion strategy. Graphic lovers have their Photoshop contests.

Photographers aren’t in any way left out. In fact, they seem to be the most proactive lot when it comes to contests. Bakari showed us some awesome free photography contests. So, let’s launch into some more popular photo contests and pit ourselves against the best of the rest.

National Geographic – Your Shot

Calendar Date: Always Open

The National Geographic photo contest can either make you go “wow”, or make you feel inferior if you are starting out with your DSLR. National Geographic is one of the more preeminent places to take your photos to. If any of your photos get selected, then it is the best badge to say that you have finally arrived. Your Shot is the magazine’s photo community which invites regular submissions from photographers of all hues.  Whether a hobbyist or a pro, you can participate fearlessly. National Geographic editors review each submission carefully and the best 12 get picked in the popular Daily Dozen category.

The best thing is that the editors also offer professional tips which are an invaluable learning experience. The publication of photos in the magazine or the website is reward enough for any photography enthusiast. The guidelines are explained here in more detail.

The Smithsonian Phototography Contest

Calendar Date: Annual (open till November 29, 2013)

Another renowned name, but one you may not immediately associate with photography. But you will be surprised to know that the Smithsonian magazine’s photography contest has its own place. Standards are of course, very high. You can enter any of the five categories — the American Experience, the Natural World, People, Travel and Altered Images – to win cash prizes. The grand prize winner gets $2500. Read the complete FAQs here.

Wiki Loves Monuments

Calendar Date: September (expected)

It’s printed in large letters — The world’s largest photo contest. It is also certified by the Guinness Book of Records as the largest photo contest in the world. Not really surprising because it was organized by the Wikipedia community. The contest started off in 2010 in The Netherlands. By 2012, it was held across 35 countries and garnered 350,000 photo submissions. The international photo contest is meant to showcase the cultural heritage through monuments of each participating country.

Though the contest for this year is yet to be announced, you can still see the latest uploads coming into the site. The photos are all freely licensed under Wikimedia Commons.

Pixoto

Calendar Date: Weekly

Pixoto is a photography contest of a different kind, and one which makes it the easiest to participate. The photo service uses an algorithm called ImageDuel to submit each photo to a comparison and voting process. The photo with the best positive feedback (an image score) wins. There are dozens of categories and each top photo can win $150 every week. Others among the top 20% can get badges to display alongside their profiles and photos on the site.

ViewBug

Calendar Date: Always open

ViewBug is a photography community with a few contests of its own. There are premium (paid) and free contests to go along with the free and premium plans the site has for you to join. The free membership allows you to participate in the free contests. There were about 16 contests going on at the time of writing this article. Awards include photography kits, pro-memberships, and exposure. Some of the categories are unique – from photographing subjects floating on water to capturing scenes by looking up.

World In Focus

Calendar Date: Annual (to be announced for 2013)

PDN’s World in Focus is a travel photography contest which is awarded separately to amateurs and professionals. There is an entry fee for this contest – amateurs ($22) and professionals ($45). The contest is open internationally. The submission date for this year’s announcements has passed, but it could be worthwhile to wait and prepare for next year. The contest closed in October last year, and the winners photos were published in March 2013. Winning entries are featured on the website and in the magazine.

No Man’s Art Gallery

Calendar Date: Annual (to be announced for 2013)

The No Man’s Art Slum Photography Contest is an annual photography contest held exclusively for kids in an underprivileged neighborhood in the world. The winning photo is exhibited in the art gallery of the organization. Children are taught how to use a camera in a workshop and then given a free rein to express themselves and their lives with photos. The site says that Plans for 2013 are to give the children in the slums of Capetown the opportunity to experiment with photography. Though this is not a usual photography contest, I decided to mention this for its novelty, and also to show how photography can be used for the charitable good. You can also sponsor a participant with your contribution.

World Press Photo

Calendar Date: Annual (February)

This is the definitive site for photo journalists to come and win an award for their profession. The World Press Photo Awards are the world’s largest and most celebrated annual press photography contest. The non-profit organization holds the contest annually. The 2013 awards were announced in February. Photos are submitted across a wide range of categories that also include arts and entertainment, portraits and nature. The awards have been held for 55 years and are meant to showcase the often dangerous, often invaluable work of photo journalists.

The Best Way to Be In The Know: Photo Contest Directories

The best way to be completely aware of the next photo contest around the turn of the calendar is through photo contest tracking websites. Subscribe to their RSS feeds or Twitter updates. But do keep them bookmarked. Here are three of the more comprehensive ones I found.

• The Photo Contest
• The Photo Contest Directory
• Photography Competitions

You have to enter to win. That’s the slight trouble you have to take with contests. I have tried to mix this article up with some high-brow contests, and a couple which you can enter more easily if you are an amateur photographer. But there are photography contests all around us, some local, some national, and international like the ones above.

Photography contests aren’t about winning prizes alone. They are also about being part of the wider photography community and taking our photography learning to a new level. Have you taken your best snaps and put them to the test on a photo contest? Tell us about the best photo contests out there; because there are so many.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

The post Photo Finish With The Best: 8 Photography Contests You Can Win With Your Best Snap appeared first on MakeUseOf.

It's not every day one of the big three gaming powerhouses announces a new console. In fact, we've been waiting a solid eight years. In an event on its Redmond, Washington home turf today, Microsoft announced the Xbox One, its next generation Xbox gaming console — and more.

In fact, the Xbox One is pretty much an audacious land grab by Microsoft, an attempt to stake out your living room as its undisputed turf. Here's how.

The new console packs 8GB of RAM, a base 500GB hard drive, USB 3.0, wi-fi direct, and built-in Blu-Ray. The One runs on a custom eight-core AMD chip and will come bundled with Kinect, the motion-based controller system that Microsoft introduced with the Xbox 360.

 

Contrary to rumors, the Xbox One will not require an Internet connection at all times. Though it may crimp your ability to play used games and apparently won't play Xbox 360 games at all. 

 

On stage in Redmond, Head of Xbox Don Mattrick touted the Xbox team's ability to stay agile with trends — not always the company's strong suit — by feeding the voracious appetite of avid gamers. "Nearly 8 years after our launch, the Xbox 360 remains a vibrant platform," Mattrick said. "We made an early bet on Xbox live. Gamers were hungry to adopt emerging technologies... we doubled down on Xbox Live. Today it's time for technology to step behind the curtain."

But it is in the living room that the Xbox One stakes its major claim to fame. A new generation of Xbox Live will be the revamped, beating heart of the console, weaving together interactive TV, real-time major broadcast events like sports and awards shows and connected gaming, naturally.

The new Xbox Live interface enables quick-switching between Xbox Live's homescreen, movies and live TV — and in the demo, quick meant quick. ""You can switch to your game like it's a TV channel flip" according to Xbox Live head Marc Whitten. The quick-switching is thanks to "snap mode," a multitasking feature that allows apps to remain running in the background so that they can pop back up instantly.

By hosting its own event on its own terms, Microsoft is jumping the gun on E3 — the biggest North American gaming conference, and traditional grounds for big, flashy hardware announcements. Of course, Microsoft is also beating Sony to the punch, considering that the rival's PlayStation 4 reveal is just around the corner too. 

All photos by Taylor Hatmaker for ReadWrite

I have absolutely no musical training or background. Give me an instrument, and I’m hopeless. But give me a simple sequencer, and I can make some music. Sequencers are brilliant because they abstract away much of the “hard stuff”: You don’t have to keep a beat, because the sequencer does it for you. You don’t have to try and pick notes that go well together, because they all go well together. If you’re a real musician, you may lament losing all of these nuances and fine-grained elements that combine to make a high-quality composition (in which case, you may want to try one of these music creation tools). But if you’re just looking to have some fun, a good sequencer is all you need. And Rolling Tones for Android is a great one. No, it’s not Holo, and I wouldn’t say it’s a gorgeous app, but it’s well-made, simple to use, and yes — free. It’ll have you making music before you know it.

First Steps

The Rolling Tones Google Play page says the app is based on ToneMatrix, a simple Flash-based music sequencer that we’ve looked at in 2009. Yes, they’re both sequencers, but while ToneMatrix lets you compose single segments, Rolling Tones lets you record entire songs and offers a much more complete experience. I would say GrooveMixer is actually a bit more similar to ToneMatrix than Rolling Tones.

When you first launch Rolling Tones, you’ll see a blank screen with lots of space for your music:

Tap anywhere on the screen, and you’ll make a note. The sequence keeps playing over and over (at 120 beats per minute, by default), so you will soon hear your note. Tap anywhere else on the screen, and you’ve made another note. A beat is formed. Pretty soon, your screen may look like this:

This is a complex sequence that’s actually a part of the demo song that ships with Rolling Tones. The different colors denote different instruments: You can see the eight available instruments lined up along the bottom of the screen.

The matrix itself is easy and intuitive to read: The vertical axis denotes pitch, while the horizontal one marks a note’s position in the sequence. This sounds clunky when explained, but as soon as you start messing around with it, you’ll get it.

From Sequence To Song

One thing I often find frustrating about simple sequencers is that they’re built like toys: You can make a basic sequence, but you can’t make a song. Any sequence you made will just repeat over and over until you change it, but there is often no way to save a sequence and move to the next one, assembling a song. Tone Matrix does let you do this. Let’s look at the relevant bit of the screen a bit closer up:

Ins and Add let you add a new segment to your song; Del lets you remove it. The << and >> buttons let you scroll through your song, and in between you can see the sequence of segments that go to make up the current song (just a five-segment portion of it — the full song can be much longer).

In the next row, the Song button lets you switch between working on the whole song or playing the current segment. Z lets you zoom in on the sequencer matrix for “precision work” — something I’ve found unnecessary on my own device, but may come in handy if you have a smaller screen. The |< and >| buttons let you change the sequence number for the current spot in the song. The Copy and Paste buttons let you quickly take a segment’s contents and paste it into a new segment, while Clear wipes the current segment clean.

This sounds like a lot to take in, but in practice, it’s quite simple. My own workflow goes something like this: I first start messing with a single segment, working up a simple beat I like. I then hit Add three or four times to duplicate the sequence. Then it’s time to change it up, so I hit Copy, hit >| to create a new sequence number in that spot in the song, and hit Paste. I then make one or two changes in the sequence (not too much though, because it still has to sound like it belongs in the same song). I then duplicate that several times, then make another tweak, and so on. Pretty soon, I have a basic melody. It may not be a hit, but it sounds like a song, and it’s fun to make.

Documentation

Rolling Tones is easy to pick up, but it also comes with a simple help page:

This is not obvious, and it does help when you’re trying to figure out what each button does. The included sample song helps, too.

Final Thoughts

Rolling Tones doesn’t win in the looks department, but it definitely has the right functionality, coupled with an intuitive interface and an attractive price tag.

Do you know of a better sequencer for Android that’s still simple enough for non-musicians to use? Let me know in the comments! And if you make anything fun with Rolling Tones, feel free to share a SoundCloud link or two, as well.

The post Create Fun Melodies On The Go With Free Rolling Tones for Android appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Every startup or business owner has concerns about their online reputation. However, when you’re in the beginning of launching your business, it can be difficult to find room in your budget for your branding strategy.

BrandYourself makes brand management simple and effective for startups. Typically, when you’re first starting your business, you don’t have a large budget set aside for marketing and branding. With the help of BrandYourself, users can make the most of their branding strategy through this affordable reputation management platform.

According to Patrick Ambron, cofounder and CEO of BrandYourself, nearly half of adults in the U.S. search for a business online before they become a customer. Of that group, 45 percent of people have ignored a business because of something they discovered about them during their online search.

The online reputation of a startup or small business is often determined by the first impression their search results make on people who Google their brand. When a person searches for your business, your reputation can easily be ruined by one negative review that made its way to the top of Google’s results list. By implementing BrandYourself into your branding strategy, you can be in control of what people see when they search for your business.

BrandYourself provides you with an optimized profile that allows you to publish relevant content about your startup. For anything from your website to your social networks, BrandYourself helps you create your own personal “hub” that consists of everything you want people to know about your startup’s mission and the services it offers.

Not only can you have control of the content that represents your startup’s brand, but you can also optimize your existing results. BrandYourself helps make your existing content easy for search engine users to find. Whether it’s changing the titles of your content to searchable phrases or changing the structure of your website’s URL, BrandYourself makes it possible for you to optimize your content to make your startup become more search engine-friendly.

If you want to take your startup’s reputation to the next level, consider investing in BrandYourself’s concierge option. If there’s something you can’t fix yourself for your startup’s reputation, concierge can step in and immediately fix your results. This gives users the ability to have dedicated professionals managing their online reputation without the outrageous fees of typical reputation sites.

BrandYourself is the first do-it-yourself platform committed to making it easy for any business to take control of their Google search results. To learn more about how you can put your startup’s reputation back into your hands, visit BrandYourself for information about their free and concierge plans.

The post Improve Your Startup’s Reputation With BrandYourself appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Dota 2 is a huge game right now, and while it may not be as popular as League of Legends, it is hot on its heels with an ever rising player base. As a whole, the MOBA genre is growing by leaps and bounds every single day, with new players discovering it and deciding to take the time to learn what these games bring to the table.

With all of that being said, Dota 2 and League of Legends are hard games to learn. The skill required to master each of the heroes is great, and it’s not the kind of game you are just going to pick up and play without getting your butt handed to you on many occasions. As I mentioned previously, watching Dota 2 streamers is a great way to learn, but if you want to go even further, there are tons of websites designed to help new players progress in the game.

In addition to learning, there are many Dota 2 websites out there designed to help keep up with the competitive scene. The rise of the MOBA has had a direct impact on the popularity of so called esports, and Dota 2 has a lively competitive scene that can be hard to keep up with. Some of the sites on this list will let you know who are the teams to watch out for, and when the next great tournament is taking place.

PurgeGamers.com

I’ve talked about Purges stream before, but his Dota 2 website is also a fantastic resource for Dota 2 information. I am especially fond of his giant article called “Welcome to Dota, You Suck.” This epic article covers almost every aspect of the game and is something I suggest all new players take the time to read. It’s not a short article by any stretch, but the knowledge contained within makes it well worth the time to sit down and plow through.

In addition to his articles, Purge also pulls some select games from his streams and posts them to the site. He even does commentary over replays of games, which offers more detailed learning, because he is focused more on teaching and less on playing. The News section even covers the competitive scene, so this site really has it all.

Dota2.com

The official Dota 2 website is a shockingly good resource. It comes equipped with a “Heropedia” designed to introduce games to the massive list of heroes, and the Steam Guides, which are also available in the game itself. These guides, written by players, offer an incredible amount of depth and knowledge for specific heroes and general gameplay tactics.

The official site does not go too deep into the competitive scene, but it covers the big tournaments like The International. Any Dota 2 fan should spend a good deal of time on this site.

PlayDota.com

This is, without question, one of the most content-packed Dota 2 websites around. It is considered an official site, and as such, all the information contained within it is accurate. In terms of news, it’s not the most active website, but it does cover much of what is happening in the biggest professional tournaments.

The bread and butter of PlayDota is the forum. It is a massive community of players covering everything from the competitive scene to tips for new players. It even continues to deal with the original Warcraft 3 Dota mod, so old school players can still get their fix there. Besides the forums, there is tons of articles and other key information to help you expand your knowledge of everything Dota. For the hardcore player, it’s easy to lose many hours hanging out on PlayDota.

Reddit.com/r/Dota2

The Dota2 Reddit is always growing, and with it, the amount of content posted expands. As you would expect from Reddit, plenty of photos are posted, but there is also a great deal of strategy discussion and players talking about the competitive scene. If you want a place to come discuss Dota 2 with other serious players, this Reddit is a great option.

Dota Insight

Dota Insight has a website, but there is not much on there other than a few hero guides. The reason this makes the list is because of their fantastic Dota 2 podcast. It’s very active, with new episodes airing weekly. Each episode covers fun games the hosts played in the last week, tips for heros, the latest patches, and the biggest happenings from the professional Dota 2 scene. If you want to consume your Dota information in audio form, this is the Dota 2 website for you.

Your Turn

What Dota 2 websites do you visit? Hit the comments section below and let us know!

The post 5 Websites For All The Latest Happenings In Dota 2 [MUO Gaming] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

On Monday, Yahoo announced it was buying Tumblr, the blog network, for $1.1 billion. And then the tweets started, with people declaring that Tumblr founder David Karp was now a billionaire.

The conflation of Tumblr's purchase price with Karp's net worth assumed that Karp got nearly all of the Yahoo payday. And that's simply not how it works for venture-backed startups. Investors like Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz will share in the take, with Karp getting an estimated $275 million.

(See also: Tumblr's Perverse Lesson: To Get Rich, Don't Make Money)

That's a lot of money, but it won't get him on Forbes' list of the world's billionaires.

You try explaining this to people on Twitter, though.

From high school drop out to billionaire: previously coy Karp cashes in on Tumblr smh.com.au/it-pro/busines…

— Sandra Sully (@Sandra_Sully) May 20, 2013

David Karp (26) now a billionaire after Yahoo! agrees to buy Tumblr news.com.au/technology/yah… Thx #FF @josepheach @sanddragger @conservotop

— Joey Myers Jr. (@JoeyMyersJr) May 20, 2013

Funny how people think that the founder of a venture backed company sold for $1.1b is somehow a billionaire

— David Galbraith (@daveg) May 20, 2013

David Karp--High school drop-out to billionaire stuff.co.nz/technology/dig… I too have no clue why anyone needs to go to school for 12yrs #Tumblr

— Tolstaja Zhirniavka (@tolstunka) May 20, 2013

Sadly, even some respectable publications like Australia's Sydney Morning Herald made the error:

From high school drop-out to tech billionaire: Meet David Karp. ow.ly/lbRIw #Tumblr

— smh.com.au (@smh) May 20, 2013

Other people asserted that Karp was a "high-school dropout." That's actually a debatable point. He left high school to continue his education through home schooling, and never received a formal diploma.

I hate how the media is referring to David Karp as a "high school dropout". Like, yeah he's a dropout but now he's a hot billionaire.

— Trey Amandus Bennett (@trey_amandus) May 20, 2013

Vespa lover, yes. Billionaire, no.

Who knew that newly billionaire @davidkarp likes to ride Vespas? nym.ag/163cMDH #VespaVita

— Vespa USA (@VespaUSA) May 20, 2013

And Business Insider's Henry Blodget tried to resolve the issue with punctuation:

New York tabloids discover @davidkarp, the city's newest ~billionaire tech god read.bi/11RmFms

— Henry Blodget (@hblodget) May 20, 2013

Related stories:

• Who Hates The Yahoo-Tumblr Deal? Tumblrers, That's Who
• Buying Tumblr Will Leave Yahoo With The Same Old Identity Crisis

Photo by Web09

Senator Rand Paul:

Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, has taken the floor with a very different tone. He says he is “offended” by the hearings. Who, he said, doesn’t try to minimize their own taxes?

“Tell me what Apple has done that’s illegal,” he said.

And on Twitter:

If there is anyone to blame here it is not Apple, it is Congress and the tax code it created.

Software solutions are vital to businesses of any size. Incorporating data and information across software services effectively can be the deciding factor in achieving business goals. With the growing number of software programs and applications, businesses struggle to find the best mixture of solutions to work for their company.

Onspring aims at ridding businesses of the hassle of mixing and matching software programs and applications from different providers by offering a comprehensive and customizable software solution that focuses on integration. With Onspring, companies can use an abundance of business applications that share and store information and data in the cloud. Companies can not only integrate and transfer data across these platforms, but also integrate and share the information across departments.

As part of its focus on integration, Onspring created a simple interface that allows users to quickly work between their applications without the need of programmers. With the ease in which information can be transferred within the Onspring applications, businesses can better use time and manpower rather than waste it on integrating and updating data and software.

Users can create, from scratch, business applications that meet their needs as well as real-time reports and dashboards from the Onspring applications. This allows users even more control over integration and efficiency of their business solution software that the traditional mix and match offerings cannot. From tracking sales and service data to employee performance plans, Onspring’s secure, cloud-based apps ensure analysts through executives have the information they need to be successful.

Onspring was a showcased startup at our Tech Cocktail Kansas City mixer.

The post Integrate Information and Data with Onspring’s Business Solution Applications appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Facebook is more than just a tool to stay in touch with friends or waste time. Sometimes people post valuable information that you may want to refer to later. So how do you find an old post on Facebook, if you barely remember the content, let alone who posted it or where? Facebook doesn’t exactly make this convenient.

While there are several ways to find stuff on Facebook, they are all but comprehensive or reliable. This situation also forces you to spend even more time on Facebook, increasing the likelihood that you will get distracted. One way to increase your chances of finding something and thus waste less time, is to enable Facebook email notifications. As I explore the benefits of email notifications, I will also show you other ways to search Facebook.

Why Would I Need Facebook Email Notifications?

Facebook Email Notifications are useful for two main reasons. First, you can read updates without visiting Facebook. Second, you are creating a searchable archive of those posts.

Facebook is an incredible time sink. It’s tough not to scroll down your News Feed or view the notifications that have accumulated since your last visit. The best thing you can do to escape this drift is to visit Facebook less. Email notifications allow you to do that and at least partially fight your FOMO (fear of missing out) because you will receive notifications of important posts and events.

At some point in the past Facebook retired its old Wall and Timeline search option. Recently, Graph Search was introduced, but it doesn’t really search posts on your Timeline or News Feed. So when you want to find a post or a comment in which you were mentioned, you have to manually search Facebook, for example by expanding the relevant time frame in your News Feed and using your browser’s search feature. If you have Facebook email notifications enabled, however, you can simply use your email client’s search tool. With Gmail’s filter and search features, this is super convenient.

Alternatively, you could download your Facebook expanded archive and search it. However, it can take several hours before your archive is ready for download. It also gets outdated the next day, and it doesn’t contain group posts.

Presently, it’s possible to search within groups. However, it’s unpredictable which features Facebook will remove or otherwise alter. So if you rely on the group search option, it’s better to be on the safe side and also collect group posts via Facebook email notifications.

How Can I Enable Facebook Email Notifications?

Facebook offers a range of ways to receive Notifications in the respective section under Account Settings. Besides email notifications, you can enable visual and audio notifications on Facebook, push notifications, and text messages.

For email notifications you have two options:

• All notifications, except the ones you unsubscribe from
• Only notifications about your account, security and privacy

You can unsubscribe from:

• Pokes
• Friend confirmations
• Friend suggestions
• Friends added based on your suggestions

Once you have enabled email notifications and made a choice what to unsubscribe from, note that you can further customize email notifications under the What You Get Notified About header.

Particularly interesting are notifications that concern activities of close friends and groups you are a member of. Note that you cannot opt out of activities that involve you, for example when someone comments on a post of yours.

Won’t These Notifications Clog Up My Inbox?

No, because you know that they are coming and you will take care of them in advance. What you need to do is set up an email filter. Your email client should allow you to automatically mark the notifications as read, make them bypass your inbox, and sort them to a separate label or folder. We have previously outlined how to set up email filters in Gmail, Yahoo, and Thunderbird.

Conclusion

Facebook email notifications can be set up in a way that doesn’t bother you, and generally can be very useful. They can serve as a partial archive, become a valuable resource when searching for information, and by allowing you to avoid Facebook they might even save you time.

If you are still not finding what you are looking for, you can try external services like SocialSearching. From my own experience I must report that they are slow and unreliable, but maybe you are more lucky.

Do you know of a better way to find things on Facebook? Please share!

The post Facebook Search Sucks – Use Facebook Email Notifications As A Workaround [Weekly Facebook Tips] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

According to the 2013 BrandZ Top 100 report, tech companies hold the top three slots in this year's list of top global brands — Apple, Google and IBM leading the pack in that order. Microsoft rolls in at number 7 on the list.

There's big money in them thar brands, too. The ClickZ report pegs Apple's brand as worth $185.1 billion, up 1% from last year. Google rose more from last year, up 5% to a brand worth of $113.7 billion. IBM's brand shrank 3% to $112.5 billion and Microsoft shrank even more: 9% down to $69.8 billion.

These valuations are based on proprietary valuation methods, so take them with a grain of salt. Still, it's interesting to see how marketing views the power of the almighty brand.

Check out BrandZ's technology sector rankings to see how your favorite companies stack up against each other.

Image via Shutterstock

Have you ever wanted to design your own rockets, launch them into space, and send astronauts to the moon (or beyond)? Now you can with Kerbal Space Program, a unique game and digital toy that focuses on the space-faring adventures of little green dudes called Kerbals.

The game, developed by a small studio called Squad, has been developed with the Minecraft approach. It is totally playable, and a lot of fun, but there are many planned features still in development. Fortunately, the game’s developers have allowed impatient gamers to go crazy with mods, and have even created a website called the Kerbal SpacePort that give modders a place to share their creations.

The only problem is the site’s huge selection; there are hundreds of Kerbal space program mods to choose from. So, to save you time, I’ve picked out ten of the best.

B9 Aerospace Pack

Besides rockets, Kerbal Space Program also includes space planes. These are much more complex and harder to design, but allow for the creation of spaceships that can sail to the stars but also re-enter the atmosphere and navigate on their own power.

What’s great about the B9 pack, and makes it among the best component packs available, is its attention to detail. The parts use quality textures and are based on concept designs shown by NASA, DARPA, and militaries across the globe. And while most useful for planes and shuttles, the parts can be used in rockets, too – so don’t count this mod you just because you haven’t started building space planes yet.

Impossible Innovations

Originally developed as a “cheat pack”, Impossible Innovations has turned into a fully-fledged component mod for people who want to take their space program a step beyond what’s possible with today’s technology.

That means a wide variety of wonderful components like fusion engines, high-capacity batteries, advanced command pods, super-charged solar panels and more. These allow for ships that are larger, faster and more durable that anything normally possible.

KW Rocketry

Designing your first rocket can feel overwhelming. After some successful missions, however, you may discover an itch for even more components. That’s what KW Rocketry provides.

In this pack you’ll find more nose-cones, decouplers, fuel tanks, fairings, a new engine numerous new engines, more solid fuel boosters, and more. These extras vastly expand the rockets you can build and allow for designs that aren’t possible with stock components. Yet they’re also relatively simple, making this mod digestible for new players.

MechJeb

Piloting can be one of the game’s more frustrating challenges. At times it is difficult, and if you’re no good at it, even the best rockets will crash and burn.

MechJeb is the solution. Once the mod is installed you’ll have access to MechJeb components which, when placed on a spacecraft, provide a wide range of auto-pilot features. This mod can handle almost everything; docking, takeoff, landing, orbital flight, and more. It can mess up from time to time but, in 90% of situations, it works perfectly.

SpaceJunk Cargo Bay

There’s one part that is conspicuously missing from Kerbal Space Program – a cargo bay. Since it isn’t present, rockets have to put satellites into orbit by just attaching to them to the top. Which tends to work fairly well, but isn’t ideal or realistic.

SpaceJunk fixes the problem with a cargo bay. Simple! The bay comes in several different sizes and allow for the deployment of small satellites.

RemoteTech

Currently the game includes the parts to make satellites, but they don’t do much. RemoteTech gives them a purpose by introducing new remote control options and a communications system.

With this mod it’s possible to remotely operate unmanned craft, but only if they’re within communications range of mission control. That range is rather short, and blocked by the terrain of Kerbin (your home planet), so you’ll need to send up relay satellites.

Eventually you’ll create a network that spans the solar system, making this mod perfect for anyone who wants to try their hand at inter-planetary communication.

Telemachus

Kerbal Space Program is as much a toy as it is a game, which means for many players the goal is far less important than the journey. And so we have Telemachus, a mod that lets you use web browsers to create a virtual mission control.

Does this make the game easier? Not really. But it does better simulate hands-off command of spacecraft from a control center rather than the cockpit itself. The mod even includes nifty telemetry data, perfect for graph-lovers and data-mongers.

Quantum Struts

One of the limitations which can become annoying in Kerbal Space Program is the inability to add components after construction. That’s annoying because space stations are almost always multiple-part structures built by docking different pieces.

Quantum struts provide a fix by adding “energy” struts that can connect different docked spacecraft, which make space stations less likely to suffer from wobble. And that in turn allows for the construction of much larger stations.

Conclusion

All of these Kerbal space program mods are free to download through the Kerbal SpacePort website, which also provides install instructions. Generally, the folders found in a mod’s zip file can be drag-and-dropped into the game’s installation folder, and that’s that. Mods compatibility doesn’t seem to be an issue (I’ve not run into it, at least).

As for the game itself, you can buy it off Steam for $22.99 or directly from Squad for $23 even.

The post 8 Awesome Kerbal Space Program Mods appeared first on MakeUseOf.

At age 18, Rob Gough was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer. He was just finishing his freshman year in college, but he would have to put his studies on hold and spend the next year and a half going through chemotherapy.

Those 17 long months were spent in and out of the hospital. He would do five days of chemotherapy, after which his immune system was completely devastated. He would spend two weeks recovering, avoiding raw fruits and vegetables because they might contain mold spores. If someone hit him, he risked bleeding to death internally. Then the chemo would start again. And over and over.

By the end, he was exhausted and his body needed longer breaks to recover. But when he was awake, he spent some of his time in the hospital dreaming up startup ideas.

Ten years later, Gough has much more energy – he can work 16-hour days on that startup he dreamed up. And he feels appreciative.

“I love what I do. It just makes me feel blessed to be here,” he says. “I was always positive and always believed that I could do anything, but I think going through cancer reinforced that feeling.”

Gough first learned that anything is possible from his mother, who once asked him whom he looked up to. When he hesitantly said Michael Jordan, his mom replied, “Well, who does he look up to?” Gough didn’t know. “The owner of the team,” she said. “That’s who you want to be.”

As a kid, Gough had already started dreaming big – or at least bigger than some of his peers. He opened a lemonade stand, sold candy on the bus, and mowed lawns. When he visited his grandparents in Florida, he would collect sand dollars and bring them home to Indiana to sell. He recalls being excited for his sixteenth birthday not because he could drive a car, but because he could own a company.

These days, Gough is putting his efforts into Eckim, a coupon company that owns DefinitiveDeals.com and CouponChad.com. He cofounded it in January 2012, and it drove over $100 million in retail sales for its merchant partners last year. The team has since grown to 15 – with no funding – and he hopes to prove that a bootstrapped company can sell for $100 million.

Oh, and while he’s at it, he might also buy a basketball team – “just to prove that it can be done.”

The post For Entrepreneur and Cancer Survivor Rob Gough, Anything Is Possible appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Browser maker Opera just released a new version for Android with a slew of new features, an upgraded design and better performance. And, for the first time for Opera, it is not running on its own Presto rendering engine.

Opera for Android is running WebKit.

In February, Opera said that it was ditching Presto in favor of WebKit, the open source browser engine that powers the likes of Apple's Safari browser and Google Chrome. The release of the new Opera for Android is the first "final" (gold version, not in a beta stage) release of Opera running WebKit, according to Falguni Bhuta from the Opera communications team.

Opera's decision caused a bit of a hullabaloo among the browser community. Mozilla's Robert O’Callahan said at the time that it was, "a sad day for the Web." O'Callahan and other browser enthusiasts lamented the loss of Presto, as it was one of only a small handful of browser rendering engines available to developers. Including WebKit, the others are Mozilla's Gecko and Microsoft's Trident for Internet Explorer.

New Features Come To Opera

Rounding up the new features for Opera, users will find some interesting capabilities:

Discover - A new feature to Opera for Android, "Discover" helps users find new articles with just a swipe from the homescreen. Opera has selected relevant global and regional news sources to give users a way to find what it going on around them.

Off-Road mode - Opera Mini has long been known for its compression technology that helps users minimize how much cellular data their browser is using. This often helps when you are having trouble getting a data connection or are roaming and is new to the full Android version of Opera. 

Combined address and search bar - Basically, Opera just created its own "omnibox" that allows you to type in website URLs or search from the same field.

Tabbed browsing - Not specifically new in the final Opera for Android version, but the UI has changed a bit from the last version and offers private browsing.

History - Easier to find your browser history. Swipe to the right to access content from the left of the homescreen.

Save for later - Allows you to download a complete webpage so as to read it later or while offline. Goes well with the "Off-Road" mode when you just want to be able to load an article or a website for later review but know that you are not going to have access to cellular data or Wi-Fi. 

Customizable navigation bar - Top or bottom, put the navigation bar where you want it.

New Speed Dial - Opera's "Speed Dial" feature now syncs with bookmarks to provide easier access to frequently visited websites from Opera's homescreen.

The new version of Opera can be found for free in Google Play.

Dell is a computer company desperately in search of a new market as the desktop and laptop PCs dwindles. But the Austin-based company is finding that that an elusive target.

Public Cloud? That's So 2011

Yesterday the company announced it was dropping Dell Cloud, its home-grown infrastructure-as-a-service public cloud service. It is also pulling the plug on its planned OpenStack-based public cloud service and online storage service before they even get off the ground.

Dell isn't out the cloud game altogether, mind you - it will be reselling public cloud services through its new Dell Cloud Partner Program. And it's still working on private cloud offerings.

Dell's decision to drop its program after only two years isn't terribly surprising - it was regarded as pricey compared to similar offerings from HP and IBM, and going head to head with similar services from Amazon Web Services and Google without good pricing and a very solid support system is tantamount to suicide these days.

Bring On The Dongles

But Dell is still on the hunt for new revenue. Reports out today indicate that the hardware maker will be releasing a new thumb-drive PC, codenamed Project Ophelia, this July for a reported $100.

PC World has revealed that the device will be based on Android and can be plugged into a TV or monitor via the HDMI port. File storage will be handled via Wyse's PocketCloud.

Dell wants to get this device in the hands of telecomm carriers, who could use Ophelia to deliver streaming TV to customers who don't currently have smart TVs or devices like Roku or Apple TV to pull in online content.

Developers will get their hands on the PC-on-a-stick first, in order to build Android apps and build up a collection of TV-friendly apps. Since there's a lot of Wyse thin-client tech packed into this thing, presumably there will be some capability to have portability between home and work.

This is an interesting concept, save for the fact that there are already similar and cheaper devices on the market now. The concept of a dongle PC is not new, and to date, they haven't really taken off.

The idea also ignores the very real trend away from vertical screen and keyboard/mouse devices to handheld tablets and smartphones. While Ophelia devices would give you portability, you still need a mouse, keyboard and screen to use these things… so the portability is constrained. And if I'm essentially recreating a PC-like portable work setup anyway, why not just use a laptop?

I suspect that's why Dell is emphasizing the telecom angle when it pitches these things. Carriers could offer Ophelia with video and data plans, maybe. But it's hard to imagine consumers buying these things off the shelf when there are other similarly priced set-top devices already on the market and proven to work.

Dell is clearly throwing a lot of things against the wall to see what sticks. Public cloud didn't work, and it's difficult to see Project Ophelia working out, either. Servers, however, aren't doing badly right now. Perhaps Dell should stick to what it knows best.

At age 12, Canzhi Ye went to Camp CAEN at the University of Michigan to learn Java and C# programming. A year later, when his mom got an iPod Touch, some new possibilities opened up for him.

After some Googling, Ye figured out that anyone could develop for iOS. “Hey, look, I can make apps,” he remembers telling his mother.

And so began his app development career. It started off simple, with a flashcards app called A+ Flashcards and the EasyTyping app that makes your keyboard bigger. One morning in 2011, when Ye got up early to preorder the newly released iPad 2, he was met with the devastating news of the Japanese earthquake. He had moved from Japan to the United States at age 3, and he wanted to do something to help. So he donated two weeks’ worth of app proceeds totalling $480.

When small business owner Jim Drought was searching online for a developer, he stumbled across the news of Ye’s donation. That was last fall. Since then, Ye has built an app called Rectangle and listed it on the app store for users who want to order prints of their Facebook or Instagram photos. They can order posters up to 24” by 32” or “pictoblocks” (see below), which are printed and shipped from Drought’s sign shop in San Antonio.

Below, 16-year-old Ye talks about being a young programmer and juggling the life of an entrepreneur and a junior in high school.

Tech Cocktail: How did you learn programming? 

Canzhi Ye: I was able to convince my mom to get me a Mac to do developing. So I just went on Amazon and I found a cool book to get started with. Mostly I used that book and I just used online forums. iPhone Dev SDK and Stack Overflow were just awesome resources for me to use whenever I had problems. So I pretty much just taught myself how to do the programming. I started in the fall of 2009 – I was still 13.

Tech Cocktail: What motivated you to learn to build apps? 

Ye: The fact that I learned a little bit about programming before just gave me a little bit of confidence in the beginning that this would be something I would be able to learn. I just kind of dove into it – I was still in middle school at the time; I wasn’t terribly bogged down with schoolwork. Once I got started with it, I just thought it was something really fun to do, and I was pretty passionate about it, so I didn’t give up at it and I’ve learned a lot since then.

Tech Cocktail: What’s the hardest part about it? 

Ye: In the beginning, I made some apps as an indie developer first before I got started with my most recent project. I’d say the hardest part is encountering some annoying bug that takes forever to fix or sometimes you just can’t find what’s wrong with your program. Situations like that are pretty hard. After you release your app and seeing that you don’t get many downloads is also pretty hard. So the post-release stuff – marketing, talking to people, profiling your app, or getting it out to other people – is pretty hard also.

Tech Cocktail: What’s your favorite part about it? 

Ye: I like the initial burst of an idea and then diving into it and getting a basic framework of what you’re going to build out. It’s pretty exciting to see that you can put your idea into practice.

Tech Cocktail: What do your family and friends think? 

Ye: My family is very supportive of it. They think it’s something really cool for a teenager or high schooler to get into. My friends at school, they talk about it a lot. Sometimes they’ll have an app idea and they’ll be like, “Make this into an app!” Everyone’s all-around supportive about it and when I tell them about my new developments, they’re pretty interested.

Tech Cocktail: Will you keep doing this after high school? 

Ye: I definitely want to keep this as a hobby or even when I go to college. It’s interesting and the mobile market is growing constantly, so I think it’s definitely worth staying in this app development business.

Tech Cocktail: How do you balance school and programming? 

Ye: I’ve got to manage my time really well. I’m a swimmer and I play piano and I do some other school activities, too, so I’m pretty busy. I mostly find time on the weekends to program. When I was working on Rectangle, entire weekends would be devoted to coding.

Tech Cocktail: Do you have any advice for young app developers? 

Ye: One main thing is just stay passionate about what you’re doing. You have to love what you’re doing and you have to let that motivate you.

The post Interview with 16-Year-Old App Developer Canzhi Ye appeared first on Tech Cocktail

As more content becomes available online, the need for a traditional television subscription may not be enough anymore to justify the costs. Instead, if all the content you care about is available online, there’s little reason to keep your TV service going.

If you’re already subscribed to services like Netflix or Hulu Plus, now may be the time to make the switch. You will still need a computer or system that can access all of that content for you — more commonly, it’s called a media streamer or a home theatre PC. While you can build your own HTPC, it might be easier to just buy something like the Roku 3. We purchased a unit to review and give away to a lucky reader, so let’s see whether it lives up to the hype!

About the Roku 3

The Roku 3 is, logically, the successor to the Roku and Roku 2. It is an online media delivery system, which means that it’s a dedicated media center box which you connect to your television as well as the Internet via some form of Internet connection such as Wi-Fi or ethernet. It specializes in retrieving content from multiple online sources, such as Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, and much more.

The unit has increasingly become smaller, but also more powerful as it delivers on consumer demands for high-definition video streaming. The product line has also shrunk down from multiple different models to just one, but this one model should be enough to satisfy the needs of all consumers.

Some competitors to the Roku 3 include the Apple TV at $99, which offers much of the same functionality such as on-demand movies and TV shows, but is more integrated into the Apple ecosystem; and requires one computer to be the dedicated iTunes server in order to watch local video files. Next, the Boxee Box at around $180, offers more or less the same features, but isn’t quite as complete. Boxee is also known to erratically drop support on existing customers and phase out products really quickly. Judging from what’s happening in Boxee’s support forum, the Boxee Box could have very well reached the end of its life.

Packaging

The Roku 3 comes in a relatively small box, but this is also because the Roku 3 isn’t very big. After taking off the top, you’ll see a “Let’s get started” guide, where underneath lies the Roku 3 unit as well as the remote.

If you pull out the cardboard, you’ll find a power supply for the unit as well as batteries for the remote and earphones on the left and right sides of the cardboard. At the very bottom of the box is a product information pamphlet.

About the unit

As I said, the Roku 3 unit is very small. It measures at just 3.5 inches x 3.5 inches by 1 inch, and weighs in at only 5 ounces. The case is made from a hard plastic which should protect it from bumps and scratches. The glossy surface is also nice, especially with the “3” created by a non-glossy border, but it definitely shows off the fingerprints that it collects.

The Roku 3 comes with decent connectivity as it includes a USB port, an HDMI port, and an ethernet port. The USB port allows you to connect additional storage to play content from. Supported formats include MP4, MKV, MP3, AAC, JPG, and PNG; and plays 720p and 1080p HD video. As the Roku 3 only has an HDMI port, it is only compatible with TVs or monitors with an HDMI input. The Roku 3 also doesn’t have a separate audio port, so remember that both audio and video will be transmitted via the HDMI cable.

The Roku 3 has internal storage for saving your added channels and games, although Roku doesn’t state how much internal storage the device has. However, underneath the HDMI port is a microSD card reader which can provide additional storage space for more channels when the internal storage runs out. While the Roku 3 offers a 10/100 ethernet port, it is also dual-band 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi compatible with support for WEP, WPA, and WPA2 encryption.

The power plug is rather small, as the Roku 3 is advertised to use only 3.5 watts while streaming HD video. This number is rather impressive, considering that the Roku 3 packs a processor that is “5 times faster” than that found in the previous generation. That’s some serious muscle power to stream HD video as smoothly as possible.

The Remote

The included remote is interesting to say the least. The first thing you’ll notice is that neither the remote nor the Roku 3 have an IR receiver — instead, they communicate with each other using Wi-Fi Direct. This simply means that the two devices create an ad-hoc wireless network with which they can communicate. Previous generations used either an IR receiver or Bluetooth. The remote also comes with rather minimal buttons, which makes the Roku 3 quite simple (but sometimes tedious) to use. Surprisingly enough though, the remote also comes with motion control which is used for some games that are available on the Roku 3.

One of the biggest advantages to the Wi-Fi Direct method of communication is that the remote is able to receive a lot more data from the main unit. Why in the world would the remote be receiving data from the Roku 3? If you look on the left side of the remote, you’ll see that you can plug in any headphones so that you’re able to move around and enjoy your content without having to disturb others. While the idea of plugging headphones into a remote may be strange at first, I am absolutely enthusiastic about this idea simply because the remote is extremely mobile. You can enjoy your videos quite wherever you’re not alone are in the room.

Setting Up

With hardware out of the way, let’s take a look at the actual experience with the Roku 3. When you plug it in for the first time, you’ll have to go through a setup process in which you choose your language, wireless network if you don’t have an ethernet cable plugged in, and a linking process where you have to link the Roku 3 with your Roku account. If you don’t have an account, you’ll need to make one in order to use your Roku 3. While I don’t have an issue with making an account, I do not like that it forces you to enter your payment information, even if you don’t plan on making any Roku purchases. However, the account creation process will also ask you whether you want to enter a PIN for making a purchase, so you’re still protected from accidentally spending money. With a Roku account, you can also add private channels, manage your subscriptions, check your purchase history, and deactivate your account.

Channels

Once you have everything set up, you can add different “channels”, which are your different content providers. There are channels for every big name in content, from Hulu Plus and Netflix to Pandora, Disney, Fox News Channel. However, the library of channels is huge and includes so much more than just those. You can also find interesting channels such as Dailymotion, cnet, NASA, TED Talks, and even MIT OpenCourseware.

Although most channels are freely available, some require a paid subscription to really use them; and then there are some which require you to pay in order to add the channel to your Roku 3. There are also private channels which you can add via your account online using a code. A good place to start looking for private channels would be StreamFree.TV. There aren’t any credible channel repositories — just the available private channels.

Experience

The general experience across all apps is pleasing. The user interfaces are easy to navigate, and best of all they are pretty predictable after you’ve looked at one or two channels. For example, if you want to watch a TV show or movie on Netflix, it’s really easy provided you already have your Internet connection set up. Just navigate to the Netflix channel and hit OK. Then, after it loads a little more, you can scroll around for your TV show or movie, and then hit OK again. Then just hit Play on the screen, and it should load.

Pandora works similarly, where you navigate to the Pandora channel, choose the station you’d like to listen to, and you’re already done. As everything is channel-based, you won’t find a web browser or file explorer that you can use. The Roku 3 is also supposed to be able to connect to other PCs on the network and stream from them, but I haven’t been able to get it to work because of the network scenario where I live.

Games

Interestingly enough, you can also play a handful of games on the Roku 3 after adding them to your device. One of the most popular games is Angry Birds Space, and I’d have to say that it’s pretty fun to play on. The graphics are very good, and playing with the remote is pretty cool. You can point with the remote to move the on-screen pointer around, and in the case of Angry Birds you can also pull back by moving the remote to the left. I’m not sure how it recognizes the motion, but it works reasonably well. You don’t even have to point it at the Roku unit — it works even when pointing the remote in the complete opposite direction. I still prefer using a smartphone or tablet when playing Angry Birds, however.

Downsides

Besides plenty of available channels and games, there isn’t a whole lot more to the Roku 3. It’s fantastic at what it’s meant to do — streaming online content. However, there are a few downsides to the Roku 3. First, if you haven’t noticed yet, there is no official YouTube channel despite the number of channels that are available for the device. As a college student, I do enjoy any content that is available for free, and YouTube is my go-to source for that. As the Roku 3 doesn’t offer YouTube, that’s a huge turn off in my eyes. After doing a bit of research, I’ve discovered that this is Google’s fault for trying to make a YouTube app exclusive to Google and Apple TV devices, and not Roku’s. I just hope that YouTube comes to the device in the near future, no matter whose fault it really is.

Next, I dislike the fact that I have to make an account for the Roku 3, but I see the reasons why I would want to do so. However, I definitely didn’t like that I was forced to enter in my payment information — maybe I’m asking a bit too much in that area. Finally, I think that the power cable is too short at just 5 feet, as I wasn’t able to place the Roku 3 exactly where I would have preferred it to be.

Conclusion

Overall, this is a fantastic streaming solution that makes the switch to online TV content a whole lot easier. Despite some of my gripes, the device has barely any downsides, although I’m still highly disappointed about the lack of an official YouTube channel. As most of my viewed content comes from YouTube, it makes the Roku 3 a lot less useful for me.

Also, if you’re invested in the Apple ecosystem, you may have a better time getting an Apple TV instead. While it doesn’t have quite as many channels as the Roku 3, it does connect to most major content providers (including YouTube) as well as your iCloud purchases and content.

How do I win a Roku 3?

We have a new giveaway procedure in place, which will hopefully make participating much easier. You may enter using your Facebook credentials (which will require you to sign into Facebook) or by submitting your name and email address. You’ll receive one entry simply by doing so.

After that, you’ll also be offered various methods to earn additional entries. They range from sharing a link to this giveaway on social networks; to commenting or visiting a specific page. The more you participate, the higher your chances of winning!

This giveaway begins now and ends Friday, May 31st. The winner will be selected at random and informed via email.

The post Roku 3 Review and Giveaway appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Guest author John Fearon is CEO of Dropmyemail.com, which backs up emails in the cloud and Dropmysite.com, a cloud-based backup company.

At any startup, the first hurdle is the lack of resources - lack of funds, lack of manpower, lack of time. Outsourcing – or relocating - the work can be a great to overcome those obstacles while controlling costs, increasing efficiency and even making workers happier

But it’s not a simple, one-size-fits-all process. In building my company - Dropmysite / Dropmyemail – I found that managing outsourcing was an ever-evolving combination of local and remote capabilities that stays flexible enough to meet changing conditions.

(See also Are Crowdsourcing And Outsourcing No-Nos For Startups?)

Learning The Hard Way: My Outsourcing Experiences

When we launched two years ago, for example, the whole development team was based in India. As a one-man founder bootstrapping the business, this allowed me to hire a team for much less money.

Plus, with India being 2.5 hours behind my Singapore headquarters, my productive workday was effectively extended. In the morning, I conducted business deals and meetings. Then, in the evening - as the team returned from their lunch - I would concentrate on working with them in real time over Skype on building our product.

After six months, I was able to sign up a local CTO to help build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that enabled me to secure funding. With some cash in hand, I started building a local team of developers to be able to improve the product more quickly.

At that point, I had two teams of technical workers in different locations – which started to cause problem. We had constant confusion, communication issues and lack of control. At this stage of the business we needed top talent, no low cost workers, so I ended the contract with the Indian team to focus on the local team.

So far so good, but soon my lead technologist decided to go back to Argentina for family reasons. He had consistently delivered good work so we decided to try a long-distance relationship. He hired a few ace developers for the Argentinean team and everything seemed like smooth sailing.

Eventually, though, the 12-hour time difference started to take a toll. Meetings were impossible to schedule and both teams were exhausted. Work delays proliferated, as even the assignments were received 12 hours later. We closed the Argentinian office, bringing one developers to Singapore.

(See also The Pros And Cons Of IT Outsourcing: Globally, Nationally And Locally.)

6 Outsourcing Lessons Learned

My experience with outsources taught me a variety of valuable lessons:

1. Keep Teams Together In One Place. Specific functions should be grouped in the same office and time zone to reduce miscommunications or time lags performing urgent work done. It also makes brainstorming sessions easier to coordinate to create better products.

2. Not All Functions Need To Be Together. That said, it may not be necessary for different function teams to be together. Front office teams (sales and marketing, for example) should be in their home market while the back office (IT and operations) can be anywhere.

3. Give Each Team A Focused Goal. Beyond stating the obvious, all teams need clear directions and key performance indicators (KPIs). Just as important, local and remote teams work better when staffed with self-starters who need less direct supervision.

4. Contract Remote Teams On A Per Project Basis. This frees them to do their work without having to rely on other teams to proceed. The offshore work should be completed parallel to that done onshore. If the remote team isn’t pulling their weight, this approach contains the impact, reducing contamination of other teams and projects. Finally, per-project deals make it easier to replace them if necessary.

5. Daily Communication/Alignment Is Critical. There needs to be constant two-way communication between teams. Remote technology development teams must make frequent reports back to the home base. The lead tech officer has to ensure that their work remains aligned to the overall company direction. Communication between business functions is also essential. Tech teams having to speak to each other, and also keep the salespeople in the loop so clients and partners stay informed.

5. Outsourcing Strategies Must Continually Evolve. Currently, Dropmysite / Dropmyemail keeps core functions and technical development in Singapore, but we have business development staff in India, Japan, and the U.S. And we have outsourced side projects to other locales, including Vietnam. The key is to find and execute the right strategy at the right time.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

$1.1 billion. That's how much your company is worth if it's long on users and short on paying customers. Just ask Tumblr. Or Instagram. Each yanked down billion-dollar acquisitions despite making virtually no revenue. 

Is this a big deal?

Acquihires And Billion-Dollar Payouts

Some seem to think so. At least, for acquihires, the kissing cousin to the revenue-free-massive acquisition. For example, Pando Daily's Sarah Lacy slams the acquihire, arguing that

Lazy profit-seekers love these periods in the Valley. Why not? They can make money without having to actually build a company. It’s like a get-out-of-actual-entrepreneurship-free card.

Venture capitalist Mark Suster goes one step further, holding that acquihires actually have a corrosive effect on the tech industry:

You have been at Google, Salesforce.com, Yahoo! for years. You have worked faithfully. Evenings. Weekends. Year in, year out. You have shipped to hard deadlines. You’ve done the death-march projects. In the trenches. You got the t-shirt. And maybe got called out for valor at a big company gathering. They gave you an extra 2 days of vacation for your hard work.

And that [jerk] sitting in the desk next to you who joined only last week now has $1 million because he built some fancy newsreader that got a lot of press but is going to be shut down anyways.

What kind of message does that send to the party faithful who slave away loyally to hit targets for BigCo? ...

It says if you want to make “real” money  - quit.

Fair enough. I've been involved in three such acquihires, and I see their point. Acquihires send a signal that failure is OK and, indeed, profitable.

But the same holds true for the billion-dollar exits on chimerical revenues. They represent entrepreneurs cashing in on popularity contests without actually having done the hard work of monetizing that popularity. That is, they represent entrepreneurs making big-money success on little-revenue failure. 

The Downside To Making Money

And why shouldn't they? It turns out that it's very difficult to remain popular while charging for one's service. LinkedIn has done it by charging recruiters. Google has done it by aligning relevant ads next to search results. But monetizing people's inane pictures of their meals? Instagram didn't even bother.

Pinterest is starting to roll out paid services. Foursquare, too, has been straining to make more money lately. Ironically, these noble efforts to actually sustain the companies on real revenue may make them far less valuable.

For one thing, monetization efforts can fail. Just look at Groupon's gyrations as it has sought to turn a massive sales force into a profit-generating machine. It hasn't been pretty, and it can turn off users who don't want to be sold.

But more pertinently, the second a business starts to make significant revenue, it will start to be valued on real-world metrics like "profit" and "operating margin" and "sales," not breathless potential based on "users" and "page views" and "social engagement." It turns out that the multiples on the former are far lower than they are on the latter.

The Entrepreneur's Dilemma

What to do? Entrepreneurs can't really set out to build a revenue-free company that VCs will sustain indefinitely. So most are probably right to initially focus on adoption. Assuming they can get traction, it pays to continue to focus on adoption, because it's harder to turn free-riding users into paying customers (or find businesses to pay for access to those users). So long as the venture money is flowing, why would an entrepreneur ever choose to fixate on the dismal science of making money? 

For me, I think if you're not making profitable money then your future - and that of your customers' - is always up for grabs. Whatever promises the purchasing company makes, they are the buyer, and you are the seller. As Dave Winer points out, this inevitably means they're in control. Not you.  

Maybe that doesn't matter. But it does mean we may be building disposable companies with little lasting impact. That doesn't seem like a good thing.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock. 

Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. Most of the listed websites are FREE or come with a decent free account option. If you want to have similar cool website round-ups delivered to your daily email, subscribe here.

Add Your Website Here!

Converseen – Converting a massive amount of pictures takes a lot of time if done manually. It usually requires you to know keyboard shortcuts, browsing through the file explorer, and fiddling with the image tool to get the pictures right. But during the process, it tends to slow you down especially if you are working with thousands of files. Read more: Converseen: Batch Rename & Resize of Images [Windows]

		Dropify – Do you have an interesting paper on modern trends that you want to share with your friends? Or perhaps there is a cool song that you want everybody to check out? One way to go about this is to upload the file to an online file host, but here to offer you a new and fun way to share any type of file on Facebook is a web service called Dropify. Read more: Dropify: Upload & Share Files With Friends On Your Social Network
		Slingpic – Allow visitors to your website to quickly share your pictures on social networks. Slingpic is a WordPress plugin that adds a share button to every picture on your site – but don’t worry, it only shows up when the user’s mouse hovers over the picture (so there’s no extra clutter). Users can click a social media icon to share the image on any number of social networks. Read more: Slingpic: Adds Share Buttons To Your WordPress Pictures
		Clipular – is a Chrome extension designed for taking and saving screenshots of in-browser images and websites. These screenshots can be saved for archival use and also shared with friends or colleagues. The app is also perfect for researching purposes. Instead of bookmarking articles and cluttering Chrome’s folders (or bookmark bar), you can simply save only important information on a single page. Read more: Clipular: Save & Share Searchable Screenshots On The Web
		Fhotoroom – Many once saw webdesign as a challenge to create the most ambitious, busy and technically impressive websites they could. These days the trend has been reversed, and simplicity is king over complexity. But much of the time you’ll need knowledge of HTML, CSS and a little bit of JavaScript. Enthuse.me takes the pain out of creating such a website. Read more: Enthuse.me: Create A Single-Page Site With All Your Personas & Credentials

These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last couple of days. If you want us to send you daily round-ups of all cool websites we come across, leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed.

The post Cool Websites and Tools [May 20th 2013] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Think about all of the software you’ve got installed on your computer. Almost all of us have some alternative of Google Chrome, Spotify, Evernote, OpenOffice, IrfanView, and more. Software of these types are pretty essential to any PC user. It’s one of the first things that you toss on your brand new desktop or laptop when you take it out of the box and set it up.

Windows 8 has managed to do a pretty decent job of putting all of your favorite and most-used applications right in your face with their rendition of the startup screen. Not all of us fancy it though. I personally skip straight the desktop. With all of these commonly-used applications so separated, daily tasks can seem like a hassle. Ubiquitous Player makes an attempt at alleviating that and serving as your Swiss Army Knife of application goodies.

Download Ubiquitous Player

Ubiquitous Player is a completely portable application that runs on any version of Windows from XP onward. It’s 100% free and even works on tablet or touchscreen devices. This application aims to serve every purpose of your daily PC routine. It’s packed with a media player, image viewer, file manager, text editor, browser, bookmark manager, notes keeper, calculator, color picker, screenshot tool, clipboard monitor, and even more.

Ubiquitous Player’s interface is very sleek and attractive. Let’s pick apart some of its many uses.

Music Player

The music player offers pretty much everything the average user needs to enjoy their music collection. You can organize a playlist and view album art (in the top-right corner) within Ubiquitous Player.

You’re able to play an entire folder, play random tracks, set a track to just play once, and skip to the next album in your folder to play it in its entirety. Ubiquitous Player includes all basic media keys to start, stop, skip, go back, and change the volume of its player. Ubiquitous Player’s music player isn’t entirely impressive, yet it’s everything you should need.

Notes

Ubiquitous Player’s take on notes is very bare and straightforward. As you can see in some of the examples above, note-taking is composed of “folders” (which simply act as a header describing a list of notes) and then line-by-line notes beneath them.

Obviously this doesn’t compare to an Evernote or CintaNotes, but it’s very quick, good for jotting down simple things, and even supports searching your notes.

Image Viewer

The image viewer offers some interesting features. Just using your left-click button, you’re able to navigate through to the next image in a folder. With each individual image, you have options to view it at its actual size, cut the image, rotate it, change the backdrop to black or white, or resave the image as either PNG, JPG, BMP, or JPEG. All images show the dimensions, size, and date modified.

When you’re hunting through a cluttered folder, Ubiquitous Player’s image viewer is a great way to look at images quickly and easily.

Text Editor

Ubiquitous Player’s text editor is a very straightforward alternative to Notepad. You’re able to format your text in a few ways, such as changing the font face, size, and color. You’re able to immediately access a special characters map from within the interface. You can also view your text in HTML format using the built-in browser.

The settings allow you to activate a touchscreen mode, change the interface scaling, and even set hotkeys related to screen capturing (all of which I used to take the screenshots in this post).

Conclusion

Ubiquitous Player isn’t the type of application to exceed your expectations. It definitely isn’t going to be a replacement for any of the dedicated applications that exist as alternatives for some of its built-in features, but it does well for bringing so many elements together in a single interface. It’s the kind of application that could work best on low-resource machines (like a netbook).

What do you think of Ubiquitous Player and the features it provides? What can Ubiquitous Player do better? I think it’s a really solid application that deserves some attention, and I hope you give it a try if it interests you. Let me know what you think about Ubiquitous Player in the comments section below!

The post Ubiquitous Player Is An Everything-In-One Portable Suite appeared first on MakeUseOf.

I often joke about being the only IT guy with a 36-inch pipe wrench in his toolbox. It’s funny, but it’s also probably true. But I do carry one IT tool in my kit that is just as powerful and hefty as that pipe wrench – it’s the Windows System Control Center on my Tools USB flash drive. Now, we had an article recently on the desktop installed version of WSCC, which mentioned its USB-portable identical twin brother. Yet, I think if you’re going to download one version or the other of this wonder tool, then make it the USB-portable one. It’s like having a 3 foot pipe wrench in your back pocket! Only considerably more comfortable.

Now, the Windows System Control Center itself isn’t really that amazing, it’s just an interface that gives you access to two different suites of tools, and categorizes those tools according to their functions. But when you realize what two suites we’re talking about, you start to realize just what a dynamite combination this is. Think of this as the IT world’s version of “You got chocolate in my peanut butter.” That’s right, when they come together they are worth more than the sum of the parts. We’re talking about SysInternals and NirSoft.

Installing WSCC

Once you have WSCC downloaded, simply unzip the package. Inside, you’ll find an executable file called wscc.exe with an icon that looks like a lifesaver. A very apt icon indeed. To install wscc.exe on your USB thumb drive, simply copy the file and paste it onto your thumb drive. That’s it. Takes about 2 seconds. If you go ahead and do it now before you run into any Windows’ issues, you’ll be glad you did!

Running WSCC

On the first run, WSCC will prompt you to download all the latest versions of all the utilities. You may as well do that to be up-to-date. Because most of these utilities are very lightweight, well under 500KB for most of them, the process is quite quick.

Unfortunately, if you have good antivirus software, the process can take a bit longer. Some of the NirSoft utilities will get flagged and quarantined because they do gain access to intimate parts of the operating system. These are false positives, rest assured.

Setting WSCC Options

There are four tabs with options in WSCC: General, Software, Network, and Console. I’ve chosen some different options for my setup, and I’ve highlighted those in yellow below. By default, these options are not checked. It’s up to you if you want to select them or not, I can’t say that they make a great difference, it’s just a matter of preference.

General: I’ve chosen to have Windows System Control Center Minimize to Tray, when not in use. I just prefer it to be there rather than in the task bar. I’ve also chosen to Show Hidden Items, just because I don’t like hidden things. I like to know ALL of my options.

Software: I’ve chosen to utilize Windows Services as well. Again, just because I like to know all of my options.

Network: Under Update Manager, I’ve also chosen to Include new software when checking for updates. Again, it’s about having options. The Use the 64-bit version if possible option seems like another nice-to-have since most 64-bit machines will also run the 32-bit versions.

Console: I see no sense in changing things here, it’s just window dressing.

What Can You Do?

More like, what CAN’T you do?! The utilities are organized in a directory fashion based upon their functionality. The major categories of tools are:

• File and Disk – For anything related to file recovery, file access, disk usage, disk or file defrag, etc.
• Network – Anything related to network functions such as Active Directory viewing, remotely opened file viewer, whois, network adapter tools, etc.
• Process -  Covers the gamut of viewing open DLLs, what programs are set to autorun at startup, file process dependencies, etc.
• Security -  Registry keys, password utilities, scan for root-kits, etc.
• System Information – Active logons, system clock, process monitor, system info, etc.
• Console – Includes a command line console, available by clicking on the New Console button in the bottom-left corner. Perfect for running command line utilities from your USB drive.

SysInternals

Mark Russinovich was an independent general computer god who got tired of not having the tools he needed to solve his Windows problems. So like any god, he created them. Like any other god, he also created a trick that was funny to some and very distressing to others, the iconic BSOD Screen Saver. Somehow it was the trick that got him the attention he richly deserved for his work on the Windows tools. At least, that’s how I came to know of him.

When people started realizing how powerful and simple to use Mark’s tools were, word spread to the progenitors of Windows and there was a deal struck. Now SysInternals Suite is an official, and free set of tools for computer techs to use. There are 70 tools in the SysInternals suite, of which I only make regular use of about 3. To date, I have not used all the tools, but it is a comfort to know that they are there.

Let me show you how powerful a tool this can be for someone to have. Let’s say you’re at a friend’s house and they just can’t get their computer to boot very quickly. You’ve got your USB flash drive with you. Plug it in, start up WSSC, go to SysInternals, click on Process, then click on Autoruns…well, watch the video.

Of course, there are several other very powerful and useful tools in SysInternals. Really, we’ve written so many articles on the different components of SysInternal Suite, that I can’t even point you to one article. Please, do the search on SysInternals on our site, you’ll find so much. Now let’s take a little look at NirSoft as well.

NirSoft

NirSoft is another Windows god in the same sense as Mark Russinovich. It is the brainchild of Nir Sofer, a software developer with an excellent knack for cryptography and reverse engineering. In his spare time, he develops these applications that he would find useful, posts them on his website and we all get to benefit. That’s a sort of altruism that I don’t completely understand, but am very grateful for.

Much like Mark Russinovich’s tools, NirSoft’s tools are already portable in the sense that they don’t have to write to the Windows registry in order to be able to use them. Which makes perfect sense. If you’re having Windows issues, you need to be able to fix them from outside of Windows.

Where NirSoft goes that SysInternals doesn’t go, is into things like Password Recovery and Web Browser information. Recently we’ve been talking about technology after you’ve passed on, on MakeUseOf.com. Morbid as it is, it is a reality for all of us. So perhaps your friend has passed on and his widow needs to access somethings on the Internet, but he didn’t leave any information. Or, maybe he told you to delete stuff, so his widow wouldn’t see it! Either way, NirSoft has a strong suite of Password Recovery tools. With the tools available, you can get his passwords from Chrome, Internet Explorer, or Firefox. You can also get them from his Outlook or even online mail service. You can recover a stored WEP key for your wireless configuration as well. Pretty powerful, possibly even scary.

The password recovery tools only touch the tip of the dozens of NirSoft utilities available through the WSCC interface. How handy to have these tools in your pocket! If your looking for more on NirSoft utilities, check out Tina Sieber’s article on another USB-based NirSoft utility launcher.

The Take Away

If you are a budding computer tech, you need this tool on your emergency USB flash drive. It’s that simple. Yes, there are other tools that you need, but this is certainly an excellent start to your portable toolbox. The price is right – free – and the size is right too – 3 MB, so why wouldn’t you? If you like the software, please donate to the folks that helped make it possible.

I hope you enjoyed our journey through this handy tool. Have you ever used it before? If so, I’d like to hear how and what the outcome was. Do you know of other excellent portable tools like this that we should know about? Plug them in the comments and we’ll have a look at them. We are IT, and we’re here to help.

The post Get a Head Start On Your USB Toolkit With Windows System Control Center appeared first on MakeUseOf.

World travel is an exciting and adventurous activity, but one thing that hinders many from taking part is the language barrier. Everyone has their reasons for not learning another language, and furthermore, it’s just not practical to try to learn the language of the country that they are traveling to. Even linguists that speak both French and English probably aren’t going to spend time learning Italian, right?

Fortunately, there are several iPhone foreign language apps that will help you translate simple phrases while you are exploring the globe. All of them are useful, but bear in mind that they are designed to help you communicate, not to help you learn the language.

Here are five apps that will help you on your journeys.

Google Translate (Free)

Full Offline Usage: No Translates Simple Phrases: Yes Audio Translation: Yes Voice Activation: Yes Number of Languages: 64

Google Translate is great for those of you who need simple phrases while you are traveling out and about. Simple selections like “Where’s the bathroom?”, “Where can I get a cheap meal?”, and “Where’s the best place to hide a body without the authorities finding out?” are probably all you would want to say.

While the app does not allow for full offline usage, it does let you to save translations so you can use them later. Furthermore, the app will show translations on the screen.

Check out our full iOS review of Google Translate.

Jibbigo ($4.99)

Full Offline Usage: Yes Translates Simple Phrases: Yes Audio Translation: Yes Voice Activation: Yes Number of Languages: 20+

Jibbigo is a translation app that was fully designed for travelers. While it does not offer as many languages as Google Translate, it works completely offline. This way you don’t have to worry about not having Internet access or paying for roaming charges while you are in the middle of a foreign land.

Jibbigo allows users to speak their chosen phrase into the app, and it will automatically translate it using audio and on-screen text. The app is also “bi-directional”, so you can theoretically have full conversations with anyone you run across.

Phrasebook (Free, $2.99 per extra language)

Full Offline Usage: No Translates Simple Phrases: Yes Audio Translation: Yes Voice Activation: No Number of Languages: 30+

Maybe you aren’t so interested in typing out phrases in one language and having them translated into another. Fortunately for you, there’s Phrasebook. The app stores a series of illustrated, audio, and text translations to help you get through your travels wherever you are.

With over 2,200 phrases per language to choose from, Phrasebook is like your personal translator! While the app itself is free, Japanese and English are the only languages that come with it. $2.99 isn’t too much of an investment when you are overseas for any additional languages you may require.

Here’s our directory review of Phrasebook for iOS.

Universal Translator ($2.99)

Full Offline Usage: No Translates Simple Phrases: Yes Audio Translation: Yes Voice Activation: Yes Number of Languages: 39

Universal Translator is a bit of an odd bird when it comes to the world of on-the-go translation. It’s weird simply because it’s designed around chatting, and in fact, it uses Google Talk. By signing in with your Google Account, Universal Translator will allow you to chat with someone and have a fluid conversation as it automatically translates both incoming and outgoing messages. Is it practical? Well, if you’re in a sit-down situation, it might be, but it’s probably not a good idea if you are roaming about.

SayHi Translate ($0.99)

Full Offline Usage: No Translates Simple Phrases: Yes Audio Translation: Yes Voice Activation: Yes Number of Languages: 39

SayHi Translate is fun little app that is functionally identical to almost all of the other apps that we’ve suggested. It uses vocal translation, and while its translation voice is a bit robotic, most users report that the translations are typically accurate. However, what really draws users in to SayHi Translate is its beautiful user interface. It’s exciting, bright, and quite pleasing to look at!

Conclusion

All of these iPhone foreign language app are great for faking your way through the native tongue while abroad. However, as far as offline translators go, I would definitely recommend Jibbigo. Google Translate comes at a close second since it’s free, but there’s the whole issue of needing a connection.

Also, make sure you aren’t getting sucked into roaming fees with the ones that require an Internet connection (use Wi-Fi wherever you can), and do your best to stay safe while in the middle of strange lands. Remember that not everyone can be Indiana Jones.

What other translation apps do you like to use? Are the apps here suitable for travelling? Have you used any of these apps before?

Image Credit: jbachman01

The post 5 iPhone Apps That Will Help You Communicate In A Foreign Language [iOS] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Sometimes you just want to fix up a picture without all of the baggage and learning curves that come with powerhouse image editors like Photoshop and GIMP. Obviously, a program as primitive as Paint won’t do, and even middle-of-the-road programs like Paint.NET sometimes won’t cut it. Thankfully, Ashampoo’s Photo Commander 11 steps in to fill the gap.

I’ll be honest: I’m really not one to do a lot of photo editing. I rarely do anything related to photos, whether it’s taking them, touching them up, or even looking at them. But even for someone like me, Photo Commander 11 was a breeze to operate. For those of you who actually like photo editing, this program will serve you well.

Photo Commander 11 is available for USD $49.99 on Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8. But for you, we’ve got a great offer that you just won’t be able to pass up: we’re giving away 10 copies of Photo Commander 11 worth a total of $500 for free! Keep reading to see how you can take advantage of this awesome offer.

Photo Commander 11 Review

When you first start up the program, you’ll be met with a quick setup wizard. This wizard allows you to choose file associations, languages, interface layouts, and a few other simple settings that’ll help you get started. It’s not the most helpful introduction, but it’s something.

Photo Commander 11 opens up to a clean workstation layout with pleasant aesthetics. I chose the photo editing layout as opposed to the photo manager layout (I don’t have many photos to manage) or the film strip layout (didn’t really appeal to me). I admit that I felt overwhelmed at first, but it all started to make sense after a few minutes of exploration.

The main aspect you really need to become familiar with is the top bar – not the usual menu options that you’d see in any other program, but the special blue navigation bar that holds all of the actions and options that you can play around with. It’s similar to Microsoft’s ribbon interface except not so wieldy.

• Quick Fix: This section of the bar is where you’ll find a bunch of one-click photo fixers like cropping, contrast & brightness, color correction, red eye removal, tilt shifting, visual effects, and more.
• Objects: This section of the bar lets you edit the photo by drawing some boxes and circles if you please, or maybe some speech bubbles or image stamps if that’s what you prefer. It’s not as feature-rich as Photoshop by any means.
• Create: Despite the name, this section of the bar is less about creating photos and more about organizing them. There are buttons to create slideshows, albums, collages, panoramas, and other containers along those lines.
• Organize: Again, despite the name, this section is less about organization and more about utility. Rename a bunch of photos at once. Find duplicate images on your hard drive. Burn images to a CD or DVD. Rotate and optimize JPG files. Lots of miscellaneous actions that don’t fit under the other sections.

Visual effects are one of the most elementary operations you can perform on a photo, but they’re just so awesome and Photo Commander makes them so easy. It really is a one-click action and you can stack multiple effects on a single photo in case you really want to touch up an otherwise subpar picture.

When you want to create a photo container – like an album, a slideshow, a collage, etc. – Photo Commander again makes it easy thanks to the various wizards that come as part of the program. No matter what you want to do, all you have to do is fill out a few fields and check (or uncheck) a few checkboxes, and voila! You’re done.

Photo Commander 11 lets you take command of your photos without requiring you to have any prior photo manipulation experience. Here are some more great features that you’ll find here:

• Automatic photo backups as you work and easy restore.
• MiniMap live preview of the photo you’re editing.
• Fullscreen editing mode to cut away all other distractions.
• Comparison mode where you can compare before and after image modifications.
• Image conversion between multiple supported formats.
• Share your photos through email, Facebook, Picasa, or even YouTube.

Again, we’re giving away 11 free copies to all of our loyal and beloved MakeUseOf fans and readers. As a reminder, Photo Commander 11 only runs on Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8.

How can I win a copy of Photo Commander 11?

We have a new giveaway procedure in place, which will hopefully make participating much easier. You may enter using your Facebook credentials (which will require you to sign into Facebook) or by submitting your name and email address. You’ll receive one entry simply by doing so.

After that, you’ll also be offered various methods to earn additional entries. They range from sharing a link to this giveaway on social networks; to commenting or visiting a specific page. The more you participate, the higher your chances of winning!

This giveaway begins now and ends Friday, May 24th. The winners will be selected at random and informed via email.

The post Touch Up Your Photos With A Single Click Using Photo Commander 11 [Giveaway] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Would you believe that many computers and smartphones can run cooler and consume less power? A trick exists, called undervolting, which can increase your CPU’s efficiency with few drawbacks. If performed right, devices generally produce less heat while exhibiting improved battery performance.

The process can require a great deal of patience and confidence as the potential for disaster exists. Only the stouthearted should even make an attempt. For those of you looking for quicker solutions to reduce battery drain, check out Tim’s excellent article on mainstream methods of cooling your computer down.

This article introduces undervolting to the uninitiated, focusing on explanation, methods of implementation, the available compatible hardware and what software exists. For a more detailed guide on how-to undervolt, check out this instructional guide.

Undervolting Explained

After an intense session of Call of Duty or Modern Warfare 3, you may notice your computer or graphics processor getting unusually hot. That’s because a simple relationship exists between the the speed at which a device runs and its temperature. When you use your computer to perform CPU intensive tasks, it will run at a higher frequency, and thus produce greater heat, than it would at idle.

There’s a formula that electrical engineers use to explain this relationship. Unfortunately, I wasn’t smart enough to be an engineer so my understanding is weak, but here goes: P = V^2/R, where power is equal to voltage squared, divided by resistance.

As you can see from the equation, lowering voltage has a tremendous effect on power. But the question remains: How could it be possible for us to lower voltage while maintaining performance? Keep in mind three factors:

• Not all CPUs are the same: Because of the ridiculously complex manufacturing required in fabricating a processor, no two CPUs are exactly the same. Rather than responding identically to voltages, CPUs exhibit a range of tolerances. Consequently, the companies that make processors established a baseline voltage that most CPUs can use without issue. Unfortunately, this voltage is oftentimes higher than required and produces a great deal of waste heat as a byproduct. Because of this, the majority of CPUs can actually use a lower voltage a various frequencies.
• A CPU’s speed progression isn’t linear: A computer’s speed varies from its top-rated clock cycle, typically measured in gigahertz, to its lowest possible speed. The progression between its fastest and slowest speed does not move in a linear fashion, but in a stepped pattern. I’ve seen differing terminologies for these “steps” on differing CPU architectures. For the PC (x86), I’ve seen it referred to as P-states. ARM does not appear to have a similar naming convention.
• You can decrease a CPU’s voltage: CPUs exhibit a range of voltages tolerances across frequencies. For example, using special software you might lower the voltage (sometimes referred to as a “VID“) at different frequencies.  If too low, it will cause crashes and blue screens, so caution is advised.

Three Steps To Undervolt a Device

• Backup Your Information: In case something goes catastrophically wrong you may get permanently boot-looped. Therefore it’s crucial to have your information backed up.
• Gradual Voltage Changes: Whenever you lower your voltages, there’s always the possibility that it will cause a reboot. Some handheld devices enter what’s known as the “sleep of death“, which means the phone requires a hard reset. If you saved your voltages this can result in an unbootable condition, since it loads up unstable voltages. Remember to gradually move the voltages down (and never above the default value!) and then rigorously stress test at each step. However, it’s important to note that the multipliers associated with faster processor speeds undervolt more efficiently than those at lower speeds, since the highest speeds produce the most amount of heat. On mobile devices, undervolting makes the biggest difference in both energy consumption and heat production.
• Stress Testing: After moving your voltages down one multiplier, you will want to stress test rigorously. Stress testing software for both Android and PC exists, which make this process much easier. It simply runs your CPU at the fastest possible speed, or at a range of frequencies. Simply set your undervolt value and then fire up your stress testing software.

For Desktops & Laptops

Some desktops and laptops can alter their voltages through their BIOS. Different motherboard manufacturers, unfortunately, use differing terminologies: Some use the term “voltage offset“, which reduces voltages uniformly across all steps. Other boards only reduce voltages at the highest CPU frequencies – you should Google your motherboard’s make plus the search term “undervolt” or “voltage offset“.

For example, my undervolt settings from my EFI (it’s basically a BIOS):

Intel CPUs: Unfortunately, Intel chipsets, Sandy Bridge and later models, do not benefit in any substantial way from lowering voltage. While my own experiences show some impact on temperature, the experts believe otherwise. The most common method of undervolting older Intel CPUs is ThrottleStop for the Windows OS.

Throttlestop lowers voltages across a range of CPU frequencies – simply check the “Set Multiplier” box then reduce the “VID” number to drop voltages.

AMD CPUs : particularly its Brazos, Llano and Trinity lines, can undervolt with great effect. One of the best examples is the undervolting software available for the Brazos series of CPU/APU. The software used to manipulate voltage values is known as BrazosTweaker. There’s also FusionTweaker. Users report up to 30% reductions in temperatures and solid increases in battery life.

For AMD chipsets, other voltage manipulation methods exist, such as PSCheck and AMD Overdrive. However, although PSCheck is the best program, it’s also the hardest to get hold of. I ended up biting the bullet and installed a zip from a complete stranger’s Dropbox—that’s always a terrible idea and you should never do that, unless you’re me. In which case you make regularly poor decisions and installing strange files from sketchy sources is the least of your worries.

Stress-Testing: To stress-test your device, simply lower your voltage by a single step and then fire up the stress testing software. In my experience anywhere from 5-10 minutes of testing is sufficient. If the computer crashes or freezes, move the voltage back up at least one step before moving onto the next multiplier (sometimes referred to as a P-State, pictured below). Continue repeating the process at each stepping point, lowering the voltage until instability occurs. Notice that as frequencies increases, so too does voltage.

The best software for stress-testing is Prime95. Prime95 runs complex mathematical formulas on your computer, which causes the the CPU to run super hot. If you’ve set the voltage too low, your computer will crash and you’ll know the absolute lowest limit of your processor’s voltage tolerance. Approximately 5-10 minutes of stress testing should weed out incorrect voltages.

From the Prime95 “Run a Torture Test“, make sure to select “Small FFTs“.

We’ve discussed undervolting on MakeUseOf before for laptops. Also, read about Tina’s breakdown of some mainstream solutions for getting your heat under control.

Tablets, Smartphones & Android Powered Devices

Before attempting to undervolt your device, you must have root access (link goes to SuperOneClick) and you should have installed a custom ROM supporting undervolting. While, technically, you only need a custom kernel that supports UV, most custom ROMs include a custom kernel.

Most cell phones with a custom kernel and the right software can undervolt – however, doing so requires special firmware, or software that exists at a level higher than the operating system. Firmware is stored on solid state memory in an area normally inaccessible to the end-user. However, if you have the right firmware, some software can modulate the voltage fed to the CPU.

My favorite software for undervolting is IncrediControl. Just run the app and select the “SVS” tab from the top menu bar. From there, you must use extreme caution. Proceed to lower voltages one step at a time. I recommend only lowering the voltages on the two or three highest frequencies; as indicated by the power equation, reducing voltages at higher frequencies has a greater impact on overall heat production.

Stress-Testing: For stress-testing, to my knowledge there’s only one app worth using: StabilityTest. Simply choose either “Classic Stability Test” or “Scaling Stability Test“. If you only intend on undervolting your highest CPU frequency, the classic test should suffice. However, if you plan on undervolting a range of values, go for the scaling test.

Conclusion

Cooling down your devices and getting better battery life takes only three steps: First, backup your device. Second, make gradual voltage adjustments. Third, stress test each time you make a voltage adjustment. For Android devices, this requires that you have root access and have installed a custom ROM. For computers, you must have a newer AMD chipset, such as Llano, Brazos or Trinity. On Intel system, you must have Core2Duo or thereabouts.

Remember to never raise your voltages above the default value. Raising your voltages will likely destroy your computer.

Does anyone else love undervolting? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credits: Lightning via MorgueFile.com; Motherboard via MorgueFile.com

The post How Undervolting Decreases Heat & Increases Battery Life appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Are you big fans of Tumblr? Here at MakeUseOf, we certainly are. The blogging platform brings together the idea of blogging together with social networking and has become home to some of the most creative, entertaining, humorous and thoughtful posts we’ve ever come across. With an easy-to-use backend that lends itself to both creating new content and sharing content that you like, it is home to some of the most viral content on the Web.

The sheer amount of content on Tumblr makes it a joy to browse (as well as easy to lose hours of your day in the blink of an eye), though sometimes you really do have to filter through a lot of repetitive content to get to the good stuff. For that reason, we’ve put together lists of recommended Tumblr blogs that we think you should be following. We’ve already introduced you to 8 Tumblr blogs every writer and book lover should follow, 7 news and political blogs you should follow, 10 humorous Tumblr blogs, 6 Tumblr blogs for history buffs, and this week we’re taking a stab at all things Game of Thrones on Tumblr.

GOT Mashups

There are several hilarious Game of Thrones (GOT) mashups that we’ve come across. For reasons that we can’t understand, but won’t question, some creative individuals out there have asked themselves the questions – what would happen if Game of Thrones met 30 Rock? Or what if Game of Thrones met Arrested Development. Best of all, what would happen if Game of Thrones met Justin Bieber? The answers are three hilarious mashup Tumblr blogs that bring everything that we love about the HBO TV show, together with mainstream pop, awkward comedy and more.

GOT in the Real World

While the Tumblr blogs above ask the question what would happen if Game of Thrones met other imaginary characters and celebs, the following Tumblr blogs ask a slightly different question – what would happen if GOT collided with the real world of fashion? The result is some pretty entertaining blogs, one of which is entirely dedicated to Daenerys Targaryen’s fashion choices in the modern world. What Would Khaleesi Wear is a genius blog which finds modern-day outfits that look like something you’d see on Daenerys. There’s even a store on the blog where you can buy GOT-inspired paraphernalia, jewelry, t-shirts and more.

A Game of Clothes is another fashion-inspired blog, but doesn’t focus on any one character in particular. It does, however, focus on women’s fashion. Shots from runways, jewelry and more – all of which look like they would fit right at home on the Game of Throne’s set can be seen on the blog.

GOT Memes & GIFs

A show as popular as Game of Thrones is bound to produce an endless amount of memes, and nowhere is that more obvious than on Tumblr. There is no shortage of Tumblr blogs chock-full with Game of Thrones memes and GIFs – thought-provoking, amusing, artistic – there’s something in there for everyone.

F*ck Yeah Game of Thrones is a good place to start since they’re keeping an eye on all the other GOT tumblr blogs and reblog that content so if there’s something good out there in Tumblr-land – they’ll probably find it. FYGOT tends to focus more on the artistic GIFs and content that stays true to the show itself.

If you’re looking for something a little more amusing, that doesn’t take itself too seriously, Thrones Meme and Game of Laughs merge all that is good about Game of Thrones with all that is good about Internet humor  and you know the final result is hilarity that could keep you busy for hours.

GOT Fan Art

Love it or hate it, fan art has found its home on the Internet, and Game of Thrones has certainly been no exception. Two Tumblr blogs that feature some of the most striking fan art we’ve seen are  Gallery of Thrones and F*ck Yeah Game of Thrones Art. A Gallery of Thrones accepts submissions from Tumblr users but does specify the kind of art that is accepted - 2D and digital drawings, paintings, illustrations; crafts, sculpture, anything handmade or one of a kind. If you’ve got some ideas for GIFs, then you’re better of sending them the way of the blogs listed above.

Special Mentions

Any list of recommended Tumblr blogs for GOT fans would not be complete without two more recommendations. My Mom Watches Game of Thrones is a great GIF-filled blog, but one that brings with it the added delight of watching the show through a mother’s eyes. Comments on particular scenes and story-lines accompany the GIFs. And of course, with it being the Internet, there was bound to be at least one blog that had something to do with cats. You’d think it might be a little bit difficult to find a way to merge the Internet’s fascination with cats together with Game of Thrones, but Game of Kittehs is a hilarious success.

What must-follow Game of Thrones Tumblr blogs would you add to this list? Let us know in the comments.

The post Game Of Thrones Meets Tumblr: 12 Must-Follow Blogs appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Google just announced that is it is shutting down Google Checkout, a Web-based payments system it launched to great expectations seven years ago.

It will continue to offer Google Wallet and handle transactions for apps, games, music, and movies on the Google Play store. But Google is largely getting out of the business of processing payments for physical goods and services.

Google Checkout may have had great expectations, but it delivered little in the way of results. Amazon and eBay's PayPal continue to dominate e-commerce, with a host of lesser-known players also doing the digital scutwork of processing credit-card transactions online. (Two of those, Braintree and Shopify, are offering discounts to former Google Checkout customers.)

Google does billions of dollars a year in credit-card transactions. But most of that is for a purely digital product: online ads purchased by small businesses.

How Google Did Not Get Ahead In Advertising

The theory has long been that Google could use the sheer bulk of these money flows to get into other parts of the payment business, first with Google Checkout, later with Google Wallet.

That theory has not worked out in practice. Where Google has a captive market, as with its ad products or the Google Play store, it's a natural thing for it to handle payments. Where Google has had to compete in payments, it has struggled.

What's Google left with? Google Wallet, a confusingly named product, is now much more of a wallet. In instances where developers use its new mobile-app payment feature, Instant Buy, to sell goods to smartphone and tablet users, Google essentially just stores a credit-card number and passes it on for processing. For Web-based merchants, Google Wallet will store coupons and help drive traffic to online stores.

And in the handful of physical retail locations that take Google Wallet, the tap-to-pay feature available on some Android smartphones will work. Google never actually processed these payments—it just passed on a card number to the merchant, who used some other service to actually handle the transaction.

Missing The Bigger Opportunity

But Google is missing out on a much bigger opportunity—which is serving as an alternative to Amazon.com for the whole world of commerce as mobile, digital, physical, and virtual collide.

It's not clear, for example, what will happen to Google Shopping Express, an experimental same-day delivery service Google is testing in the San Francisco Bay Area. That relied on Google Wallet to process payments for physical goods—exactly the business Google has said it doesn't want to be in anymore. We've asked Google for comment on the future of Google Shopping Express but haven't heard back yet.

The real prize for Google in being a player in the payments world is data—data about what advertisements and experiences lead to transactions. The risk is that Amazon and PayPal, by handling more kinds of transactions than Google is willing to do, including traditional e-commerce, will attract more merchants. Or that merchants will simply sign up with a payments processor and leave Google out of the equation altogether.

While Google's not completely of the payments game—and one should never count the monolith of Mountain View out—it feels like Google is taking a big step back from the money business. Whether its bet on digital and mobile payments is a tactical retreat or a strategic defeat might not be clear for years.

Microsoft removed a variety of features from Windows 8. These features range from the widely-used — like the Start menu and DVD playback — to the useful-but-rarely-used, like Windows Media Center. Other features, like the Windows Briefcase, are hopefully not being used by anyone anymore. Many of these features aren’t great losses to most people, but they are if you depended on them.

Luckily, Windows 8 isn’t yet a locked-down mobile operating system, no matter how hard Microsoft is trying to make it into one. While many features are missing from Windows 8, you can still get them back. Most important features can be restored with high-quality alternatives, but replacements for other features — like the Windows 7 Aero theme and Windows Classic theme — are nowhere near as polished as Microsoft has removed the necessary theming code.

Start Menu, Unified Search & Boot to Desktop

Windows 8 removed the Start button and traditional Start menu, opting instead for the Start screen, which functions as a sort of full-screen Start menu. You also can’t boot directly to the desktop in Windows 8, nor can you use unified search to search programs, settings, and files at once, like you could in Windows 7.

All of these features can be returned to Windows 8 by installing a third-party Start menu like the popular Start8, free Start Menu 8, or traditional ClassicShell. There will be a delay before you see the desktop every time you log in — Microsoft added a delay to hinder people who try to boot to the desktop as they want you to see the Start screen every time you log in.

DVD Playback

Windows 8 can no longer play DVDs out-of-the-box. While you can re-purchase DVD support from Microsoft by purchasing the Windows 8 Pro Pack and then the Media Center Pack, this will cost you over $100 in total. Luckily, you don’t have to do that. Just install the free VLC media player to play DVDs on Windows 8.

Note that, if you purchase a new computer that comes with a DVD drive, the computer likely comes with included, licensed DVD playback software that you can use to play DVDs without downloading anything else.

Windows Media Center

Windows Media Center is no longer part of Windows 8. If you love Windows Media Center and want to keep using it, you’ll have to upgrade to the Professional version of Windows 8 and purchase the Media Center Pack. You can do all this from within Windows 8, but it will cost you over $100 in total. You could also try using a different media center application like XBMC instead.

Solitaire, Minesweeper & Other games

Windows 8 removes Solitaire, Minesweeper, and the other games included with Windows that procrastinating office workers everywhere depend on. You can install Modern versions of Minesweeper and Solitaire from the Windows Store. If you really love the desktop versions, you can install the desktop versions of Solitaire and Minesweeper on Windows 8 — although this will take some work.

Windows Desktop Gadgets

Desktop gadgets were removed from Windows 8. Microsoft says they’re insecure — a desktop gadget is a program and can modify your system like any other program. This is true, but means that desktop gadgets are just as insecure as any other desktop program. If you love desktop gadgets, you don’t have to go without. You can easily install desktop gadget support in Windows 8.

Parental Controls

The parental control feature found in previous versions of Windows is now gone. It’s now replaced by Microsoft Family Safety, which is integrated with Microsoft accounts, gives you a web-based administration console, emails you reports about your children’s internet use if you like, and adds many other new features.

Windows Aero Glass

The transparent, glass-like Windows 7 theme is also gone. You can get some transparency with a tool like Aero8Tuner, but don’t bother. This doesn’t work very well and, even if it did, Microsoft removed the blur effect so it’s not as slick-looking as it is in Windows 7. Microsoft went out of their way to strip the Windows Aero theme engine out of Windows 8.

Windows Classic Theme

The Windows Classic theme has been removed. You can approximate it by using a user-created Windows Classic theme, but it’s nowhere near the same. This theme is essentially a tweaked version of the High Contrast theme, as many elements of the default theme can’t be tweaked.

You can also install a variety of other interesting third-party themes for Windows 8 if you don’t like the included theme. This requires overriding the protection against installing third-party themes on Windows 8, just as it did on Windows 7, Vista, and XP.

Do you depend on another feature that’s missing in Windows 8? How did you get it back? Leave a comment and let us know!

The post 8 Features Missing in Windows 8 and How To Get Them Back appeared first on MakeUseOf.

An 18-month congressional investigation turned up evidence that Apple is a major-league tax avoider, the New York Times reports — one that allegedly sheltered billions of dollars from taxation by moving the money through a web of subsidiaries, some of which had no employees and claimed to be exempt from taxes. Apple CEO Tim Cook will testify before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations tomorrow; Apple has released an advance copy of his testimony.

It wasn’t that long ago that Yahoo stood accused of letting Flickr decay beyond repair. 

Today, under the guidance of new CEO Marissa Mayer, the company has given the oft maligned image-sharing community a major facelift. Yahoo’s announcement promises a Flickr that’s “more spectacular, much bigger, and one you can take anywhere.” 

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the grid. Here’s what’s new on your Flickr account:

Room To Grow

As recently as yesterday, free Flickr users could upload and display 200 images at a time. Now every user has one terabyte of storage space. For those of you playing along at home, that’s enough for roughly 200,000 photos. Or as the Flickr staff puts it even more dramatically, “you could take a photo every hour for forty years without filling one.”

Following Flickr’s consistently freemium model, you can get even more perks by going pro. Fifty dollars will remove all advertisements. And for the serious professional, $499.99 will double your storage space to two terabytes per year. Or, you know, more than 400,000 photos. 

If you already had an original Flickr Pro account, priced at $24.95, you’re getting a heck of a deal. Yahoo has upgraded you to the $49.99 option until August 2013, free of charge. Pro user Aaron Brazell sent us a screenshot of his pro account, pictured below:

Introducing The Grid

The most instantly noticeable change is an aesthetic one. Your photos have enlarged themselves to jaw dropping size and now dominate the screen. Taking a cue from Instagram, your home page is now an infinite scroll through your contacts’ recent photos.

Your profile page has also gone the way of Pinterest and Windows 8, filling the page with a grid of images. Just like Facebook and Twitter, your profile page includes a background photo to offset your profile picture. 

I found that Flickr had already put one of my Favorites as my background image, a photo I didn’t even take myself. As it’s not credited, I certainly hope the photographer doesn’t take issue.

Wait, What’s Going On?

A lot here has changed and Flickr power users are still trying to figure out what’s new. Flickr’s most active discussion forum, Flickr Central, is abuzz with comments about the change. Given that these are the people that continued to daily use Flickr even as the rest of the Internet complained it was dead, it’s no surprise they’re unhappy with the change.

“I signed on Flickr to post a story about Yahoo vowing not to screw up Tumblr … and then I see the clusterfuck that is the new homepage,” one user wrote. 

Meanwhile, confusion abounds at Flickr’s official Help Forum. I’d be amazed if the staff can answer all 1,100 plus questions that were added in the last hour. It looks like Yahoo might want to update Flickr’s FAQ guidelines, which still link to old news like the ability to pay $24.95 for a pro subscription.

If you're confused, don't add to the backlog. I have reached out to Yahoo for details on when the new FAQ will be up and will update when we know more. 

OCRemix has been covered here before as one of many sites where you can legally get free music. The catch, of course, is that the songs on OCRemix are remixes of popular video game soundtracks. You won’t find Pink Floyd or Taylor Swift here; however, you might be surprised to find that there are still tons of professional quality tracks for you to enjoy – even if you don’t like video games!

This list will cover remixes for Chrono Trigger, one of my favorite RPG games of all time, but one thing to keep in mind is that you can enjoy this music without ever having played the game. Maybe you’ve never even heard of it. That’s fine. Music is music, right? And even though these songs are based on video game tracks, that doesn’t mean they sound like video game music. Trust me on that.

“Subterranean Opus” [Creeping Through the Sewers]

I wasn’t sure whether to sort this list in best-first or best-last order, but I’m so excited to write about this song that I think I need to start with the best. “Subterranean Opus” is a track that caught me completely off guard. I have a playlist of many OCRemix songs that I listen to on a somewhat regular basis, but before today I’d never heard of this song. Boy, I was really missing out.

“Subterranean Opus” was composed by Zircon, who just happens to be one of my favorite electronic composers. I had no idea that he started his career remixing video game songs but, looking back, it makes sense. You have to listen to this song and get at least to the 1:25 mark. That’s when things start to bump and sway with a beautiful mixture of hybrid orchestra touched with a Spanish flavor.

This song sits at the top of my list – not only for Chrono Trigger but all OCRemixes in general – for the high quality sound and the skillful rearrangement that injects many different musical styles while maintaining the heart of the original.

“Wind Scene Concert Paraphrase” [Yearnings of the Wind]

Here’s another song that elevates an original track up into the heavens by revitalizing it with the soul of a new genre. Based on “Yearnings of the Wind,” which you might also know as “600 A.D. Wind Scene”, “Wind Scene Concert Paraphrase” is one of those tracks that brims full of emotion, passion, and energy – even though the song itself is quite soft and mellow. It just feels alive.

It just goes to show that you don’t need an orchestra of instruments to create beautiful renditions. “Wind Scene Concert Paraphrase” is just one man on one piano creating sophisticated music using nothing more than creativity, hard work, and love. He was able to infuse the original wind song with a jazzy feel that warms the heart and relaxes the muscles.

“Dream of Zeal” [Corridor of Time]

Every good video game – just like every good movie – has that one tune that always pops into your head when you think of it. Most of the time, it’s the theme song. If I were to mention Harry Potter, I think we all know which song you’d be thinking about. Similarly, when it comes to Chrono Trigger, “Corridor of Time” (which you may know as the “Theme of Zeal”) beats out all other tracks as the iconic theme.

There are dozens of “Corridor of Time” remixes available on OCRemix and many of them deserve high praise. But in the interest of not flooding this article with more than one remix of the same track, I chose “Dream of Zeal” to represent.

It captures the essence of the original while adding a new layer of life on top. The sound samples may not be the best, but you have to consider that this remix was released nearly four years ago. Even still, it’s held up to time well and remains as one of my favorite Zeal remixes.

“Far Away Memories” [Outskirts of Time]

This remix of “Outskirts of Time” has such a homey, comforting quality about it. The choice of samples and the actual rhythm-melody combination evoke some real imagery – as if I’m strolling through a sunset countryside on a long, empty road. “Far Away Memories” is aptly named and I applaud the composer for creating such a fresh take on the original track.

“Behind the Sealed Door” [Sealed Door]

When you name a song “Behind the Sealed Door,” you inherently charge the composition with an aura of mystery. Smartly, the composer allows this mysterious feeling to pervade this remix and I think he did a great job in maintaining the original track’s soul while taking it in a whole new direction (compare it to the original “Sealed Door” and you’ll see what I mean).

There’s a dark and haunting quality to this song that I love and it’s balanced with a strong rhythm that keeps it from delving too deeply into somber territory. The piano is both light and gloomy – an interesting paradox – which provides further balance. Around the 1:30 mark, there’s a transition that incorporates a notably bright Final Fantasy melody, but it eases back into the eerie around 3:17.

Conclusion

Music is inherently subjective so there’s no doubt that some of you will read this and disagree with me. That’s fine with me. If I had the time and space, I’d expand this list to ten, fifteen, or even more songs because there are just so many Chrono Trigger remixes on the OCRemix site and they’re all lovely.

If there’s a Chrono Trigger remix that you think belongs in the top five, please share them in the comments! I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The post Looking For New Music? Here Are 5 Of The Best Chrono Trigger OCRemixes appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Visualisations (or visualizations if you’re American or absolutely love your Zs) transform whole sets of arbitrary data into beautiful, visual learning tools. From basic graphs and charts to complex animations, visualisations take an infographic-like approach to helping us understand the world around us.

Today’s Stuff to Watch features nothing but the most interesting visualisations I could find. As a species we’re suckers for statistics and numbers, but it’s amazing how little we can deduce from raw data without visual intervention.

From the size of the universe to birth and death rates, visualisations help us understand everything.

US Births & Deaths in Realtime

Fancy something to make you feel a little more mortal? Here’s a slightly unnerving realtime simulation of births and deaths in the US split by county. It’s important to remember that this is only a simulation, and so the frequency and locations of deaths and births are calculated from birth and death rates as well as random data.

This simulation is the work of Brad Lyon, who just wanted to “get a feel for the qualitative rhythm of births and deaths in the U.S”. You can mouse over each county to get more information or click it to perform a Google search of that location. This would make a great screensaver to remind your colleagues of the fragile nature of life and the (frequent) miracle of birth.

Perpetual Ocean

When it comes to cool-looking scientific things, NASA are on the whole are pretty good. In addition to a huge range of downloadable space apps and weeks worth of Stuff to Watch content, their Goddard Space Flight Centre are pretty good at visualising data, as seen in this Perpetual Ocean visualisation in 2011.

The short video presents a three-minute long look at the planet’s tidal patterns, in a stylised and rather beautiful manner. In addition to the YouTube embed above you can download the video in a variety of formats as well as some select huge screen grabs here.

US Wind Patterns

On a similar note to the NASA video above, two artists have created a stylised visual representation of wind patterns across the USA. Working under the joint name of Hint.FM, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg created the tool to pull in fresh data every hour and display it on an interactive map.

You can view the realtime results or simply watch the video above, but the creators stress this is not an accurate scientific tool for flying planes, sailing boats or putting out fires. It’s quite pretty, though.

Every Documented Incoming Meteorite

Visualizing.org is a site that specialises in showcasing visualisations, unsurprisingly. In addition to infographics full of graphs and charts, video visualisations offer a highly accessible window into science, such as this visualisation of Earth meteorite strikes.

Since 2500BC 34,513 meteorites have been recorded as hitting Earth, though only 1,042 were witnessed. This video provides a clear overview of that history.

Stephen Hawking’s Lectures, Visualised

How do you visualise the words and thought patterns of an individual on a chart, graph or via a map? When it came to the work of Stephen Hawking, all Jared Ficklin could see was stars and so he turned the great physicist’s voice recordings into a visual representation of the night sky.

A little outlandish, a little interpretive but incredibly fitting; Jared provides a nice dry explanation at the start of the video, so click play and enjoy.

100,000 Stars

A great use of WebGL if ever I saw one, 100,000 stars is Google’s attempt at visualising the universe through the wonders of in-browser 3D rendering. If ever you needed a reminder of how tiny and insignificant we all are, this is it.

No really, keep zooming. And zooming. Eventually you will find our Earth, a tiny speck in a sea of nothing. These are the 100,000 nearest stars to our tiny patch of space; for reference there are 200-400 billion in the Milky Way alone.

Hans Rosling’s Visualisations

Hans is a professor of global health at the Korolinska Institute in Sweden, and he’s got a certain way with words.

Watch Hans Rosling as he takes us through the history of the developing world, and the progress made since 1963. Hans shows us how child mortality rates fall dramatically, global education standards improve and just how recent some of these developments really are.

The above video is actually a TED talk from 2010, and involves Hans using Ikea props to visualise global population growth and trends. There’s a certain charm about the mannerisms, wit and method behind this video, making it a personal favorite TED talk of mine.

Finally there’s the above video, titled “200 Countries, 200 Years in 4 Minutes” which uses 120,000 data points to map the health of 200 nations in two centuries. This video was in fact an outtake from a BBC show called The Joy of Stats, which you might enjoy if this sort of thing appeals to you.

Mapping Fame: Bruce Springsteen

Before the Internet and “going viral”, the only way to measure fame involved sales and event attendance. The more records and artist sold and the more people who came to the shows, the more popular the artist was perceived to be.

Here we have 40 years worth of Bruce Springsteen performances on a map of the USA along with album launches and performance attendances. It’s an interesting look at the performer’s career using the only data available, and it’s much nicer than finishing on a visualisation about how we’re all doomed.

If you have any favorite visualisations either in video or infographic form be sure to share them in the comments below!

The post Visualisations: Helping You Put Meaningless Data Into Perspective [Stuff to Watch] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Speaking of The Talk Show, we’re doing another live audience episode in San Francisco on Tuesday 11 June, the second day of WWDC. Last year’s show was great, this year’s should be even better.

Big week for Yahoo.

This week’s episode of The Talk Show, with special guest Merlin Mann. We cover important, serious, issues, such as whether Larry Page more resembles a Bond villain or Magneto. In other words, the usual.

Brought to you by two great sponsors:

• Squarespace: Everything you need to build exceptional websites.
• Mailroute: Innovative cloud email protection.

An interesting read, including this:

Apple does not use tax gimmicks. Apple does not move its intellectual property into offshore tax havens and use it to sell products back into the US in order to avoid US tax; it does not use revolving loans from foreign subsidiaries to fund its domestic operations; it does not hold money on a Caribbean island; and it does not have a bank account in the Cayman Islands. Apple has substantial foreign cash because it sells the majority of its products outside the US. International operations accounted for 61% of Apple’s revenue last year and two-thirds of its revenue last quarter. These foreign earnings are taxed in the jurisdiction where they are earned (“foreign, post-tax income”).

(Via Jim Dalrymple.)

Marco Arment on the Yahoo/Tumblr deal. Great perspective from the inside.

Taking your pen to hand – or more often keyboard, in these times – is not always a simple undertaking. That’s not to say writing is bothersome. No, rather the opposite. Writing is wonderful, awesome, enchanting, and a hundred other things. The problem then is that there are too many distractions. Loud noises, flashing lights….not just outside of your window, but on your computer as well.

Perhaps you have better concentration than I do, but for me my best writing happens in a comfortable, reliable and distraction-free place. If you want to, as Neil Gaiman said, “Make Good Art“. Make yourself a beverage, find comfortable seating and open up a decent writing tool.

Maybe you’ve already encountered your own diamond in the desert. As we well know, there’s no shortage of great Mac apps. But if you’re using an office suite or notepad application to spin sentences (as opposed to writing reports), you’re definitely missing something out. Allow me to introduce you to Byword, a beautiful, simplistic writing tool.

Byword ($9.99)

The Byword writing app is a text editor available for Mac OS X and iOS. In this article, we’ll mostly be focusing on the desktop client. What you should know starting out is that Byword is no traditional office text editor or notepad application. Rather, it’s a very simplistic rich text and markdown editor, intended to be completely (or as much as possible) distraction-free.

It’s not just a prettier alternative to TextEdit, though. Byword is completed with a variety of features that assist you while you’re writing your next novel, article or literary doodle. It’s a simple package, all in all, but very rich in usability. Add in other techniques to help you focus and stay productive for a killer combination.

Rich Formatting Versus Markdown

By default, Byword will function as a markdown editor, similar to FountainPen which was previously reviewed on MakeUseOf. In case you’re wondering, Markdown is a way to impose styling (for example, bold text or headers) on a document in plain text, all without hindering reading the document in its current form.

Byword provides a guide to pick up on its own MultiMarkdown formatting. The guide itself was, in fact, written in MultiMarkdown in Byword.

If markdown editors are not your cup of tea, don’t worry. You’ll be able to switch to rich text formatting in the settings. These formatting options are a far cry from what you’d find in most rich text environments, but Byword hopes to offer what you really only need to structure your writing.

This covers three different text sizes, the usual bold, italic underlining, alignment, bullet lists and highlights. A nice finish is the formatting pop-over, which is activated by pressing command+T, and lets you stylize currently selected text.

Fullscreen Mode

One of the first things you do when you don’t want to be distracted is close your door. The analogous action on your computer is to put your application in full-screen. Byword can be put full screen by pressing the Command and Enter keys on your keyboard.

Your text is centered on the screen and Byword’s word and character counters are still visible on the bottom of your screen in a light grey. Apart from that, there’s absolutely nothing. It may sound strange to describe it so, but it’s a view that I absolutely love. Especially when you switch the color profile from white to black in the application settings, as you can see in the screenshot above.

Line & Paragraph Focus

Another two cool features that Byword adds to the mix are line and paragraph focus. The idea of paragraph focus is simple: the paragraph you’re working in looks normal while the rest of the document is greyed out. Not the best idea for documents where you need overview at all times, but good for almost any other scenario.

Line focus is similar, only the current line is spared instead of the entire paragraph.

Typewriter mode offers another novel way to keep your focus on the text you’re currently working on. Not through shading, though, but through placement. Like the typewriters of old, this mode puts the line you’re working on in the vertical center of your screen. Start typing somewhere else, and it readjusts. Not only is this a great way to keep focus, it also does a lot to prevent eye fatigue.

What text editor do you normally use, or do you use more than one? Let us know in the comments section below!

The post Byword Offers Fullscreen Distraction-Free Writing Pleasure On Your Mac appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Nozbe is a tool that helps busy professionals and teams organize time and manage their projects to get things done efficiently and effectively.

Nozbe keeps your tasks in sync. Featuring not only a powerful web app but also apps for the iPhone, iPad, Android (phones and tablets), Mac and Windows PC. (WP8 and BB10 apps in June).

Nozbe also keeps your team in sync. Easily share projects with anyone to delegate and comment on to-dos.

Nozbe also works with your favorite apps — you can comment on tasks with your Evernote notes and Dropbox files. You can also sync your date sensitive Nozbe tasks with Google Calendar.

Nozbe is Freemium. When you upgrade, use coupon code FIREBALL and get 20% off on any Nozbe plan (this week only!).

I love food. If you follow my posts here on MakeUseOf even half-heartedly, I’m sure you managed to figure that out by now. Only two weeks ago, I told you about some great iPad apps for learning how to cook, and researching that post opened up a whole new world for me — a world of gorgeous and irresistible food apps.

One of the apps I got acquainted with on this journey is Foodie Recipes, a free iPad app that’s both beautiful, diverse and seasonally relevant. Foodie Recipes is based on the website foodie.com, but is not merely a mobile version of the website. Rather, Foodie Recipes offers a recipe magazine of sorts, which aggregates the best seasonal recipes from food bloggers and professionals from all over the world. Each edition of Foodie Recipes has a different theme, with dozens of easy-to-follow recipes for you to prepare.

When I say Foodie Recipes is free, I mean it. Not only is the app free, not only is the current edition free, but all past editions are also free, which easily brings you to over 150 curated recipes for all kinds of dishes suitable for different times of the year.

Spring Flavor

The current edition available on Foodie Recipes is Spring Flavor, which includes 40 recipes for spring-themed appetizers, drinks, soups, salads, small plates, pasta, main dishes, sweets, and preserves. Each recipe comes from a different contributor, which makes for a pretty diverse collection of recipes.

The app is built much like a magazine, with an editor’s note at the beginning, and one recipe and image per page. There are several ways to navigate through the app: flipping through recipes by tapping, jumping through them using the visual toolbar at the bottom of the screen, or using the collapsible table of contents on the left.

The Spring Flavor edition includes recipes ranging from super easy ones (deviled eggs, strawberry and avocado salad, grilled baby artichokes), to intermediate ones (broiled salmon with rhubarb salsa, chocolate-covered strawberry pie), to special occasion ones (lamb curry meat pie with minted peas, chickpea cakes with shaved asparagus and yogurt, key lime pie marshmallows). Each recipe comes with one image of the finished product, an ingredient list, and step-by-step directions, as well as prep time, cooking time, and yield.

The recipes are easy to follow and clear, but if you’re a complete beginner, you’ll find that they don’t exactly teach you how to cook. Most of these recipes are aimed at people who cook from time to time or like cooking, and are looking to expand their usual repertoire.

Unlike the Foodie website, there’s currently no way to bookmark recipes, add them to a recipe book, or mark them in any other way. You can, however, share a favorite recipe on Facebook or Twitter, email it to yourself or someone else, or print it straight from the app (requires AirPrint).

More Editions

Foodie Recipe’s offering doesn’t end with one edition, though. To date, Foodie has released four different editions for its iPad app: Spring Flavor, Romantic Meals, Game Day Guide, and Holiday Deserts. Some of these, such as the Romantic Meals edition, even come with an amusing video helping you set up the mood for a romantic Valentine’s day dinner.

To access these extra editions, tap the “Contents” button on the top left to expand the table of contents. Below the names of the different sections, you’ll find the “Editions” button. Tap an edition to start downloading it for free.

Each edition contains 40 recipes from a range of sources, showing you how to make everything from bourbon and ginger cupcakes or vanilla carrot soup, to stuffed pizza mushrooms, and bourbon and cider turkey meatballs.

A new edition of Foodie Recipes is released every couple on months, so you can always look forward to new and surprising recipes on the same stunning interface. Best of all the app has no intrusive adverts and won’t keep nagging you to buy in-app purchases to unlock content – this is one truly free app to help discover your inner chef.

Foodie Recipes is a great source of recipes, but doesn’t provide any way to collect or manage your recipes. If you’re looking for a recipe manager, Paprika Recipe Manager is worth a look. And as always, don’t forget to check out our Best of iPad Apps page for more recommendations you can make use of.

Download: Foodie Recipes on iTunes (Free)

Do you like Foodie Recipes? Is there another foodie app you’d like to recommend? Tell us all about it in the comments!

The post Enjoy 160+ Free Recipes At Your Fingertips With Foodie Recipes For iPad [iOS] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

The Tumblr acquisition may give Yahoo the young, hip audience it’s always wanted — assuming it can keep them. Because Tumblr users aren’t happy, and they’re letting it all out. 

“Yahoo is buying Tumblr guys THIS IS NOT OKAY THEY’LL RUIN OUR HOME,” blogged one user in a sentiment repeatedly echoed on the #yahoo, #tumblr, and #yumblr tags on Tumblr, all of which are currently experiencing an overload of activity. 

Via the 5EXi Tumbr

Tumblr users’ greatest fear? Change, of any kind. Many have vowed to leave at the first sign of Yahoo involvement. One Tumblr user-generated photo shows a purple, spammy nightmare of what many bloggers fear Tumblr may soon become. 

Via the castielmalotovedlucifer Tumblr

These concerns aren’t exactly unfounded, either: Yahoo has a track record of botching its acquisitions. It’s telling that Yahoo’s press release on the acquisition notes that it “promises not to screw it up.” (You read that correctly — that's in the press release.)

(See also: Buying Tumblr Will Leave Yahoo With The Same Old Identity Crisis)

Tumblr CEO David Karp assured users in an announcement that “We’re not turning purple.” (Of course, Tumblr has been purple before — back in 2010, it went purple for Pride Day. When it reverted to traditional blue, well, users complained about that, too.)

There are some obvious conflicts a-brewin'. Yahoo is a self-described family friendly brand while Tumblr is infamous for its uncensored pornographic content. As a result, some users worry about a culture clash. "Yahoo buying Tumblr is like having a house party supervised by your Grandma," one user blogged.

Yahoo is already working to defuse such fears, though it's far from clear how successfully. In addition to the company's promise "not to screw it up," CEO Marissa Mayer made a point of offering this reassurance on a call with analysts and press shortly after the acquisition announcement: "We really want to let Tumblr be Tumblr and let Yahoo be Yahoo."

Via thefrogman.me Tumblr

Some of Tumblr's competitors say they smell blood in the water. WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg, for instance, wrote on his personal blog Sunday that “normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000.” (Full disclosure, I’m currently a trial employee at WordPress.com.)

Of course, social-media outrage is often transitory. On Quit Facebook Day in 2010, organizers planned to lead a mass exodus from the site in protest of Facebook privacy policy. In the end, fewer than 2% of American users left after all.

Mayer has already begun addressing the culture clash on her brand new Tumblr, which spells “Mayr” without the “e” as a nod to Tumblr’s quirky spelling. Her latest post speaks Tumblr’s language — a spot-on GIF that depicts Mayer and Karp battling it out through netspeak. Mayer's rallying cry: WFH [Work From Home]. Karp's? NSFW [Not Safe For Work].

When Karp announced the acquisition, he signed it with a nod to one of Tumblr’s most viral (and NSFW) memes, “Fuck Yeah.” Even if Yahoo is planning to change an aspect of the site, Tumblr’s salty language and aversion to censorship don’t seem to be one of them.

Lead image via the tinsoftware Tumblr

You have a high-quality stereo system that powers outdoor speakers on your deck? Awesome, but can you manage playlists and change songs without walking inside? Is everything readily available at the touch of a button on your Bluetooth, smartphone remote control? Of course not; that would be impossible. Or is it?

This dilemma was all too familiar for Jason Carman and Mark Vogt, cofounders of Flyover Innovations, but their engineering educations and background work at Garmin gave them the tools they needed to craft a solution.

“From a technical standpoint, it was relatively simple for us to create something new to solve this problem: aka, Blumoo,” says Carman.

Under the banner of Flyover Innovations, Carman and Vogt developed Blumoo to give users full control of their existing stereo equipment, powered speakers, outdoor stereo, or whole-home audio systems at the touch of a button from their mobile device.

Blumoo is a peripheral “pod” device that connects your Android or iOS device, via Bluetooth, to your sound systems. Blumoo itself connects to your stereo equipment via standard 3.5mm jack or RCA connections.

It enables both universal remote control functionality and hi-fi audio streaming. The user interface for the remote is extremely simple, with the standard forward, backwards, stop, play, and pause functions.

Blumoo can work with different hardware, so there are virtually no compatibility issues. It was designed as an inexpensive way to take your existing equipment further in its capability.

Consumers find they have to switch out their high-quality, sometimes embedded, speakers for Bluetooth speakers to obtain the portability that Blumoo offers. The issue that Carman and Vogt recognized here is that Bluetooth speakers are expensive and often provide lower levels of sound quality.

“People have mobile devices that have to be docked for various uses, and that renders them non-portable,” explains Carman. “Blumoo unlocks their truly mobile functionality.”

Perhaps the most exciting feature of Blumoo is that it will be released on an open API platform. This ensures that the app will continue to thrive and grow with the help of innovative developers. The hope is that users might one day be able to go beyond simple stereo capability and utilize their Blumoo and smartphone to control home theater or video functions.

Flyover Innovations wants their flagship product to be held down by nothing as they move forward. They are giving it every opportunity for success, and have launched and Indiegogo campaign to get it as much exposure as possible.

“We want people to use our technology, but we do not want it to be a hindrance to them,” says Carman. “That is why we have designed the Blumoo to be as easy as possible to use – like an ATM.”

Flyover Innovations was featured at Tech Cocktail’s Kansas City Mixer & Startup Showcase on May 7th. 

The post Blumoo: Use Your Mobile Device as a Bluetooth Stereo Remote appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Despite the popularity of social networks like Twitter and Facebook, RSS readers are still arguably the best way to monitor and manage daily news items and subscriptions on both our computers and mobile devices. With the pending death of the Google Reader, we have shared a number of alternative RSS feed reader clients that go beyond Reader’s capabilities.

One of the newest RSS feed readers on the block is NewsBar for Mac (offering a free lite version, and $3.99 full version) and iPhone ($3.99). Though I’ve been a longtime user of NewsRack, I was immediately impressed with the features in NewsBar and how they could be useful to my workflow as someone who monitors news and blog feeds throughout the day.

How NewsBar Stands Out

NewsBar is similar to traditional newsreaders in that it enables you to add RSS feed subscriptions and manage them in folders/categories. NewsBar also supports Google Reader integration, but since that service will be shut down by July 1 of this year, it’s probably better to manually add subscriptions instead of importing Google Reader subscriptions.

NewsBar’s user interface is quite different from most readers in that feeds are continually displayed in a window bar on a designated side of your Mac desktop. Clicking on a news feed item will display a reader window that includes the original source article, and from there you can select to open the item in your default web browser. You can also double-click on an item to open it your web browser.

This window bar interface works great for large screen Macs or for those of us who use more than one desktop monitor. I have NewsBar parked on the far left side of my second monitor. Placing it on your main monitor desktop might make it a little obtrusive.

Unfortunately, NewsBar doesn’t have an automatic hide feature for when it’s not being viewed. You can however set feed items to auto hide after you have marked them read. I have mapped  NewsBar to BetterTouchTool which enables me to quickly perform a three finger tap on my trackpad to mark all items as read.

Appearance

NewsBar includes additional preferences that make it easy to adjust its appearance to your liking. You can select to have the window bar Always on top or always in the background. You can set the background opacity of the bar, as well as adjust the text size of feeds and the box height of the bar.

If you want NewsBar to compliment your existing desktop wallpaper, you can change the window background color of the sidebar and even add a background gradient that might make it less distracting.

If you subscribe to a dozen or more feeds like I do, you might find folders useful for managing feeds. But more importantly, I really like that you can set a different text and background color for each of your subscriptions. So for example, if you have a feed that you want to stand-out above the rest, you might change the text or background of the feed’s news items or posts to red.

It is also possible to set the refresh rate individually for each feed, how many feed items to show and the number of news items that should remain in the feed window. Custom icons for each feed source can also be added or changed by simply dropping the icon in the subscribed feed window.

Other Features

Another one of the NewsBar’s powerful features is keyword notifications. If you monitor dozens of feed subscriptions a day, you might want to identify particular keywords in news or blog items that you want NewsBar to highlight visually with a designated text or background color.

For example, you might add keywords like “releases,” “updates,” “now available,” and “arrives” to highlight feed items that announce new updates to or releases of software or online services. You can also have NewsBar issue a sound alert for keyword related items, as well as put those keyword notices in the OS X Notification Center.

NewsBar also includes buttons and functions for performing a quick text search, adding new feeds, starring feed items, and showing only keyword filtered news. In its most recent update, keyboard shortcuts were added for toggling read items, marking items read and unread, and for starring them.

Another useful feature allows you to quickly share feed items to a new email or via Twitter, Facebook, Messages, or Safari’s Reading List. By right (or control) clicking on a feed item, you can also select to mark individual feed items or all feed items as read or unread, and even delete a selected item from the list.

Conclusion

In the first few days I have used NewsBar, it has already shown itself to be a time saver. It reduces the need to constantly launch a newsreader in order to check new feeds. I can simply glance over to the left side of my second monitor and view and interact with new items. And by using special colored highlights, I can scan items for what I’m actually looking for.

The “lite” version of NewsBar will give you a glimpse of how it works, but this version doesn’t include many of NewsBar’s more advanced features (no folders or menu bar buttons, and limited to two feed subscriptions). That said, if you’re an avid newsreader user I think NewsBar is worth checking out.

Download: NewsBar for Mac OS X or iOS

Let us know what you think of NewsBar, and any of your other favourite clients in the comments below.

The post Power Up Your Mac Desktop With RSS Feed Reader NewsBar [Mac & iOS] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

SECURITY!

If you’re running a business that relies on the internet to succeed, online security protocols need to be front-and-center in your business planning — not an afterthought. Too many startups neglect to invest properly in their security infrastructure, often citing that being popular enough to get hacked would be a good problem to have. WRONG. Startups need to be locked down from day one. And they need to be proactive and aggressive in their approach to security. Passive defense and adhering to minimum compliance standards are a recipe for disaster.

On Wednesday, May 29th, we’ve assembled some of the top experts in online security who will share their experiences, and provide tips and tricks to help make your startup bulletproof.

This is a VERY special event.

We’ll receive expert advice from:

* Joe Sullivan, Chief Security Officer of Facebook * Michael Coates, Director of Security Assurance at Mozilla * Mark Risher, CEO/Founder, of Impermium * Deron McElroy, Director of Regional Partnerships, Cybersecurity and Communications (CS&C) at U.S. Department of Homeland Security (Invited) * Dan Goodin, IT Security Editor at Ars Technica (Moderating)

Join us and get secure!

Register @ http://areyousecure.eventbrite.com

A signature tells you something about a personality. Just as two people hardly write alike, they also sign differently. That’s how the “science” of Graphology came into being. But the digital age and the email signature have reduced the way you sign-off on a mail to a footnote. Just a typed name, and maybe a phone number or a Twitter handle – how utterly dull. Just as there is a way to write and format proper emails, there are also ways to end them well.

A few years back, I showed you how to create custom signatures in Gmail with Firefox add-ons. Much of that information remains true. So do the six tips to get more out of your Gmail email signatures. The common thread is to not only create a stylistic impression, but also create a personal brand or promote a corporate one.

So, without further ado, let’s look at how you can benefit from the power of email signatures.

The Benefits of an Email Signature

1. An email signature shows your openness to communicate.
2. A well designed email signature conveys professionalism via your emails.
3. An email signature is a promotion tool for a business, a website/blog, a book, or a social cause.
4. An email signature with the relevant information is your short-biography.
5. An email signature is also a social networking tool, like a business card.

The Absolute Basics of an Email Signature

A neat email signature says just one simple thing – you care about the way you communicate. So, a basic email signature without a touch of pretension should answer who you are, what you do, and how you can be contacted. I personally prefer an email signature that is minimal and does not hog space. Our attention spans being limited as it is, I feel you could start with these points…

1. Your full name.
2. Your contact information.
3. Your personal or professional website/blog.
4. Your business address (or any other you might want to include).
5. Include links to your social network profiles only if they are important enough.

Designing a Simple Text Email Signature

Email signatures in simple text allow you to create clean lines of information without fancy graphics and logos. They are also consistent across devices and aren’t handicapped if image blockers are in place (as in Gmail or Outlook). Designing a simple text signature for your email takes some creative thought because you can only work with fonts, font sizes, symbols, spacing, and the colors available. The following image illustrates a neat text signature created in Gmail:

This is a simple signature that took me just 3 minutes to set up in Gmail. All I used was the Verdana font and some spacing between the letters of my name to make it stand out. If it suits you, you can pick the colors of your company logo to design your text signature. Here’s another look at it with a placement of the address:

To take your default Gmail signature beyond text, you can use the rich text editor in Gmail to spice it up with hyperlinks and images too.

Take Your Gmail Signature beyond Simple Text

The rich text signature editor in Gmail also helps you create HTML logos. You can insert small transparent logo icons for the services you want represented in your signature. An advanced Google Image Search will give you the location of such icons. Many services have media logos in different sizes, for instance: Twitter. Preferably, go for 16px by 16px sized transparent icons. Upload and position them appropriately. Here’s a sample signature I created quickly:

Also note (as this Gmail support page says) – if you send mail “from” multiple addresses in Gmail, you can set a different signature for each address in the General tab of your settings. You can also use the power of canned responses to set up multiple email signatures in the same account.

Create a Signature with LinkedIn

LinkedIn has a rich signature generator that helps you populate your emails with HTML signatures. The signature generator comes with many hued themes to give your emails a stylized look. The LinkedIn signature generator gives you a JavaScript window as seen below. You can copy-paste the code into email clients which support HTML signatures.

The signature generator does not say that it supports online email clients. But there is a simple workaround you can implement for Gmail. Simply copy all the text in your LinkedIn signature and paste it into a new compose window. Gmail automatically displays the signature with the LinkedIn theme chosen exactly preserved. You can save and re-use this signature as a canned response.

Spice Up Your Emails with Third-Party Email Signature Tools

WiseStamp

WiseStamp is a browser add-on for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Thunderbird. The browser extension comes with many email signature templates which you can customize with your own information like a profile picture or logo, IM & social profiles. The singular feature of WiseStamp is that it gives you a choice of apps across the social web which you can connect to with your signature. For instance, you can add a Facebook email app to promote a Facebook page or a WordPress app to give your blog readership a boost.

The free version gives you two signatures (e.g. personal and business), while the paid version with different plans comes with multiple signature support.

Last year, Tina did a comprehensive review on WiseStamp. Since then new apps like Pinterest and Instagram have been introduced. Outlook.com is a webmail platform that is supported. One of the significant additions are the Sidebar Apps.

Sidebar Apps allows you to showcase your content alongside your emails. The sidebar placement allows you to promote your content on the right-hand side of your emails and potentially garner more eyeballs. Sidebar Apps are available for YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest for now.

Sigwich

Sigwich is another third-party app that helps you create an appealing signature. It works with email clients like Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo, and on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. Sigwich has a powerful signature engine that helps you build a creative signature easily. It has 6 different signature layouts that give you enough room to design a customized look. After touching up your signature, you can install the signature file and use it with your email client. Do note that you have to sign-up for a free account before you can click on download.

The optional signature layouts are good, but I wasn’t too satisfied with Sigwich. One of the little bugs I found while using Sigwich was that the Image Cropper wasn’t working properly.  I missed the ability to color the fonts. Going head-to-head, WiseStamp is far more powerful and easier to use.

There are many do’s and don’ts for creating the perfect email signature. Using the right tool is perhaps number one on the list. Keeping it simple and slim should be at number two. The benefits of using an email signature are often intangible. But you never know where the good word is being carried to. What about you? Do you consistently use an email signature? Mention how it benefits you? How did you design it? If not, it’s about time you did.

Image Credit: Reading a letter by candlelight via Shutterstock

The post You Too Can Benefit From The Power Of Email Signatures appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Seamless and GrubHub, both sites for ordering takeout, today announced that they plan to merge.

Combined, they cover over 20,000 takeout restaurants in over 500 cities in the United States.

The new organization will be headed by CEO Matt Maloney, GrubHub cofounder and CEO. Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky will be president. The name of the new takeout-ordering site will be determined after regulatory approvals.

The post Seamless and GrubHub to Merge appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Mark Wilson, writing for Fast Company: “Even Google’s Own Developers Won’t Be Seen Wearing Google Glass”:

Those of us who believe in the future of Glass technology can identify other culprits: We can blame price. We can blame availability. We can blame battery. We can blame the silly aesthetic. We can even blame it on the rain! But imagine if Apple announced their new iPhone, yet almost no one at Cupertino felt the need to carry one. Or imagine if Ford announced a new car, but their execs insisted on biking to work.

If Google’s own cohort doesn’t feel compelled to wear Glass in spite of its perfectly predictable shortcomings, why would they ever expect that the rest of us will?

But then here’s Pete Pachal, writing for Mashable: “Google Glass Stole the Show at Google I/O 2013”:

The glaring omission didn’t stop Glass from stealing the show for the rest of the conference, though. Day 2 of I/O was packed with sessions on Glass, including one where official Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr apps made their debut. The sessions themselves garnered the kind of lineups usually reserved Lady Gaga tickets. Many developers were walking around wearing Glass, but it was the looks of jealousy from the Glass-less that underscored just how much interest there is in Google’s head-mounted gadget.

One of these guys is wrong.

Andy Boxall, writing for Digital Trends:

Analysts broke it down like this: Globally, it’s estimated the Android industry made $5.3 billion profit in the first quarter of this year, while the profit estimates for Android phones shipped by Samsung comes in at $5.1 billion for the same period. The exact figure quoted is 94.7 percent profit share, and that’s not including tablets either.

According to Strategy Analytics’ chart, in a (very) distant second place is LG, with 2.5 percent profit share, while all the other Android phone manufacturers — think about it, that’s everyone from Sony and HTC to Huawei, Acer and ZTE — are lumped into an Others category, which totals 2.7 percent.

Rather remarkable.

Over the years, we’ve loved our popular search engines — AOL, Yahoo in 1994, and Google in post-1998. However, while all of these search engines have existed for quite a while now, none of them have been the first to exist. Instead, the first known search engine has made its place in history with the name of Archie.

Written over two decades ago and with no updates since then, Archie provided a very different search experience than we’re used to today. So how is it different, and could it still be useful today? I’ll take you on a tour of the Archie search engine and give you a perspective of how things have changed over the past 23 years.

About Archie

Archie, which is somehow short for “archive” because Archie followed the Unix naming standards, was written in 1990 by Alan Emtage, who was studying at McGill University in Montreal at the time. While the World Wide Web didn’t exist yet at this time, there was a much smaller network in place that hosted a number of different files. The Archie search engine was a simple search engine that would keep an index of the file lists of all public FTP servers it could find. This way, users would be able to find publicly available files and download them. This provided a much better way to find files, as previously people could only know about files by simple word of mouth.

First Impressions

One of the places which still hosts an Archie search engine is the University of Warsaw. With this page, you can search for public files available via FTP as well as regular Polish web pages. As Linux files are commonly available via FTP servers, the first thing I searched for was “linux”, which returned 100 results of various Linux-related files at a time as that is the default setting. There is a “More Results” button you can click on to return the next 100 results. However, after looking at the list, I quickly discovered that most files found dated to 2001 so I assume that this particular Archie search engine hasn’t fully updated its index of files since then.

Customizing Your Search

Despite the Archie search engine being very primitive, the search page still offers a number of different features to customize your search experience. For example, besides being able to choose between “Anonymous FTP” and “Polish Web Index”, you can also choose whether your search entry should be treated as:

• a sub string (as long as a part of the filename includes what you searched)
• an exact search (anything that doesn’t match the query exactly is rejected), and
• a regular expression

You can also choose whether the case is sensitive or insensitive. Another option that’s available is the ability to search for strings rather than paths to files or websites. In other words, if this option is enabled, it returns the filenames of what Archie finds, but not the actual place where the file was found so that you can download it. I’m not entirely sure why this feature would be very useful, but I’m sure it was added in for a reason. There are even three options for how the search results should be outputted, including keywords only, excerpts only, and links only.

Advanced Options

There are a number of optional search parameters that can help you be more specific with your needs as there are many files on the Internet. These optional parameters include the abilities to:

• change how Archie treats spaces in your search query from “OR” to “AND”
• limit the search results to match a directory path
• exclusive search results that match a directory path you don’t want
• limit the search to certain domains such as .com, .edu, .org, etc.
• set the maximum search results at one time
• set maximum hits per string matched (if using a non-exact search)
• set maximum characters of string matched (if using a non-exact search)

Conclusion

Overall, I feel that an Archie search engine, despite being primitive compared to today’s standards, was still a functional way to accomplish searches. I am surprised, however, about how specific you can still be with it, which can help a lot when looking for a specific file. I still prefer today’s search tools a lot more because it only takes a few keywords to find what I’m looking for without having to fill in a bunch of optional search parameters. Those improvements can be contributed to Ask.com’s ability to use natural language in its searches, and Google’s algorithmic advances. It’s interesting to see how search engines have progressed from Archie to Google, and it makes me excited to see how searches advance even more in the future!

What’s your favorite search improvement when compared to the 90′s? Which search engine do you prefer most, and why? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: Auntie P

The post The Archie Search Engine – The World’s First Search! appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Marissa Mayer, on her Tumblr:

I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!

We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve. Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster. […]

I’ve long held the view that in all things art and design, you can feel the spirit and demeanor of those who create them. That’s why it was no surprise to me that David Karp is one of the nicest, most empathetic people I’ve ever met. He’s also one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I’ve worked with. His respect for Tumblr’s community of creators is awesome, and I’m absolutely delighted to have him and his entire team join Yahoo!.

Humanely written. Love the “We promise not to screw it up”, because it’s a direct acknowledgement of every Tumblr user’s primary concern.