Technology News
YouTube 2.1 App For Android Now Available With Better User Experience
The latest YouTube app, version 2.1, is launched on the Android Market few days ago, which is made by Google, so your YouTube app updates are not tied to Android OS releases anymore.
The new and robust app is rebuilt from the ground up to mirror the YouTube desktop experience. It is going to be the fastest and most intuitive YouTube mobile app to date. A beta version of this app was launched a few weeks ago and the latest and final version has been designed on the basis of user feedback.
Many new features has been introduced!!
1. Full screen mode which can be activated by just rotating your handset. Users can pause or resume the playback by just tapping on the screen.
2. Subscription updates, if you signed into your youtube account, you will see all your subscription updates right on the home screen of the app.
3. Posting comments are much easier even if the video is playing.
4. Users can read the video descriptions, rate or flag the videos without having to interrupt video playback.
YouTube app version 2.1 only works on devices running Android 2.2. To install it, search for ‘YouTube’ in Android Market. It also comes pre-installed on many upcoming Android 2.3 devices, such as the Nexus S.
Google Starts Inviting People To (Try And) Create Apps For Android Devices
At mid of this year, we told you about The Google App inventor. we told you about what it will do for user and how easily and useful its going to be for a non-programmers. Google were asking users, to fill a form and then anytime soon Google will start sending invitations to download and use this app. Today we are glad to tell you that Google has started sending invitation to download and install App Inventor via email.
Well, it’s still not a complete and final version of App Inventor, it is beta kind of thing as Google Says “App Inventor is currently available as an invitation-based beta product. We are limiting access in order to ensure that our systems can handle the load”.
So guys, download and install it, and simply attach your phone with your computer and start inventing apps using this App inventor. Its fun and happiness for non-programmer guys, but programmers will always be on top and will have more control over Apps no doubt.
If you have not applied yet then you can fill a form by clicking here. Google labs will be granting access to App Inventor over the coming weeks. While you are waiting feel free to read more about App Inventor and learn how it works. Check out this video to hear more about App Inventor for Android at University of San Francisco
How Much Is A Petabyte? [Graphic]
Do you guys know what comes after Terabyte? It’s Petabyte which is a unit of computer memory or data storage capacity equal to 1,000 terabytes. Recently, I found an infographic in which you will get the answer of the question “How Much is a Petabyte?”. This infographic was created by Mozy to visualize and understand Petabytes with the help of Gigabytes.
We would love to know what you are thinking while viewing this infographic. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter.
History Of The Internet [Graphic]
Recently, I have found graphical visualization “History Of The Internet” created by Online MBA who used simple to understand graphical format to show from where the internet and all the world wide web legends came from. If you go through this graphic, you will get information from 1962 to 2009 about all the major happenings about the internet.
We would love to know what you are thinking while viewing this infographic. In future we are going to release/share these types of more amazing infographic with you. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter.
Here is a graphical visualization which provides a brief history of the Internet, to fulfill your appetite for knowledge.
I want to give 5 stars to Online MBA who created this.
How Americans Consume 3.6 Zettabytes A Day [Infographic]
Recently, I have found an infographic “US Data Consumption In One Day” created by Artist Rob Vargas who used data from a study by the University of California at San Diego. According to this study Americans consume 3.6 zettabytes a day, isn’t that too big? but that’s true.
If a zettabyte is beyond your comprehension, too, it’s essentially one billion trillion bytes: a 1 with 21 zeros at the end. To put that into perspective, one exabyte — which equals 1/1000 of a zettabyte or 1 billion gigabytes — is roughly equivalent to the capacity of 5.1 million computer hard drives, or all the hard drives in Minnesota – said bits.
Taken from Fast Company
The 7 Must-Have Apps For Android Phones To Make Your Lives Easier
This is one of the very best list of its kind where you can find incredibly useful and life saver FREE apps for your android that you probably never used of and these would be great enough to bookmark or just for get in your knowledge. I hope everyone of you will like this list, you can try these whether you are an office worker, a manager, a supervisor, a student, a home user, etc.These are really amazing in respect to their features. The 7 Must-Have Apps For Android Phones To Make Your Lives Easier. Just take a look at them and share your thought’s here.
You are welcome if you want to share more useful android apps that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at smashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.
You can edit and share anywhere with Adobe Photoshop Express software for Android phones. It will help you crop, rotate, and color-correct with the touch of a finger.
Twitter for Android is a fantastic application to use, and sharing any link or photo is super simple too. Just look for the share button in your favorite application and choose Twitter.
AndFTP is a FTP/SFTP/FTPS client for Android devices. It allows managing several FTP servers. It comes with both a device file browser and a FTP file browser. It provides download and upload features with resume support. Use device menu to rename, delete, copy, set permissions and create folders. It provides FTP (File Transfer Protocol), SFTP (SSH’s secure File transfer protocol) support and FTPS (Explicit FTP over TLS/SSL).
This PayPal application will give you easy access to your PayPal account right from your Android phone. You can withdraw funds from your PayPal balance. Request Money: Get paid faster. It’s the easy way to ask for the money you are owed. Split the Bill: Instantly split the bill, calculate tip, and request everyone’s share. Set Reminders: Never miss rent or a bill.
Thinking Space is a Mind Mapping application for Android phones. Portable Mind Mapping has never been so much fun! Thinking Space is available for free in the Android Market.
The initial release of WordPress for Android has focused on giving you the ability to manage your blog while on the go. You can manage posts, comments, pages.
Accessing your Dropbox using android phone can give you another great experience of data synchronization. You can upload photos from your Android and email its public link to a friend in less than a minute. All the contents of your Dropbox are available for viewing. You can even stream music and movies in your Dropbox straight to your Android.
Big Day At Digg, New Digg (v4) Launched Today
After long wait and excitement it seems the new digg launched. Yes! you read it right digg releases their version 4. People have too many reservations with digg’s new version but today is a day when every one has to accept it with it’s all pros and cons. At the moment, there are some deployment issues and implementations of the new version is going on due to which digg is responding very slow, but digg’s administration is working very hard to get it rolled out successfully. Guys, you can follow us on digg by going here.
This is how new digg looks like
They also shared picture of the digg office to show the world what is going on there.
No doubt it’s a great news for digg community and now everyone is waiting to start exploring the new digg as production version. Will it give more surprises, to find out this we have to wait and keep using the new digg. I am hoping that this new digg will be as lovable as the old one for the community and it will be a much greater place for everyone. Good luck Digg.com guys.
Google’s App Inventor Helps You Visually Create Any Android Apps
App inventor from Google Labs is a great new and free tool, which makes life easier of programmers, non-programmers, professionals and students to create mobile applications for Android powered devices. This app inventor requires Zero programming knowledge, because instead of writing code you visually design the way app will look, you can use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.
I mean the App inventor enables users to drag and drop blocks of code, which are shown as graphic images and representing different smart phone capabilities. These blocks are created for just about everything you wish to do with an Android phone, as well as blocks for doing “programming-like” stuff, blocks to store information, blocks for repeating actions, and blocks to perform actions under certain conditions. There are even blocks to talk to services like Twitter and more.
App inventor will let you create apps that use advance feature like Sending or receiving SMS or working with GPS, App Inventor provides access to a GPS-location sensor, so users can build apps that know where they are. Users can build an app to help them remember where they parked their car. In App Inventor, the Apps you build can store data created by users in a database, so we can create a quiz kind of app in which the teachers can save questions in a quiz for their students to answer and something like that. So, if you can use database in it then you can think of many apps you can build in App Inventor isnt it?
You can fill a form by clicking here. Google labs will be granting access to App Inventor over the coming weeks. While you are waiting feel free to read more about App Inventor and learn how it works. Check out this video to hear more about App Inventor for Android at University of San Francisco.
An Easy Solution To Synchronize Folders In Windows With Bvckup
I use two computer machines – a desktop and a laptop. I run Windows on both. Whenever I create a new file on either machine, I back it up on the other. Many people use this system of manual backup which is quite time consuming. A much better alternative is automatically file synchronization and one of the best programs for this is Bvckup.
Bvckup is a program currently in its beta that works with Windows operating systems. The program has a number of interface and functionality features which set it apart from applications that perform the same auto-synching tasks.
After installing the program you can view it monitor your files from your System Tray.
When you open Bvckup, its window program readjusts to the compact view by default to occupy the minimum space on your desktop.
To enable the backing up a folder, you simple add a new backup job. This means selecting a name / description of the backup and selecting the source plus destination folders.
If there are files in the source folder which you want excluded from the synchronization process, Bvckup lets you specify these files.
You can also choose between scheduled backup or automatic backups whenever Bvckup picks up a change in the source folder. The program detects changes in the source folder by first inspecting changes in the local hard drive area. If no local changes are found, it saves time by not even reading that part of the hard disk thereby eliminating unnecessary spin-ups of idle hard drives. Moreover while backing up files, whenever possible only the modified portion of the file is copied instead of the entire file – this saves time.
A complete backup log is maintained which details all errors that occurred, if any.
In conclusion, Bvckup is a competent and user friendly file backup solution for Windows. You should hurry up in getting it because the program is only free as long as it in beta.
You can get Bvckup from www.bvckup.com
Top 20 Features Of Firefox 4 (Beta) That Make It Stand Out
The beta for Firefox version 4 was recently released and it has already created a buzz on the web. While many of its features will already demonstrated in its nightly builds, the beta more widely showcases these new features.
Release notes for Firefox v4 outline all the features which web developers and ordinary internet users will find helpful. To know what exactly these features are, read on:
- Tabs are now on top by default on Windows only – OSX and Linux will be changing when the theme has been modified to support the change.
- On Windows Vista and Windows 7 the menu bar has been replaced with the Firefox button.
- You can search for and switch to already open tabs in the Smart Location Bar
- New Addons Manager and extension management API (UI will be changed before final release)
- Significant API improvements are available for JS-ctypes, a foreign function interface for extensions.
- The stop and reload buttons have been merged into a single button on Windows, Mac and Linux.
- The Bookmarks Toolbar has been replaced with a Bookmarks Button by default (you can switch it back if you’d like).
- Crash protection for Windows, Linux, and Mac when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins.
- CSS Transitions are partially supported.
- Full WebGL support is included but disabled by default at this time.
- Core Animation rendering model for plugins on Mac OS X. Plugins which also support this rendering model can now draw faster and more efficiently.
- Native support for the HD HTML5 WebM video format.
- An experimental Direct2D rendering backend is available on Windows, turned off by default.
- Web developers can use Websockets for a low complexity, low latency, bidirectional communications API.
- Web developers can update the URL field without reloading the page using HTML History APIs.
- More responsive page rendering using lazy frame construction.
- Link history lookup is done asynchronously to provide better responsiveness during pageload.
- CSS :visited selectors have been changed to block websites from being able to check a user’s browsing history.
- New HTML5 parser.
- Support for more HTML5 form controls.
As you can see, many interface changes have been made to make usage a lot more user friendly. At the same time, great web development features have been added with a special focus on HTML 5. For a full list of features for developers, you can click here.
Firefox enthusiasts, who are interested in what else Firefox has to offer, can get the unofficial beta 2 of Firefox v4; this beta is available from FTP server and is a follow-up to the current publicly available beta. Beta 2 offers even more features however has addons disabled by default, to prevent addon-related browser crashes. To enable addons support in Firefox v4 beta 2, install the “Add-on Compatibility Eeporter” addon, then restart Firefox twice. Type in “about:addons” in the URL bar which will open up the Addon Manager and let you use addons.
