Hasta La Gadget!

Apps, books or music? Looks like we just can’t get enough apps these days. Image: Asymco

Our appetite for downloading apps is tremendous, and just seems to keep on growing, and yet our need to download other forms of digital entertainment isn’t nearly as staggering.

Market intelligence blog Asymco found that the rate we’re downloading iOS apps at these days absolutely dwarfs iTunes music downloads, and crushes iBooks downloads. Only in recent months though have total app downloads exceeded mp3 downloads.

We’re downloading approximately 34 million iOS apps each day, weighing in somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 billion app downloads per month. Mp3 downloads, however, are relatively modest in comparison: We’re downloading 8.3 million songs every day. Up until around 2010, the rate of iTunes song downloads increased steadily, but has leveled off over the past year. In comparison, iOS users’ year-over-year appetite for apps is practically exponential.

Unlike music and literature, apps are relatively versatile. They’re a source of entertainment, they’re a way to discover new information, they’re a way to keep your life organized. While important, music and books are primarily consumption-based forms of entertainment and enrichment — wonderful cultural objects, though not immediately practical.

There’s another factor potentially affecting the number of songs we’re downloading from iTunes: The rise of streaming music services. There are a host of competing alternatives including Google Music Beta, Turntable.fm, Rdio and Spotify. Many of these are also available in app form, negating the need to download a bunch of songs onto your mobile device.

Before smartphones came into wide use, we were all obsessed with loading up our iPods and mp3 players with music. Now, smartphones are replacing the need for a dedicated mp3 player.

Similarly, we just don’t accumulate books the way we consume apps or music. They’re generally a more expensive purchase (in 2010, the average iBooks purchase was $12.31). Compare that to the App Store, where around 80 percent of the content is free, while the average paid apps price is around $1.44. iTunes song downloads generally hover around a buck.

With iOS and Android neck and neck in the mobile race, it’ll be interesting to see how these patterns play out over the next few years. Will we continue to download apps at increasingly astounding rates, or will we eventually hit critical mass and slow down a bit? Guess we’ll have to see.

via GigaOM

This article was written on February 07, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Have you ever wanted to change the resolution of your computer in a single click? There are various reasons that you may want to do that, such as playing a game that requires a certain resolution or developing a program that needs to be tested in various conditions. Today we’re going to show you how to create a simple shortcut that can be used to switch between multiple resolutions.

This trick is going to require a third-party application called Resolution Changer, but it requires absolutely no installation and will eat up a mere 150KB of your hard drive. With it you’ll be able to adjust the resolution, color depth, and refresh rate with the shortcuts you create. It even has support for multiple monitors!

–Instructions–

Setting up a shortcut to use Resolution Changer is a quick process, but there are a ton of different options that you can configure. Be sure to checkout a list of some other options available at the end of this article.

1. Download Resolution Changer (the console version), and put it in a location you’ll know how to access from the command line. The easiest spot for it would probably be at the root of the C:\ drive, which is where I’ve placed it on my system.
2. Now we need to create the shortcut to the application. Right-click on your Desktop and choose New -> Shortcut. You’ll need to enter in the location of the shortcut followed by the width and height that you want the resolution set to. Here’s my example where I’m changing the resolution of the screen to 800×600:

   C:\reschangecon.exe -width=800 -height=600

   In Vista it should look something like this (Click to Enlarge):
   

3. Now specify a name for the shortcut, and finish the wizard. Double-clicking on the new shortcut will set the resolution to whatever value you specified.

–Other Options Available–

There is a lot more that you can do with Resolution Changer, and if you’re feeling ambitious you might want to tinker with some of the other settings:

• Multiple Monitor Support
  This does support multiple monitors, and more information on that can be found here. To sum it up you can change the resolution of a specific monitor by providing the monitor number in this format:

  reschangecon.exe -monitor="\\.\DISPLAY1" -width=800 -height=600

• Launch an Application
  After the resolution has been changed you can have an application or document opened immediately afterwards:

  reschangecon.exe -width=800 -height=600 "c:\test.exe"

  What’s cool about that is after the program or document is closed the resolution will revert back to what it was like before it was executed.

• Adjust the Color Depth and Refresh Rate
  There are two other options that can be used to adjust the color depth and refresh rate of the monitor. Accepted values for the color depth are: “4″ = 16 colors, “8″ = 8-bit, “16″ = 16-bit, “24″ = 24-bit, and “32″ = 32-bit. Here’s how you can adjust the depth and/or refresh rate:

  reschangecon.exe -width=640 -height=480 -depth=8 -refresh=72

–Extra Credit–

You can also assign an icon to the shortcut that you just created and/or establish a keyboard hotkey for quickly switching between resolutions. Just right-click on the shortcut and choose the Properties option. From there you can configure the shortcut key or change the icon:

I’m sure this is going to spark some discussion about alternative ways to changing resolutions on your computer, and there are all kinds of apps that run in the System Tray doing the same kind of thing. The reason why I prefer this shortcut method is that the program only runs when I need it to, which saves on both processing and memory. It’s just my personal preference, but I like to minimize the number of applications I have running at a time.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Your Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryCyberNotes: Override & Modify Keyboard Shortcuts on a MacCyberNotes: Shortcuts to End Processes and ProgramsCyberNotes: Create Shortcuts To Shutdown Or Restart Your ComputerWindows Media Center Extender (Xbox 360) Choppy Video Troubleshooting Tips

This article was written on September 24, 2007 by CyberNet.

Current WordPress 2.7 Version: 2.00 (Download – 4KB)
Release Date: November 2, 2008
Compatibility: Only works with WordPress 2.7.x

Current WordPress 2.5/2.6 Version: 1.70 (Download – 4KB)
Release Date: March 30, 2008
Compatibility: Only works with WordPress 2.5.x and 2.6.x

Current WordPress 2.3 Version: 1.48 (Download – 10KB)
Release Date: December 17, 2007
Compatibility: Only works with WordPress 2.3.x

This is a plugin for WordPress 2.3+ that utilizes the built-in tag system for recommending and displaying a list of your current tags. It avoids the troubling issue of creating duplicate tag names that are nearly identical, such as “download” and “downloads.”

–Features–

Here is a list of all the features included in Recommended Tags:

• WORDPRESS 2.3 ONLY: Type-ahead tag completion will show a list of matching tags as you type them in the box. This is included as a feature in WordPress 2.5, and we have therefore removed it as a feature of this plug-in in the latest version.
  • The total number of times a tag has been used is also shown in parenthesis immediately after the tag name.
• Intelligently recommended tags based on the content of the article:
  • Tags can be “exploded” so that the tag name is broken up into individual words. This will let a tag called “Windows Vista” be recommended even if you only mention “Vista” (note that it is without the “Windows”) in your article.
    • You can specify words to ignore that may appear in your tags, such as “the”.
  • Common plural/past endings can be trimmed off of the end of tag names. That way a tag called “downloads” will still be recommended even if you only mention “download” in the article.
    • On the Admin screen you can customize which endings are trimmed off.
  • HTML tags are stripped from the post so that things such as URL’s are not matched in your tags. That way linking to a Wikipedia article won’t necessarily recommend the “Wikipedia” tag, unless you’ve specified the tag name somewhere in the content of your article.
• Complete list of all existing tags is shown below the upload box incase a desired tag is not recommended.
• Completely customizable via the WordPress Admin screen
  • Display a list of existing tags
  • Display the recommended tags
  • Enable type-ahead auto-completion of tag names
  • And more…see the screenshot below

–WordPress 2.5+ Installation–

• Download the current version of the plugin to your computer, and extract the contents.
• Upload the recommendedtags.php file to your WordPress plugins directory.
• Optional: There are several options which can be configured from the WordPress Admin screen. Just go to Options -> Recommended Tags.

–WordPress 2.3 Installation–

• Download the current version of the plugin to your computer, and extract the contents.
• Upload the recommended-tags folder to your WordPress plugins directory.
• Optional: There are several options which can be configured from the WordPress Admin screen. Just go to Options -> Recommended Tags.

–Screenshots–

Here are two screenshots of the Recommended Tags plugin in action on WordPress 2.3. The one on the left is of the configuration screen, and the one on the right is what it looks like when using the plugin (Note: there have been some changes to the layout, but it is generally the same as what you see in the screenshot). You may click on either screenshot for a larger image.

–Changelog–

• November 2, 2008 – Created a version that is compatible with WordPress 2.7.
• March 30, 2008 – Added a version of Recommended Tags specifically for WordPress 2.5. This version does not include the type-ahead auto completion because this is now a feature of WordPress.
• December 17, 2007 – Fixed a bug where tags on future scheduled posts wouldn’t appear in the list until after the post was displayed on the site.
• October 17, 2007 – Definitely fixed the “Empty Delimiter” error that some people were having. Thanks to Chris over at FootNoted.org for lending me his site to try it out on.
• October 13, 2007 – Hopefully fixed the “Empty Delimiter” error that some people were having. You must be running a certain version of PHP to see this error message.
• September 29, 2007 – There were some issues with cross-browser compatibility. Hopefully most of the issues should be solved now. To counter the issue that I was having I had to have the tag editor get placed below the Save/Publish buttons, which may not be ideal but there are not many other ways around it.
• September 27, 2007 – Added type-ahead auto completion of tags, and made all options configurable via the WordPress Admin screen.
• September 24, 2007 – First Public Release

–Contact/Support–

Feel free to contact me with any issues you may be having. I’ll do my best to help, and please tell me what browser you’re using when you contact me.

–Credits–

This plugin was originally based off of Andy Staines’ work, who created the Click Tags plugin.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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SwipePad: SwipePad is a better app switcher for your Android phone. Instead of holding down the home button to launch your recent apps, SwipePad uses hotspots-corners and edges of your phone’s screen-to trigger a new ‘pad’ (which is sorta like a dashboard of apps). Just drag your finger from a hotspot to the middle of the screen and the app switcher will pop up. It’s like adding another layer to your phone. Free

More »

This article was written on November 09, 2010 by CyberNet.

I’m definitely a big fan of using Google Chrome, and last week I came across what has quickly become my favorite extension. The one I’m talking about is called Chromey Calculator, and with an average 5-star rating from 800+ reviews you know this has got to be good.

As you can see from the screenshot above Chromey Calculator puts some heavy-hitting computational power just one click away in your browser. With it you can do calculations, conversions, equation solving, basic calculus, and much more. What I love, however, is that this doesn’t just rely on one source. Instead this taps both Google Calculator and WolframAlpha for answers to anything you ask.

As you can see above there are quite a few unique queries it is capable of handling, but that is only part of what it can do. Here are some tips from the developer for those of you wanting to maximize the usefulness of the extension:

• Use up/down arrow keys to access input history.
• Click on any result to insert it into the input area.
• Ctrl+Click on any result to copy to clipboard.
• Click the little arrow at the upper right to pop out to new window.
• Last result can be accessed using the “@” variable.
• Create your own user variables — @abc_123 = 42
• Store an unevaluated expression — @x := 10 meters
• Hover over the the space to the left of a result to reveal a “G” or “W” link. Click the link to see the original source of a result.

Personally I’ve always wanted an extension that was capable of something like this, and now that I have it I’d find it hard to switch to any other browser without this functionality. I’ll admit that it took a little bit for me to remember that I had this sitting there just one click away, but after a few days I found myself turning to this for all my calculation needs. Sometimes I even pop this out into its own window when I am using it a lot, which is nice because you can then Alt+Tab to this.

Chromey Calculator Homepage

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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