Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on April 01, 2008 by CyberNet.

…not as good as I thought they would be. Apple brought Safari 3.1 out of Beta in the middle of March, and shortly after that they started to push Safari out to all of the Windows users who already had iTunes or QuickTime installed. Well, as we roll our way into April I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of bump Safari got in usage by using their rather questionable method of distribution.

Overall in February Safari had a market share of 5.70%, and in March it climbed to 5.82%. The disappointing news is that Safari already had 5.82% of the market share in January, and so the small jump that they had in March merely got the browser back up to its peak.

As you might recall from our last coverage on the browser stats Safari 3.0 was capturing a majority of the Safari browser market share. Here’s a breakdown of Safari’s March stats showing how the four most popular versions differ from February:

• Safari 3.0: 3.96% [down 0.60%]
• Safari 3.1: 0.82% [up 0.82%]
• Safari 41: 0.58% [down 0.12%]
• Safari 31: 0.30% [down 0.03%]

As you can see a majority of the people using Safari 3.1 are those that have likely upgraded from previous versions. It will be interesting to see what the stats are like for April since Safari 3.1 will have had a full month to incubate on the computers. But it doesn’t look like the overall market share for Safari will not likely soar because of Apple installing the browser onto millions of ill-informed Windows computers. You can, however, bet the bank that Apple will be boasting how many computers it has been installed on.

[stats via Net Applications]

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This article was written on August 18, 2008 by CyberNet.

Mac only
One of the things that I really like being able to do on my MacBook Pro is monitor the temperature of various parts of my laptop, and also control the speed of the fans. Using the iStat Pro widget (review) I’m able to read the temperature of my hard drive, CPU, GPU, heatsinks, wireless card, and more. If you want you can take it a step further and even control the speed of your fans.

When I’m running a lot of different applications on my computer I’ve noticed that the fans don’t always increase their speed despite the temperatures rising to nearly 70 degrees Celsius. After a little searching around I found a free program called smcFanControl that lets me create different profiles to control the minimum fan speed.

By default Apple has set the fans to run at 2000 RPM, but smcFanControl will let you override the minimum speed setting. It will not, however, let you set the minimum speed below what the default is.

After running smcFanControl I configured a few different profiles. The default one, which I still use almost all of the time, is set to run at a minimum of 2000 RPM. Then I also created two other profiles that run at 3000 and 4000 RPM respectively. With a quick glance at my Menubar I can see what my CPU temperature is, and choose one of the alternate profiles accordingly:

The fans don’t have any problem going this fast, and can actually be pushed up to 6000 RPM. You do need to keep in mind that running your fans at a higher speed for a long period of time could make them more prone to failure due to the extra wear and tear. In my case I only bump it up when I see my processor temperature inching closer to the 70 degrees Celsius mark, but I normally use the Apple-recommended 2000 RPM speed.

Get smcFanControl for Mac

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An analyst note released by research firm IDC yesterday points out that in the nearly two months since Windows Phone 7’s retail release, the Windows Marketplace has swelled to 4,000 applications — a number that the Android Market took five months to reach. That’s impressive, no doubt, and the analyst behind the numbers notes that he “would not be surprised if Microsoft had the third largest app portfolio in the industry by the middle of next year.” Now granted, hitting number three would take very little effort on Microsoft’s part — they’d just have to beat webOS, BlackBerry OS, and Symbian, none of which have sparked iOS- or Android-like levels of developer interest. So beyond that, what does the growth mean? Read on!

[Thanks, Stephen]

Continue reading Windows Phone 7’s Marketplace grows faster than Android did at launch, doesn’t mean much

Windows Phone 7’s Marketplace grows faster than Android did at launch, doesn’t mean much originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Dec 2010 22:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on June 24, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Sure you might be a geek, but there’s a good chance that you don’t conform to the geek-code of ordering a pizza for dinner every night. If that’s the case then it might be time to trade-in your recipe box for a digital alternative. To help you make the switch we scoured around looking for a few recipe management applications for both Windows and Macs. We managed to find two free solutions that can both simplify your recipe management.

You might be wondering what kind of benefits there are for having an application store your recipes. The most notable feature in each of the applications is probably the fast search capabilities. With them you can actually pull up recipes that deal with, for example, chicken, within seconds. No more flipping through a recipe box looking for a specific index card… these apps will do the digging for you!

–Recipe Center (Homepage)–

Windows only
This is one of the most powerful recipe managers out there, and the best part is that it will get your recipe collection rolling by giving you 200 different recipes to start off with. One of the really nice features is being able to copy and paste ingredients from a recipe on a website into the application. With some quick reformatting you can have it automatically parse the text, and insert the ingredients accordingly into the application.

Here’s a list of Recipe Center’s best features:

• Advanced Recipe Encoder: You can copy and paste ingredients into the special recipe encoder so that it doesn’t take so long to enter in your favorite recipes

  (Click to Enlarge)
  

• Create New Recipes: Quickly add new recipes thanks to the IntelliSense that suggests ingredients as you type
• Recipe Download: Recipe Center can import thousands of recipes from various compatible recipe websites
• Recipe Resizing: Type in how many people you need to serve, and it will adjust the amount needed of each ingredient accordingly
• Advanced Search Filters: Search by recipe name, ingredients, or keywords
• Recipe Card Printing: Print out recipes, with the option to attach pictures
• Recipe Exchange: Send recipes to your friends by email (PDF format, Text format and Recipe Center format)
• Shopping List: Print your shopping lists based on ingredients of selected recipes
• Unit Conversion Tool: Convert between an extensive list of units for cooking
• Spell Checker: Spell check your recipe ingredients, procedures, and shopping list

(Click to Enlarge)

Note: This app does display an advertisement in the bottom-right corner.

–Yum (Homepage)–

Mac only
Yum isn’t quite as extensive as Recipe Center for Windows, but I’ve found that entering in recipes is a faster process with Yum. The reason for that is it includes a “paste ingredients” option that doesn’t even compare to how Recipe Center makes you enter in ingredients. All you have to do is copy the ingredients to your clipboard, and click the Paste Ingredients button. Yum will automatically parse what you have on the clipboard, and pull out all of the ingredients along with their corresponding measurements. In the few tests I ran this worked flawlessly.

Some of the other features are:

• Instantly search through all of your recipes
• Create as many categories as you would like, and you can even place recipes in multiple categories
• Print a single recipe, all recipes, selected recipes, recipes in a certain category, or recipes from your search results
• Customize the appearance of recipe directions including fonts, styles, paragraph settings, graphics (copy and paste, or drag and drop) — a few different themes are included by default
• Ingredients are recommended as you type

(Click to Enlarge)

Note: This program will display a popup window every 10 times you run it, but you can get a registration code to eliminate the “nag” screen by donating to the developer. There’s no mention as to a recommended donation amount, so that is up to you.

–Overview–

I can definitely see how any recipe manager would be tedious if you’re trying to convert your handwritten collection into a digital format. What I recommend doing is performing some quick searches online to see if someone has digital copies of your recipes, because it will be much faster in both applications if you can just copy and paste.

How do you store your recipes? Whether it be an application like one of these, or a simple text file, we want to hear what you use to manage your recipes.

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This article was written on May 27, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

It’s crazy to think about how unpopular encyclopedias have become thanks to the various references found online, and the same thing is happening to dictionaries. These days word processors (and other apps) are integrating dictionaries so that they are even more useful to the end user. The next logical step for dictionaries is a system-wide integration, which gives the user access to definitions from within any application.

What we’ve got in store for you today is how you can maximize the convenience factor of system-wide dictionaries for both Mac OS X and Windows. You can literally retrieve definitions and synonyms within seconds if you know the right keys to press.

–Mac Dictionary–

Mac only
If you’re a Mac user you probably know about the built-in dictionary/thesaurus that you can pull up at a moments notice. What you may not know, however, is that in Cocoa applications such as Safari, iChat, and Mail you can also get in-place definitions. Just hover your mouse over a word and press Command+Control+D to bring up the definition:

The menu in the bottom-left corner will let you switch between viewing a dictionary definition and synonyms from the thesaurus. Unfortunately this doesn’t work in non-Cocoa applications such as Firefox.

–WordWeb for Windows–

Windows only
Last week one of our commenters, “skh.pcola,” pointed out a fabulous application called WordWeb. It operates much like the built-in dictionary on the Mac, except that it is compatible with nearly all Windows applications. The simplicity of WordWeb is really what makes this an indispensable app for any Windows user. Just Control+Click as you hover over a word and you’ll instantly see a definition appear:

If you don’t know how to pronounce a word just click the speaker button towards the upper-right corner. This only uses the built-in Windows text-to-speech engine to speak the word, but it will give you some idea as to how it’s actually pronounced.

WordWeb comes with 150,000 words and 120,000 synonym sets making it ideal even when you’re not connected to the Internet. It offers definitions, synonyms, antonyms, and more all in one place.

One thing that I want to point out is that there will sometimes be plus/minus signs when viewing different tabs, such as the antonyms pictured to the right. Clicking the plus sign will add more results by making the search criteria less restrictive, and the minus sign will do just the opposite.

There is support for viewing Wikipedia articles from within the application, but it’s nothing to really jump up and down over. It doesn’t modify the layout of the page at all, and is really no different than viewing the actual article in your browser:

Interestingly the free version of WordWeb has a license unlike any other that I’ve seen. They are actually trying to help the environment with the restrictions they’ve imposed:

WordWeb free version may be used indefinitely only by people who take at most two commercial flights (not more than one return flight) in any 12 month period. People who fly more than this need to purchase the Pro version if they wish to continue use it after a 30-day trial period.

–Overview–

Now if those aren’t two fast ways to get dictionary definitions then I don’t know what is. Drop a comment below with the tools you use to lookup words, whether it be a site like Dictionary.com or an application.

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