Hasta La Gadget!

How better to celebrate your billionth download than with a brand new app store? RIM just rolled out App World 3.0 beta to its Beta Zone users, bringing with it a redesigned home screen created to “let you quickly find what BlackBerry app, game or theme you’re looking for.” Seems a bit overdue if you ask us, but better late than never, as the idiom goes. There are also new home screen icons for Games and BlackBerry Themes — the store’s two most popular categories. (Yes, Themes really is one of the two most popular categories… behind Games, we hope.) You can also flick between app summaries, screenshots, and reviews from one screen, and share links to your favorite apps over Twitter, Facebook, email, SMS, and BBM. You may find it difficult to get too excited about an app store update, but for those of us who use BlackBerrys despite the occasionally less-than-stellar app experience, anything RIM can do to streamline the procurement process is more than welcome.

RIM BlackBerry App World 3.0 beta adds home screen search, social media features originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 06 Aug 2011 02:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on August 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

The Register had a chance to interview Opera’s founder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner last week. They discussed some of the challenges facing the company, as well as things they hope to accomplish in the future.

It was actually really interesting to read what Tetzchner’s take is on their competitors. There was a little bit of discussion on the iPhone, and a slightly larger portion dedicated to thoughts on Firefox.

Here are some of the more interesting things that I pulled from the interview:

Do you feel you’re falling behind?
We have by far the most used mobile web browser. Net Applications’ survey is showing Mini as the fifth most used browser in the world and in some countries it’s beating Safari, and others it’s beating Mozilla. The Nintendo Wii is also helping and we’re working on new version coming out.

We’re also spending time with the services, with Google and Yahoo! discussing compatibility.

Does Mini make money?
We’re not making money off Mini at this time. But we have achieved one billion page views, and so we believe we can have business models with Mini that don’t upset users. We make money through operator deals and the Yahoo! deal, for example. We’re also offering it on the server side. T-Mobile, Vodafone, Telfonica, all get specialised versions with their own front pages – and they pay us for the hosting.

How? [in regards to Opera’s efficient performance]
It’s easier to be efficient if you’re coding every piece of the code yourself. I’ve seen it myself. Someone on a core part strives to make their part really efficient; then someone on the UI side makes something simple but that makes heavy demands. It’s easy to think, "something I do doesn’t have to be that efficient", but it does. For example, in one of our builds we noticed the progress bar loading was taking up 25 per cent of the CPU.

I’m still amazed Opera has such a tiny footprint
This has been a focus for us – Opera runs on 10 year old hardware. But we noticed external code takes up time and we write our own libraries. There are libraries out there that satisfy a lot more different kinds of programmers – but when you use it your program becomes bigger and slower.

I thought that was pretty interesting how Opera Mini has had over 1 billion pageviews already. That’s pretty insane if you think about it, and if you’re wondering how they know the number of pageviews it’s because all site requests go through their servers where the pages are optimized and scaled for the best viewing possible on small screens. This even includes scaling images so that they don’t hog your bandwidth.

With Opera 9.5 Beta (hopefully) around the corner we might possibly see Opera tying all of their browsers together. For example, my bookmarks should get synced with their servers so that they are accessible where ever I am. Then when using Opera on the Wii or Opera Mini on my phone I would be able to access all of the bookmarks that I’ve already saved on my desktop. That should have been something on my list of "5 things that can make Opera better."

Source: The Register [via Opera Watch & Slashdot]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on November 02, 2007 by CyberNet.

Winamp 5.5 has all kinds of great new features, but one of my favorite things is the new Bento skin that it includes. It’s not only slick, but also very functional. Pieter over in our forum posted a cool Easter Egg that involves the Bento skin, and I think you’re going to like what you see.

The process of activating the Easter Egg isn’t new, but the result is different than it used to be. Here’s how you activate it:

1. Give Winamp’s main window focus.
2. Press the following keys: N, U, L, Escape, L, Escape, S, O, F, T.

Pressing the Escape key is necessary because the “Open File” dialog box pops up after pressing the “L” key. Here’s an alternate way to do it:

1. Give Winamp’s main window focus.
2. Press and hold the Shift and Control keys, then type : N, U, L, L, S, O, F, T.

In older versions of Winamp it would add “IT REALLY WHIPS THE LLAMA’S ASS!” to the title bar of the application (as seen in this screenshot), but if you’re using Winamp 5.5 with the Bento skin you’ll see something a little different. Whenever you play a song the transparency of the skin will “throb” in and out. Here’s what it looked like at one point while playing a song:

It can really make you go crazy after a little while, but it is cool nonetheless. The player will return to normal when you restart the program, so there is no need for you to frantically trying to disable the Easter Egg.

I was also glad to see that one of my favorite Easter Egg’s still exists in the program. Pull up the Winamp Preferences and go to Input -> Nullsoft Vorbis Decoder and then press the About button at the bottom. Start clicking the little fish as fast as you can with your mouse and see how many RPM’s you can get:

You gotta love Easter Egg’s.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 21, 2008 by CyberNet.

Late last year I highlighted what I believed to be the 5 best features in Vista that often don’t get any recognition. Among those features I talked about the file previews in the new Windows Explorer, which can be opened by going to Organize -> Layout -> Preview Pane. This gives you the opportunity to view the content of the file without needing to open an additional application. It’s quite clever actually.

The only problem that I’ve found with it is that you’ll often need to have a third-party application installed to get previews for certain types of files. For example, you won’t be able to preview PDF’s without a program such as Adobe Reader installed. And no Microsoft Office will mean that you can’t preview your Office documents. It would have been much better if more preview handlers were included out-of-the-box, but maybe we can makeup for Vista’s shortcomings.

The How-To Geek scrounged up a free program that will ease some of the burden, but only after he walks through the daunting steps to configure the preview handler manually. The free app is called PreviewConfig (no install needed), and it can be used to associate some additional file extensions as plain-text or media. There are quite a few areas where this would be beneficial, such as a CSS (cascading style sheet) file which is really just a text file with a special extension. With PreviewConfig you could associate that with being plain-text so that a preview will be available. Similarly you can find media extensions that do not have a preview available, but they have to be playable in Windows Media Player.

PreviewConfig Homepage [via The How-To Geek]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on September 10, 2009 by CyberNet.

Windows only
There are some things I never understood with Microsoft. For example, why was it never possible until Windows 7 to have a keyboard shortcut for creating a new folder? Or for that matter why was there not even a toolbar icon you could add to perform that action? At least in Windows 7 they finally assigned Ctrl+Shift+N for creating a new folder, but that’s not the only thing that’s perplexed me.

Another thing that bothers me is why they make it so difficult to paste plain text in Microsoft Office. In Office 2007 you have to click the menu button located underneath the “Paste” icon, select “Paste Special”, select the “Unformatted Text” option, and then click “OK.” Really? I mean really? When I click the paste menu why would it not offer me three options: paste, paste unformatted, and paste special? I have a hard time believing that I’m the only one with this issue. Oh well, I know I’m talking to a wall.

If you feel the same way there’s a pretty nice app called PureText that makes the whole process a lot easier. You can create a customizable keyboard shortcut (default is Windows Key+V) that when pressed will insert the clipboard contents as plain text. All text formatting will be removed, but line breaks, tabs, and other “white space” is preserved. The clipboard contents also remains in-tact so that you can still paste the formatted version using Ctrl+V later on down the road if you need to. And the cherry on top is that it works across all Windows applications.

PureText is free, and doesn’t require any installation. All you have to do is download and run it to get started where it will sit in your System Tray. Just click on the icon if you want to change any of the settings.

PureText Homepage (Windows only; Freeware; Portable; Tested on Windows 7 64-bit)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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