Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on January 04, 2010 by CyberNet.

Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about. Don’t forget to send in your own tips, or just leave a comment on this page if you think you’ve got something we should include.

–News–

Google Chrome Nabs #3 Browser Spot
Internet Explorer has been on a rather fast decline, and that point is driven home by the fact that it has lost nearly 1% of its market share in each of the last 6-months. Chrome keeps on pushing forward as it squeezes into 3rd place past Safari, but still lags far behind IE and Firefox. All browsers seem to be making progress with the exception of IE, and with some luck we may see Firefox cross the 25% threshold next month.

BaconBits: BitTorrent Tracker for “Good” Reddit Users
I have to say that I was rather surprised to see a BitTorrent Tracker that is geared solely towards the Reddit community. In order to be a member of this site you must have signed up at Reddit over 3-months ago, have at least 100 comment karma, and have at least 1 link karma. As long as you meet those requirements there is nothing else you have to worry about… meaning there is no certain ratio you have to hit to remain an active member.

Firefox 4.0 Pushed Back to Late 2010/Early 2011
Mozilla is letting the deadlines slip once again. The Firefox 3.6 release is now expected sometime in the 1st quarter of 2010, which kicks back Firefox 4.0 to the late 2010/early 2011 timeframe. I understand that issues arise and release dates have to be adjusted accordingly, but I hope Mozilla realizes how competitive the browser market is becoming now that Google has joined the race to dethrone IE. Maybe Mozilla needs to hire on some more people so that they can hopefully meet their initial targets.

–News in Brief–

Most Pirated Movie of 2009 Makes Heaps of Money
Star Trek is said to be the most pirated movie of the year, and according to estimates the movie still profited over $100 million.

Verizon Forces Subscribers to Use Bing
Microsoft struck a $500 million deal that has forced Verizon Blackberry users to use the Bing search engine.

Google Android Event Tomorrow
Google temporarily posted the support page for the Nexus One, which is expected to officially be announced tomorrow.

–Tips, Tutorials, and Reviews–

How to Temporarily Change the Default Program for Filetypes
Coffee is a pretty cool portable app that will let you define a custom set of default applications to use when the program is running. For example, you could use Coffee to make a portable version of Firefox your default browser. All you’d have to do is plug in your USB drive, fire up Coffee, and it will kick in and make the portable Firefox the default app for your web surfing needs.

Enable Windows Aero in Vista/Windows 7 Home Basic
If you’re running Vista or Windows 7 Home Basic I’m sure you’re aware that you can’t take advantage of everything the OS has to offer since you don’t get Aero support. Well, this app will remove that limitation. Assuming your graphics card can handle Aero this app will make the necessary changes so that the additional functionality will be made available to you, and it will disable future hardware checks that could cause Windows to disable it.

–Tips in Brief–

SPlayer – A Lightweight Media Player
This portable media player is compact, free, has a clean UI, and is easy on system resources. A killer combination.

Check Unread Counts for Gmail, Wave, Reader, and More in Chrome
This Google Chrome extension will monitor most of your Google services for unread items.

Upload Files to Dropbox by Email
If you leave this app running on a PC you’ll be able to upload files to your Dropbox account simply by attaching files to an email.

Thumbnail Database Files (thumbs.db) Cleaner
You could simply just search your computer for these files, but this provides a slightly different approach for deleting those pesky thumbnail files from your machine.

Manage Your Windows 7 Library Settings
Get complete control over your Windows 7 libraries: add/remove them, change icons, change default saving location, and more.

–Downloads–

• Defraggler 1.16.165 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Dropbox 0.7.97 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• FileZilla 3.3.1 RC1 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Foobar2000 1.0 Beta 6 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• ICQ 6.5.2024 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Notepad++ 5.6.4 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Paint.NET 3.5.2 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• TeraCopy 2.1 [Homepage] [Mirror]

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on December 21, 2010 by CyberNet.

I’ve been using Google Latitude with some friends and family ever since it was released last week for the iPhone. I noticed that it used very little battery on my phone, which made me wonder how frequently it actually sends updates. To get this information I went ahead and enabled the history functionality that keeps a log of all the coordinates that your device has sent.

I found that if I was relatively stationary for a period of time, such as being at home, that no updates would be sent to Google. In that respect it is pretty smart. That got me curious as to the logic that Latitude uses on my iPhone to determine when to send updates. After a little searching around I came across this article that explains the update interval for the different platforms. Interestingly enough Latitude takes into account how fast your moving, how much battery life is left, and whether you’re switching between cell towers. Here’s a breakdown of how it works on your device:

Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian:

The background location update frequency isn’t a fixed amount of time. The update frequency is determined by several factors, such as how much battery life your phone has, if you are moving, or how fast you are moving. Background updating will only use cell ID or WiFi location detection depending on your device. GPS will not be used in the background to preserve battery life.

iOS-only (iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad):

Your location will only update in the background when you’re moving (exceptions: when you switch the app from foreground to background mode, or go from a “moving” to a “stationary” state, the app will continue to update your location for a few minutes).

The background location update frequency isn’t a fixed amount of time. The update frequency is determined by several factors, such as how much battery life your phone has, if you are moving, or how fast you are moving. Background updating will only use cell ID or WiFi location detection depending on your device. GPS will not be used in the background to preserve battery life.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on May 21, 2010 by CyberNet.

Ashley and myself have always been on the lookout for the perfect iPhone-to-iPhone messenger app that would let us drop down the number of text messages that we send each month. After all, about 75% of the text messages that we send every month are between each other, and thanks to push notifications on the iPhone I figured a dedicated messenger could potentially save us a lot of money.

We have tried all kinds of messenger applications. For awhile we used apps like BeejiveIM (iTunes) and IM+ (iTunes) because they would just integrate in with our existing Google Talk accounts. This worked out pretty well, but we found that both apps would get “disconnected” from the accounts regardless of whether we had the maximum disconnect time of 7 days. That’s why we moved on to other messenger apps that used their own account systems, and are therefore able to keep you connected at all times.

We had tried a lot of apps, and forced ourselves to use them for at least a week so that we could get a feel for both the user interface and the reliability of the service. Here are the ones we didn’t like:

• Textie (iTunes – free and in-app purchase to remove ads): This is one of the better ones because the interface is decent, and it was the most reliable out of the bunch. The problem was that we had already set our hearts on the winner that we mention later on, and this just wasn’t good enough to pull us away from it. This does do group conversations.
• PMessenger (iTunes – paid and free versions): This was one of the most reliable messenger apps, and we could always feel confident that the other person received the message. To aid in the reliability it also offers indicators that tell you whether your message has been read by the recipient already. The interface, however, is not that great. This does do group conversations.
• TextPlus (iTunes – paid and free versions): This app is largely targeted towards people who want to send text messages to other users’ cellphones, but I wanted to try it as an iPhone-to-iPhone messenger as well. The interface was okay, but it just didn’t have a good enough reliability factor to make it useable. Messages that we would send one another weren’t always delivered, or at least we’d never get the corresponding notification. This does do group conversations though.
• Ping! (iTunes – paid and free versions): The interface for Ping! was actually pretty good, but this too suffered from random messages not showing up. This does not do group conversations.
• WhatsApp Messenger (iTunes – paid only): I liked this app because it would show you when the recipient had read the message, and the reliability was really good. At times the interface seemed cluttered though, and not offering a free version meant that I couldn’t have some of my friends download it without convincing them to drop a little money. Sure, it’s not expensive, but I want my friends to have the option of whether they want to buy the app or not. This does not do group conversations.

So what app has won our heart? It’s Hello! Messenger (iTunes – paid and free versions). The interface is gorgeous, and while the reliability was flakey initially I can say that it has been nearly perfect since the last release. Here are some of the features I’d like to highlight:

• The box where you type your message expands as your message gets longer, just like in the native SMS app.
• There is an indicator for whether your messages have been read of not.
• Your account information is retained on their server. That means you could easily pick up a new device, login, and see all of your contacts without needing to add them all over again.
• You can have group conversations.
• The available sounds that can be played when you receive a message actually sound good, which is not something a lot of the other apps can boast.
• There is an indicator to let you know when the other user is typing.

(Click to Enlarge)

After using this app for a few weeks both Ashley and I feel that it’s actually nicer than the built-in SMS app in most areas. I’ve also contacted the developer, and he has said that both Blackberry and Android versions should be out by the end of the month… which is rather incredible. That means nearly all of my friends would be able to use this app, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them jump on board. Plus he said a native iPad app will be started once some of their other developments wrap up.

If there was one negative thing I could say about the app it’s that the primary user identification consists of 7 random numbers/letters. That doesn’t bother me too much since you can find friends by name or phone number, but the app also makes it easy to send your ID to your friends via SMS or email. This is a petty complaint, and overall I’d say this is leaps and bounds beyond the other apps.

By using Hello! messenger we’ve been able to drop down from our unlimited text plan ($30 per month on the family plan) to just 200 text messages per month ($5 per phone = $10 per month). That means we save $20 every month thanks to this app! Needless to say we use this app so much that we decided to spend the $1.99 and grab the ad-free version.

Hello! Messenger (iTunes – paid and free versions)

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

Flipboard on iOS has had audio for some time, giving users the chance to go all high-brow as they listen to NPR while browsing the news on their iPad. It’s Android’s turn to adopt that cultured stance: an update to Flipboard on its newer platform includes the full, listen-in-the-background Audio category channel selection, whether it’s thoughtful public radio snippets or spotlights on podcasts and artists. SoundCloud mavens get the biggest fill, both through a direct link to their account as well as a list of specialized channels. Anyone who can already use Flipboard for Android just needs to hit Google Play to add the new audio dimension; Kindle Fire and Nook owners should see a fully tailored experience in a matter of days.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

Flipboard for Android gains audio, lets us tune into SoundCloud from our Samsung originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Oct 2012 11:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There’s a good reason Foursquare has an Overshare badge. Still, that hasn’t stopped the location service from rolling out an update to Android users that simplifies broadcasting your position to the world. The Android check-in screen now matches that of the iOS app with a more streamlined appearance that more quickly shares updates with Facebook and Twitter; mentioning friends is easier as well. As long as your social circle doesn’t mind knowing that you checked into three different dance clubs in one night, Foursquare’s update awaits at the source.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

Foursquare for Android updated for more social check-ins, shares club-hopping with the world originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Oct 2012 18:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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