Hasta La Gadget!

Before you know it, you’ll be enjoying a cleaner, shinier Firefox UI on Android — but not before Mozilla gets the more adventurous to test it out. The brand-spanking new interface merges the Start Page and the Awesomescreen, which is what you see after tapping on the URL bar. Thus, it will house your history, bookmarks, reading list and most visited websites in one place. While Mozilla UI engineer Lucas Rocha calls it the “biggest UI change in Firefox for Android” since the app was released, the update isn’t quite yet ready. If you’re unafraid of testing unstable releases, however, you can take the new UI for a spin via Firefox Nightly — Mozilla’s launchpad for new features. Everyone else, feel free to head past the break for a comparison image of the current and future interfaces.

Filed under: Internet, Mobile

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Via: Android Police

Source: Lucas Rocha, Firefox Nightly

I’ve seen some unusual user interfaces and input devices over the years, but one that I’ve never thought of before now is a pinwheel. Sure, there are games on the Nintendo handhelds which require that you blow on its microphone to create virtual wind, but this is definitely much a more tangible interface.

This pinwheel-based interface was designed by Adi Marom and the LAB at Rockwell Group as a mechanism for users to control videos of convertible Ultrabooks in Intel’s booth at CES 2013. A user simply blows onto the pinwheel, and it moves the frames in the video accordingly. The harder you blow, the faster the video advances. Here, check it out:

Pretty neat, eh? Sure, I can’t think of too many applications for a pinwheel interface, but it’s still kind of fun to watch.

It’s been a couple months since we first saw the fruits of team Paranoid Android’s labor around in-app pop-up window multitasking, and it looks like Paul Henschel and co. are finally sharing the finished product. HALO, as it’s called, loosely combines the ideas behind Samsung’s Multi Window and FaceBook’s Chat Heads into a slick multitasking interface. The feature is activated from the notification tray. It places an icon — or halo — on the display, which can be moved around very much like Chat Heads, or dismissed by double-tapping and dragging it towards the red X at the top. Swiping sideways from the halo shows a series of white lines and text bubbles that match and highlight the notifications in the status bar. Releasing your finger is like tapping on the selected notification, but instead of launching full-screen, the app opens in a pop-up window on top of whatever’s already running, just like Multi Window. The background app continues to run while you interact with the foreground app — to dismiss the pop-up window, simply tap outside of it. Other cool functionality includes swiping up to dismiss the last notification and the ability to pin apps permanently to the halo. But what’s really most exciting is that team Paranoid Android‘s decided to make HALO open source so anyone can be involved. Check out the awesome demo video after the break.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile, Samsung, Google, Facebook

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Via: xda-developers

Source: Paranoid Android (Google+)

Artists going all-out on mobile music editing have relatively few options — GarageBand won’t always cut it for the pros. IK Multimedia thinks its newly launched AmpliTube 3.0 could be the solution for those producers on the move. The $20 iOS app introduces a full, multi-track audio editor that can create a final masterpiece. With the help of a guitar rig and customizable drum loop, the suite is theoretically good enough to keep computers out of the studio. Even if musicians don’t want to go that far, they may be happy to hear that IK Multimedia has shipped the iRig HD. The $99 interface gives iOS and Mac users a preamped adapter for instruments with quarter-inch plugs. While we’re sure some performers would rather stick to traditional recording methods, those who’ve embraced digital with open arms can check out both AmpliTube and iRig HD at the source links.

Filed under: Cellphones, Peripherals, Tablets, Software

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Source: App Store (1), (2), IK Multimedia

Instagram has already made the jump to the web with profile and individual photo pages, but it’s fully embraced it today. You can now keep an eye on your entire Instagram feed in your desktop web browser (or mobile browser, for that matter), and make use of most of the functionality found in the mobile app. The key exception is that you still can’t upload photos using the web interface; Instagram says that it’s “about producing photos on the go, in the real world, in realtime.” You can like and comment on photos, though, and take advantage of a responsive design that lets you narrow the site to a single column more reminiscent of the mobile app.

Filed under: Internet

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Source: Instagram