Hasta La Gadget!

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

Comments

Via: xda-developers

Source: Paranoid Android (Google+)

Wikipedia allows users to check out edits made to an article via its accompanying history page, which lists changes along with the date and time, IP address or username, and an edit summary. Such is a useful feature, providing essential information to the crowd-created and updated online encyclopedia. It doesn’t, however, make it simple to see the big picture, and that is what two developers have partly changed via their open source project.

The project displays a global map, and updates in real-time when a change is made on Wikipedia, displaying it as a small circle that flashes on the editor’s location, as well as the name of the article that was revised and the editor’s IP address. Below the map is a scrolling text box containing more information, including a link to the article, the language of the article, and the city, state, and country where the edit was made.

So far, edits made on the English, Japanese, Russian, German, Spanish, Indonesian, and French Wikipedias are available, with users being able to select one or more to view. When watching the map under the English version of the website, it averaged about 500 edits per 33 seconds. While the edits shown are substantial, the project only tracks those made by unregistered users, which represent about 15-percent of the edits made to the online encyclopedia. The information is pulled via live feeds broadcast with Wikimon.

The programmers behind the project advise that, according to a survey done in 2007, edits made by unregistered users on Wikipedia are often of less value than ones made by registered users, advising that you can correct an issue if you happen to spot one while using their real-time visualization. The project was built using DataMaps, d3, and other services and libraries, and is open source for anyone to grab on github.

Watching the map provides an interesting passive sort of observation, giving us a peek into what articles are of interest to users and where those users are located. When observed long enough, shifts can be noticed, such as edits increasing and decreasing with the fluctuations of waking and working hours, topic trends, and more.

SOURCE: Hatnote

Project shows Wikipedia changes in real-time is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Some of you may have heard of Philips’ Ambilight, a technology that’s only present in some of the company’s high end TVs. Ambilight projects ambient lighting that matches the colors and brightness of what’s being displayed on screen. Lightpack does the same thing and then some. Plus, it can be installed on any TV or monitor.

Lightpack consists of a small central device that you attach at the back of your TV. The box connects the 10 small LED strips that provide the lighting to a desktop computer where you’ll install Prismatik, the software that controls the LEDs. Prismatik analyzes the images being output from your PC or Mac to your display and instructs the LEDs to light up accordingly.

Keep in mind that Lightpack isn’t capable of analysing data coming across an HDMI cable to add ambient light to TVs without a computer. Its makers are working on another project to do that, but it’s not likely to make it to market any time soon due to HDMI/HDCP licensing issues, Phlips exisiting Ambilight patents, and high production costs.

Prismatik also has many advanced features. For example, you can turn the LEDs into mood lighting even when your TV is off. Because Lightpack is built on open source hardware and software, if you know how to program you’ll be able to extend its functionality, like using the LEDs for Skype notifications or for indicating the temperature. Watch the video for more:

Pledge at least $80 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a Lightpack unit as a reward. Note that the current unit only works with displays that have a diagonal length between 10″ to 50″. If you have a larger TV you might need to get two Lightpacks.

Fresh off of a trip to North Korea, Google’s executive chairman has found himself on stage here in New York City. Eric Schmidt is kicking off the second day of D: Dive Into Mobile 2013 here in the Big Apple, and we’re just a few feet away — you know, so we can liveblog every last word of it. And, to ogle his fashionable sneakers. For those looking for a glimpse into yesteryear, you can relive our liveblog from Schmidt’s D9 keynote in 2011 right here. Head on past the break for today’s interview!

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Google

Comments

If you’re a programmer of some kind, then you’re undoubtedly familiar with GitHub, an online collaboration website that allows programmers to share and collaborate on open source projects. The site turned five years old today, and the founders announced that GitHub has 3.5 million users with over 6 million repositories.

In a short-and-sweet blog post from the three founders of GitHub, they note that 6,000 users were signed up with the website when it first launched five years ago, and it was home to just 2,500 repositories at the time. That number has since grown tremendously, obviously, but it shows how far the service has come in just five short years.

GitHub reached the one-million-user mark back in September of 2011, and three million users were gained in January of this year, meaning that 500,000 new users signed up for GitHub in just a matter of months. The site was co-founded by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett back in 2008, and now Github employs over 150 people.

Not only is GitHub a great place to share your open source creations and to collaborate with other programmers, but you can also use GitHub to receive feedback on your products. Users can ask for reviews, comment on lines of code, report issues, and even ask other users about ideas that they have and attempt to turn them into a reality.

[via The Next Web]

GitHub turns five, boasts 3.5 million users is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.