At Engadget, we tend not to make a big fuss about cleaning products, but this one deserves a little shout-out: Brasso, a well-established metal polish brand in good ol’ Blighty, is pushing out its Gadget Care polish gel to the masses tomorrow. What really caught our attention was the fact that this will be Brasso’s first new product for a whopping 110 years, but of course, at the end of the day it’s all about whether the polish does what it says on the bottle, and whether it’ll leave your gadgets’ paintwork unharmed. The selling point’s simple: not only does this gel clean your gadgets, but it also leaves a layer of silicone that’s supposedly both anti-static (or dust-hating) and smear-preventing. Well, ’tis certainly a very bold claim, so join us after the break to see if this new Brasso’s worth your money.
A few months earlier in the year, we covered the arduous process of staying connected while traveling abroad. One of the ways we mentioned for jetsetters, backpackers and common tourists to stay jacked in while situated far from their homeland was a MiFi rental service from Xcom Global. The company has only been operating for a matter of months, but we recently took their services for a spin in order to give you a more detailed look at what to expect. The long and short of it? These guys are the guys to contact when you’re about to grab your next passport stamp. Read on to find out why.
This article was written on June 20, 2008 by CyberNet.
Compiz Fusion on Linux has definitely received a lot of attention because of their innovative thinking, and the latest thing to come out of their lab is a plugin called Stackswitch. To put it simply it is an application switcher, but it comes packed with pizzazz. Once it’s activated it angles all of your windows so that it appears as though they are laying flat on a table that’s sitting in front of you, and the window you currently have selected stands up straight to draw more attention. Some aspects are also configurable, such as the angle at which the windows lie down.
As you might recall Compiz Fusion has already cloned Vista’s Flip-3D and Mac OS X’s Expose features. The Flip-3D feature is called Shift (video demo), and the Expose clone is called Scale (video demo). Stackswitch has its benefits over both because all of the windows are visible at the same time, and it’s more compact.
There’s one thing that I’m dying to know though… is this something you would actually use, or is it merely one of those things that you show off to your friends? Personally the thing that I still find myself using the most for switching between applications is Alt+Tab (or Command+Tab on a Mac). Take a look at this video demonstration of the new Stackswitch, and let us know whether you would ever use something like this:
We’ve all seen what a bumpy ride Nokia’s had over the last few months — disappointing profits, the departure of a couple of old friends, and the slight delay of the forthcoming N8. Despite all that, Espoo seems to have at least one stronghold that remained unshaken throughout the storm: its research center in Cambridge, UK. Yep, we’re talking about the magical place where Nokia and University of Cambridge co-develop the core technologies for the futuristic Morph concept. Actually, “futuristic” might be too strong a word here, as we were fortunate enough to see some of Nokia’s latest research at the heart of Morph — namely flexible circuitry and nanowire sensing — demonstrated live yesterday. Curious as to how well the demos went? Then read on — you know you want to.
This article was written on October 28, 2007 by CyberNet.
Have you ever wanted to morph multiple images together? You know, take a picture of your friend and have it morph into a monkey or something? I accidentally came across a free application today called Sqirlz Morph that will do just that.
A screenshot of the program can be seen above, but don’t let the stripped-down toolbars deceive you. This program has a powerful array of options that will help you morph images with ease. With that being said it took me 5 or 10 minutes before I fully understood how the program worked, and so I thought I would give some pointers:
You can use as many photos as you want in the morphing process, but the more images you use the more work you’re going to cause yourself. So you may want to be selective.
After you have your images open you’ll need to add a few morphing points to start with. This is done with the green plus sign on the side toolbar. When you add a morphing point on one image it will be added to all of them.
What you need to do now is switch over to the other photos that you’ve opened, and move the points around so that the key features match up between all of the images. You can move the points around by clicking the black arrow in the side toolbar, and then clicking on a morphing point. In the example above you can see that I made sure the eyes, mouth, and edges of the face matched up.
Go to Image -> Animation Order if you want to change the image morphing order.
I chose to output my morphed images in a GIF format so that I could easily post the result in this article, but you can also save it as an AVI. When saving the image it asked for a frame rate, and 15 frames per second is pretty standard. I, however, chose just 3 frames per second so that you could clearly see the morphing process:
Adding the morphing points to the photos are a critical part of how Sqirlz Morph works. The result will not look right if you don’t take the time to properly align the points on the photos. That’s why in Step 1 I told you to be selective in how many photos you choose to use.
I have to admit that this is a pretty cool program, and I haven’t seen any other freeware that does the same sort of thing. You may not see a purpose for it right now, but at some point you may realize that this is just what you’re looking for. Bookmark it even if you don’t plan on using it right now.
Post links below to any images you decide to morph together. Can’t wait to see what some of you come up with.
I’ve had it. I can’t take all this Nokia operating system speculation anymore. The final straw came with a VentureBeat piece citing a “trusted source” that claims “Nokia is now likely to use Windows Phone 7 as an additional platform for its phones.” Enough already. Nokia has a strategy and hiring Stephen Elop away from Microsoft’s Office team isn’t going to change that no matter how much the US media (where Nokia has near zero presence) wishes it were true — if anything, it’s going to accelerate it.
This article was written on May 01, 2008 by CyberNet.
Yahoo Messenger is the number one instant messaging service, and they are really starting to show off the talent their development team has. It’s been over a year now since we first got a glimpse of what their Vista-specific messenger looked like. And disappointingly a lot of time has passed since it was last updated causing debate as to whether the project was still alive.
About two months ago they assured us that a new version was on the way, and they weren’t lying! The Yahoo Messenger blog announced today that the app has entered the Beta stage, and is ready to be downloaded. I have to admit that they have added some really nice features to this version, and it’s definitely not lacking in the eye candy department. Here’s an overview of what’s new:
Additional features and enhancements: – New and Optimized for Vista – WPF Interface – Skin Chooser – Customizable Contact List – Vector-based – Tabbed Conversations – Windows Sidebar Gadget
So the big news would have to be the voice support and SMS messaging. The video below shows the cool visualizations that users see when they are engaged in a voice conversation, and it’s pretty slick if I may say so myself. The SMS messaging is something that I really like. When you send a message to one of your friends using SMS it will automatically direct the replies back to the messenger, which eliminates the need to grab your cellphone. Very smart!
Kudos to the Yahoo Messenger team on a job well done, and I’m thinking the only thing this lacks now is video support.
If you’re an iPhone owner then you’ve certainly heard of the Mophie Juice Pack. It’s emerged as the external battery pack of choice for any iPhone owner needing more untethered power than Apple can provide from its non-removable batteries. But what about all those feisty upstarts? Can they compete in terms of design, functionality, and price? Let’s find out. We put two iPhone 4 external battery pack cases — the Mophie Juice Pack Air and Mili PowerSpring 4 — head to head to see how they perform. Both promise to double the iPhone 4’s 1420mAh li-poly battery life without adding too much bulk. And surely the 1600mAh capacity Mili outlasts the 1500mAh Mophie, right? You’d be surprised.
This article was written on September 03, 2007 by CyberNet.
CyberNet Exclusive Look
We’ve decided to break away from our normal CyberNotes today to take an exclusive look at the features in Opera 9.5 (codename Kestrel). Opera has done a remarkable job of keeping the specs and features of Opera 9.5 under wraps. The Opera Desktop Team wrote a post last week that detailed some of the under-the-hood work that has been going on in 9.5, but as expected, they steered clear of mentioning the most notable features. After all, they want to save the excitement for the big Alpha release tomorrow!
Luckily I was able to test drive Opera 9.5 a little bit early, and it’s only fair that I share my findings with you (and we have Opera’s permission of course). I’ve put together a 5-minute video review that details four of what I believe to be Kestrel’s most notable features. So you can start out by watching the video, or you can read through the article as I cover each feature there as well.
–Video Introduction–
I thought it would be best if I start with a video of Opera 9.5’s new features. All of these are covered in detail below, but this will give you a really good idea of what you can expect tomorrow when Opera 9.5 Alpha is released.
–Rendering Engine–
It’s been over a year since Opera’s rendering engine has seen any significant improvements, and this time around there are some significant improvements. Kestrel is now running the same rendering engine that powers the Wii Internet Channel browser as well as Opera Mini 4 Beta, and there are some astonishing differences…probably due to the thousands of bugs they’ve fixed.
I’ve been told to expect to see the rendering speed get better as further builds get released, but I have a hard time believing that they can get better than what I’ve seen. I decided to do a rather unofficial speed test to see how fast the different browsers rank in terms of loading our site (with an empty cache). I did three tests for each browser and averaged out the time it took for each to completely load our site. Here are the results with the slowest browsers first:
Internet Explorer 7: 18 seconds
Firefox 2: 15 seconds
Opera 9.23: 12 seconds
Firefox 3 Nightly: 11 seconds
Opera 9.5 Alpha: 8 seconds
Aside from speed improvements, the site compatibility has also gotten much better. They’ve fixed problems with various Google sites, some issues with the default WordPress template, and corrected a few things with some of the JavaScript libraries. Opera 9.5 can now handle many more sites…with ease!
Here are some of the other updates in Kestrel related to the rendering engine:
A lot more CSS3 support, including complete Selectors
Support for JavaScript 1.5 Getters and Setters
AJAX compatibility has been improved
New JavaScript engine that is faster and more efficient
Improved HTML table layout algorithm
–Open With… (in the video)–
Despite all of the hurdles Opera has overcome with their new rendering engine, there are still some sites that probably won’t work as they should. Opera isn’t going to deny that it happens, and they are actually going to do what they can to help the situation. You can now right-click on any site and choose to open it in another browser that is installed on your computer!
I’ve also been told that the “open with” command will work with some files as well, but complete support hasn’t been added yet. I would like to see this feature extended to things like images so that I can right-click on an image and have it open in Paint.NET without needing to save it first.
–Restore Windows (in the video)–
Opera has a little trash can on the Tab Bar that is normally used to restore tabs you’ve recently closed (which can also be done with Ctrl+Z). Kestrel has introduced a new feature that will let you restore entire windows that you have closed, which includes all of the tabs contained within that window. I don’t open multiple windows very often, but I know this feature will come in handy.
–Sync Bookmarks (in the video)–
This is one of those things that I had said Opera needs to work on the most. By this point, most Firefox users have grown accustomed to keeping their bookmarks synchronized with an online service. Now Opera users will have the same pleasure! All you need is a free My Opera account, and you’ll be able to privately synchronize your bookmarks, Speed Dial sites, and Personal Bar with their server. You’ll then be able to access that data whether you’re at work, home, or anywhere!
To setup synchronization just select the “Synchronize with My Opera” option from the File Menu.
–Full History Search (in the video)–
The search capabilities in Opera 9.23 vs. Opera 9.5 are like night and day. They have now introduced full history search that looks back over all of the pages you’ve visited. I’m not talking about just scanning the URL and title of the page either…it looks at all the text contained within each site!
There are two ways that you can take advantage of this feature, and the most common one will be straight from the address bar. As you can see in the screenshot above, I was typing in “thumb” into the address bar, and the resulting page that was returned is our homepage. That’s because I had recently visited CyberNet where “Thumbnails” was one of the words used, but it wasn’t in the title or the URL, it was just in the body of the article.
If you’re looking for a more detailed way to search your entire history, just type opera:historysearch into the address bar. The result will be a Google-like search page where you can type the keyword(s) that you are looking for. It will then return the results that matched just like in this screenshot:
–What You Don’t See–
It’s very obvious that there has been a lot of under-the-hood work in Opera 9.5, and you’ll be able to see that as soon as you start using it. There has particularly been a lot of fixing up for the built-in Mail Client. Now it has a new indexing and storage backend that doesn’t use as much memory and runs faster. IMAP also works much better, and the browser isn’t supposed to freeze anymore when checking for new mail or feeds.
Of course Opera still starts almost instantaneously, which is one of its best qualities. And memory usage has (somehow) gotten better. I’ve never seen Opera 9.2 climb over the 250MB marker, and that was when I would have 50 to 100 tabs open at the same time (hey, I go through a lot of news in a days time). Now it seems to run at about 80% of the memory usage that it used to, and for most people it will hover between 25MB and 70MB.
–And There’s More!–
I’ve covered most of the big stuff above, but that’s not everything! Here’s a list of some other things that have been improved in Opera 9.5:
The Status Bar is enabled by default…yay!
The “Save your password” dialog box does not stop the page from loading behind it. That way you can verify that the username and password you entered works before actually saving it. What a great feature!
Content blocking is better
A “drag to scroll” feature has been added that will let you scroll by “grabbing” the page, much like in a PDF reader. You can enable it by typing opera:config#UserPrefs|ScrollIsPan into the address bar.
It supposedly looks better on a Mac, and conforms to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Unfortunately I don’t have a Mac to try that out on.
–Making it Better–
There are some things that I believe Opera can do to make the final product even better, but one of the most important is inline spell checking. This is often the first complaint I hear from existing Firefox users who try Opera, and I think it is an extremely useful feature.
–Overview–
There’s no doubt in my mind that Opera 9.5 is going to be a truly amazing browser once it is released, and it will likely raise the bar for other browsers. However, the build being released tomorrow is an Alpha, and it will have issues at first. There might be sites that don’t work properly with it, and if you decide to try this out, make sure to install it in a separate location from your stable Opera installation.
For more details on some of the backend work done to Kestrel, read this article posted by the Opera Desktop Team.
Nothing spices up waning interest in an aging console like a special edition, and while one could say that announcing three special editions is something of a stretch for the word “special,” these certainly are some… vibrant color schemes. At its press event yesterday, Sony announced a couple of new, pupil-assaulting two-tone color schemes for the PSP, along with a Monster Hunter edition that left many an otaku fainting in the aisles thanks to its gold highlights and redesigned analog nub. Read on for our impressions of all three noble beasts.
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It’s very obvious that there has been a lot of under-the-hood work in Opera 9.5, and you’ll be able to see that as soon as you start using it. There has particularly been a lot of fixing up for the built-in Mail Client. Now it has a new indexing and storage backend that doesn’t use as much memory and runs faster. IMAP also works much better, and the browser isn’t supposed to freeze anymore when checking for new mail or feeds.
