Hasta La Gadget!

The perks of living in a big city, eh? Citizens of Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco are being treated to some three-dimensional March madness from the guys and gals at Nintendo. For the remainder of this month, Ninty’s 3DS handheld will be available to try and play in so-called Demo Pods (see above) at strategic locations in each marquee city. The Mii Maker app, nintendogs + cats, Madden NFL Football, Aslphalt 3D, and a selection of other games will be preloaded and waiting for you, letting you have a taste of what’s to come on March 27th. See Nintendo’s PR after the break for the full details.

Continue reading Nintendo rolls a 3DS Demo Pod across US, gets gamers salivating for March 27th launch

Nintendo rolls a 3DS Demo Pod across US, gets gamers salivating for March 27th launch originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Mar 2011 09:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on August 07, 2008 by CyberNet.

Mozilla is apparently not going to sit on the sidelines while browsers such as Flock get all of the social fanfare. Instead they are trying to develop a way to integrate Web 2.0 services such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Talk, and more into a central location that makes following your friends easy. Huh, sounds like exactly what the Flock browser is for.

Snowl (download) is the name for Mozilla’s project, and it ships in the form of a Firefox extension. Once you get it installed you’ll be able to enter in the address of RSS feeds, provide your Twitter credentials, or import an OPML file containing a list of feeds.

After you get it all setup you’ll want to pull up the View menu in Firefox. From there you can show the Message List, which is simply a listing of your feeds in a classic three-pane fashion:

(Click to Enlarge)

Any RSS feeds for blogs or websites will appear at the top of the list, while people you’re following (currently only available with your Twitter account) will appear at the bottom.

Also in the View menu you’ll see an option for a River of Messages. This is a two-pane interface that makes it possible to scroll through all of your messages without needing to click on any of them. Normally when I’ve used these kind of layouts in the past the scrolling is always done vertically, but for some odd reason this one is horizontal:

(Click to Enlarge)

I’m extremely disappointed with how the extension handles itself, but I guess I’ll cut them some slack since this is still a very early prototype. Snowl, in its current state, can’t hold a candle to how well the Flock browser has integrated the social web. Here are some of the reasons I’m not impressed:

• The interface is very rough around the edges. For example, the vertical divider in the River of Messages view covers the text as you scroll horizontally. This particular view still needs a lot of work.
• Aren’t designers always taught to minimize the horizontal scrolling? Why is it then that they’ve decided to implement their River of Messages view horizontally rather than vertically like other feed readers.
• Tighter integration with web services is needed. I shouldn’t have to go to the settings in order to setup my Twitter account. The extension should recognize when I’m on Twitter’s site, and ask whether I want my account associated with Snowl. And providing my Twitter credentials only lets me read messages from friends… I can’t even respond to them from the extension?
• Better sidebar functionality is a must. I can’t tell which feeds have unread items, can’t group them into folders, or anything like that.

Maybe I’m being overly hard on Mozilla since this is still early in development, but I hardly think it’s usable in its current state. They should have held off a bit more, and polished the extension up a bit. It just feels like Mozilla is trying to play catch-up with Flock now, and is losing big time.

Get Snowl 0.1

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on December 04, 2006 by CyberNet.

Microsoft is really trying to show off what Vista is capable of doing graphically by creating their own application that uses the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). The program that they have created is a 3D way for you to view your RSS feeds and is called UniveRSS (took me a minute but then I realized the name is like “universe”). Here is a brief overview of how the feed reader works:

It introduces a full-screen 3D universe where galaxies represent the folders of your RSS feed directory, and the stars are represented by the spinning cubes that hold the feed information. Size and position of the feed cubes indicate how many unread items they contain.

You navigate through the feed galaxies in a game-like environment, freely moving in all three dimensions. Selecting items in lists will turn the cube to the next side displaying the item’s content including images. Just click the right mouse buttons and you turn back to the list view or to the galaxy.

UniveRSS is a showcase application that demonstrates the use of several WPF features, 3D animations, data binding, and data visualization. Currently UniveRSS uses the RSS Feed Store managed through Internet Explorer 7. Later versions will allow you to manage the Feed Store from within the UniveRSS application.

Two things came to my mind when I saw this and the first thing was the system requirements. I looked and it requires Vista running with a compatible WDDM graphics driver which means it won’t work on my laptop (but should do fine on my desktop). The second thing that popped into my head was how useful this would really be. Sure it looks cool but there is no way that I could navigate through my 1,000′s of feed posts that I receive every hour by shuffling through cubes. This is obviously meant for the casual RSS subscriber.

Not only that but if you want to use UniveRSS you’ll need to have your feeds stored in Internet Explorer 7. That was the “nail in the coffin” for me not installing the program. They mentioned that future versions will have its own storage system but for right now you’ll have to use IE 7.

So I haven’t tried this myself so I don’t know what the graphics are really like but I can’t imagine that is anything so great that it should require users to have Vista installed with a WDDM driver. In the coming months we may see a knock-off version of this written in OpenGL or something along those lines that works with more than just Windows Vista.

Download UniveRSS

News Source: Neowin

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on November 24, 2006 by CyberNet.

The next version of the Vista Transformation Pack (VTP) should be coming up in the next month or so but testing is now underway. If you haven’t used the VTP on your XP machine then you are surely missing out. Once installed it will make XP  look like Windows Vista by applying a transparency to the border of the windows as well a skin that is unbelievably similar to what is included with Vista.

One thing that everyone always complains about with the VTP is that it has problems uninstalling and returning your PC to the previous state (icon restoration is the biggest problem I hear about). With that being said the new VTP 6 RC1 is a test release and isn’t exactly something that I would install on my primary system, but that is my personal preference.

You can view the full changelog and join in a discussion about VTP 6 at JCXP.net. Reading through some of the posts that are already there show that there have been some problems with the installation but the developer has already fixed that problem. If you are feeling like your PC needs a change then go ahead and give it a whirl.

Download Vista Transformation Pack 6.0 RC1

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on June 12, 2006 by CyberNet.

Alright, Google continues to be on a roll with the release of Google Earth 4 Beta (of course it is Beta). There are a variety of enhancements that you will see while using the new version. Some of these new features include a new user interface, integrated SketchUp designs, and some KML improvements.

I would say that the biggest thing is that there are Mac and Linux versions now available! The Mac version is a universal binary which will definitely expand the Mac user base for Google Earth. I knew the Linux version was in the making but I wasn’t expecting a release so soon, especially a completely new version!

Google Earth 4 Beta Homepage
Download Google Earth 4 Beta

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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