Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve held no punches in sharing our thoughts on Palm’s recent ad campaigns, but the one spot that was actually not heinous has seemingly served as the basis for one of Microsoft’s first-ever WP7S commercials. Debuting here at the tail-end of MIX, the ad spotlights Anna — a fictitious gal we’ve certainly heard of before — using her new smartphone to share photos with her dear lover Miles. It also features Luca, a kid with an undying love for playing Xbox LIVE titles, who seems to be caught somewhere in between the world of nature and nurture. At any rate, it’s worth your while to give the new Microsoft commercial and the Palm ad which it has oh-so-much in common with right after the break.

Oh, and Palm — we guess “Windows Phone 7 Series was your idea,” right?

Update: Yes, that definitely looks like an HTC HD2 at the 0:43 mark, but you can rest assured WP7S won’t ever come to that gem in native fashion.

[Thanks, Sean]

Continue reading Microsoft takes a note from Palm in new Windows Phone 7 Series ad

Microsoft takes a note from Palm in new Windows Phone 7 Series ad originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon has at last released Kindle for Mac, which means you can now read your Kindle books on most any device. It joins the iPhone, PC Blackberry and, of course, the Kindle itself.

Like the PC version, Kindle for Mac is a bare-bones reader. You turn pages with either the scroll-wheel of your mouse or the arrow keys, and it stays in sync with any other device authorized for the same account. You can view notes and bookmarks made on other devices, but you can’t create new ones (a limitation shared with the PC version).

It’s pretty bad. If you want to zoom the text, for example, the standard Mac shortcuts are Cmd + and Cmd -. They don’t work. Instead you have to open a special panel, which can leave a blank “cut-out” in the text after it has been closed.

It is a beta, but you only know that if you open up the “about” box. We guess it’s nice to have a way to read on a computer, and even better to have a local archive of your books, but I can’t help feeling that a company the size of Amazon could do better than this. Especially as it bought the quite excellent Stanza almost a year ago, which has a great Mac app, along with the iPhone version.

Amazon might be happy selling books, and not care about the devices they are read on. But if you carry on like this, Amazon, people will be pushed to buy their readers, and books, elsewhere.

Kindle for Mac [Amazon]

Press release [Business Wire]

See Also:

• Large-Screen Kindle Won’t Mean Squat if Apple Tablet Arrives
• Showdown: Kindle 2 vs. Sony Reader
• Kindle Goes International — With a Little Help From AT&T
• Amazon Brings Kindle to iPhone
• Kindle for PC Ships, Hints at Future Color Kindle

A new iPhone dock and speaker from iLuv offers an unusual twist. A literal twist, even. It turns the iPhone 90-degrees and holds it, charging, in landscape orientation. By day, this isn’t so useful, but by night, it means that the screen can display a big clock so you can know the exact times you wake up cold and sweating from your many fevered nightmares.

The hardware is called the iMM190 App Station and it pairs with a free iPhone application called iLuv App Clock. They collaborate to lull you to sleep at night with your own music library, wake you in the morning with your choice of sounds and all the while tell you the time and weather (so you can decide whether it is worth getting out of bed). The iMM190 can be used upright or horizontally and powered from either the mains or from six AA batteries.

Unless you are the couple in the picture above, who sleep with the lights on, then you may not use the actual clock at night. I have tried a bunch of alarm apps and, while they work to wake me with mellow music, the glow of the screen is too bright. Even with a blank black screen image and the backlight turned all the way down, enough photons escape the screen to illuminate the room slightly. This isn’t a criticism of the iLuv app, just a note on iPhones in general (and on my hypersensitivity to the light creeping into my hermetically sealed bedroom).

We do like this trend of marrying hardware and software, though, especially as the apps (including this one) often come free, a kind of software promo. The speaker will cost you actual dollars, though: Ninety of them.

iMM190 [iLuv. Thanks, Jennifer!]

iLuv App Clock [iTunes]

This article was written on June 26, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Mac only
For me using a computer without keyboard shortcuts would be like trying to cut the grass with a pair of scissors. Sure it could be done, but it would take a lot longer to accomplish a task that should take no time at all. One thing that I’ve come to notice is that keyboard shortcuts seem even more important on a Mac than on a Windows machine.

What’s nice is that Apple has not only made it simple to edit many of the built-in keyboard shortcuts, but they also let you create your own keyboard shortcuts. Of course many of the application-specific shortcuts are terribly difficult to remember because the system-wide shortcuts have all of the easy key combinations. Since you’re able to create your own keyboard shortcuts, however, you might be able to get around that.

The first thing you’ll want to do is browse through all of the universal shortcuts that Apple has already created for the operating system, and then disable/change the ones you don’t think you’ll ever use. That way we can try to free up some of the easy to remember shortcuts for our own use later on.

1. Open the System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse. Then choose the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
2. You can double-click on any of the shortcuts listed to change the key combination used, or uncheck the box next to a shortcut to completely disable it. You can always return to the factory settings by clicking the Restore Defaults button in the lower-right corner.

Now we’ll get to the good stuff! What we want to do now is create our own keyboard shortcut(s) that can execute any menu item from within one or all applications. For example, using this method we could override the “New Tab” shortcut in Safari to be Command+N instead of Command+T. Here’s how you can do that:

1. Open the System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse. Then choose the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
2. Click the plus sign located in the lower-left corner to add a new shortcut.
   
3. From the popup choose an application from the list, or leave the All Applications option selected if you want the shortcut available throughout the entire operating system. Remember though, the shortcut will only work if there is a corresponding menu item available.
   –Example: Choose Safari from the list of applications.
4. In the Menu Title box you’ll need to enter the menu item exactly how it appears in the menu.
   –Example: Type New Tab into the box.
5. Assign a shortcut by pressing the corresponding keys on your keyboard.
   –Example: We’ll use the Command+N shortcut, which will remove that shortcut from the “New Window” option in Safari.
   
6. Press the Add button to complete the process.

What’s the end result? In our example we set out to replace the new tab shortcut in Safari with the shortcut that is normally used to open a new window. If you followed the steps outlined above it should have worked, and you can easily tell whether it worked by opening up the File Menu in Safari:

Did you notice how the “New Tab” shortcut is now assigned Command+N, while the “New Window” shortcut has been removed all together? That’s a good sign that the new shortcut should be working.

Now you know everything that’s needed to modify, create, and override keyboard shortcuts on Mac OS X. Don’t forget that you can also create shortcuts for items in the Apple Menu, which includes the ability to sleep, restart, and shutdown the computer.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

Your Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryUsing Google’s Keyboard ShortcutsUltimate List of Keyboard ShortcutsKeyboard Shortcut Pop-up Menu Now in GmailCyberNotes: Our Favorite Thursday CyberNotes Articles

Ninth time’s the charm, sometimes! At least that’s Microsoft’s hope with IE9, which they’ve just announced at Mix, brings new HTML5 support (including HTML5 video!), hardware-accelerated 2D graphics, and a totally new JavaScript engine—and no XP support.

Microsoft’s just demoed the latest build of IE9, the final version of which doesn’t yet have a release date, and for something as sleepy as a browser, it’s pretty cool. Here’s what’s new:

HTML5

HTML5 is basically the talk of the town right now, assuming your town is populated exclusively by web developers and Apple apologists. It’s magic! It’s going to save the internet! It’s going to kill Flash! Etc. But really, it’s more subtle than that: It’s the next version of the entire language that underlies the web—HTML—and it supports a lot of interesting features, which will make websites behave more like apps. Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera have pretty much left Microsoft in the dust in terms for HTML5 support. Until now! Here are the HTML5 features Microsoft says IE9 will support:

• h.264 video: When people talk about HTML5 killing Flash, this is what they’re talking about. Some video sites, like YouTube and Vimeo, have been experimenting with video playback that doesn’t require a plugin to play. h.264 is the format standard the big sites have chosen to go with, and now Internet Explorer will support it.

• Embedded Audio: Just as the video tag allows for video to be embedded directly into a page without a plugin, the audio tag allows audio files to be embedded straight into the page. IE9 supports MP3/AAC codecs.

• Scalable Vector Graphics: Scalable vector graphics allow for the creation of certain types of graphics that scale perfectly—because they’re drawn as vectors, not plain images. It can also allow for rudimentary, Flash-style animations.

• CSS3: CSS is essentially what the web is formatted with, and Internet Explorer’s various CSS compatibilities have been maddening since, well, forever. IE9 supports more standards-based CSS3—including Selectors, Namespaces, Color, Values, Backgrounds and Borders and fonts—and should support more before launch. They’re finally trying, is the point.

The New JavaScript Engine

Modern web apps are loaded with JavaScript, to the point that new browsers are practically measured by how fast they can render it. (A faster JavaScript engine means sites like Gmail, Facebook and even Gizmodo don’t just load faster, but run more quickly.) Here’s how Microsoft says IE9 measures up right now:

Keep in mind that this is a WebKit-designed test, and that IE9 isn’t ready for release yet—Microsoft says they’ll still improve the rendering speed. And really, while IE9 might not outpace the fastest browsers out there, it’s at least close. And hilariously faster than IE8. In the onstage demo, IE9 didn’t do terribly well on the Acid3 test, either, scoring a mediocre 55/100, which they vowed to improve. But again, they’re at least trying, and when you’ve got the market share (and history of ignoring standards) that Microsoft does, this is, again, worth a lot.

2D Acceleration

Internet Explorer nine adds DirectX video acceleration for SVG graphics and even text rendering, which will make some SVG graphics and CSS3 rendering faster, but also applies to text rendering, which makes the entire browsing process a bit smoother.

HTML5 video rendering is much, much smoother than in Chrome (demonstrated onstage), simply because of Direct2D video rendering—Microsoft was able to demonstrate two 720p HD videos playing smoothly in the same browser window, while Chrome choked on just one. Getting this acceleration doesn’t require any extra code on the website’s part, though developers won’t be able to depend on this kind of video acceleration in their webpages, since it’s unique to IE9 and Windows, for now. More than allowing for absurd demos like this, what this means is that any video played back via the video tag in IE9 will simply use less CPU power than it would in another browser, which is an objective improvement. (Note: This won’t be available on Windows XP.)

Additionally, some Javascript rendering can also be offloaded to the GPU, which, again, helps speed along rendering and responsiveness for complicated web apps.

A lot of what Microsoft is doing here could be accurately described as catchup. And aside from the 2D acceleration features, there’s really not much new here, as far as your average browser is concerned. But Internet Explorer adoption is inevitable, and for Microsoft to embrace modern web standards—at least more than they have in the past—will have a measurable, positive effect on the internet, and the people who browse it. (From work, which I’m fairly sure is the only place where the computer-literate people use IE anyway.)

A Clean Break

It’s hinted on Microsoft’s IE9 site that some of the features of IE9 won’t be compatible with XP, and some commenters have told me the prerelease version doesn’t run on the aging OS. The truth, as confirmed by Mary Jo Foley, is more severe: IE9 will not support Windows XP.

A clean break at some point is inevitable, but this isn’t going to go over too well with the millions of XP loyalists still out there.

The Preview

You can actually try it now, though some of the features—most conspiciously HTML5 video—aren’t yet there, and the interface is still pretty barebones. (There’s no proper address bar, for example, but just a “go to” popup window. This is a developers’ test tool, really.) The download’s available here.

[Giz at Mix]