Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on April 04, 2007 by CyberNet.

Click to Enlarge the Mockup

Mozilla is working on a new addition for Firefox called Coop, and the goal of the project is to add some social networking features to the browser. I was actually really shocked when I heard about this because Flock, a browser based on Firefox, has already gotten a huge headstart at implementing social features that connect users with their favorite services such as Del.icio.us and Flickr.

The Coop Firefox extension will let you track your friends pictures, bookmarks, movies, blog posts, and essentially anything else they feel like sharing. Right now I’m not huge into the whole social network thing like MySpace and Facebook…in fact I don’t have an account on either service. It’s not that I feel it’s bad, but everyone I know who has those accounts seem to get consumed in them. Once you’re in, you’re hooked…kinda like World of Warcraft (another thing I forbid myself to try).

There is currently a prototype of the extension available in the Add-ons Sandbox (you’ll have to login to your Mozilla account in order to download it) that works only with Facebook for the time being:

This version is a very early prototype with only a fraction of the proposed functionality. It lets you log in to your Facebook account, see your Facebook friends, send them links by dragging and dropping them onto your friends, and see the links your friends send you.

While new Firefox features are always exciting to get, hopefully they are also focusing heavily on the memory leak issue that plagues so many users. A memory leak, for those unfamiliar with it, is when an application continuously eats up more and more memory (a.k.a. RAM) without ever releasing it. The result will either be a really slow program, or the application will just crash. Numerous memory leaks still exist in Firefox 2, but my experience in Firefox 3 has been much better with Firefox normally taking up less than 150MB of memory.

For right now this Coop feature is in the very early stages and may differ as the development progresses. One thing that I do like about Coop is that it is just an extension you have to install, so if you’ll never use it you don’t have to worry about it adding some extra weight to your browser.

Source: TechCrunch

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on December 28, 2006 by CyberNet.

I’m not sure if this is really the world’s largest Firefox logo but I would have to say that it is pretty close! It weighs in at 9.66MB and stretches 20502 x 19839 pixels. I mirrored the image on FileHo because I didn’t want to link to the private server that Jake sent me in the tip. I furiously tried to upload it to a photo service but Flickr only allows 5MB images for free accounts and AllYouCanUpload errored out each time despite it being a restriction-free photo service.

Once I had the image on my PC (as pictured above) I tried opening it with the Windows Picture Viewer but that crashed Vista. Then I decided to try Firefox and it slowly opened it. It took about 4-minutes for it to completely render and scale the image to the browser window, but the funny thing is that it didn’t scale it proportionally:

Eventually after it finished loading I was able to expand the image to its normal size. The scrollbars were still extremely small on my 24″ monitor (with a resolution of 1920 x 1200). I scrolled to a portion of the image that we would all be able to recognize…the nose. Here is what the nose looked like after I scaled it to fit this blog (the dimensions of the original screenshot before scaling was 1642 x 1084):

The nose was originally three times that size! For comparison sake here is a smaller version of the logo:

I was pretty amused by this. You can always play with the image yourself by downloading it here.

Thanks again for the tip Jake!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on May 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

I was pretty excited this morning to see that FeedDemon 2.5 was finally released. I had been Beta testing it for a month or two, and the improvements it incorporated put it at the top in comparison to other RSS feed readers.

Before I get started on what’s new, I want to point out that this application costs $29.95 to purchase. I bought a license a few months ago, and it has been worth every penny for me. I read hundreds of feeds everyday and skim through thousands of articles…without using FeedDemon that would be quite a chore. If you’re just a casual feed reader then I recommend using Google Reader (online feed reader) or RSS Bandit (free desktop application).

FeedDemon makes it really easy to flip through a large number of feeds in a short period of time, which is the reason I love it so much. I have used other desktop applications made for reading feeds, but they just don’t offer the power that FeedDemon does.

One of my favorite features in FeedDemon, which has been improved in the new release, is the Popular Topics. In a single click you can get a list of the popular topics across all your feeds:

This is done by looking for sites that are all linking to the same URL, and obviously the more people that are linking to a single URL the more popular that story probably is. Of course this doesn’t replace going through the feeds “manually,” but it does make it easy to see if anything big happened while you were gone. This is always the first thing I check when I get up in the morning.

Here is a list of what’s new in FeedDemon 2.5:

• Synchronized news bins with shared RSS feeds – share a FeedDemon “news bin” (similar to a link blog) as an RSS feed so that others may subscribe to it. Simply copy a post from any feed into a shared news bin, and everyone subscribed to that news bin’s feed will get a copy of it. You can also drag-and-drop FeedDemon browser tabs – or even hyperlinks from an external browser – into a news bin to share those links.
• Vastly improved offline support – including the ability to prefetch links and images in all unread items for offline reading.
• Completely rewritten “Popular Topics” – view the most popular topics in all the feeds you’re subscribed to, alongside the topics that are popular with all NewsGator subscribers.
• Embedded video support – video objects embedded in feed items can now be securely viewed inside FeedDemon.
• “Who’s linking here?” – with a single click, find out who in the blogosphere is linking to a specific post in your subscriptions.
• and much more…

One of the other features that I really like is being able to easily customize the feeds that appear in the desktop alert (a popup window similar to what you receive when someone instant messages you). In just a few clicks you can choose which feeds appear in the alert, instead of having to go through the properties of each feed individually:

Many of you probably know that I don’t purchase many applications, and I think there are only a small handful that I ever buy. Normally there are plenty of freeware options available to do what I’m looking for, but nothing matches up to what FeedDemon has to offer. Give it a shot and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Download the FeedDemon trial or purchase it for $29.95

Note: No, I wasn’t paid to write this review nor was I given the software for free. I really did spend the $30 out of my own pocket for FeedDemon after trying it out.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on September 18, 2007 by CyberNet.

When Flock 0.9 launched it was a pretty big overhaul, and now their next big milestone is Flock 1.0 which currently has a vague release date of Fall 2007. Honestly this is the dream browser for any heavy social network user out there, and hopefully they’ll pursue more of the less tech savvy people who use MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube because I can guarantee that they would absolutely love it.

I still believe that the best feature is the built-in feed reader, and after installing a nightly build of Flock 1.0 I had noticed that it is getting a pretty slick overhaul. As you can see in the screenshot above there is a lot of eye candy going on there, and the number of unread feed items are always prominently displayed in blue boxes next to the feed’s name. The only downside I see to such a design is that it doesn’t make it very easy for heavy reading since each line in the sidebar is a bit oversized, meaning you’ll probably only get to see a dozen or two feeds in the sidebar at a time.

The new feed reader is only one area that has been revamped, and here are some other things that will be coming in Flock 1.0:

• Redesigned MyWorld with a much nicer layout
• Notifier for when your friends have posted new content
• Easily drag and drop items onto friends, blogs or email for effortless sharing, publishing and communicating.
• Filmstrip view of your favorite photo and video streams from: YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, Piczo, Truveo and Facebook
• Flock helps you to discover photos, videos, feeds from your friends and favorite sources

Unfortunately all of these features do seem to come at a price, and you’ll be "making the payments" with your computer’s memory. Having tested out the nightly build of Flock 1.0 left me in dismay at how much RAM it could actually eat up. At startup the browser choked down 50MB of memory, and after just three tabs that had risen to over 75MB! Now I’ve had similar problems with Firefox, but Firefox consistently uses 30MB less memory than Flock…so I guess you now know what the real cost of Flock’s added features. Maybe they’ll throw a curve ball and have some helpful optimizations by the time Flock 1.0 makes its way out the door?

Download Flock 0.9 (latest stable release)
Download Flock 1.0 Preview (nightly build, could be highly unstable)
Source: Flock Blog

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Voice recognition. Or, more specifically, speech recognition. It’s one of those technological wonders that we all seem to take for granted, while simultaneously throwing laughter its way for not being nearly sophisticated enough. Anyone that’s used an early generation Ford SYNC system — or pretty much any vehicular voice command system — knows exactly what we’re getting at. While processing speeds and user interfaces have made great strides in the past handful of years, voice recognition has managed to continually disappoint. It’s not that things aren’t improving, it’s just that they aren’t improving at the same rate as the hardware and software surrounding them. Even today, most new automobiles have to be spoken to loudly, pointedly and directly, and even then it’s a crapshoot as to whether or not your command will be recognized and acted upon.

For as much as we complain, we totally get it. Teaching a computer program how to recognize, understand and act upon the movement of human vocal chords is a Herculean task. Throw in nearly unlimited amounts of dialect and regional variation with even a single language, and it’s a wonder that programs such as Nuance’s Dragon Dictate even exist. Teaching a vehicle how to route calls, adjust volume and tweak a radio station is one thing, but having a program that turns actual speech into presentable documents requires a heightened level of accuracy. The newest build of Dragon Dictate for Mac (v2.5) allows users to seamlessly combine dictation with mouse and keyboard input in Microsoft Word 2011; it also gives yappers the ability to more finely control how Dragon formats text such as dates, times, numbers and addresses, while a free iOS app turns your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch into a wireless microphone. We recently pushed our preconceived notions about this stuff aside in order to spend a solid week relying on our voice instead of our fingertips — read on to see how it turned on.

Continue reading Nuance Dragon Dictate 2.5 for Mac review

Nuance Dragon Dictate 2.5 for Mac review originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Sep 2011 16:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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