Hasta La Gadget!

Android, as Andy Rubin (no relation) has pointed out on multiple occasions, plays a game of numbers. And at Google I/O, the company carrying on its development shared some large ones: 100 million activated devices with 400,000 being added each day. However, like in many games, different players can catch up or overtake each other at different points. Just ask Nokia and RIM. To stay on top, operating system vendors implement strategies that lock consumers in. The more money consumers sink into iPhone apps, for example, the more incentive they have to stay with that platform; the same is true for accessories that use Apple’s 30-pin dock connector that has been around since the third-generation iPod.

With Android having become the lead operating system for every smartphone company that licenses its OS with the notable exception of Nokia (which nearly did), Google showed that it’s intent not just on moving Android into other devices with sufficient computing horsepower such as tablets and, increasingly, TVs, but now has its sights set on having just about everything that can’t run Android directly feed into it. Google is taking two approaches – one for things that plug into Android devices, and one for things that don’t.

Continue reading Switched On: Adding to Android’s army

Switched On: Adding to Android’s army originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 22 May 2011 15:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on February 24, 2008 by CyberNet.

Ever since I released the Vista Flip3D mouse shortcut I’ve received a few emails from people who still prefer the Alt+Tab application switching (especially XP users who don’t have Flip3D). I have since modified my Flip3D AutoHotkey script, and spun it into a different variation that works great with the Alt+Tab key combination.

What this standalone (no-install needed) application does is execute the Ctrl+Alt+Tab key combination when you press and hold the left mouse button, and then press the right mouse button. The Alt+Tab application switcher will appear on the screen until you click on one of the windows that you want to switch to:

This should work in any version of Windows that supports the Alt+Tab key combination, and it can easily be set to start with Windows by placing it in your Startup folder located in the Start Menu. You’ll know this is running when you see the Vista-like orb in the System Tray, and you can temporarily disable the functinoality by right-clicking on the icon. Enjoy!

Here’s the one line of code needed for anyone looking to add this functionality to their own AutoHotkey script:

~LButton & RButton::send, {lalt down}{lctrl down}{tab}{lalt up}{lctrl up}

Download the AltTab Mouse Shortcut

UPDATE: Thanks to the commenters I found out that this script doesn’t work in XP since there is no Ctrl+Alt+Tab command. I’ve created a version that does work with XP, and it can be downloaded here. To use the XP version press and hold the left mouse button while you continue to press the right mouse button to switch between the windows. When you release the mouse buttons you will immediately be switched to the selected window. This version will also work in Vista if you would rather have this behavior over the “click to select” method mentioned above.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Alt-Tab Replacement Optimized for the MouseHelpful Tip: Vista Flip3D Mouse ShortcutCyberNotes: Override & Modify Keyboard Shortcuts on a MacHelpful Tip: “Open in New Tab” Keyboard ShortcutsCalibrate Your Mouse

This article was written on February 27, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

As you may have noticed by now we’ve been trying to cover a variety of Greasemonkey scripts on the site with our Best Greasemonkey Scripts series, and today we’re going to put it into overdrive. Below we’ve taken five extremely popular sites that have dozens (or hundreds) of Greasemonkey scripts available, and grabbed only the ones we’ve found useful.

I’ve tested all of the scripts below in Firefox 2 running the latest version of Greasemonkey, and can verify that they work on the sites as of today (02/27/2008). Some of the scripts will likely get broken in the future as sites are redesigned, but then we just have to keep our fingers crossed that the developers will update them.

Alright, now on to the five sites: eBay, Gmail, YouTube, Flickr, and Digg:

–eBay–

• Show Only Negative Feedback – This adds two new tabs to the feedback screen for “complaints left” and “complaints received.” It might give you a better perspective on the person you’re buying from since you can see negative and neutral feedback without going through a mile long list.
• My eBay Autologin – If Firefox automatically fills in your username and password this script will submit the login form for you. This makes the “auto-logout after a day” feature eBay has much less annoying.
• eBay Search Pictures – Not every seller decides to pay for a gallery image, but they often still include images of the auction item within the post. When performing a search on eBay this script will go fetch images for the results that don’t have them, and then place them next to the listing as if they were a gallery image.
• Display Totals with Shipping – When comparing items on eBay do you have a hard time adding the selling cost + shipping to get the final total? With this script a new column is added which totals the two amounts together for you. Thank goodness because that 4th-grade math can really be killer!

–Gmail 2–

• Gmail Account Multi-Login (Review) – Provides a quick drop-down menu for switching between multiple Gmail accounts.
• Folders4Gmail (Review) – Lets you create expandable/collapsible labels for better organization.
• Gmail Sidebar Remover (Review) – Removes the ads in the sidebar so that you can read emails in the full-width of the screen.
• Gmail HTML Signatures – Setup a unique HTML signature to be inserted that is based upon which email address you are sending from.

–YouTube–

• Videoembed – You how it can be annoying when a site links to a video on Youtube without actually embedding it? No problem, this script will recognize those links and automatically embed the video after the link. It works with about 20 different sites including YouTube.
• Download YouTube Video – Does exactly what you think it would… lets you download a YouTube video to your computer.
• YouTube Cleaner – You can toggle the comments and related videos on or off, which cleans up the interface… especially when you have those videos with hundreds of pointless comments.
• YousableTubeFix – The best thing about this script is that it resizes the video to fill up your screen. Underneath the video you’ll find several links for dynamically resizing the video.
• YouTube Prevent Autoplay – When viewing videos on the YouTube site you won’t have to worry about them automatically playing. Thank goodness!

–Flickr–

• Flickr Photo Page Enhancer – Adds links underneath the “Additional Information” section in the sidebar which link directly to the different size photos, and also provides hyperlinking code.
• Flickr Link Original Images – Adds a small button to the upper-left corner of the images which links directly to the original image.
• Flickr Remove Spaceball – Removes the empty image that is sometimes placed over Flickr photos to prevent them from being saved to your computer.

–Digg–

• Add Mirrors – This is the most condensed way I’ve ever seen to add mirror links to each Digg article. The links are shown as four small icons immediately underneath each “Digg It” button.
• Old Comments – Makes the nested comments look way better.
• Digg Me Later – This is really clever, and a script that I’ve been using for quite some time now. Whenever you click on an external link on Digg a green bar will be placed at the very top with a “Digg It” link. That way you don’t have to return to the Digg site just to Digg the article after you’re done reading it.

–Overview–

We know that many of you use Greasemonkey scripts on a regular basis, and we would love to hear what your favorites are! Just post them in the comments below.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Your Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryRunning Greasemonkey Scripts in Internet ExplorerCyberNotes: Your Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryGmail Greasemonkey APIBest Greasemonkey Scripts: Gmail Account Switcher

This article was written on October 23, 2009 by CyberNet.

I’ve been working on a new version of CyberSearch for a little while now, and I’ve been trying to come up with ways to add all of the most requested features. It wasn’t until about August 2009 that I started to get inspired to work on the extension again, which is when we all of a sudden saw a huge surge in downloads that has remained constant ever since. In the last 3 months we went from getting about 300 downloads a day and 10,000 active users to an astounding 3,000-7,000 downloads a day and almost 90,000 active users. I believe the rapid increase has been coming from the fact that we’re now a Mozilla “recommended” add-on, and as some users have pointed out to me our add-on sometimes shows up in the add-on management window within Firefox. So a big thanks to Mozilla for giving me the motivation to push out a new version, because without them the CyberSearch growth graph probably wouldn’t look like this:

CyberSearch 2.0 is almost a complete rewrite of the previous version, and I did that for performance concerns. Since I wanted to add more features I knew I had to squeeze every last ounce of juice out before I could move on, otherwise I could have ended up with something sluggish enough that people wouldn’t even want to use it. To put it in perspective… CyberSearch 2.0 actually does about half the number of computations that CyberSearch 1.0 did for each search that is performed.

As far as new features go we’ve got quite a few! The first thing is Bing support. You can now create keywords that use either Bing or Google, which is pretty cool if you think about it. That means you can make one keyword that searches Bing, and another that searches Google. If you don’t like the results that one search engine shows just try using the other… and all you have to do is change the keyword. The real reason I wanted to add Bing support, however, is because they have some API functionality that Google doesn’t offer. Thanks to Bing you can actually create keywords that will do conversions/calculations using their Instant Answer technology, or lookup the spelling of a word. You can do this all from the comfort of your address bar.

Next up: search descriptions. This is undoubtedly the most requested feature. You wanted some way to view the descriptions of all the search results just as if you were at the search engine page. I struggled with this for awhile because I didn’t want to try and cram the descriptions into the Address Bar menu which is already cramped, and could require a lot of scrolling to see all the results. That’s when I came up with the idea to use the area behind the menu for this! That way I have a large amount of space to work with, and am able to display way more details than I originally anticipated. For example, if you’re using a keyword with the Google Local service just press the arrows on your keyboard to highlight one of the results. You should see the background behind the menu dim down, and location details will appear… including a thumbnail of a map for where that place is located (as seen in the screenshot above)! All of the different types of searches provide you with customized details (video searches show the duration, book searches provide the ISBN number, blog searches show the publication date, etc…), and screenshots of them all can be found on the CyberSearch homepage.

Those are the two main highlights of the extension, but that doesn’t mean that’s all that changed. You’ll also find little things throughout CyberSearch 2.0 that should make your life a little easier. Things like a “snapback” button in the address for pulling up the last search phrase you used, or the ability to import/export your configuration and keywords so that setting up multiple machines with CyberSearch is a breeze! These were all your ideas, and hopefully they are exactly what you wanted.

When I describe my extension to people they often ask if it’s similar to Google Chrome’s “omnibar,” which is the name for their browser’s address bar. It eliminates the need for a search box just like CyberSearch does, but it isn’t nearly as powerful. Just watch this 3-minute video I put together and tell me if Chrome can do this:

The next thing I want to try and work on is localization so that CyberSearch supports other languages/countries, but it will probably be a little while before I can get to adding any big features like this again. If you find any bugs please report them so that I can try to get them fixed right away. Thanks again for all of your support and feedback!

CyberSearch Homepage

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Bing Has Been Removed from CyberSearchCyberSearch 2.0.5 – Easier “Search This Site”Microsoft Does Image Search Right with BingCyberSearch Passes 50,000 DownloadsSafari’s Inquisitor Comes to Firefox

Been on pins and needles since Google unveiled its long awaited Music Beta service at I/O? Good news: it seems that the non-Xoom owners among us are finally getting a crack at the thing. We’ve received reports from numerous tipsters that El Goog has finally started delivering invites to those who signed up through the site, letting even more users upload 20,000 of their favorite jams to its cloud-based storage locker. If you’re one of the lucky ones, please sound off in the comments below — and if not, be sure to read our hands-on review of the service while you wait.

[Thanks everyone who sent this in]

Google Music Beta invites start rock ‘n rolling out originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 May 2011 20:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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