Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on September 13, 2007 by CyberNet.

As the saying goes "imitation is the best form of flattery." If there’s any truth to that I would have to say that Opera’s ego has got to be growing quickly. Why’s that? Back in April Opera 9.2 introduced a new feature called Speed Dial. It gives users 9 shortcuts that are aligned in a grid-like fashion for quick access. As it turns out there were a lot of people who found it to be useful…even those who were using other browsers.

Weeks after the launch of Opera 9.2 came a Firefox extension designed with Speed Dial in mind, but without some of the functionality Opera’s creation offered. Then came along Exalead which was a web-based search engine that also offered a Speed Dial-like feature for the homepage. What about Internet Explorer users? Well, IE7Pro made sure they weren’t left out and created their own copycat called "Easy Homepage."

And now the time comes for a dedicated personal homepage to appear, and it’s called HYPERiGO. After registering with the site you can create your own customize page with all the sites you want on it. You can have it show small thumbnails of each site or large ones, and you can sort them in various ways including by the most visited.

By default your tab(s) are all public so you may want to be careful what you put in there (here’s my homepage). The privacy setting is one of the few things you can change, and there are a handful of different themes available for you to choose from.

I can’t honestly say that I’m all that impressed with the service though. I added our site to the bookmarks, and then I had to play the waiting game as the screenshot got queued. This also makes me wonder what the update period is on the existing screenshots?

As far as the interface goes I would say that it is nicely laid out. However, the site is painfully slow to load even when doing a simple thing such as adding a bookmark or switching a tab. Reordering the entries also needs some work, because I would expect it to use some AJAXy drag-and-drop effects which it doesn’t. Not only that but every reorder operation you do causes the entire page to refresh. Ouch!

So before you go taking the time to signup like me I suggest you at least browse around to see if you’ll be able to withstand the loading times. So Opera can once again be flattered by this Speed Dial-like service…you just can’t beat the speed of having the feature integrated into the browser when compared to a web-based version.

HYPERiGO [via Download Squad]
Thanks for the tip "s"!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 30, 2007 by CyberNet.

Last week we mentioned the Firefox Companion for eBay that had just been announced, and at the time it wasn’t yet open for the alpha test program. Recently we were able to download the extension and give it a try. After playing around with it for the last 20 minutes, I wouldn’t say it’s something an occasional eBay user would use, but more for those who either sell, purchase, or watch items frequently.

After installing the Firefox extension, the first thing you’ll want to do is set-up your account.  You can choose whether or not you want Firefox Companion for eBay to automatically connect when Firefox starts or not.  To get the most use out of this, you’ll probably want to select yes to this option.

The companion shows up in the left toolbar, and then there’s a drop-down menu at the top of that toolbar where you can select what you’d like to view: ended, active, bidding, watching, or selling items. I chose to view the items that have ended that I was either watching or selling.  The screenshot below (click to enlarge) shows what this looks like.

You’re given many options to choose from, and there are separate options for watching, bidding, and selling. You can either choose to receive an alert box, or the item will glow in your sidebar.

For example, if you’re watching an item, you can get an alert when it’s going to end soon so that you can determine if you want to bid on it.  Other options include an alert or “glow” if you’ve been out-bid on an item, won an item, or lost.  If you’re selling, you can select the option so that items will glow when they’re ending soon.

Up at the top of your browser, you’ll notice that there are quick links so that you can easily navigate to important eBay pages likes “My eBay, eBay Homepage, Provide Feedback,” etc.

eBay is no stranger to scams, particularly those involving passwords.  To help with this, there’s built in password protection (pictured below).  All you have to do is enter in the password that you use for eBay and PayPal, and you’ll get warned if you begin to enter your password into a site that hasn’t been verified.

As of now, it’s available for eBay.com, eBay.co/uk, ebay.fr, and eBay.de, and I’m sure they’ll be adding other sites soon.

I think this could be a great way to promote eBay, but especially Firefox because some of the non-Firefox users may want to get in on what this has to offer.

If you want to sign up for The Alpha test program, click here.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on January 29, 2007 by CyberNet.

It was just the beginning of January that Yahoo acquired MyBlogLog for an estimated 10-12 million. We were wondering how long it would take Yahoo to  integrate some of their other acquired services like Flickr. Well, that question has been answered because Flickr has been integrated into MyBlogLog.

Now you have the option of adding your Flickr photo stream to your MyBlogLog account. Mashable also points that integration with other Yahoo services is inevitable like posting del.icio.us links, or even the ability to log into MyBlogLog with your Yahoo Account.

All you have to do is click on the button “click here to automatically show your recent Flickr photos” from the view/add pictures page. From there, Flickr will display your 10 newest Flickr photos(only the public photos). It’s a simple, but nice integration to get the ball rolling with Yahoo!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on January 04, 2008 by CyberNet.

Ask.com has just added a new and free voice activated directions service to their Mobile site so that users are able to speak their location and then speak their desired destination and receive directions on their mobile phone.  When I first read about it, it seemed like it was Ask.com’s response to GOOG-411, except they were trying to take it a bit further. I decided to put the service ,which is called “Click to Speak” to the test to see if it was something worth using.

The first thing I did on my mobile phone was go to http://m.ask.com. Then I saw the following options:

I selected #2 – Directions with voice entry, and then it asked if I wanted to place a call. Placing the call connects you to their service at which point you’re asked to speak your location.  It’ll repeat it back and ask if it’s correct, and which point you say yes or no and then it will move on to your destination.  You can enter in an address or an intersection, it accepts both. While I was entering in my destinations, I noticed that it had a hard time with extra words for a street name like “Avenue” or “Road.” It would ask me to repeat the names of the streets, but without the extras. Once it had my starting and ending points, I was informed that I would be receiving a text message soon.  The call ended, and sure enough, a text message came with my directions.

Problems with the service

While the entire process of entering in an address was fairly simple and easy to use, the directions it gave me weren’t the best. For my example trip, I entered that my starting location was the intersection of Michigan Avenue and Ontario Street in Chicago, Illinois and that I was headed to the intersection of Lincolnway and Duff in Ames, Iowa.  Their estimated time that it would take me to drive this was over 8 hours which I knew wasn’t quite right as I’ve done this drive before.  Then I went to Google and entered the same instructions, and the route they provided said it would take me about 5 hours and 40 minutes which is what I would expect it to take. It appears as though the route that Ask.com calculates for you is chosen based upon miles. The shortest route wins, even if it will take quite a bit longer.

Would I use this service again? Well, to be honest, probably not.  While it’s nice and could perhaps work for shorter distances, the directions it provides for long distances just tacks on too much time.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on March 19, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

We realized that we’ve never really done an article diving deep into the history of browser stats even though we have shown you screenshots of browsers from long ago. Thanks to Net Applications we have about a year and a half worth of data to look at, and it is interesting to see the rise and fall of the different browsers.

We had aggregated so much information that even the most severe stataholics would probably start to feel queasy. Below we’ve got an overview of all the browsers wrapped up into one, and then we dive even deeper by breaking the stats down into the popular versions of each browser. To try and ease the nauseous feeling we decided to hide the actual numbers that were used to generate the graphs, but they are still available by clicking on the Details link located at the beginning of each section.

We’ll start by comparing the market share of each major browser, and then we’ll break it down into Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Netscape usage.

Note: The timeline for each graph is the exact same, but the market share percentages are scaled differently for each chart to make it easier to read. You can click the Details link to see what percentages make up each graph.

–All Browsers (Details)–

From this graph you can see that Internet Explorer still owns a huge chunk of the browser market share, but over the duration of the graph it has changed quite significantly. In the next month or two it will likely hit a 10% drop since August 2006, and about 5% of that has occurred in the last 6-months.

–Internet Explorer (Details)–

It wasn’t until December of 2007 that Internet Explorer 7 actually took over Internet Explorer 6 in usage, which is rather surprising. Maybe it is because so many people are sticking with Windows XP and not making the upgrade to IE7, but it looks like things are finally starting to pickup for IE7:

–Firefox (Details)–

When Firefox 2 came out in October 2006 it didn’t take long for users to make the jump from Firefox 1.5, and ever since then it has been rocking the house.

–Safari (Details)–

This obviously proves that Safari users enjoy playing with Beta versions of the browser, but don’t really adopt it until the stable version is available. In June 2007 Safari 3.0 Beta was made available by Apple, and in October it shipped with the OS X Leopard operating system. While in Beta it didn’t really affect the usage of other versions, but people made the upgrade rather rapidly once it was released. It’s been a hit ever since.

–Opera (Details)–

The Opera 9.x browser was first introduced in June 2006 shortly before these stats started to be collected. You can see from the chart that Opera 9.x usage has been increasing quite steadily even though the market share is still small. Considering the fact that until September 2005 you had to pay for Opera (or suffer with a built-in ad banner) I would say that they are doing pretty good.

–Netscape (Details)–

Late last year Netscape announced that they would no longer be developing the Netscape 9.0 version of their browser. Well, this might give us some indication as to why that is. The service we got our stats from didn’t even have anything on Netscape 9.0 presumably because the market share was so low. While Netscape 6.0 is currently the champ of all the versions available.

–Overview–

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed taking a look at all of the charts to see how your favorite browser has progressed over the last year and a half. If you haven’t gotten enough be sure to checkout our history of web browsers where we provide screenshots of browsers over the last 10+ years.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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