03 July 2013

5 Truly Hidden Features In Windows 8.1



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Microsoft recently released its latest desktop operating system called Windows 8.1. Although the new version looks similar to Windows 8, the newest version of Windows has hundreds of new features and functionalities, we have already covered the 50 major new features in Windows 8.1 update. While Microsoft has talked about most of the major changes [...]

Spotify vs. Rdio: A Complete Comparison




I recently cancelled my Spotify Premium membership after a year of uninterrupted monthly payments to the company. This decision came about when I accidentally signed up for 14-days of free Rdio Unlimited. Quite frankly, I was left confused as to who I should be paying money to and after playing with both services there's a good chance you would be too. If you're choosing to take the Netflix-style "all you can eat" route with your music, you've got quite a selection of services to choose from - but who reigns supreme?

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Read full article: Spotify vs. Rdio: A Complete Comparison



Spotify vs. Rdio: A Complete Comparison




I recently cancelled my Spotify Premium membership after a year of uninterrupted monthly payments to the company. This decision came about when I accidentally signed up for 14-days of free Rdio Unlimited. Quite frankly, I was left confused as to who I should be paying money to and after playing with both services there's a good chance you would be too. If you're choosing to take the Netflix-style "all you can eat" route with your music, you've got quite a selection of services to choose from - but who reigns supreme?

Continue reading the article


Read full article: Spotify vs. Rdio: A Complete Comparison



YouTube Pro Aims To Help Users Turn Channels From Hobbies To Jobs [Updates]



youtube_icon.jpg

YouTube is continuing the trend of trying to get higher quality content on its site with the introduction of a new service called YouTube Pro. It is designed specifically to offer users advice and tips for taking their channel from a hobby to paying gig.

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Read full article: YouTube Pro Aims To Help Users Turn Channels From Hobbies To Jobs [Updates]



Technophilia Episode 70: Live From MakeUseOf!



This week: absolutely no news about Sean Parker’s wedding. You’re welcome, Internet. The US military is working on new policies for cyberwar, while Congress wants to make a database of every person legally allowed to work in this country. Nothing could possibly go wrong. All this, along with complaints from old men, in episode 70 [...]


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Read full article: Technophilia Episode 70: Live From MakeUseOf!



Help Google Translate Support Māori



Google's homepage links to a page that asks Māori speakers to help Google add this language to Google Translate.



"Google Translate is a free automatic language translation service by Google. It works without the intervention of human translators, using state-of-the-art technology instead. Google Translate currently supports translation between 71 languages. Our team is working on expanding this list and Māori could be one of the next supported languages with your help. If you speak Māori and English, we will greatly appreciate your help with identifying good Māori translations."









Google links to some pages that allow you to rate translation quality. Please don't use this feature if you don't speak Māori.






From Wikipedia: "Māori (...) is the language of the indigenous population of New Zealand, the Māori. It has the status of an official language in New Zealand. (...) According to a 2001 survey on the health of the Māori language, the number of very fluent adult speakers was about 9% of the Māori population, or 29,000 adults. (...) 157,000 New Zealand residents claim they can converse in Māori about everyday things."

How To Set Desktop Background Picture As Start Screen Background In Windows 8.1



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In Windows 8, Microsoft dropped the good old Start menu and replaced the same with a full screen, Modern UI-style Start screen. While the Start screen in Windows 8 was way superior than the Start menu in many ways, it was not perfect for majority of PC users who mostly use the desktop environment to [...]

Blogger Requires to Write the Title First



I don't know about you, but I like to write the title of the post at the end. It makes sense to pick a title only after writing an article because the title usually summarizes the text. Sometimes I have no idea what's the right title, but it reveals itself after writing the last paragraph.



This post is not about finding the right title for a blog post, it's about a new Blogger feature that shows this message as soon as you start writing a post: "Required field must not be blank". The warning is placed below the title field, but it's not obvious that it refers to the title. Click "ignore warning" and the warning is displayed again in a few seconds.



You can't save, preview or publish post if you haven't picked a title. This is really dangerous: what happens if write a long post and the browsers crashes? Until now, Blogger automatically saved the post as a draft and you could find it. Now it's no longer saved until you write a title.






You could write a temporary title and change it later, but why use a workaround? The title should not be required field. Show a warning before publishing the post and that should be enough. I can write email messages without a subject, but I can't write blog posts without one.



To sum up: here's a feature that's annoying, not useful, dangerous and hard to understand. It's really difficult to come up with something like this, but someone did.

A Google Trends Annoyance



It's sometimes helpful to read some instructions, especially when you use advanced features. What happens when you can't dismiss these instructions and you have to see them every time you use a service?



Google Trends shows an annoying box every time you click the search box: "Explore Trends. Separate terms by commas to compare. Some examples: [GMC, BMW, Honda], [Swine Flu], [Madonna, Adele]."






Google Trends used to display this information on the homepage, but now the homepage shows a list of hot searches.






Here's the old Google Trends homepage:





Google's Homepage Promotes the Mobile Search App



Google's mobile homepage now promotes the Google Search app for iOS. There's a big banner at the top of the page in both Safari and Chrome for iPad.






There's a standard iOS feature for promoting mobile apps, but Google doesn't use it.



"Smart App Banners vastly improve users' browsing experience compared to other promotional methods. As banners are implemented in iOS 6, they will provide a consistent look and feel across the web that users will come to recognize. Users will trust that tapping the banner will take them to the App Store and not a third-party advertisement. They will appreciate that banners are presented unobtrusively at the top of a webpage, instead of as a full-screen ad interrupting the web content. And with a large and prominent close button, a banner is easy for users to dismiss," explains Apple.



Google implements a similar feature, but it doesn't work so well. Dismissing the banner doesn't work: when I open google.com in a new tab or refresh the page, the banner shows up again. That's annoying.

Facebook Chat Sticker now available for desktop chat



Facebook stickers, popular large emoticons for Facebook mobile applications, are now also available for desktop chat.


Facebook has just launched these extra-large stickers for desktop chat also and alerts users by a pop up in chat-box.


facebook-chat-stickers


You can access these stickers in same ways as you used in mobile chat box, Just click on the smiley face in the chat box, then a pop up menu will appear with sticker store link, click on this link and download your favorite stickers absolutely free.


facebook-stickers-store


The post Facebook Chat Sticker now available for desktop chat appeared first on Hack Illusion.



How To Easily Shut Down, Restart, Or Hibernate Windows 8.1



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Microsoft’s decision to remove Start menu and move power options to Settings charm had made many Windows 8 users add custom shut down, restart, and hibernate tiles to the Start screen, and also add shut down, restart, and hibernate options to the power user menu (Win + X) menu that appears when you right-click the [...]

Reduce your Print Costs with Adobe LeanPrint



Printer toner is expensive. Adobe LeanPrint for Windows reduce printing costs by optimizing the layout of documents before sending them to the printer.



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Digital Inspiration @labnol This story, Reduce your Print Costs with Adobe LeanPrint, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 02/07/2013 under Print, Software.



Who Do You Think You Are: 4 Sites That Want To Know With The Help Of Shared Photos



TBH

We are a generation of over-sharers - every photo of coffee, breakfast or cocktail on Instagram can attest to that. That said, there is a lot of "sharing" on the Internet that is pretty interesting. A variety of show-and-tell websites encourage users to share photos that give a glimpse into their lives, without giving away too much.

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Read full article: Who Do You Think You Are: 4 Sites That Want To Know With The Help Of Shared Photos



What Are Your Views On Crowdfunding Through Sites Like Kickstarter? [You Told Us]




Crowdfunding is becoming a legitimate tool for inventors, merchants, and creative people to raise money for their wares. We asked for your views on the phenomenon. Crowdfunding seems set to keep on growing, so gaining an insight into how the MakeUseOf readership thinks about it all was a good idea.

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Read full article: What Are Your Views On Crowdfunding Through Sites Like Kickstarter? [You Told Us]



Moto X - Designed by You, Assembled in the USA



Moto X is no longer a rumor, Motorola's CEO announced it in May. "Moto X will be built in a 500,000-square-foot facility outside of Fort Worth, Texas, that was previously used to build Nokia phones. Seventy percent of manufacturing will take place there, making this the first smartphone built within the United States, Woodside said. However, the processors are from Taiwan and the OLED screens are from Korea." It's surprising to see a CEO that reveals so many details about a new phone before it's launched.



AdAge reports that Motorola will run a full-page ad "in the July 3 editions of The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post". The ad announces the "first smartphone designed, engineered and assembled in the USA" and "the first smartphone that you can design yourself".






Motorola has a new logo, is now "a Google company" and has bold ambitions. "We're not just any company," says the ad. Once a mobile phone pioneer, Motorola lost market share and was saved from bankruptcy by Android and Google. Now Motorola tries to bring back innovation and go back to the roots.



{ Thanks, Florian K. }

Four Cool New Tools From Facebook [Weekly Facebook Tips]



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With giant apps like Facebook, you sometimes find that little changes creep in without you noticing. Some are good, some are bad, but all of them make the landscape ever so slightly different. Also, they can be extremely useful. Facebook's latest crop of improvements are actually pretty big news.

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Read full article: Four Cool New Tools From Facebook [Weekly Facebook Tips]



They Killed Reader And iGoogle – What To Do If FeedBurner Is Next



Feedburner Alternatives Intro

Google is commendable for being so willing to experiment with new potential products. Where would we be if they never fooled around with, say, Gmail or AdSense? Yet it seems like for every product that succeeds, a handful of others get the axe. Most recently, Google killed Reader. What happens if they come after Feedburner next? Do you have a backup plan?

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Read full article: They Killed Reader And iGoogle – What To Do If FeedBurner Is Next



How To Use Chrome To Learn A Foreign Language While Browsing The Web



learn-language-chrome-intro

One of the more natural ways to learn anything is to immerse oneself in that environment. In fact, if you stay in a foreign country for any length of time, you naturally pick up some of the colloquialisms. Well, the best way to save yourself the price of a plane ticket is to use the browser to travel. Travel the web with Chrome and take the help of these Chrome extensions for learning a foreign language while you are simply browsing.

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Read full article: How To Use Chrome To Learn A Foreign Language While Browsing The Web



An Old Google Ad



Here's an old Google commercial from 2007 that was restored and enhanced for the Computer History Museum. It's from India and it was the result of a partnership between Google and Airtel, a mobile network operator. The commercial announced the launch of Google search on Airtel Live.






Director: Ram Madhvani

Writers: KS Chax, Ajay Gahlaut, Pradyumna Chauhan

Agency: Rediffusion DY&R, Delhi



{ Thanks, Kristian Serrano and Roney Thomas. }