Maxthon Cloud Browser: A Completely Different Browsing Experience

Maxthon has come a very long way since originally dubbing themselves as a mere replacement to Internet Explorer. As MyIE Browser, it boasted features like tabbed browsing and mouse gestures. Today, it’s much more.

You and I have both witnessed browsers like Rockmelt come and go without even denting the browser market. While Maxthon currently has no significant presence beside names like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE, it’s still worth your attention. I’ve seen competing browsers take an approach to cloud browsing and do it much less effectively.

Let’s check out what new developments have come to the latest version of Maxthon and go over what makes this application interesting.

Maxthon

If you used Maxthon more than a year ago, I’m not doubting you if you say that you weren’t impressed. Maxthon offered absolutely nothing new to the world of web browsing and, at the very best, it came across as the next best browser to Internet Explorer (wherever that may reside in the rankings).

The browser climate has now completely evolved, and everything is now up in the cloud. The Maxthon team deserves great credit for how quickly they revved up to speed and followed what’s current.

As MUO’s keeper of portable applications, I love that Maxthon offers an official portable version of their browser. Too many browsers dismiss portability and rely on third-party developers to pick up the slack for them. Maxthon has excelled in this area.

The Maxthon web browser has also been made fully available on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android platforms. Reaching such a broad audience on every platform is another way to see your browser succeed. A wide range of compatibility works perfectly with the in-cloud nature of the browser.

Cloud Features

Signing up for a Maxthon Passport opens you up to a wide range of awesome cloud features.

Cloud Push is the most significant integration. After registering for Maxthon Passport, feel free to right-click any image, link, block of text, or tab and select Cloud Push to…. From there, you’ll be prompted to log into your account.

You’ll then be met with the Choose a device prompt that will allow you to push this content directly to any other device that you have (assuming Maxthon has been connected). As you can see in the above screenshot, I’ve got no other devices connected through Maxthon but you’re still able to push content to your cloud storage.

Another very useful feature is Cloud Download. When prompted to download any file through the Maxthon browser, you can tick a box that will additionally send that download straight to your cloud.

Cloud Tabs is a feature that is coming up commonly in mobile versions of some of our other favorite browsers, where your open tabs will synchronize across Mac, Android, and iOS devices. Cloud Sync is becoming just as common in browsers like Firefox and Opera, where all of your favorites, settings, and form data can be saved to the cloud so that you never lose that important information.

Other Features

Magic Fill is like a localized version of LastPass. You’re able to save identities and login information within your browser and sync it to the cloud (as aforementioned). Most browsers today support this functionality, but not all of them support the cloud.

Ad Hunter is Maxthon’s integrated solution to blocking pesky advertisements and pop-ups. Be advised that not all advertisements are blocked by Ad Hunter (which I completely support), but you’re given a point-and-click option that will allow you to add rules to your list of blocked ads. It’s a great feature.

My favorite new functionality may be Resource Sniffer, which is an all-in-one way to rip video, audio, and images from a website. No more third-party image scrapers and no more YouTube-to-video converters. Just use this.

Additional features includes neat perks like New Session, allowing you to create two instances of the same website for multiple logins, SkyNote, allowing you to create and access notes within the browser, and Maxthon Snap, an integrated way to take beautiful webpage screenshots.

Do you guys think the new Maxthon web browser is worth a try? I gave the browser a spin and was very impressed by all of the new features. Let me know what you think in the comments.

The post Maxthon Cloud Browser: A Completely Different Browsing Experience appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Bring Back The Google Search Sidebar With These Tools

Change is the only constant. This is becoming even more true as we rely on web apps that can change out from under us. One day you’re using a familiar interface with features you rely on, and the next day you open your browser to realize that the interface you rely on is gone.

We’re naturally wired to dislike change – even positive change – but not all change is for the best (just look at Windows 8). Google’s new search page layout, placing search tools at the top of the page, makes more room of the search page for Google’s knowledge graph. However, it has some problems.

Search Tools – Now On Top

The new search tools layout cleans up the search page, especially for the majority of users out there who probably never touch these powerful tools. However, the search tools are now harder to get to for those of use who make use of them. Even worse, some options have been removed – there’s no longer any option to search for an image of an exact size, just an image that’s larger than a certain size.

Google says they’re working on re-adding this feature, but if you want to back now – or just want to get that familiar search sidebar back where your muscle memory expects it to be – you can use one of the below tools.

The web doesn’t have to be something we’re powerless to control. Our browsers make it possible to remix the websites we use, changing their interfaces to add new features and do what we like with them. We’ve covered some of the many ways you can modify websites and your browser before, and the below tools make use of these methods.

Greasemonkey & Userscript

Websites use JavaScript code to modify their layouts and add interactive features. A user script is essentially a piece of JavaScript code that you choose to run on certain web pages. After you install this user script, it will run in the background whenever you open a Google search results page, modifying the page and putting the search sidebar back in place.

If you’re using Firefox, you’ll need to install the Greasemonkey browser extension to use user scripts. Chrome includes built-in support for user scripts, so you won’t have to install anything extra.

To install the Google Search Tools Back user script, visit its web page and click the green Install button. If you’re using Firefox, you’ll be prompted to install the user script without any problems. If you’re using Chrome, you’ll see a message saying you can’t install the script from this website and the .user.js file will be downloaded to your computer.

To install the user script anyway, click the menu button, point to Tools, and select Extensions. Drag and drop the .user.js file from the downloads bar onto your Extensions page to install it.

You’ll now see the sidebar whenever you visit a Google search page. If you want to give the new interface a chance in the future, you can uninstall this user script from your Extensions page. In Firefox, you can remove it from Greasemonkey.

Stylish & Userstyle

Stylish allows you to install user styles that affect the layout and functionality of web pages. Web pages use cascading style sheets (CSS) files for their layout. Stylish hooks into your browser, giving you the capability to add your own stylesheets to web pages when they load.

This user style works perfectly with Firefox, but it requires some manual tweaking with Google Chrome. The instructions for tweaking it for Google Chrome are on the user style’s page, but we recommend using the user script method if you’re using Chrome.

To get started, visit this page on the userstyles website. Click the link on the page to install the Stylish extension for your browser. After you’ve installed Stylish, click the Install with Stylish button to install the user style. The next time you reload the page, the search tools sidebar will reappear.

How do you feel about the new Google search tools layout? Do you prefer the more compact use of space in the new layout, or do you find yourself yearning for the old layout and its features?

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Make Free International Calls for a Month with Skype

This holiday season, you can talk to your far-away relatives and friends to your heart’s content without having to worry about the phone bills. The @Skype team has just tweeted an offer that is too good to ignore. →

Skype to Skype calls have always been free but you can now also use Skype to make free and unlimited voice calls to mobile phones and landlines for 30 days. In addition to phone calls, you can also have video calls with a group of 3-10 friends during the same offer period.

To get started, use this special link to sign-in to your Skype account, enter your credit card or PayPal details (you won’t be charged) and complete the sign-up process. Once your Skype Premium service is activated, you can cancel your recurring subscription immediately while the premium services will continue to work for the entire 30-day period.

The fine print says that you can make free calls to landlines and mobile phones in Canada, Guam, Hong Kong S.A.R., Puerto Rico, Singapore, Thailand and United States.

The countries where you can call landline numbers for free include Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Chile, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom and Venezuela.

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This story, Make Free International Calls for a Month with Skype, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 17/12/2012 under Skype, Internet.

Preview or Pro – Which Office 2013 Edition should you Download?

Microsoft is expected to release a new version of Office, called Microsoft Office 2013 (or Office 15) early next year. The new Office, the release version of which is already available for download to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, sports a minimalist interface and, among other features, is very tightly integrated with SkyDrive. →

If you aren’t an MSDN/Technet subscriber, you can still download and install Microsoft Office 2013 as long as your computer is running Windows 7 or Windows 8.

Where can I download Microsoft Office 2013

Option A: You can go to office.com/preview and download the full-featured edition of Office 2013 that includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, and Microsoft Access (no Visio here). You can install this version on up to 5 PCs using your Microsoft account.

This is actually Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium Preview and what’s unique here is that you can get Office running on your computer within minutes of hitting the install button. This uses Microsoft’s Click-To-Run installation technology – you just have to download a 500KB installer and it “streams” the Microsoft Office applications to your computer.

The downside is that you have to install the entire Office package and second, this isn’t the final release of Office but a “preview” edition (version 15.0.4128.1025).

Option B: The other option is that you download the Microsoft Office 2013 installer from the Technet website (all you need is a Windows Live ID). Unlike the preview edition of Office, this one is the “final” Office Professional Plus 2013 release (version 15.0.4433.1506) that will continue to work for 60 days from the date of installation.

In order to install this version of Office, you’ll be required to download the full MSI installer (666 MB, OfficeProfessionalPlus_x86_en-us.img) but the advantage is that you can choose which Office programs should be installed on the computer.

Which Microsoft Office 2013 edition should I download?

Microsoft Office 2013 Pro is available as a 60-day trial while there’s no exact expiry date fixed for Office 365 Preview. Microsoft says that Office Preview will expire approximately 60 days after Office 2013 becomes available in that market. You will thus have more time to play with Office 2013 with the preview release.

Office 365 Preview can be installed alongside an older copy of Microsoft Office whereas in the case of Office 2013 Professional, it will override your existing installation.

One more thing. The Office 2013 preview release streams very quickly (click to run) and you don’t even have to be an administrator of your computer to install it. That’s not the case with Office 2013 Pro.

Microsoft hasn’t specified an exact release date for Microsoft Office 2013 but if you buy a licence of Microsoft Office 2010 now, you will get a free upgrade to Office 2013.

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This story, Preview or Pro – Which Office 2013 Edition should you Download?, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 17/12/2012 under Microsoft Office, Software.

Kindle For PC Proves That You Don’t Need A Kindle To Enjoy Books From Amazon

Being the voracious reader that I am, a library was always a small hillock to conquer. Thanks to the eBook revolution that has swept over us now, we now have peaks to scale. One of them just happens to go by the name of a jungle – Amazon. Or to be more specific, the Kindle Store. The Kindle Store is heaven sent for us bookworms. I am not even talking about paying a dime here because there are absolutely legal ways to download free books from the Kindle Store.

Did you know that there are more than 50 websites that tell you all about the availability of free books on Kindle? From the known Project Gutenberg to the well recommended Hundred Zeros and Pixel of Ink. Then there’s the horse’s mouth too which tells you all about the Top 100 free books on Kindle. Subscribe to their feeds to stay in the know.

But I don’t want to buy a Kindle

You don’t have to. It’s Christmas and someone might gift you one. I am kidding, because with the range of free reading apps from Kindle, you don’t really have to make anyone plonk down $100 or more. The free Kindle reading apps cover the gamut – from smartphones and computers to tablets. My friend Ryan should you how to use the Kindle Cloud Reader which is entirely on the browser. Just a few months back, Yaara gave you a quick peek into ways to enjoy books without an eReader. She hinted at the Kindle desktop app for Windows and Mac. It’s the free Kindle reading app for Windows (available for both 7 and 8) that I will be looking at here.

Get started with a free Amazon account

After quickly installing the 32 MB sized download package, all you need is register the eReader with your Amazon account. Even if you don’t have one, you can create a new one straight from the first screen.

In a flash, Kindle for PC will sync all your purchased or freely downloaded books. You may use any Kindle reading app across the devices you own; your books and collections are all kept synchronized. Amazon Kindle uses Whispersync technology to automatically sync your books across apps and this gives you a seamless reading experience as you jump from the Kindle reader to the PC or to the Android smartphone.

Reading with Kindle for PC

Kindle for PC mirrors most of the features you will find on any other version of the Kindle. On first use you may have to download the books and other elements like the dictionary, but it all happens in a jiffy. If you have loads of books, it’s always better to arrange them in collections. As you can see in the screen below, organizing collections is a simple matter of right clicking the book thumbnail and creating a new collection or adding to an existing one.

You can jump to a bookmarked page, or a specific location from the options on the right-click menu. The right-click menu also gives you the shortcut to view any notes you might have saved for reference. Remember, all bookmarks, annotations, and notes are also synced across all your installs of Kindle thanks to Whispersync. The last page read is automatically saved and synced. You can also refer to the page numbers that correspond to a book’s print edition page numbers to easily cite passages.

Adding highlights and notes is something we usually do during the course of our reading. It’s very smooth – click on a passage to add highlights, and also if you wish to append a note.

All you notes, highlights, and also bookmarks are viewable on the left pane. A note icon is also visible on the text body which you can click to expand the note.

A right-click on a relevant work can also bring up the dictionary meaning, and a few other tools like a link to Shelfari and reference information on the book. It could include extras like character sketches, quotes, Dewey classification, reading level of the book and other supplemental material. You can also use the Wikipedia link to get a quick page of information.

These extra tools do not interrupt your flow and help to give you more context around your reading.

Personalize your book

The Kindle App for PC allows you to personalize your reading experience. For instance, I generally prefer to read my books in the full-screen view. Sometimes I switch on multi-column to do a bit of speed reading or if the material really demands it.

The Options window allows for a few customizations as you can see in the screenshot. What’s always nice to play around with are the three color modes available.

You can’t cuddle up with a book but…

You can do so much more apart from cuddling up under the blanket with a good book. The Kindle for PC application gives you an unified interface for all your books. If you are nitpicky, you can arrange them in collections and use notes to record useful information. Best of all, it is synced across all your devices, so reading a book on your Android wouldn’t require you to thumb through the last read page. Kindle for PC has found a place on our Best Windows Software page. Has it, or will it find a place on your PC?

The post Kindle For PC Proves That You Don’t Need A Kindle To Enjoy Books From Amazon appeared first on MakeUseOf.

[WhatsApp] Using WhatsApp as a Private Store for your Documents and Notes

You have been using WhatsApp primarily for text messaging and calling but there are a couple of other interesting uses for WhatsApp that will help boost the utility value of this app even further. 

Other than communicating with the external world, you can also use WhatsApp to:

1. Capture and save ideas, notes, voice memos, scanned documents and everything else in you own private storage space that is accessible from everywhere.

2. Quickly transfer web links, documents, screenshots, and other files between your computer and phone without having to sign-up for another service.

The idea is simple. You create a new virtual contact inside WhatsApp and, everything that you wish to capture privately, you can just share it with this virtual contact.

It is not possible to send WhatsApp messages to your own number but there’s a simple hack to get around this problem. Create a new WhatsApp group with just a single participant – you. Here’s how:

1. Open WhatsApp on your phone and create a new group.

2. Add any contact from your address book to this group. Give your group a name and save.

3. Now go to the group in WhatsApp, tap the subject to view the list of participants.

4. Tap and hold the lone participant in this list and remove them from the group.

That’s it. What you now have a private store in WhatsApp that is visible only to you and accessible from the web (desktop) and your mobile phone.

If you wish to transfer a document from computer to phone, open web.whatsapp.com on the computer, send the file to this group and it will instantly become available on your phone. There’s search built-in so you can easily find messages by keyword later.

A New Way to Publish your Shared Folders on the Web

File hosting services like Dropbox and Google Drive have made it easy for anyone to distribute files through Shared Folders. You can upload a file to your shared folder and that file is instantly available to all other people with whom you have shared that folder. In the case of Google Drive, you can even create “public” shared folders where your files can be viewed by anyone on the web. →

The problem is how do you keep people in the loop when you add new files to a shared folders. Also, the less tech-savvy crowd may still prefer to receive these shared files as email attachments instead of using Dropbox or Google Drive.

iBeam.it, a new web service from Wappolf, is trying to solve this problem in an interesting way. Here you can put your files on Google Drive or Dropbox as before and the files are instantly “beamed” to other users who are watching your shared folder.

To get started, you just have to connect any of your Dropbox or Google Drive folder with iBeam.it (it uses OAuth). The folder get a unique URL that others can use to follow your folder (see this sample folder).

The “followers” are unaware of the service that you are using to host your files and they may choose to “receive” them inside Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, SkyDrive, Box and other popular services. Alternatively, they may choose to follow your Shared Folder through email and in that case, they will get your files as email attachments.

The service is free though you are only allowed to beam files up to 25 MB in size. Most email programs won’t handle attachments that large anyway. Also, sharing is one way – if you delete a file from the shared folder, it won’t be deleted from the folders of other users.

Similar things can possibly be done through IFTTT but iBeam.it is super-easy and doesn’t even require you to create an account.

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This story, A New Way to Publish your Shared Folders on the Web, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 17/12/2012 under Dropbox, Google Drive, Internet.

Save.me Brings Clipboard Monitoring To A New Level [Windows]

It only took me one or two disasters in losing huge blocks of copied text to cave in and download a third-party clipboard manager for Windows. While there are many, like ClipTrap, I’ve found that plenty of them have poor interfaces or indexing options that are not very featureful.

Just the other day, I stumbled across a new one by the name of Save.me. At first, Save.me doesn’t come across as a clipboard manager. Save.me interacts with the clipboard to archive all of the data you copy, sort it by media type, and store it for you forever. If you’ve used other clipboard monitors and handlers on Windows, this one should be an entirely unique experience.

Save.me

I’m not going to lie to you. The Save.me website is a little lackluster.

Let’s not judge a book by its cover though. Tucked away in those 4.6 MB downloads, for both 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows, is a clean and effective little application that saves and organizes data that I often find to be incredibly important.

Save.me can be extracted to a flash drive and it’ll work just fine. The application is completely portable in both versions.

Upon launching the application, you should be at the Wizard screen where you’re prompted, by a text field, to enter your name.

If you’ve got data that already exists as copied to your clipboard, it should immediately be the first item that is indexed within Save.me. To check, go to the Default tab on the left and under the Views header. If you’ve got nothing there, pick any file, URL, or block of text to copy onto your clipboard. You should definitely see a change to the page now.

Here’s where Save.me gets cool and strays away from other clipboard monitors and handlers. Save.me actually has a unique preview for a wide range of different types of clipboard content: URLs, folders, images, and more.

As you can see here, the URL of a MakeUseOf article was copied to the clipboard. Rather than just plainly displaying the URL, Save.me actually shows a frame with an active preview of that URL.

It works just as effectively when you copy an image, as you can see below where I copied a screenshot of the author’s homepage.

Each item shows a caption, where the contents are from, what application it was copied from, the date it was copied, and the size of the copied contents. You can also mark an item as a favorite or protected item, for easier access or for sensitive data that you want secured.

The Logbook view is also very interesting, giving you a calendar-style breakdown of exactly when data was copied to your clipboard and thus saved to Save.me.

And of course this clipboard monitoring application wouldn’t be complete without a way to search through all of your saved data for certain keywords, which can easily be accomplished at the bottom-left of the main interface on the Default view, or in plain sight in the Wizard view.

Save.me offers a really unique experience to capturing and visualizing all of the contents of your clipboard. What do you guys think of this method of managing the Windows clipboard? Let me know in the comments!

The post Save.me Brings Clipboard Monitoring To A New Level [Windows] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Easily Install Bookmarklets on your iOS Device

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You can go to ctrlq.org/ios to quickly and easily install all the essential and popular iOS bookmarklets for your iPad and iPhone from one place.

A video tutorial for installing bookmarklets in mobile Safari is also included.

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This story, Easily Install Bookmarklets on your iOS Device, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 15/12/2012 under Internet.

The Emoticon Is Thirty! But Where Did It Come From? [Geek History]

In 2012, the emoticon as we know it turned thirty years old. A lot of us take it for granted that we can convey emotion through text using constructs like :) and :( and O_O, but there was a time when using one of these faces would be met with a confused frown and ridicule. How did such a prominent feature of modern day communication even come about?

Believe it or not, even though emoticons as we know them today are thirty years old, they have a long history before the invention of the computer. Some say that emoticons were used on paper up to 150 years ago. That’s a lot of time to cover, but join me as I look at that span and trace the birth of our beloved :-).

The Prehistory of Emoticons

When we look back in history to pinpoint the first time someone ever created a smiley-face with English characters, a lot of people will point to Abraham Lincoln. Yes, the same Lincoln that became the 16th President of the United States and emancipated the slaves. Take a look at his speech above and you’ll notice a stray ;) face. Some say it’s an emoticon; others just a typo.

In 1881, a United States magazine called Puck published a number of typographical emotion points that were meant to convey emotion through text. These points were a far cry from what we know today, but they had the same intentions. For example, consider the “snigger point,” which is written as \___/! and is meant to represent smiling lips.

But if we step back even farther back in time, we’d see that there were already a good number of punctuation points meant to convey emotion. The exclamation point, for instance, can convey anger or excitement; the question mark, confusion; the percontation point could convey sasrcasm or irony.

But punctuation points aren’t emoticons. Emoticons are typographical representations of actual facial expressions. Up until now, everything was just building towards the emoticons of modern lingo.

The History of Our Emoticons

In 1982, professor Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon University explicitly proposed two unique typographical facial expressions that were to be used intentionally for emotion: :-) and :-(. Take a look below to see the actual transcript of this proposal:

Luckily for the not-yet-prevalent Internet, these smiley faces exploded in popularity and began to be used on a widespread basis. From there, human creativity was the only limit when it came to altering these faces into other emotions. When you’re joking? :-P. When you’re being sly? ;-). When you’re laughing? :-D.

The draw of emoticons was that they could be used anywhere that regular text could be used. Emails, instant messages, chatrooms, webpages–if you could type, you could convey emotion. And while it stayed like that for a few decades, it didn’t end there.

The Evolution of Emoticons Beyond Text

Enter the world of graphical and animated emoticons. Message boards and forums ran away with the whole emoticons fad and began to replace text faces with images. Even some instant messengers, like Skype, ran with the idea and started making emoticons for things that weren’t even emotion-related!

Nowadays, emoticons support is almost necessary for anything social. Human interaction is predicated on facial cues and expressions, which means that text needs to have emoticons in order to set the tone of a statement or question. That’s why big social brands like Facebook implement emoticons support.

And for those times where you need super awesome emoticons, there’re always Emojicon.

So there you have it: the humble beginnings of what has now become a global phenomenon in text-based communication. It’s hard to imagine where we would be if professor Scott Fahlman had never made his proposal; it’s equally hard to imagine where we’re going to go from here. Will emoticons be phased out? Will they evolve into some other form? What do you think?

Image Credit: Smiley Face Via Shutterstock, Punctuations Via thedailyomnivore.net

The post The Emoticon Is Thirty! But Where Did It Come From? [Geek History] appeared first on MakeUseOf.