Too Many Clicks? Follow These Tips To Save Time With Gmail’s New Compose

In a recent poll we held here at MakeUseOf, we found that over 75% of you already use Gmail’s new compose. By reading that poll’s comments, I’ve also gathered that while many of you are using the new compose, there are things many of you find annoying. The most common complaint, and one which I agree with wholeheartedly, is the increased amount of clicking, hovering and clicking this new interface requires.

Do you want to change your text formatting? There’s now an additional click involved. Want to CC or BCC someone on an email? Here are those extra clicks again. Want to include a link? Hover, expand, click. It does get pretty tiresome. On the flip side, Gmail’s new compose really is clutter-free and very nice to look at, and this is partly due to how Google has nicely hidden all these extra buttons from view.

So can you use Gmail’s new compose and still not waste all those valuable clicks and minutes? The answer is yes, sometimes, and depends.

New Compose? What?

In case you’ve missed it, or still haven’t got around to using it, Gmail’s new compose brings new emails to a separate Windows, enabling easy multitasking, and making things look better in general. To find out more about it, you can read Justin’s quick review of all its new abilities.

Just so we’re all on the same page, this is what it looks like. You can clearly see that accessing many of the readily available options from the old interface now require extra work.

New & Exciting Keyboard Shortcuts

The people behind the new compose experience are not complete idiots. They must have known that hiding many buttons from view will make them harder to reach, adding all those extra clicks into the mix. For that reason, they’ve decided to include several new keyboard shortcuts that were introduced with the new compose feature.

Unfortunately, those shortcuts were not emphasized enough, and while they do appear on the interface itself, I managed to completely miss them for the first few weeks I was using it.

I won’t keep you waiting, here is a list of very useful shortcuts that will save you considerable time while working with the new compose:

• Ctrl+Shift+C –> Add a CC recipient to your email.


• Ctrl+Shift+B –> Add a BCC recipient to your email.


• Ctrl+Shift+T –> Edit the To: field.


• Ctrl+Shift+7 –> Start a numbered list in your email.


• Ctrl+Shift+8 –> Start a bullet-point list in your email.


• Ctrl+K –> Insert a hyperlink in your email.

If you really hate using your mouse for extra clicks, you can make use of one of the top three shortcuts to open the top compose panel, where you can also change the sender address for this email. This still requires you to use your mouse, but at least you’ve saved the extra click. I find that being able to insert links and lists without having to click or hover over the bottom panels is a godsend, and I only wish I’d known about it before.

Of course, you can still use the usual Ctrl+B for bold, Ctrl+I for italics and Ctrl+U for underline, which means that most of the formatting options can now be accessed with your keyboard. That’s most, and not all, and if you were used to easily changing fonts and font sizes, for example, you’re in for some extra work. But there’s a way around that too:

Lab: Default Text Styling

While it can’t and won’t solve all of your problems, Default Text Styling is a great lab to enable if you’re regularly using a different font, font size or font color than usual. This is not a new lab, but if you’ve relied on the ease with which you could switch fonts, you might want to give it a try now.

To enable it, go to Settings –> Labs and search for “Default Text Styling”. Choose to enable it, and click “Save changes” at the bottom. Now, access Settings again, and under the General tab, you’ll find a new option.

From here, you can choose a default font, font size and font color for all your email conversations. If you like bigger fonts, for example, setting the font to Large from here will save you the need to click away at the formatting panel to increase its size every time.

It still doesn’t solve all the formatting problems, as it’s limited to only these three features, but it’s a great start.

Conclusion

Before writing this post, I set out to make my new compose experience better. My first and foremost wish was to find a way to switch to right-to-left writing without that extra click. In that mission, I failed. There is not keyboard shortcut, no lab and no add-on that can do that, as far as I could see. But in my quest, I found some awesome shortcuts and tricks I will definitely be using, and with luck, more will be added as the new compose feature settles in.

Do you know of other cool shortcuts that can help with Gmail’s new compose? Have you found a great hack that solves this problem? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

The post Too Many Clicks? Follow These Tips To Save Time With Gmail’s New Compose appeared first on MakeUseOf.

IFTTT Automation For Your Facebook Page [Weekly Facebook Tips]

Facebook Page administrators realise that it takes time and effort to create a vibrant, useful page for fans to enjoy. While some administrators are paid for their efforts, many more are merely volunteering their time for a cause they believe in – their band, a local club or a cause. For these page admins especially, it’s incredibly useful to be able to automate as many of their tasks as possible.

Now, when it comes to automating social media tasks, the best place to turn is IFTTT. This is because you can take material from a huge number of sources and send it to somewhere else online, while sticking to some pre-determined rules and custom formatting. This can be invaluable when ensuring your Facebook page always contains relevant, regular information.

So, check out some of these great IFTTT automation ideas for Facebook Pages!

Facebook Pages & Twitter

Now, before you rush off to use IFTTT for this one, please note that Twitter/Facebook integration works very well directly. You can easily set up a Twitter account to post to your Facebook page or vice-versa. However, you may well know this and still need another way to customise these posts or post to another account.

There are dozens of options ready-made for Facebook Pages and Twitter, plus it’s possible to create your own recipe. Here’s a few you might like:

• Send FB page statuses to Twitter


• Facebook pictures forwarded to Twitter


• FB Page Link Post Sent To Twitter

Facebook Pages & LinkedIn

Being business-oriented is normal for a Facebook Page, which is why integration with LinkedIn makes sense. Here’s some recipes which will make that link easier:

• FB Page Status To LinkedIn


• FB Page Link To LinkedIn

Facebook Pages & Blogs

Any Facebook Page owner with a blog knows that it’s irritating to have to post things in multiple places. Here’s some quick automation for RSS and WordPress:

• RSS To FB Page


• FB Page Link Posted To WordPress As Blog Post With Link To FB Page

Facebook Pages & Tumblr

Many people use Tumblr in order to share quick, colourful blog posts with the world. So, it’s great to see that there’s an easy way to get that Tumblr content to post directly into your Facebook page.

• Photo Tumblr Posts Go To FB Page Album


• Any Tumblr post -> FB Page link

Facebook Pages & Instagram

Instagram is a very popular way to share photos, so it’s no surprise that Facebook Page administrators might want to bring in content from Instagram. Here’s a few neat ways to do so:

• Instagram Photos Go To FB Page Album


• Instagram Photos Of Particular Hashtag Go To FB Page Album

Facebook Pages & Flickr

Very few people have the patience to upload photos multiple times. It’s fantastic to be able to simply upload once and see the photo automatically copied to another service for you. Here’s some useful Flickr and Facebook Page recipes:

• FB Page Photos Uploaded to Flickr


• Flickr Photos Tagged Specifically Will Be Uploaded To FB Page

Facebook Pages & Other Services

There are several other services which are easy to import into Facebook Pages. Here’s a few you might like:

• YouTube Upload To FB Page


• Google Calendar Event To FB Page (This lets you use Google Calendar to schedule updates)


• Pinterest board posts to Facebook page

More Reading For Page Admins

There’s a lot of great advice available for administrators of Facebook Pages. Here are a few articles you might learn a trick or two from:

• 10 Great Ways To Improve Your Facebook Page’s Popularity


• How You Can Make Your Facebook Group Popular [Weekly Facebook Tips]


• You Like This: The Facebook Marketing Guide


• 5 Great Ideas To Make Your Facebook Fan Page Interesting


• The Top 4 Facebook Page Admin Annoyances Made Easy

What’s your favourite hack for automating your Facebook Page?

The post IFTTT Automation For Your Facebook Page [Weekly Facebook Tips] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

What Is Moore’s Law, And What Does It Have To Do With You? [MakeUseOf Explains]

Bad luck has nothing to do with Moore’s Law. If that is the association you had, you are confusing it with Murphy’s Law. However, you were not far off because Moore’s Law and Murphy’s Law are connected.

Moore’s Law was formulated by Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel. In 1965 he reported observations about how fast semiconductor technology had advanced since the late 50s. Based on this data, Moore made projections for the future development of semiconductors, i.e. microchips and microprocessors. This Law has held true ever since.

Much more than that, it has served as a guiding principle for many companies in the industry. Although the technology repeatedly faced challenges that seemed like they would bring development to a halt and break Moore’s Law, engineers kept solving them with ever new innovations. Due to its history, Moore himself once described his law as a violation of Murphy’s Law: “Everything gets better and better.”

And according to Intel, this trend will continue for at least another decade, a statement they have been issuing for more than three decades.

What Is Moore’s Law?

In 1965 Gordon E. Moore published his observation that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled approximately every year since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958.

At the time Moore predicted this trend would continue for at least ten more years. In his 1965 paper Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits Moore wrote:

With unit cost falling as the number of components per circuit rises, by 1975 economics may dictate squeezing as many as 65,000 components on a single silicon chip.

This projection wasn’t quite right. When by 1975 chips only held 10,000 transistors each, he updated his prediction to a doubling approximately every two years. Almost 50 years later, Moore’s (updated) Law still holds true. Today, over a billion transistors find space on a single chip.

Intel:

“If the transistors in a microprocessor were represented by people, the [above] timeline gives an idea of the pace of Moore’s Law. Now imagine those 1.3 billion people [at the end of the timeline] could fit onstage in the original music hall [at the beginning of the timeline]. That’s the scale of Moore’s Law.“

Why Did Moore’s Law Persist?

As Moore himself anticipated, the economics dictated the continuous development. In its original formulation, Moore’s Law was already tightly associated with minimum component costs.

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year.

In other words, Moore’s projection for the future was also based on the observation that costs had decreased with increasing complexity. However, Moore emphasized that each evolution of the technology has a specific complexity that achieves minimum component costs. When complexity increases beyond this point, so does vulnerability to defects, narrowing the yield and thus effectively increasing component costs. Thus constant evolution of the technology, driven by innovation, has been and always will be inevitable if Moore’s Law is to be upheld.

So to fully answer the question why Moore’s Law is in effect until this day, we must also examine its effect on technology.

What Effect Did Moore’s Law Have On Technology?

Moore’s Law became widely accepted and the industry began to establish road maps and set goals based on Moore’s projection. As the production of integrated circuits became more complex and involved the interplay of various specialized companies, a plan was needed to help all parties set individual targets and advance at an equal pace.

Since 1998, the ITRS (International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors), a yearly report produced by a group of semiconductor industry experts, provides the basis for such a plan. The ITRS documents assess the directions of research in all areas relevant to semiconductors and provide timelines for up to 15 years into the future. Ultimately, the law has been serving as a vision for an entire industry and has become something like a perpetual self-fulfilling prophecy.

What Does Moore’s Law Have to Do With Me?

On the one hand Moore’s Law has fueled technological advancement. An entire industry was driven to keep up with Moore’s projection. As a result, many of Moore’s other predictions about technology, e.g. home computers or personal portable communications equipment have also been realized. Today, all of us enjoy and benefit from this technology, we have become used to fast paced developments, and are anticipating future innovations. So you, a representative of the customer side, are said to keep expecting and demanding technological advancements. Do you?

On one of the flip-sides of Moore’s Law, however, we have The Great Moore’s Law Compensator (TGMLC), also known as software bloat or Wirth’s Law, and several derivatives. TGMLC is based on the adage coined by Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Wirth, who in 1995 quoted Martin Reiser in his paper A Plea for Lean Software:

Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

So in essence, end users don’t necessarily benefit from developments on the hardware side, as software developers feel compelled or liberated to create products that are equally more complex and resource hungry.

A popular example is Microsoft Office. In 2008, Randall C. Kennedy, a former Intel employee, demonstrated TGMLC using a standard computer of the year 2000 running Office 2000 and a standard computer of the year 2007 running Office 2007. When both versions of Office ran the same task, Office 2007 did so at half the speed of Office 2000.

So you’re not crazy when your new computer seems slower than your old one after very little time. Chances are, you merely updated your software.

Conclusion

What you can learn from Moore’s Law is that the future can be shaped by goals. If a simple law can unleash this enormous creativity to fuel constant innovation and motivate an entire industry to continuously work together to meet a boring and above that imaginary number target, imagine what a compelling vision could do. Focusing on a positive and desirable future will help you manage even the greatest challenges.

What do you anticipate for the future?

Image credits: Futuristic Microchip via Shutterstock, Moore’s Law Visualized, Microprocessor Transistor Counts, Customers

The post What Is Moore’s Law, And What Does It Have To Do With You? [MakeUseOf Explains] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

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?

The post Bring Back The Google Search Sidebar With These Tools appeared first on MakeUseOf.

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.