When You Open Gmail's Compose Box in a New Window

Sometimes little details matter. If you open Gmail's compose box in a new tab or a new window, the formatting options are visible by the default and you no longer have to click the formatting button.

How to open the compose box in a new tab or window? There are at least 7 ways:



Open in a new window

1. Shift+click the compose button

2. Shift+c (keyboard shortcuts need to be enabled)

3. Click the pop-out button from the compose box.



Open in a new tab

1. Ctrl+click the compose button

2. Ctrl+c (keyboard shortcuts need to be enabled)

3. d (keyboard shortcuts need to be enabled)

4. Ctrl+click the pop-out button from the compose box.



Replace Ctrl with Command if you use Mac OS.

What's The Right Answer?

Sometimes the same question can have multiple answers, even when you're looking for a simple fact. I've searched for [ny population] using Google and Bing and got two completely different answers. Google's answer is 8.245 million, while Bing's answer is 19,501,616.

It's obvious that Google replaced "ny" with "New York City", while Bing replaced it with "New York State". If you're searching for [new york], Google will show information about the city, while Bing's data refers to the state.

To disambiguate your query, you need to search for [ny city population] or [ny state population] and both search engines will return similar answers.



What if you search for [ronaldo age]? Here's what you get: 28 years (Google) and 36 years (Bing). Google mentions that the answer is for Cristiano Ronaldo, but Bing doesn't.

Both answers are OK because there are two football players known as Ronaldo: Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima (born 18 September 1976) and Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro (born born 5 February 1985). Most of the top search results from both Bing and Google are about Cristiano Ronaldo.



To sum up, it's a good idea to disambiguate your query and to check the answers provided by search engines.

Make Writing Papers Easier – 4 Websites That Help You Cite Sources

When the time comes to write a paper, one of the biggest pains can be citing your sources. You've spent hours and hours slaving away over your computer, perfectly crafting every word. You're cruising for an easy A, and then you have to go and spend even more time citing all those sources. Thankfully, the Internet makes this arduous part of the paper writing process a little easier.

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Create Survey Forms With Style Using Typeform Beta

I have used Google Forms to post quick surveys and collect contact information for various purposes. As part of the Google Drive suite of tools, Google Forms is convenient and pretty easy to use. There are similar online form creation services that are just as good, but none as far as I can tell are as stylish as the new Typeform form creation and data collection service, available for free at the beta level.

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10 Tips To Get The Most Out Of BBC iPlayer

What is the best in British entertainment? Is it on TV or on the radio? Either way, both media are accessible with the BBC’s iPlayer service. BBC iPlayer is a browser-based service that is also available as desktop, mobile, and console apps. International viewers can also take advantage of the service, with some restrictions. With so many shows on offer and many options for playback and downloading shows (with DRM) if you’ve ever used the service it might be the case that you haven’t used BBC iPlayer to its full ability.

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10 Tips To Get The Most Out Of BBC iPlayer

What is the best in British entertainment? Is it on TV or on the radio? Either way, both media are accessible with the BBC’s iPlayer service. BBC iPlayer is a browser-based service that is also available as desktop, mobile, and console apps. International viewers can also take advantage of the service, with some restrictions. With so many shows on offer and many options for playback and downloading shows (with DRM) if you’ve ever used the service it might be the case that you haven’t used BBC iPlayer to its full ability.

Continue reading the article

Read full article: 10 Tips To Get The Most Out Of BBC iPlayer

10 Tips To Get The Most Out Of BBC iPlayer

What is the best in British entertainment? Is it on TV or on the radio? Either way, both media are accessible with the BBC’s iPlayer service. BBC iPlayer is a browser-based service that is also available as desktop, mobile, and console apps. International viewers can also take advantage of the service, with some restrictions. With so many shows on offer and many options for playback and downloading shows (with DRM) if you’ve ever used the service it might be the case that you haven’t used BBC iPlayer to its full ability.

Continue reading the article

Read full article: 10 Tips To Get The Most Out Of BBC iPlayer

Twitter’s Tracking Your Internet Activity Now – But Will Let You Opt Out [Updates]

Twitter has started tracking the Internet usage of its American users, just in time for the 4th of July – but you have the freedom to opt out. Users won’t see more ads on Twitter, but they may see better ones.

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Pure Android

I'm sure that one of Google's OKRs is to increase the number of pure Android users. This has multiple benefits: users get the latest updates faster, Google promotes its own apps, users get to try Google's original flavor of Android, the latest version of Android gets more market share and developers are encouraged to use the latest APIs.



Here are some strategies used by Google to make pure Android (or almost-pure Android) more popular:



1. Nexus is now a family of affordable devices and Nexus 7 is the most popular Nexus device ever released. Google sells them online in a few countries and provides software updates.



2. Google Editions of the most popular Android devices: HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4. Manufacturers provide software updates for the devices and include some of their software. Devices are still sold online via Google Play, but only in the US. Maybe other devices will follow.

3. Motorola will only release devices with stock Android. "Consumers love what the Android OS can do for them, and they want to have the most recent releases faster. From a software and UI perspective, our strategy is to embrace Android and to make it the best expression of Android and Google in the market. It will be the unadulterated version of Android, and I feel really good about our embracing Android and being the best Android experience," said Jim Wicks, Motorola's design chief.



4. A lot of stock Android apps are now in Google Play Store and many Google apps are preinstalled on devices from Samsung, HTC and more. You can now install Google's calendar app, the keyboard, Hangouts, Google Search with Voice Search and Google Now, Chrome, Google Maps, Google's music player, Gmail and much more. Some missing apps: the launcher, camera, gallery, clock, calculator, news & weather, contact manager, phone app and the messaging app.



Pure Android is not perfect and some Android flavors from Samsung, HTC and others offer support for more technologies, more features and better built-in apps. What they don't offer is a coherent experience: few developers implement their APIs and you end up with features that only work in a small number of apps, features that compete with each other (Google Voice Search vs S-Voice) and apps you can't remove.



Maybe OEMs should focus on the user experience and add their features and software on top of the pure Android. Improve Google's stock apps, develop a better camera app that takes advantage of your hardware, build a great music player and some beautiful widgets, but only include the apps that are strictly necessary. Featuritis helps create some nice demos, but you end up with software that's hard to maintain and hard to use, while slowing down devices and using more resources.

A Guide To Good Deals: How To Save Money On Everything You Buy Online

Online shopping makes it easier than ever to get a good deal. We've put together a short guide on how to get the best price on just about anything you might be looking for online. And remember, to be a conscious consumer, you also should do a little bit of research to make sure that your good deal really is a good deal.

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Party Planning Made Easy: 12 Of The Best Resources

As summer rolls in (and out again, for the famous week long British summer), the time for garden parties is upon us. You’ve set a theme and instructed everyone to come in costume, but as the host your job is the hardest: food, decorations, perhaps activities and games. So here, my fellow party planners, are (at least) 12 sites that should be your first stop for inspirational ideas to help you pull off that perfect party.

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Download Windows XP For Free and Legally, Straight From Microsoft

As the years progress and Microsoft moves on from Windows 7 into Windows 8 and beyond, it's certainly starting to feel like Windows XP is just an artifact of the past. But is it? There may be situations when you need to use XP again or you might want to take a stroll down memory lane. Well, Microsoft offers VirtualBox, a free Virtual Machine featuring a free version of Windows XP, which runs within your current OS. You can use this system for testing or running older programs that only work in Windows XP.

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YouTube's Video Pages Will Load Faster

A few weeks ago, a reader noticed an interesting YouTube experiment that displayed a red progress bar when loading video pages. It was obvious that video pages were loaded dynamically using AJAX.



Gizmodo posted an article last week about this experiment. It turns out that YouTube will soon launch this new interface.



"Currently, when you click on a YouTube video, first the watch page loads (the webpage that the video sits on). Then the JavaScript that controls that page is downloaded, then the video player, and then the video itself starts downloading." In the new interface, everything is downloaded simultaneously. When you click a new video, YouTube only loads the new page and then the video. It's no longer necessary to download the video player and the JavaScript/CSS files.

Another change is that YouTube preloads the page and the first part of the video you're likely to watch next before you even click it, so that the video loads almost instantly. This works because the Flash player now uses adaptive streaming and downloads videos in slices. The first slice of the next video you're likely to watch is prefetched. This works well for playlists and search results (YouTube prefetches the first result), but also for video pages, where YouTube shows suggestions.

How I Make Software Demos using Animated GIFs

Aniamted GIFs are a good alternative to screencast videos since they are easy to produce, can be hosted anywhere and people love sharing them on social sites.

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This story, How I Make Software Demos using Animated GIFs, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 04/07/2013 under Gif, Screencasting, Software.

3 Windows 98 Bugs Worth Revisiting

Is it just nostalgia that keeps me attached to this OS, or was Windows 98 actually worth remembering? This operating system released 15 years ago had its ups and downs. Critics have been pretty harsh on the recent versions of Windows. Vista took it the hardest, but there are a lot of you who don’t seem to be the biggest fans of Windows 8 either. Maybe we should take a trip back in time and remember just how bad certain parts of Windows 98 were. Love it or hate it, you were in for some pretty big problems.

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6 Ways To Reclaim Your Email Inbox

Is there anything else that’s as useful, prevalent, and frustrating as an email inbox? It’s been around forever and we keep using it, and as long as we keep using it, people like me will keep writing about it. You probably think it'd be easier to tame a lion than tame your inbox, but there are tools that will make you think twice. There are built-in features for some email services that will do most of the heavy organizational work for you.

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New York City Gets Its Own .nyc Domain Name [Updates]

The Internet domain regulation organization ICANN has recently approved .nyc as the official top level domain for New York City. This decision makes New York City the first city in the world to be granted approval for its own domain, with London and Paris close behind.

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4 Good Ways To Disguise Yourself Online

Why would it ever be necessary to disguise yourself online? Isn't such behavior only for the likes of hackers, spies, and lowlifes? Well, not exactly. It isn't always easy to fully disguise yourself in a way that is untraceable, but using the tools described in this article, you should be able to pull it off in fairly short order.

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Fedora 19 “Schrödinger’s Cat” Is Alive And Full Of New Features and Improvements

Joy to the world, a new version of Fedora codenamed "Schrödinger's Cat" has been released! In the past, Fedora has provided leadership in the open source community, holding up to strict open source policies, continuous support to upstream projects, and by offering the latest software before any other distribution.

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How To Boot Directly To Desktop In Windows 8.1

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Microsoft’s decision to remove the Start menu and replace the same with Start screen in Windows 8 didn’t go well with end users as most XP, Vista, and Windows 7 users who upgraded to Windows 8 either installed third-party Start menu programs, disabled the Start screen or used programs to skip the Start screen to [...]