Pin Web Apps To Windows 7 Taskbar With Pokki

As more and more utilities are being moved to the cloud, it is become imperative to integrate cloud based services within the desktop environment of operating systems. For starters, how about pinning web apps to the Windows 7 taskbar?

Pokki is an application built on the Chromium framework, which enables developers to build web applications which can be pinned and executed from the Windows taskbar. These web apps not just automatically pin to the taskbar, but also provide notifications for unread items.

The currently available web apps which can be integrated with your taskbar include apps for Gmail, Tweeki (for Twitter), Facebook, Headlines (RSS Feed Reader), LivingSocial, Groupie, Wall Street Journal, and eBay. Pokki is not just for common users but also an opportunity for developers to develop web apps and get wider exposure by using the Pokki platform.



To use Pokki, you will require downloading and installing Pokki based web apps from the developers website individually. While this may seem like a downside, it is in fact useful for installing your desired web apps and not a bundle of unwanted applications. For example, if you wish to download a Twitter web app for managing your Twitter account from a pop-up on the taskbar and to get periodic Twitter updates, then you can download and install the Tweeki web app.




Once your desired apps are installed, you can manage your online accounts from pinned web apps on your Taskbar, within pop-up windows. For example, you can use the Tweeki web app to manage your Twitter account or use the Gmail app for fully managing your Gmail account. To view all installed Pokki apps, click on the Pokki icon (first icon on the left). You will see all installed web apps (Pokkis), as shown in the first screenshot above.

Pokki is still a young application and as this project is further developed, we are likely to see more pinnable web apps. If you are a developer, you can benefit from the Pokki platform by signning up for an account via the Build a Pokki button on the developer’s home page. You can start building a Pokki, by downloading the Pokki SDK and checking out their developer’s guidelines available from the sign up page.

Pokki, for now, is only available for Windows 7.

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Mebook Touch Mini, Ebook Reader Review

Ebook reader has become so famous all because of its light weight, clear text reading and enhanced battery backup capabilities. Compare to multi media players, ebook readers usually consumes less battery power as it just operates to display text and few pictures. iPad and multi media enabled tablets give us a huge diversion and not fit to read books as it gives less battery backup.

Chinavasion has recently developed an ebook reader named Mebook Touch Mini, with some extra ordinary capabilities to suite your needs. This is ofcourse a great competitor for other ebook readers exist in market today. This light weight ebook reader helps you to read books for so many hours without making your feel like you are holding it on your hand.

It comes in 4.3 Inches of size with color resistive touch screen with bright display. It has 480 x 234 pixel screen resolution that supports ebook formats like TXT, EPUB, PDF, HTML, UMD and few more.

There is 4GB internal memory and the external memory can be expanded up to 32GB with the help of microSD card slot so that there is an extension of storage space for all your favourite contents. The Mebook is packed with media player, 3.5mm headset jack, built in mono speaker, 1700 mAH battery, microUSB port and others as additional features.

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Facebook + Skype joins to bring Facebook Video Chat

Google+ developer preview launched recently to showcase the Facebook alternative. Now worlds no 1 social networking site Facebook has its real opponent while many have failed in the battle of social networking. This flawless winner now has to take quick steps to prevent loosing some huge amount of users when Google Plus launch Publicly to all users



Google Plus is not just a facebook killer. It also targets some more famous services to hunt down. Skype and Twitter are the two important among those. Google+ is kind of an upgrade to existing social networking. Rather texts, images and links, the communication becomes effective with Google Hangout and few other features. We expect many more features to be announced by Google+ in coming days.

Facebook Video Chat

Facebook and Skype has a strong relationship and this time they joined hand to provide Free video chat feature in facebook. So that you can skype call your facebook friends simply from your facebook chat panel. This one really sounds interesting where it cuts the usage of multiple applications in the system.

Facebook may announce this new service by next week and this is unofficial confirmation leaked on net.

Whats your opinion about this integration ? Do you think this the best step that Facebook has taken ? Please let us know via comments.

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Google+ On Android

Google Plus is without a doubt the product of the week, month, and probably even year, for Google, and the Android app is going to be as essential in the future as the Twitter and Facebook apps are now. Get ready to make friends with this one, because unlike Buzz and Wave, this one is definitely on the way to the top, and you can quote me on that in a year.

Real-life sharing rethought for mobile.

Google+ (Google Plus) is still in active development and not yet available to everyone. You need an invitation to sign in.

Google+ for mobile makes sharing the right things with the right people a lot simpler. Huddle lets you send super-fast messages to the people you care about most. With your permission, Instant Upload automatically puts the photos and videos you take into a private album in the cloud, so you can share them anytime, from anywhere. And no matter where you are, the stream lets you stay in the loop about what your friends are sharing and where they’re checking in.

Features:

* Circles let you share the right things with just the right people.
* Stream is where you can get updates from your circles or see what people are saying about things nearby.
* Instant Upload automatically uploads videos and photos to your own private album in the cloud, to make sharing a snap.
* Huddle is super-fast group messaging for everyone in your circles.

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3 cool Android apps for Multimedia

Layer Draw

LayerDraw is an image editing program that is optimized for tablets and phones. You can draw images in portrait or landscape mode, create separate layers for each part of an image, set background colors for each layer, move and resize layers, and (on Android 3.0 and above) set the opacity (alpha) for each layer.

Create custom Brushes for everything from drawing simple lines to drop-shadowed lines, fill areas, neon effects, fade, re-paint existing lines, color empty areas between other areas, and more. Brushes are also pressure-sensitive. Press harder to draw wider lines or more intense colors.

FEATURES:

• Draw in Layers
• Import Gallery pictures into Layers
• Take pictures directly into Layers
• Portrait and Landscape mode support
• Pressure-sensitive Brushes
• Multi-touch for drawing straight lines
• Optional hardware acceleration
• Use for photo editing, or drawing from scratch

Fresco Lite

The lite version now lets you try Fresco for free.

Fresco is a powerful painting and image editing app that features layers, filters, an intuitive interface and more! Designed for both novices and professionals, Fresco has everything you need to create digital artwork on your phone or tablet.

Feature List

Full support for layer-based image editing:
- Add, duplicate, merge, hide/show and reorder layers.
- Transform layers by scaling, rotating, moving and mirroring.
- Alter layer opacity.

Enhance your work with the use of over 20 filters:
- Create interesting effects with the blur, sharpen, emboss, noise and vignette filters.
- Adjust image colors with the brightness, saturation, exposure and posterize filters.

An interface where everything you need is at your fingertips:
- Configure the texture, size and opacity of the brush and eraser tools.
- Select colors using the color palette, HSV color picker and eye dropper tools.
- Use gestures for zooming and panning.
- Reverse mistakes with the robust undo system.

More features:
- Export your work to Adobe® Photoshop® format (.PSD) with layers intact.
- Import and position photos on the canvas.
- Your work is kept safe by the autosave feature.
- Share your images with other apps to upload to Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox and more.
- Fresco uses less than 1Mb of storage space and is optimised for speed.

Autodesk Inventor Publisher Viewer

Autodesk Inventor Publisher Mobile Viewer allows you to view interactive, animated 3D assembly instructions created with Autodesk Inventor Publisher desktop software.

Features

✓Simple, intuitive user interface
✓Zoom, pan, & rotate in 3D using Multi-Touch
✓ Play or scrub through animated sequences of step-by-step instructions
✓ Double Tap on individual components for detailed part information
✓ View text descriptions and annotations that can help augment 3D graphics
✓ Includes sample instructions and access to an online gallery of instructions right in the app
✓ Create, publish, and deliver instruction files to mobile devices using the Publish to Mobile capability of Autodesk Inventor Publisher desktop PC software.
✓ Store files on your device or Cloud Storage.

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Windows 8 Immersive Metro UI Start Page For Web Browsers

The Windows 8 Immersive Metro UI for tablet PCs that Microsoft demoed a short while ago has left quite an impressions among Windows enthusiasts. One DeviantArt user has coded a start page in HTML, CSS and JQuery intended to be used as new tab page in browsers, that mimics the tile-based Metro UI interface.

By default, the start page contains shortcuts to twelve popular websites such as Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, CNN, Grooveshark etc, but all the shortcuts and images on the start page can be customized and tweaked easily by modifying JavaScript file which contains all the settings.

To use Windows 8 Metro UI-styled homepage on your web browser, simply download EIGHT - Firefox start page, unpack to a location in your hard drive and set the index.htm file as the homepage in your browser. If you want the start page to open every time you open a new tab, configure your browser to open the homepage as the new tab page.

To customize the shortcuts you have to create the images containing the logo or name of the websites, place them inside the folder ‘thumbs’ and then edit the file source.js and replace the URLs. The logos look best when set in white with alpha transparency. In simpler terms – transparent images with white logos. The background image of each tile can be changed too, by replacing the images under the folder ‘lib’. You can also change the search engine to Bing or Yahoo.

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Google Chrome Now Opens Search Pages Instantly by Prefetching

Last year, Google introduced Google Instant, a feature that auto completes queries and returns results immediately as the user typed. Today, the company unveiled a new feature called Instant Pages, available only to Chrome, that takes Google Instant a step further. After returning results for a query, Google will guess which results the user is likely to click and prefetch it in the background. If the user happens to actually click on the guessed result, the page will open instantly. Google says Instant Pages will save 2-7 seconds for every search.

Instant Pages will prerender results only when they’re confident that the user is going to click them, such as the top three results. “We’ve been working for years to develop our relevance technology, and we can fairly accurately predict when to prerender,” says Google. It's different than Firefox's pre-rendering, says Google, because it also executes some of the JavaScript, not just the HTML.

Google Fellow Amit Singhal said, that a typical guess will be the top results but there are cases when it will pre-render one of the lower results. The average user takes 15 seconds to scan a list of search results, Google estimates, so that one page should be loaded before you're done scanning. The service does not pre-render ads – only "organic" search results. Google hinted that it may expand the service to ads in the future.

Because Google is likely to make mistakes and render pages you don't actually want, this will undoubtedly skew page-view statistics for those running websites.

Instant Pages is currently available in the developer version of Google Chrome; it will be available in the beta channel on next update. You can test Instant Pages on Google.com now. Later on the functionality could be extended to other sites as well. Google has even open sourced its pre-rendering code, and it hopes that other browser vendors will adopt the technology as well.

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Replace windows progress Bar with a Nayn cat

Nyan Cat, also known as Pop Tart Cat, is an internet meme that depicts an 8-bit animation of a cat with the body of a cherry Pop-Tart, flying through outer space and leaving a rainbow behind it. In video form, the animation is often set to a remix of the song "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!”. As with any absurd internet memes, Nyan Cat is insanely popular, so much that last week YouTube enabled a custom flash player for the original Nyan Cat video that showed an animated mini Nyan Cat flying across the progress bar with a rainbow trail.



The Nyan Cat Progress Bar. Yes, you’ve guessed it – this free application displays the Nyan Cat over progress bars in Windows. Simply download the Nyan Cat Progress Bar, extract the contents of the zip file to a folder and double-click on the executable file.

The applications sits on the system tray and waits for the Windows progress bar to show up, when you copy files, install programs etc. When it finds one, it promptly replaces the progress bar with an incredibly annoying Nyan Cat with the speakers blazing Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!

The developer of Nyan Cat Progress Bar says that the program depends on the progress bar being a standard Windows progress bar and so won't work with every progress bar on your system, but he has confirmed that it works with Windows Explorer for file copies.

You can choose to silence the Nyan Cat from automatically activating, or if you don't want a particular program to activate the Nyan Cat, you can right-click the Nyan Cat Progress Bar icon and choose "Ignore (application name)". You can also add programs to the ignore list in the Settings dialog. There is an option to prevent Nyan Cat from activating while you're listening to music in either iTunes or Winamp.

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Google Takeout:Export your data out of Google

The Data Liberation Front – an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products – has just debuted its first product, Google Takeout.

Google Takeout lets you take your data out of multiple Google products in one fell swoop. Just sign in to the service, select which Google services you want to back up, and then click Creative Archive. Each of the services will be neatly backed up to a zip file in open formats that can be imported into other web services and products. Takeout has launched with support for five services - Buzz, Contacts, Picasa Web Albums, Profile and Stream, but Google promises to add more services later on.





You can either download all your data from the 5 services at once or choose individual services to export data from. After you make your choice Takeout will automatically calculate the estimated size and the number of files in the package. When you are ready to download, click on the Create Archive button and download the zipped file. Buzz posts are saved as HTML files, and Gmail contact groups as VCF files.

The service is a bit borked at the moment – you can’t download your profile, only the first 100 photos from each of your Picasa Web album are downloaded (discovered by Alex Chintu), and Gmail contacts that aren’t included in any group are not downloaded. Additionally, Takeout takes a long time to prepare your archive.

Until these issues get sorted, you can use Picasa software to download your albums from Picasa, and use the Export action in Gmail contacts to download all your contacts as VCF or CSV file. Buzz data can be downloaded using any email program.

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