Facebook has recently carried out lots of revamping to make the Facebook experience smoother and cleaner. They introduced time-line interface, then offered us the choice to make our fan page a time-line, then recently high resolution photo viewer as well.
With all those, you can smooth your Facebook experience as well. Just think you have few fan pages for the same product or business and managing them would be a real pain. You have no way to discard few pages and keep one since you don’t like to lose your fan base.
There is a built in feature in Facebook fan pages which lets you merge the fan bases in two different pages. You can try this to save time that you have to spend for different duplicate pages.
Steps to Follow
First make sure all the duplicate pages are having the same name.
Then go to the Primary Facebook page you need to keep in long run.
Go to Admin Panel -> Manage -> Edit Page -> Resources -> Develop your page.
Only if you have duplicate pages under same name, you will be able to see the option Merge duplicate pages as shown below.
Click on Merge duplicate pages.
It will give you below pop up.
Check in the pages you need to merge and click Merge Pages.
It will take you to below Popup.
There you can see a warning stating that only your likes and check-ins will be merged not the content. Content in the duplicate pages will be permanently deleted, so be careful and make sure there are no important content.
If you have any content that need to be merged, you have to upload them manually to primary fan page.
Once you click Merge Pages it will show you below confirmation.
Now your pages have been successfully merged.
Here after you won’t be able to access the duplicate pages. But their fans will be re directed to your primary page. Your fans who were in duplicate pages probably won’t feel a difference even after getting re-directed to your primary page since it’s having the same name. In order to avoid any possible confusion you can update a status and let the fans know about the merge.
Multimedia compression is employing tools and techniques in order to reduce the file size of various media formats. With the development of World Wide Web the importance of compress algorithm was highlighted because it performs faster in networks due to its highly reduced file size. Furthermore with the popularity of voice and video conferencing over the internet ,compression method for multimedia has reached it next generation to provide smooth service even in unreliable network infrastructure. Although many methods are used for this purpose, in general these methods can be divided into two broad categories named Lossless and Lossy methods.
Lossless Compression Algorithms
There will be no data loss in this type of compression as it is defined by the name. Both original data and the compressed data are the same in this compression. The algorithms for the compression and decompression are exact inverse of each other in the Lossless Compression. The main mechanism in this compression is removing the redundant data in the compression and adding them in the decompression.
Advantages: The original format of the data remains even it is compressed.
Disadvantages: Reduction of the size of the data is a small. Sometimes the size can increase instead of decrease.
Run-length Encoding
Run-length encoding can be named as the simplest method of encoding. Any combination of symbols can be compressed by this encoding technique. The concept of this algorithm is removing continuous sequence of symbols using another shorten symbol which represent it. Practically what is does is to replace the number of occurrences with the numeric value and the symbol itself. For example, a text like ‘AAAACBBBBB’ is replace by ‘A04C01B05’. This method is very much efficient when there are only two symbols.
Huffman Coding
This is a little bit complicated than the previous one. First, the frequency of each appearing character is taken. Then the characters that have least frequencies being taken to give values ‘1’ for the higher one and ‘0’ for the lower one and there wise it is continued. Then the each available character is represented by a separated code included with 1s and 0s.
Lempel Ziv Encoding
This system does the encoding as two processes. They are indexing and compressing a string of symbols. When there is a set of characters, first step is to check whether an index have the minimum available character combination that appears. If available then put the index number in the string. If not, it will be added to the index. This compression technique is more effective as it has a two way compression method.
Lossless Compression File Formats
Audio
Waveform audio format (WAV)
Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC)
Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC)
ATRAC Advanced Lossless
Audio Lossless Coding
MPEG-4 SLS
Direct Stream Transfer (DST)
DTS-HD Master Audio
Meridian Lossless Packing (MLP)
Monkey’s Audio APE
RealPlayer – RealAudio Lossless
Shorten – SHN,TTA – True Audio Lossless
WMA Lossless
Graphics
Adaptive Binary Optimization (ABO)
JPEG XR
Progressive Graphics File (PGF)
Portable Network Graphics (PNG)
Tagged Image File Format (TIFF)
Video
Animation codec
CorePNG, Dirac
FFV1
JPEG 2000
Huffyuv
Lagarith
MSU Lossless Video Codec
SheerVideo
Lossy Compression Algorithms
It is the compression technique which will lose data in the original source while trying to keep the visible quality at the almost same amount. The compression ratio will be very high. Most probably the ratio will be a value near 10. It reduces non sensitive information to the human eyes and the compressed media will not be the media that was available before compression.
Advantages: Can reduce the file size more than in the Lossless Compression
Disadvantages: The original file cannot be taken after the decompression
Mathematical And Wavelet Transformation
In this process, images are converted to the mathematical functions. Discreet Cosine Transformation uses series of cosine functions to approximate image. This technique is used with JPEG, MPEG1 and MPEG 2 formats. A wavelet function is used to approximate the image. This can be used with the JPEG 2000 and MPEG 4 formats.
JPEG Encoding
In this encoding, an image is represented by a two dimensional array of pixels. A Grayscale picture of 307*200 pixels is represented by 2,457,600 bits and a color picture is represented by 7,372,800 bits. Due to the number of calculations to be had in a JPEG format of a grayscale picture, it is divided into blocks of 8*8 pixels. The number of the units’ id equal to the number of mathematical equations of each picture. The whole idea of JPEG is to change the picture into a linear set of numbers that reveals the redundancies. In addition to those techniques, MPEG is also a Lossy Compression technique. It is a way to encode the moving images and audio included in it. It supports many video formats from mobile phone to HD TV.
H.261, H.263, H.264
H.261 is designed for video telephony and video conferencing applications. It was developed in 1988-1990. Data rate is a multiplication of a 64 kb/s. H.263 is a video coding technique for low bit rate communication. In addition, a 30% of bit saving can be done by this technique when it is compared to the MPEG-1. H.264 is a joint project of ITU-Ts Video Experts Group and the ISO/IEC MPEG group. All those three methods use different methods of reducing redundant data. There for the output differs from bit rate, quality and latency.
Future Trends Of Compression
cvements as they are being proposed. One of the available problems is the way how to handle the errors in a data loss of a data packet. Wavelet transform techniques will be a good further implementation for the next generation. Wavelet coding has two main advantages. The first one is that the video construction is achieved in a fully embedded style. Two processes of encoding and decoding can be stopped at a defined bit rate. The desired spatial resolution and the required frame rate can encode the stream. Vector quantization makes use of the correlation and the repeats between the pixels located near or between the frequency bands.
References
(2002). MultimediaElements. In J. G. Shuman, Multimedia In Action. Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd.
iPhone and iPad was one of the hot stories in the past few years. There were billions of search queries in most of popular search engines and millions of both online and offline articles in blogs, magazines and newspapers. Also there were billions of status updates in facebook and tweets. Those facts indicate the impact these magical consumer electronic products have made on human civilization. The major contributing factor to success of these products was their operating system which is iOS. It gave a solid, streamlined and user-friendly interfaces and functionalities to the end-user with the maximum entertainment experience of using a multi-point touch screen. Most importantly it gave a flexible platform for the application developers to develop highly creative applications for iPhone and iPad with maximum hardware access including camera, accelerometer, GPS and touch screen. As a result there was millions of application in apple app store for iPhone and iPad which contributed to its success and market domination. iOS was continuously evolving with new features and providing more facilities to the application developers. Recently Apple released iOS 4.3 beta version for developers which made an active discussion again around the globe.
New Features
Multi-Touch Gestures For iPAD
There were many touch screen mobile devices in market, yet iPhone was one of the most prominent out of all mainly due to its amazingly fast responsiveness and multi point sensitivity. iOS is giving support to use this capability to deliver an unmatched multimedia experience to users. Along with this advance hardware and software, developers can come up with more creative ideas like ‘Gestures’. In here the software captures the special and unique movement using touch screen to trigger commands. Now with the advancement of iOS 4.3 they have come up with multi touch gestures which are specially designed for iPAD. It allows the users to minimize and maximize multi task bar, switch between applications etc. using four or five finger touch gestures.
Hardware Rotation Lock
Hardware rotation is one of the most attractive features in both iPhone and iPad provided by iOS with the aid of its accelerometer. The hardware was sensitive enough to capture even a slight variation of angle of the device relative to gravitational field and it was good enough even to play a car game using it as a controller. However, at some instances user was required to switch off the screen rotation and they were using hardware switch in iPad. In iOS 4.2 it was only a mute button and many of the users requests to let them choose the functionality of the hardware switch. As a result in iOS 4.3 user can select whether the hardware switch need to be mute switch or rotation lock switch which will be very useful to the iPad users.
AirPlay
This was one of most prominent features in iOS 4.2 which allowed user to send a stream of media which may include video, audio or photo to another AirPlay enabled device. However, it was enabled for built in application. In iOS 4.3, it’s going to give the same facility to developers, so they can use AirPlay in their own application to make them more attractive to the users. The limitation for developers when they are using AirPlay is not yet defined according to my research and I hope they will give maximum. That was one of the catchy points in iPhone development that they give lots of freedom to developers to use OS features and hardware unlike in previous dominant platforms like J2ME
Camera Effects
There were unofficial reports which contain some details about new camera effect in iOS 4.3. The camera in iPhone is one of most discussed hardware in it. There were lots of complains about its quality and incapability in the early stage. However it supported many software applications to deliver a high quality multimedia experience to its users. With the improvement of hardware, the camera also came a long way. Currently the ‘I’ devices are equipped with high quality cameras even with front camera for video conferencing. The iOS 4.3 will provide extended support for those hardware capabilities along with more camera effects in future.
Video Scrubbing Options
Most of the portable video playback devices doesn’t provide video scrubbing feature, just play and stop. In case you need to quickly go through a video to get an idea, it will be difficult or may be not possible. However, iOS was providing video scrubbing manually where you can drag the curser in video play back time line. In iOS 4.3 you have more options. By dragging down the finger in video playback time line you can switch between few scrubbing modes and current mode will be displayed under the time line.
In addition to above features iOS 4.3 will be equipped with more user interface advancement like icon arrangement, onscreen keypad improvement, and extended support for retina display. Further, it will be having options like 10 times SMS tone play, ping restriction and HTTP live streaming statistics.
Evolution of iOS
In the early time when 1st iPhone introduced, iOS was an inferior operating system for mobile devices compared to other operating systems available in the market in that time, including Symbian and Windows. Top of all in that time it didn’t even have very basic functionalities like multi tasking. However, due to its exceptional user interfaces and multimedia capabilities it survived. The huge success of iPhone was defined by the ‘Apple’ name itself and its exceptional hardware capabilities including multi point touch screen and accelerometer. But today thing are way better, iOS came a long way adding more and more functionalities in to that. Now it’s having multi tasking, extended application support, improved hardware accessibility to 3rd party application and great developers support. I wouldn’t hesitate to say, today iOS is way better than Symbian in many aspects. However, the major competitor of iOS, Android OS is out there growing fast too.
Future Market Impact
Apple iPhone and iPad has already made a phenomenal impact on market point of view on mobile devices. They actually redefined the previous standards and showed ‘This is how a mobile device should be!’ They made billions of dollars worth sales and dominated the market. In the meantime they developed themselves as well, both in software and hardware side. Now they present iOS 4.3 and they gave multi-point touch screen, accelerometer and retina display before. Those things make evident that they are the best and on top of the market. But are they really? Android OS is giving a silent yet significant challenge to iOS showing the strength of open source community. It’s also equipped with more and advance applications and features. Further, it’s also having a Software Development Kit released for developers which is building a huge development community around it. Most importantly it’s using the language JAVA which is the most popular according to TIOBE index. It comes as open source so its evolution is not decided by one company. It comes with many devices from many manufactures which will give a wide selection and features to its users. Hence, it takes leaps ahead in most aspects which will directly affect the market share. However, the most important factor which will decide the existence of any application of hardware would be the community and culture it will develop among its users. There is no argument that ‘Apple’ is the best in there with their ‘i’ culture where Android is nowhere near. So it is going to be a tight game and current stats say that Android is growing faster. No matter what, end of the day consumers will get the best product for cheaper price as a result of any market war.
References
Patel, N. (2011, January 12). iOS 4.3 beta arrives for devs, brings AirPlay video support to apps, personal hotspot and customizable iPad side switch (update: video!). Retrieved January 19, 2011, from www.engadget.com: http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/12/ios-4-3-beta-arrives-for-devs-brings-airplay-video-support-to-a/
Viticci, F. (2011, January 11). Apple Releases iOS 4.3 Beta, Here’s What’s New. Retrieved January 19, 2011, from www.macstories.net: http://www.macstories.net/news/breaking-apple-releases-ios-4-3-beta/
Woods, B. (2011, January 13). Apple rolls out iOS 4.3 SDK to developers. Retrieved January 19, 2011, from www.zdnet.co.uk: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/tech-tech-boom-10017860/apple-rolls-out-ios-43-sdk-to-developers-10021483/
If you are a web developer you know what a favicon is. It’s the small image you can see in the browser title bar right next to the web page title. This is mainly used for branding purposes. Of course it’s giving good impression about the website to the users. Since most of the modern browsers are using tabs this favicon will be displayed in the tab.
If you want to add a favicon for your website, as the first step you have to create an image file following below specification.
File Format: ICO
Dimensions: 16 x 16px
No problem you can create a image file with given dimension, but you will find out that most of the common image editors doesn’t support this file format.
Then you might try to download ICO file from some website, but in that there won’t be the element of originality.
Here is a good solution for you to create your own original favicon using online tool comes totally free. This will give you array of options to customize your favicon exactly the same way you need it.
How to Use Favicon.cc
Visit Favicon.cchome page
There you have an image editor in the middle and color picker in right panel.
If you take a closer look in to color picker you will be able to see transparency adjustment, Last used colors, eraser, automatic color picker and move tool.
If you need animated favicon, you can expand the use animation section under the image editor.
All you have to do is draw whatever you need in the image canvas using mouse.
If you feel like drawing using mouse is not a good plan, you can import a image from your local computer.
Then it will be automatically converted to the favicon format.
Below the image canvas you will be able to see a preview of favicon as it will be seen on the browser.
There you have the download link download the file to your computer.
This is a very simple and easy tool for you to create your own original favicon for your website. Operations are flexible and letting you to draw one from the scratch and convert existing image to a favicon as well.
How to Add Favicon to Your Web Page?
In HTML files things goes between tag will be displayed in the browser page and meta data goes in between tag. Since favicon won’t be displayed one the page but on the browser title bar it will go in between tag.
As the first step upload the created favicon file to a known location on your web server. Then insert the below code to the page where you need to add the favicon.
Now you will be able to see your own favicon once you load the web page in browser tab.
In a previous post I was talking about Windows Phone 8 device line up. There I specially mentioned about two major manufactures, Nokia and HTC and had a discussion about Nokia Lumia 920. Today I’m going to take a closer look in to HTC Windows Phone 8X.
Same as Nokia Lumia 920, this device is also coming with unique features. They share many common things as well. Let’s get started with specification highlight.
Device Configuration
Design
It’s a single block design with different color options. Most Windows 8 phones are available in different attractive colors. Device thickness is 10.1mm and weight is 130g.
Front panel holds 4.3 display, capacitive buttons and front facing camera. In back panel you can find primary shooter, LED flash and loudspeaker. Top edge has the 3.5 mm audio out while right edge has the volume rocker and shutter button.
Display
The display is 4.3 inch Super LCD panel behind Corning Gorilla Glass 2 with 720x1280px resolution and 342ppi of pixel density. Display size is smaller than Lumia 920 but having the same resolution. The result is super sharp and compact display.
Processor and Storage
All the Windows Phone 8 devices share same hardware platform which is Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus (MSM8960) with 1.5GHzDual Core Krait CPU and Adreno 225 GPU. RAM is 1GB and internal storage is 16GB non expandable.
Camera
Primary shooter is usual 8MP one with 1080p @30fps video recording and other standard features. But front facing camera is different here. It’s a 2.1MP one which can record 1080p videos. I haven’t noticed a phone with this level of front facing camera. You might be able to use this creatively.
Connectivity
This comes with standard technologies such as 2G, 3G, HSDPA, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth 2.1, NFC and microUSB 2.0. You will be able to enjoy LTE as well, but it would depend on your carrier.
Battery Life
Capacity of battery that comes with is 1800 mAh. There are no official records of talk time and I assume it will be same or may be lesser than Nokia Lumia 920.
Wrapping Up
The specs build up a picture of average Smartphone. But HTC 8X has few unique feature. The best thing here is ultra sharp display. It’s sharper than famous retina display in iPhone 5 and even sharper than Nokia Lumia 920 display. Next hook is built-in Beat audio enhancement. Combination of both of this feature would make this a great multimedia device.
Phone is expected to be release in end of 2012. Hope this will give a good break to Windows Phone 8.
