Google has now become the backbone of WWW. In past few years they came out with many web applications, replacing desktop applications we used for decades. Today for all the business and organizational needs Google has their products and the best part is, most of them are for free.
When you are using Google services the main problem you might face is you have to go to many URLs and keep many browser windows open. It could have been nicer if you can have one dashboard to access all the Google services. The good new Gpanion does it for you. Let’s go and get hands on.
Getting Started with Gpanion
Go to Gpanion website and login with Google account or Google apps account.
It will take you to main dashboard.
Let the quicktime run to play sound notifications
Take a look at settings before start using. Show icons in color would be a good idea. Other than that default would work for most people.
In left side bar you can find links to favorites, apps and search.
In favorites, next to title you can find the favorite editor.
In Google data section you can open Gmail, calendar, tasks, documents and reader right in the same page.
If you are using Google apps with your domain, this would be a nice idea to get single point of access to all the service. You can open few apps in the same page even without going to another tab. Give it a try. It might save a lot of time when working with Google services.
The main players in SoC cold war are Nvidia Tegra and Qualcomm Snapdragon. They manufacture mobile SoC and sell them to other manufactures. They have already reached quad core CPU, high end GPU, DDR3 RAM and all the other goodness you can ever imagine of.
Apple Ax and Samsung Exynos is also continued to improve their SoC, but I generally keep them out in SoC cold war since they are not selling those to other manufactures. Recently Samsung came out with latest Exynos 5 Octa with 8 CPU cores. You can find the same chip in Galaxy S IV (i9500) international version. This is going beyond all the boundaries compared to other SoC. Let’s see what sort of place it has in the SoC cold war.
We are talking about 8 Core CPU. So you must be expecting way higher benchmarking results compared to other SoC. But result is not exactly the same. It’s slightly better than Snapdragon 600 and way lesser than Nvidia Tegra 4, the current winner. You can see the benchmarking results of above SoCs here.
As it appears, the objective of packing 8 CPU cores in Exynos 5 Octa is not to make it super powerful, but to make it less power hungry. In order to check whether it’s working we have to collect lots more data about battery life in Galaxy S IV. It may come up in few weeks.
If you are planning to buy a Galaxy S IV and stuck with the decision which version to buy, now you have your answer. There won’t be much performance difference regardless of number of CPU cores. Quad core version comes with LTE in USA carriers, so that would be a better choice than 8 core version which doesn’t have LTE.
Few years ago Samsung released a revolutionary Galaxy Note, the original one introducing a new mobile device category. It became a new trend like never expected and paved way for Galaxy Note II. Now we are hearing rumors about Galaxy Note III expected to be released this year.
Specs and Features of Galaxy Note III
Design: Thinner Bezels // Thinner profile
Display: 5.99 Inches // Super AMOLED // 1080×1920 px // 367 ppi // Corning Gorilla Glass III
Camera: 13 MP (Primary) // 2 MP (Front) // Features as Galaxy S IV
OS: Android 4.2.2
Connectivity: LTE // HSDPA // GSM // Wi-Fi // BT // NFC // IR // USB
Battery: Don’t know yet
The design will be almost same as Galaxy S IV only little bigger. It will be much thinner, lighter and surrounding bezels would be also thinner to make the device smaller as possible.
The display in Galaxy Note II is massive but still has 720p resolution which gives it significantly lesser sharpness. In Note III Display will be even bigger with higher 1080p resolution and sharpness. With this level of pixel density it’s qualified to call as “Retina Display”.
The hardware here would share the same platform as Galaxy S IV, yet configured to be even more powerful. Galaxy Note is always about multi tasking, so it can always use some extra processing muscle.
Camera, OS, TouchWiz and connectivity would be again same as Galaxy S IV. Notes are very popular for longer battery life. So there is a high chance for it to pack up with massive battery, probably even bigger than Note II.
This is expected to be launched in IFA trade show this September. Be ready to witness another massive phablet powerhouse.
The idea of wearable computers was around for several decades. We’ve seen some prototype devices, but they were nowhere near polished enough for day to day usage. Google is the very first company to perfect a wearable computer as Google Project Glass. They have already released it to media and selected few people as Explorer Edition.
Google Glass is bringing many brand news idea in to the table. And it’s perfect timing. Mobile device market is saturated with technologies we know for years and their incremental updates. So Google Glass made a huge buzz all around web like no other mobile device.
Closer Look at Google Glass
Design
The design of Google Glass is same as any other sunglass. Right hand side hinge holds brain, camera and head mounted display. The battery is placed in same side behind the years. The explorer version comes with removable black glasses. Down the time there will be lot more options. More interestingly you might be able to get to prescribe a spectacle with Google Glass brain.
This is the most interesting component in Google Glass. It’s a head mounted display projecting images right in to eyes through a prism to create a large virtual display. When you are wearing glasses you use this while driving, walking or any other work without any interruption.
Processor and Storage
Platform: IT OMAP
CPU: 1.2 GHz // Dual Core // Cortex A9
GPU: PowerVR SGX540
RAM: 1 GB
Internal Storage: 16 GB
Expandable Storage: N/A
This spec is exactly same a Samsung Galaxy Nexus released back in 2011 November. You might be thinking that this is antique compared to latest Android phones. But Google Glass is only an extension to your phone, not a replacement. It performs few selected and important operations.
After all my Galaxy Nexus still fits super fine with my day to day work such as email, social media, YouTube, camera and basic gaming. It’s a wise move to keep hardware power as low as possible to save battery.
Software
OS: Android 4.0.4 ICS
UI: Customized
In early promotional videos no one could guess what the OS in Google Glass is. Finally we got to know that its Google’s very own Android, yet bit old version. They UI is totally customized to fit with HMD and voice triggered operations. In addition it’s designed to identify eye movements and touch pad is there for additional operations.
As I said earlier this is an extension to your phone. You can use MyGlass app to connect an Android phone with Google Glass via Bluetooth. Then Glass can use GPS and data connectivity through the phone.
Camera
Primary: 5 MP // 720p@30fps
The camera is also same as Samsung Galaxy Nexus. I’m pretty sure that this camera will change the face of whole social images and videos. With this you can record videos, totally hands free even while you are walking or driving. You will be able to see interesting photos and videos in social media really soon. We already have few recorded with Google Glass Explorer Edition.
Connectivity
Mobile Network: N/A
Wi-Fi: 802.11b/g
GPS: via MyGlass companion App
Bluetooth: Yes
USB: microUSB 2.0
Audio: Bone condition
This is a wearable device. So it’s a not a good idea to include microwave transmitter in it. So Google Glass comes with Wi-Fi and BT only. Mainly it’s using BT to connect to your phone and use its data connectivity, GPS and other resources.
Once you pair this with your phone it will work as head set as well with built in microphone and bone condition audio.
Battery
We don’t have exact information about battery type and capacity. But according to Google it will be able to live for a whole day with general usage. This is a pretty small device, so it will have a small battery. Engineers must have taken desperate measures to save battery life as much as possible.
Wrapping Up
By now you must have figured out that this is a BT paired device working with your phone. Normally you are using such a device to extend microphone and speaker. But here you are getting a camera, head mounted display and processor as well.
Google Glass is already released as explorer edition to few selected people with $1500 price tag. They have already done amazing things with it. Some people have even rooted it.
It doesn’t need a genius to say that this will turn whole mobile device market upside down and open countless opportunities. To make all those happen, Google has to keep the price point low, like their other devices. If they manage to do it, this will make many new sales records in mobile device market and change the lifestyle of whole human civilization, like iPhone did back in 2007.
Google has become the largest search engine ever on earth. All the webmasters know that a large part of the organic traffic that comes to your website is from Google. In the early stage major strength in Google search engine was Page Ranking Algorithm which shows us the best pages at the top of search result.
With time it evolved to be an even smarter search engine. Today it’s assessing best pages based on more than 200 signals. Practically if a page is good for a human, it’s good for Google. So most of the SEO techniques internet marketers used for years have become obsolete.
Google is continuing to collect detailed and meaningful information about your web pages. Most of the decisions are taken based on visible content in the page. But in some special cases you can add Meta information (not keywords or description) to guide Google to retrieve exact data about your page. This is very useful to create rich snippet in search results which will definitely increase click through rates.
Let’s go and figure out how to give meaningful data to Google search engine using two different techniques. Proper application of these techniques will give a competitive advantage in the very noisy WWW and of course give you more visitors.
Google Webmaster Markup
Here what you have to do is include few more HTML tags to further explain content in your web pages. Google has released few markup formats and supported types of content such as Reviews, people, recipes, music etc.
Once you do that your pages will be displayed in search results as shown below with extra details.
Visit this page from Google web master tools and check out below video to start with Google webmaster Markup.
Google Data Highlighter
This is actually an alternative for the previous webmaster markup. Here you don’t have to change any of the code in your web pages. Instead you can show important data in your web pages by highlighting them and labeling. Then Google is automatically creating rich snippet for that web page.
Best part here is that you don’t have to do this for all the pages. Google automatically understand the pattern of data and automatically highlight data in all the other pages. All you have to do is verify them and submit. You can do all those with Google data highlighter tool. Watch this video to get a clear picture for you to start with.
Hope these tips would be helpful to improve search engine presence of your websites and most importantly to improve conversion rate.
Tell me how you think about Google rich snippet as a comment below. Subscribe to our email list and stay connected.
In Android phone market manufactures are competing with hardware spec. In last few months we saw quad core processors, 1080p full HD displays, 2 GB DDR3 RAM, 72 core GPU and even Octa core processors as well.
While everything is going on like this, the Apple iPhone 5 still has a dual core processor and 1 GB DDR2 RAM. But the magic is iPhone 5 is performing as good as any latest muscle Android phone. What is the secret here?
OS Architecture
iOS
Android
Android architecture is almost same as iOS, but it has additional layer, Android RT. What is that? It’s coming up in next section.
App Development
iOS
iOS app development is done with objective-c, a simplified version of C, the most powerful programming language ever. It’s capable of natively working with core libraries and even kernel with much lesser overheads.
The problem here is not many developers are using C or objective-c. But with a polished up development tools and support Apple managed to overcome this problem. Today there is a huge development community around iOS.
Android
By the time Android came in to market, iOS was pretty popular and it had huge active development community. Android needed some strategic way to attract developers and Google decided to go for JAVA, the most popular programming language by then.
Unlike objective-c JAVA is not capable of working nativly with core libraries or kernel. It requires a virtual machine sitting in between. So Google came up with Android RT, a simplified version of JAVA RT to Android OS.
This system worked perfectly and lots of existing JAVA developers came in to Android app development market. Today Google play is even bigger than Apple App store.
Android Lag and iOS Smoothness
Now we know the architectural overview and app framework of Android and iOS. It’s time to sum up reasons for Android lag and iOS smoothness.
iOS runs native code (objective-c) and Android runs on byte code (JAVA) which need to be converted real time to native code through a virtual machine (Android RT). This is an extra overhead and common for all JAVA apps. Even in desktop computer there is a measurable performance difference between JAVA and C/C++ apps.
iOS has top priority process to render UI and Android has normal priority.
Andrew Munn
Android follows the traditional PC model of rendering occurring on the main thread with normal priority.
This is a not an abstract or academic difference. You can see it for yourself. Grab your closest iPad or iPhone and open Safari. Start loading a complex web page like Facebook. Half way through loading, put your finger on the screen and move it around. All rendering instantly stops. The website will literally never load until you remove your finger. This is because the UI thread is intercepting all events and rendering the UI at real-time priority.
If you repeat this exercise on Android, you’ll notice that the browser will attempt to both animate the page and render the HTML, and do an ‘ok’ job at both. On Android, this is a case where an efficient dual core processor really helps, which is why the Galaxy S II is famous for its smoothness.
iOS is very strict with multi-tasking. In early few versions it didn’t support it at all. Android supports to multi-task as much possible, but it lead to poor UI performance.
iOS has minimalistic set of features and user customization. Android let you to personalize UI with home screens, widgets and has wide set of features. They require significant processing power and eventually lead to poor UI performance.
Possible Solutions for Android Lag
With stronger hardware android also will be able to perform smooth as iOS and that’s why Android handset manufactures are focused on Octa core CPU, 72 cores GPU and DDR3 RAM. But this will lead to extra radiation and poor battery life.
Change the core Android architecture. This is a huge mission, next to impossible. With this, all the apps need to be re-written or Android has to support legacy apps.
In Android Jelly Bean, Google managed to increase the UI frame rate to 60 FPS which is promising. Now it’s par with iOS. But still there are occasional UI “hiccups” especially when you are dealing with network application.
To compete with iOS, Android must take some serious steps to optimize core OS functions rather than increasing hardware power. That’s lots of challenging work for Android development team. Let’s see how they are going to solve this.
Let’s face it. Our smartphones and tablets are cluttered with tons of personal photos- be it food, vacations, selfies, or random things we see on the street. It’s all there in our memory cards, and at some point we want to show it to our friends. Question is- how do we access them?
This is where Etikado comes in. Etikado is a free mobile application that allows you to tag your photos so you can easily find them wherever and whenever you want to. Its easy-to-use interface allows you to tag, find, and share photos, with a few taps on your phone.
How Does Etikado Work?
Etikado operates on the premise of Tag. Find. Do.
Tag
After taking a photograph on your phone, or choosing a photo from your phone’s gallery, you will be given an option to add tags to the photo. Do this by simply entering tags related to your photo. Press DONE after each tag entered. You can also assign colors to tags so you can find it easily afterwards.
Find
Here’s the fun part. Now that your photo is tagged, you can easily find it using the color-laden and fun-looking Tag Cloud. Swipe your screen to the left or right to see tags categorized by color. To locate a photo, click on a tag you might have assigned to a photo. After clicking a tag, photos tagged with the same name will show up. For example, if you’re looking for a photo you might have tagged with the word “travel”, you will see all photos tagged “travel.”
Share
Now that you found your photo, you can share it on Facebook, Twitter, or via email. Simply type the status or message you want to go with the photo, and click the icon of how you want to share it to the world. After confirming your message, the photo will be posted on your profile together with the tags you used to find it.
Finally
Etikado is pretty cool. It’s colorful and user-friendly interface requires no learning curve in order to get started using the app. Most of all, it keeps your (hundreds slash thousands of) phone photos in one place. Etikado is available for download on iOS and Android devices. Try this app and share your comments on www. etikado.com
Most of the Smartphone today are having at least 5MP of camera in built. They produce very high resolution images. There is no problem when you are uploading them to social media because they have in built mechanism to reduce the image size and fit those in to webpage.
When you are embedding those images in your own webpage, situation is different. One option is manually re-size them and insert. But in that case image will be having lesser definition. Another practical way is, you can insert a thumbnail and display the full size image upon clicking.
What if you are dealing with a panorama image? Most of the Android phones were having panoramic image capturing for years and recently iOS also joined the club. They have weird aspect ratio and it’s quite difficult to fit in to a webpage. Reducing resolution is also not an option because in that case viewer won’t be able to enjoy it.
There is an amazing image viewer which is giving solution to all the above image embedding problems. Further it’s letting you to embed ebooks and even web pages. Let’s take a closer look in to Zoom.it brought to you by Microsoft.
Getting Started with Zoom.it
Go to Zoom.it home page.
Upload your image or eBook to web storage space. Best suggestion is DropBox public folder.
Now copy the link to image and past it in text box in Zoom.it home page, then click create.
Then it will fetch the image, convert it and display in Zoom.it image viewer.
There you can zoom it in and out, see it full screen and home button will reset the layout.
You can share this as a link or embed it in your webpage using options in the page.
How to Embed Zoom.It in WordPress Blog Post?
This will work just fine for most web pages. But if you are a WordPress blogger like me, you might face difficulties when embedding given script in your post. Sometimes it’s getting disappeared etc. For that here is a good solution.
Download openzoom-zoomit WordPress plugin from here.
When you are embedding Zoom.it image in your post use below code.
[zoomit id=”6VoqM” width=”auto” height=”400px”]
Here zoom.it id is the highlighted part in share URL. http://zoom.it/6VoqM
Now it will work just fine. If you need to alter the width and height, change parameters in zoomit tag. Remember guys, this will override functions in your native image gallery, you may won’t like it. Try this and tell us what you feel about zoom.it by dropping a comment below. Here is an example before i go.
In a previous post I was talking about how to embed audio clip in a blog post and its importance. There I was using latest HTML 5 audio player with self hosted audio file. In order to play it user need only an updated browser, not any 3rd party plug-in.
Today I’m taking it to the next level and going to tell you how to embed a video file in your blog post like a BOSS. It’s almost same as embedding the audio file, only few additional details to pay attention to.
Prepare Video Files
Here we have a minor problem. There is no one common format which is supported by entire browsers. As same as audio file you need a copy of same file in different formats. Most commonly used format is MP4. In order to expand browser compatibility you may include OGG and WebM formats as well.
There are several free video converting software. But my best suggestion is Online-Convert.com. It supports wide set of file formats as input and having MP4, OGG and WebM as output.
Finally upload them to WordPress media library or any other web storage such as DropBox.
Embed Video Files with HTML5
It’s same as audio embedding but you have to include 2 more parameters to specify the videos, width and height. I recommend you to embed video in its original size. If it’s not in required size, re-size it while you convert it in Online-Convert.com.
You are done and here is the outcome.
Hardware: Intel Core i5 2nd Gen // 4GB DDR2
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium // 64 Bit
Browser: Google Chrome Version 23.0.1271.91 m
Hosting video files in your server is not as easy as it’s with Audio file. It will consume huge amount of space as well as bandwidth for transferring. Pay close attention to them. In a storage and bandwidth critical situation, I recommend you to not to use this.
So far you optimized the software aspect in your WordPress blog and in last post I discussed how to select good hardware infrastructure as well. Now you must be having super speedy WordPress blog. But here I’m trying to take you to the next level of performance.
Your web server is getting data from your MySQL database, create dynamic web pages and present them to visitors. But if you take a closer look, most of the content in your webpage are static and not getting changed over a period of time. Previously we enabled browser caching to prevent loading the static content over and over again from server. However, caching alone would not give you optimum performance.
When it comes to dynamic web content, you have no option but to deliver them from your web server. But think about static content such as images, CCS and JS. There are no dynamic content creations, only a content delivery. For optimum performance you can host those contents in multiple geographical locations. Then users will be able to fetch static content from nearest location which will be way faster than single server.
This is a great idea but you must be thinking about the cost. To setup this kind of hosting backbone you will need many web serves all around the world. Definitely it will cost you a fortune. But if you take a good look, there are some solutions even you can use.
Roadmap
What is a Content Delivery Network?
Content Delivery Network is a web hosting service, but they are not capable of executing server side scripting or databases. They can only deliver static content. Generally they have data centers all round the world. So users can access the nearest center and get static content quickly. The whole process is transparent to users. They just have to look up the URL, and dynamic content will be delivered from web server and static content will be delivered from CDN automatically.
Amazone Cloud Front is a great content delivery network service. It’s spread all around the world and giving high performance service. Best thing is, it’s unbelievably cheap. So anyone would be able to use it.
But here I’m trying to give you a totally free solution. Further, this is fully automated; therefore no complex configurations are needed and provide extra services as well. They have more than 20 data centers around the world to deliver static content. It’s CloudFlare.
How to Configure Cloud Flare with Your Blog?
Normally you will have to re write URLs of your static content to deliver them from CDN. But with CloudFlare you only have to change the nameserver records in your domain. Then it handles the rest of it.
Go to CloudFlare and create an account
During the registration processes you will have to go through several steps
There you will have to change NS records and finally update your nameserves in domain control panel.
That’s all and you are done. Now all the traffic that comes to your website goes through CloudFlare. It automatically stores your static content, optimizes them, provides security and gives analytical report of visitors as well.
Now your visitors will get static content from CloudFlare CDN and only for dynamic content they will go to your web server. This will save lots of server resources and make it work faster. Your visitors will get static content from nearest location. So page load will be super speedy for them. Though CloudFlare keep copies of your static content, they respect your caching rules. So they will work the same.
Now you have taken all the possible steps toward High performance WordPress blog. Now your blog must be loading within few seconds or may be within less than one second. With time you will notice that you are getting good search engine traffic as well as good user engagement.
This is the last episode of “Road Map to High Performance WordPress Blog”. In case you need further help to optimize your wordpress blog, drop a comment below.
Contact me @MalindaOnline to claim your Free Website Performance Review. I’m giving you a detailed report with identified performance bottlenecks and optimum cost effective solution.
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