How many phone calls do you usually make per day? Answer is, many. Be it a friendly call, casual call or serious business call it is always a good practice to organize what you have to say before making the call. Organized people always use note books, either printed or digital, to maintain a ‘to-do’ list. But how do you organize things you have to say to each person when you make calls? Of course you can do that with your existing note book with few additional notes. But again how to get the right reminder in the right time?

To solve all these problems, there is a precious piece of software, especially designed for your android Smartphone. And the best part is, all of it comes for free! This is known as the Bubble.

How to Install Bubble in Your Smartphone

If you want to use Bubble, you must have any type of Android Smartphone and it should have Android version 2.1 or later. Then you can download the application from Android Market for free. The installation file size is 837KB. The application’s most updated release is version 1.1.0.

Once the installation is done you can access the application from the icon which will be there in your menu. Once you open the application you will see that there are three sections named ‘contact’, ‘bubbles’ and ‘call log’. By default it will open ‘contact’.

How it Works

Once you open the application as I said before you can see the contact list by default. You can tap on one contact to open it. Once it open you can see ‘add bubble’ button there. By tapping it you can add a note related to the selected contact, and then assign a color to the note as well. When you open the same contact again you will be able to see the note on the screen. There is a cross in every note to remove it in case you don’t want it anymore. After you successfully add a bubble to a contact you will be able to see the ‘bubble’ icon in the contact list in front of subjected contact.

In the ‘bubbles’ section you can filter out the contacts which are having bubbles. By tapping any contact you can access the previous screen which let you add/remove bubbles as well as directly make a call to the contact.

After you add these bubbles, when you make a call to contact which is having a bubble or when you are receiving a call, you will be able to see the attached notes in the calling screen instead of the default screen. They will be displayed in a bubble with the color you select when you make the note.

In the third section ‘call log’, you can see the list of incoming and outgoing calls and related bubbles to that. In here you can add, remove and edit bubbles depending on your calling activity.

Eg: Suppose you added a bubble for discussing a meeting with your boss. And few minutes ago you made the call and discussed about that. Now you don’t need that related bubble to your boss anymore. So you can go to ‘call log’ and, make sure you made the call to boss, then remove the bubble. If you have anything else to talk with Boss when he calls again, you can add a new bubble.

Unlike the traditional note book you used to maintain the ‘to-do’ list you can get the right reminder, with right activity, related to the right person in right time using Bubble android application. That’s how Bubble makes your life easier.

Below you can see a video released by “Bubble” development team, “GoodFriend” which gives you good idea about usage of bubble.

How to Use Bubble Effectively

Bubble is not a replacement for your traditional note book or to-do list. It’s an extension and a different version of it. This will be a very useful tool for the people who need to interact with many other people like businessmen, academicians, politicians, management and marketing professionals etc. They can use the conventional note book and to-do list for general purposes. In case you need a reminder, especially if you need to delegate some task to another person, best way to get the reminder for that is when you make the call to that particular person. That’s exactly what bubble does.

Politicians might use this to note down the things that he “must NOT tell” to someone else, especially to journalists. All he has to do is make a small note related to contacts of all journalists using bubble. Every time he make a call or get a call from those journalists, bubble will remind the politicians about the things that he “must NOT” speak about.

This will be a useful tool to management professionals. Most of the time, they have to assign work to fellow employees. After assigning he can make a note, a bubble in subjected employees contact. When he call him again or getting call from him, the application will always remind about the work you assign to him. Things will work the same with marketing professionals as well.

Another example is when you make a call to customer service division. After you make the call, you can make a note mentioning the last time progress with the complaint. So, next time when you make a call to same customer service, application will remind you what happened last time.

There are unlimited creative usages of this application. You will be able to share your experience with us as a comment.

Popularity of Bubble

In the android market the application “Bubble” is getting good user feedback. So far it has received 60 feedbacks and 32 are having 5 starts. Average rating is 4 stars. Currently application download is categorized as 10,000-50,000. When I take a deeper look into user feedback, I could see that Bubble users are having many different types of Smartphones including Samsung, Motorola, HTC and LG. It says that it is popular among variety of Android Smartphones. Considering the last 30 days download chart, I could not see a steady growth. It’s peaked in the last 15 days and then dropped drastically. I could not find a logical reason for this so far.

Suggestion to the Development Team

The application is simple, smart and exactly serves the purpose in a very user-friendly manner. In order to develop the application further and make it even smarter I have a few suggestions to the development team.

• Online synchronization system for bubbles, especially as a disaster recovery plan
• Ability to delete a note while call is on
• A checkbox for each note to mark them as done
• More readable font colors and sizes
• Search and narrow down contacts without scrolling

Notes of Genius is looking forward to see further developed versions of this valuable piece of software in near future and wishing all the best for the development team!

Tags: #Android

The very first version of the iPad was introduced to the market few years ago. By that time the concept of tablet device was pretty new to the mobile device users. Same as in many times before in apple history, they made a global life style change. Few months after launching Apple iPad, I could see many people using those in public places, buses and trains. Most of the time people were using those to read E books on the run, kids used them to play games and most interestingly, many people use them to browse internet in public Wi-Fi zones. It’s a really an amazing experience to browse internet with big touch screen in iPad. It also had a version with 3G connectivity addition to Wi-Fi. Many of the businessmen use that as a window to take a look in to their business on the run and sometimes control it. With in short period of time Apple iPad change the global idea of mobile tablet device.

In the first quarter of the year 2011, apple introduced iPad 2 as a continuation and improvement to the previous iPad. It contained lots of more cool features and new technologies. Again same as before sales hit the sky and people started using iPad 2 like crazy. It became a day to day item than a high tech magic in matter of months. In this article I’m going to take a look in to social impact done with the wide spreading of Apple iPad 2.

Specification Overview

• Processor

• Operation System

• Display
  • 9.7 inch
  • LED Backlit
  • Multi Touch sensor
  • Fingerprint resistant

• Sensors
  • Gyro meter
  • Accelerometer
  • Light Sensor
  • Compass

• Connectivity
  • Wi-Fi
  • Bluetooth
  • UMTS/HSDPA

• Camera
  • 720p HD video
  • Front VGA
  • 0.7 Mega pixel rear
  • 0.3 Mega pixel front

• Battery life

• Online service

In my first look I didn’t notice many differences in tech specification. But when I take a closer look there are very important improvements. Mainly they have increased the processing power from A4 chip to A5 dual core chip which will give you double the processing power. And previous iPad didn’t have any camera while this one has 2 with 720P HD video recording. Happy news for mobile games, iPad 2 comes with Gyro meter which give you more precise control when you play games with physical movements. Previous one only had a accelerometer which capture only movement of device not the movement relative to gravity. These features have enabled whole lot of new possibilities with iPad 2.

Usage Impact

Games

The iPad 2 comes with lots of favors for gaming. Its processor, highly accurate multi touch screen and special motion sensors like gyro meter turn it in to excellent gaming device. Lots of games developers have take the advantage of improvement of iPad 2 and came up with cool concepts. Most popular one would be car games and the most interesting part is you can drive the car considering the device as the steering wheel. With new gyro meter you can do more than previous accelerometer. I believe that game developers have not yet taken the full advantage of gyro meter and its capabilities, yet soon we will be able to see cool game which uses this new hardware. I wish there is a game which help us to work out, especially aerobics properly by guiding us detecting our movements.

Scientific Application

Other than the general public, iPad has dominated the scientific and academic world as well. Most of the scientist and researchers are using iPad as their notebook and data collection device. When they are working in field, this becomes really handy. There are custom developed applications which allow the researchers to store new data in central database and a retrieve the data as well. Improved connectivity options of iPad 2 have made those possible. The data could be presented to the researcher in various different graphical ways with the 10 inch display. Additionally they are using it as a communication tool, especially for video conferencing with the aid of front camera.

Graphic Designing

Many of the expert graphic designers and art directors are using iPad as their idea book. They are drawing  sketches using multi touch screen and edit them using special software. With the improved multimedia capabilities and graphic acceleration this kind of work will become even easier and efficient. Additionally they can get the use of gyro meter to come up with graphic design with physical movements like smudge painting. Since iPad 2 comes with a camera capable of capturing stills and720p HD videos they can record their inspiration on the run and attach them in to their portable digital idea book.

Music Production

In music production software, it’s very difficult to handle its control surface with mouse and key board. To make controlling easier music produces were using hardware control surfaces. Still there were problems, like its very difficult upgrade hardware surface with the rapid improvement of software. Purchasing new and upgraded hardware surface was very costly. iPad and its multi point touch made music produces world much easier. They could extend the PC or MAC software interface to iPad and control it with touch screen. In this case, dealing with software upgrades is effortless. This comes handy when they are working with mixers and their faders. This made it very easy to program and automation while mixing audio. And this made it very easy to program drum beats with drum machines. One of the most popular music production software re designs their interfaces to work with touch devices in their latest version. They came up with special drum machine named Kong Drum Designer with big buttons which works amazingly with touch devices. With the improvement of processing power in iPad 2 all these processes became smooth with lesser latency.

Stock Trading

Stock traders are set of people who deal with lots of information and make quick decision. iPad gave them perfect solution to their needs. iPhone is having too small display to give what they want. With iPad mainly they are reading news. 3G connectivity always helps this. And news is not enough then need stock market statistics and software to execute orders. Again iPad provides versatile solution to install application, visualize data in big 10 inch screen and place order with the Wi-Fi of 3G connectivity. One of the most popular stock trading software, Direct FN Pro has released iPad version of the software. This software work with iOS 5 and let the traders to get the market statistic, visualize them with charts, apply market indicators and place orders. You will find more information about this iPad application in here, with screenshots.

In early time most of the investors were reluctant to use these kinds of devices considering the performance issues and connectivity issues. A delay of one second may lead to loss of many millions in finance game. I believe that iPad 2 has given a solid solution to those investors to be confident and do their trading on iPad with its Dual core A5 processor and 3G or may be Wi-Fi connectivity.

Market Impact

Same as in any other apple product iPad 2 hit the sky with its sales soon after its launch. According to statistics it shows even bigger sales in first few hours, than previous version of iPad. Within 24 hours after launching, recorded number of sales were nearly 500 000 devices. At the same time it took the large proportionate of Laptop market. After launching iPad 2, there were significant dropping of sales of Laptops, since iPad 2 practically replace and gives better experience than conventional laptop. And there were huge improvement of gaming with iPad 2. Sales of iPad gaming application were boosted by more than 100% and 17% of iPad 2 users mainly used the device as a gaming platform. This is again huge improvement compared to 9% with iPad original version.

This amazing device changes the world of good with its amazing capabilities and made a significant impact on global life style. It introduces the easier way to do things as well as totally new ways to do things. It redefine the way we game, create computer base graphics, music and many more. This impact will surely continue and make the earth a better place with the creative contribution of iOS software developers and Apple team.

Tags: #Apple #iPad

Project Natal is a research project carried out by Microsoft to develop digital input device mainly for their product Xbox. The specialty in project natal is it’s not an ordinary input device which you have to press buttons and swing joy sticks. Using the Natal sensor you can control the game which you are playing without having any physical contact with the controller. It detects your body motions and voice to control the applications. This is an innovative concept to the gaming world, so every one’s eyes were focused to Project Natal recently.

The code name ‘Natal’ is a Brazilian city which showing Microsoft naming culture. The project coordinator Alex Kipman was from Brazil and it his choice to use this name. The first announcement of project natal was made on June 1st, 2009 by Microsoft at Los Angeles Convention Center. There was various promotional videos was launched and they got huge numbers of hits in YouTube. The commercial release of the produced to the market is unofficially schedules on October 2010 and the expected price would be around USD 150.

Technology

The Natal sensor contains three sensors which are RGB camera, Infrared depth sensor and multi array microphone. The RGB camera will be used to capture the 2D image and motions in front of the sensor along with the color details of it.  The IR depth sensor will be used to capture the distance variations from the sensor to the users. The multi array microphone will be used to capture the voice and the direction of it. Combining all the above factors the Natal sensor can determine the full body motion of the user. In order to do that there must be complex image and voice processing algorithms. The full body motions will be digitally transfer in to controlling signals and will be send to the Game console Xbox.

However there are various arguments about the practicality of this technology. Theoretically the above process is justifiable. But in the real gaming environment, especially in multiplayer games things can go wrong easily with the multiple movement. Furthermore some demonstrations in promotional videos seem not real and practical including the speed, response time and feedback. Many people believe that it’s not the real functionality, but a promotional staged act. As an answer to these arguments the Microsoft has released live demo of Project Natal which can be found on YouTube.

Applications

Gaming Controller

The primary application of project natal is as a Gaming controller. This extends the boundaries of gaming in to new dimension. With the Natal sensor the gamer can interact with the Gaming environment as he is actually living inside that. As long as it captures the full body motions without any gadget attached in to the body, the games will be free to express his self with the body motions and voice commands very precisely. Probably this will help Microsoft it increase their sales exponentially and expand their gaming empire.

Artificial Intelligence Application Interfacing

The development of artificial intelligent application is facing huge challenge that there are no proper input devices to interact with them. No matter how much the researchers develop the software, to make it ‘looks like human’ there has to be next generation input device which can understand human voice and activities. Project Natal provides perfect solution for these applications interfacing. There is a popular video found on YouTube which demonstrate this AI interfacing with Natal sensor for the Character ‘Milo’.

3D Graphic Designing

Project Natal will provide good support for 3D graphic designing industry. The current challenge is to model the Object correctly. The traditional controllers including keyboard and mouse don’t provide much support for that. Even when it comes to Laser scanning the process is complex and takes lots of time. The natal sensor will provide accurate interface for the artists to design 3D models without touching any controller, simply by their body motions.

When it comes to the motions capturing project natal can provide perfect solutions there as well. This is one of the major challenges faced by the film industry to capture the accurate human emotions and put it in to a 3D model. In addition to that the sensor can capture the voice too. This kind of emotion capturing process would provide a relaxed environment to the actor to give his best performance without getting attached to so many sensors.

Automated Customer Relation Management

This might sound like a crazy idea but the natal sensor could be used to automated and improved customer relationship management. At the door step of a costume store they can place a natal sensor and connect it to a computer which is having huge Plasma screen in front of that. Once the customer step in the natal sensor can capture that and automatically suggest some costumes which are suitable with an aid of AI character like ‘Milo’. Furthermore it can generate a 3D image of customer and show a demonstration of suggested costume as well. If technology manages to implement this, it will be the next generation of customer relations.

Military Applications

Another possible application of Natal sensor is to control advance military applications. The modern unmanned military aircrafts are controlled by Joystick from a ground base. However with the improvement of other implications, it’s asking for better and advanced controller where the project Natal might give a solution. In addition to that this can be used to control unmanned war robots. Finally let’s hope no one will ever use these things against Humans, but some kind of Alien invasion may be.

Future Development

Apparently the technology in project natal in something no one ever dreamed of. But still there can be improvements to be made. The most important factor would be the accuracy. That matters a lot in gaming environment to deliver an extraordinary gaming experience to the user. The usability of hardware seems good since you can easily place it on top of your TV.  The next most important factor would be the identification of multiple movements, especially in multiplayer environments. Though it started as a gaming controller, there is a huge possibility to use it for many other applications as mentioned above. Let’s have a curious mind about this path breaking hardware by Microsoft.

References

Tags: #Microsoft

Microsoft Office 2010 will be released on June 2010 with lots of new user-friendly features and capabilities. This development project was having the code name ‘Office 14’. Apparently there won’t be significant changes to the basic appearance and features. But there will be lots of new features which will give its users a band new experience. Microsoft Office has revolutionized the life of the people all around the world. It ‘s a software package which  is providing living examples about  the way how computers have changed peoples’ lives so easy. It provides easy and excellent methods to get aware to the ‘Geeky computer world’ even for a novice. Teachers start teaching about Information Technology to the little students with typing a letter on Microsoft Word.

Software Contents For The Packages

There are several applications that would be available in every edition of Microsoft Office. They are;

• Microsoft Access 2010
• Microsoft Excel 2010
• Microsoft Word 2010
• Microsoft OneNote 2010
• Microsoft Outlook 2010
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2010
• Microsoft Publisher 2010
• Microsoft Office Communicator 2010

In addition to them, Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 and Microsoft InfoPath 2010 will be available only in Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus edition.

New Features In Microsoft Office 2010

64-bit And 32-bit

Microsoft Office 2010 will be available for the Operating systems came after the Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3. A 64-bit Office 2010 version will be there for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows 7 operating systems. Meanwhile Windows XP Professional edition will not be supported for Microsoft Office 2010.

Office Mobile 2010 And Web Applications

Mobile 2010 will replace the currently available mobile applications that are used to read word, excel and other documents. This will required to have Windows mobile 6.5. There are several updates being done to the Mobile 2010. The new SharePoint Workspace will give the ability to view and edit the document content in offline mood. Microsoft Office 2010 provides the facility to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote online. This gives the user to work in remote machines as well.

Embedded Videos In PowerPoint 2010

PowerPoint 2010 provides a new facility to add the videos embedded inside the presentations. This will encourage the users to give much effective videos to the public without using flash. In addition, PowerPoint will have more techniques to edit the images and videos. Adding fades, reflection will give a much better output.

Office 2010 MAC Edition

Microsoft will release the Office MAC edition in 2011. It will be a 32-bit application and there will be no beta versions according to the statements. This will be a great encourage to the Apple users to bend their necks more to the Windows side for their personal and office purposes.

Appearance

The main eye catching change in the appearance is that applying the ‘Ribbon’ menu system to the every tool in the Microsoft Office 2010. It was not available in Microsoft Office 2007 for some tools such like Outlook 2007 and OneNote 2007. In addition, the big circular Office button has been replaced with a small rectangular Office button.

Open Office vs. Microsoft Office

Open Office is the most popular open source office package that is available in multi language and multi platforms. Sun Microsystems introduced Open Office with the for data interchange in Open Document Format (.ODF). It came very much popular due to the free availability among the users as a promising software package. It also allows the users to save and edit the files in the Microsoft Office formats as well. The Oracle Corporation does a large part of development of this software package.

The latest release of the Open Office is OpenOffice.org 3.0. The Open Office statistics shows that more than 98 million downloads were done by the people all around the world. It is an outstanding performance at the moment. But the number of Open Office users has reduced due to the several reasons. They are;

• The attractive interfaces of Microsoft Office
• New tools availability
• Attractive and in-built fonts
• Cracks and patches availability for the Microsoft Office

Challenges And Threats

There are several challenges that Microsoft has to face and they are already facing. Several countries used to ban some Microsoft Office products due to several issues. Security is one of the most considerable factors. Microsoft has solved several security issues by the results they got in the beta testing. File block, Office file validation and protected view are some of steps taken to assure the security of Microsoft Office 2010. The universities also used to encourage the students to use open source software rather than using the Microsoft Office because of it is proprietary software.

Microsoft Word Banned in USA

Microsoft has been banned to sell Microsoft Word in USA once due to an appeal from a company named i4i. This order was released by a judge of Texas court. This was regarding to an XML format used by the Microsoft Word. ‘i4i’ is a Canadian firm who had the patent for their XML plug-in has appealed that they own the XML plug-in which were used by the Microsoft Word 2007 and Word 2003.

What’s Next?

Microsoft Office has always provided a set of promising tools to the world that can be used for day to day life. There will be a good trend for accounting software and a diary software in the future. As far as the world has tended towards the digital world, the diary book will not remain in the future. There will be a good trend to a digital personal or a business diary in the office. Accounting is another important thing that should be removed from paper based books. Several accounting software exists in the world. Microsoft can provide an excellent tool for personal and business accounting. Microsoft has taken a huge step to develop a mobile application of Microsoft Office 2010 that could be carried with the mobile phone. An inbuilt personal tracking application would be a great implementation for future releases. That might be useful to add a ‘Geo tag’ for the documents.

References

Tags: #Microsoft

2011 was the year of Smartphone and Tablets. If you take a look back in to the year, you will figure out how many Smartphones and Tablets came in to the market with lots of interesting features. Out of those devices, when it comes to sales, Apple’s iPhone and iPad took the lead.  However HTC, Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony Ericsson were also giving a good competition. If you take a look in to the cool features in those Smartphones and Tablets, the main thing you will notice is the Multi touch screen and interfaces. Other than that those devices comes with dual core processor, 1GB RAM, Gyroscope and many more advance hardware.

The main difference between a Smartphone and Tablet is the screen size. If you make the screen size bigger, it will become less portable but more usable for many applications like Business and Multimedia. That’s where the “Tablet Trend” started. Smartphone always fits in to your pants pocket, does things almost the same as Tablet, yet limit you with a smaller screen. Normally Tablets devices comes with 8 or 10 inch screen while Smartphone comes with approximately 4 inch screen.

In the last quarter of 2011, a brand new device came in to the mobile device market with a brand new concept which is going beyond Smartphone and Tablet. This device which took my attention is Samsung Galaxy Note. It is almost same as Samsung Galaxy S 2, yet having bigger, 5.3 inch screen, yet smaller and portable than Samsung Galaxy Tab. This would be a new beginning of Tablet-Smartphone “Hybrid approach”.

Interesting Features

Screen and Interface

The major noticeable thing in Samsung Galaxy Note is its 5.3 inch Super AMOLED screen which supports HD resolution 1280 x 800 pixels. And it’s having 285 ppi density which gives ultra sharp images, only second to iPhone 4S. This device comes with Android 2.3 Gingerbread and Samsung TouchWiz UI which was also a standard features in Galaxy S2 as well. The touch surface is protected by Gorilla glass which is scratch proof.

Other than the bigger screen, the next interesting thing that comes with Samsung Galaxy Note is its Smart Pen. This gives you more accurate control over the screen’s touch sensitivity than finger tips. The phone is having a compartment to keep the smart pen which reminds me of older version of Palm-top computer’s stylus.

Processing Power and Storage

The Samsung Galaxy Note comes with 1.4 GHz Dual Core processor which is the fastest processer ever built in to a Smartphone. Same as in Galaxy S 2 it comes with 1GB RAM and microSD card slot which supports up to 32GB. When you purchase the device it will come with a 2GB microSD card. Additionally it is having internal 16GB storage space as well.

Connectivity

Other than the traditional connectivity, Samsung Galaxy Note comes with 4G support. The underlying technology used is LTE 700. This is another significant improvement from previous Samsung Galaxy S 2. Other than that this device also support quad band GSM, HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and micro USB.

Sensors

Sensors were one of the most interesting things in any Smartphone or Tablet. Most of the devices come with Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Proximity sensor and Digital compass. Samsung Galaxy Note is also having all of these standard sensors and additionally a Barometer which is new to Smartphone world. It let you measure the atmospheric pressure which opens lots of possibilities for application developers.

Potential Usage

Notebook or Idea Book

The new features of Galaxy Note open new possibilities to use it as a Notebook, if you think more creatively as an’ Idea Book’. It’s having a bigger screen than conventional Smartphone, yet portable than Tablet. Therefore it gives you good space to replace your paper based notebook, further turn it in to an idea book with the extended multimedia capabilities. Since you have the Smart pen you can even use the device as drawing canvas. The faster processor, 1 GB RAMS and improved GPU will make this experience even better. The inbuilt camera could be use to make photo and video notes wherever necessary.

This opens new opportunities for multimedia professionals. They can develop concepts in any environment where they are comfortable. They don’t like to type, but to draw. In here they can do that as well with the smart pen. Once they come up with something, they can easily connect to the main office through high speed 4G connectivity and deliver the concept or the artwork.

The same system could be use for e Journalism as well. Journalist can travel to any location and create multimedia rich article which conclude, images, videos and even sketches, then upload it to a web site using high speed internet, without using a PC at all.

Business Applications

The main limitation in Smartphones to use them as business organizers was their inadequate screen size and resolution. If you try to replace it with a tablet, it solves the screen resolution problem while introducing a new problem which is portability. Samsung Galaxy Note, the Tablet-Smartphone Hybrid approach, solves both the above problems giving bigger screen to run business applications while giving the maximum portability with smaller design which fits in to your pant’s pocket.

This would be an ideal device for business organizing applications as well as Stock trading applications. The bigger screen will accommodate visual representation of business status such as charts. The faster processor will let all the operations run smoothly while advanced 4G connectivity reduce the information delay drastically.

In near future we will be able to see most of the business people will be using this kind of hybrid devices replacing Smartphones and tablets. Laptop and Palmtop computers are already replaced by Tablets and Smartphones.

Navigation Device

Most of the people were using Smartphones as navigation devices and they worked just fine. But when dealing with different altitudes GPS error is significant. This will affect especially when you are using Google Maps Indoor Application with automatic level changes in a building. In most of the cases you have to manually enter the level that you are currently in. When you are in a complex motorway system the right place you are at should be pointed out using correct altitude as well since there could be many over head ramps in there.

Other than driving, when you are going on a Hike, knowing the exact altitude that you are in is very important. In that case horizontal location only won’t help. If you are in a Hot air Balloon, again it’s going to be very important to know the altitude accurately. In such cases GPS altitude accuracy is way not accurate enough.

To solve all the above problems Samsung Galaxy Notes comes with a Built in Barometer which use to measure atmospheric pressure, could be used to calculate the altitude accurately. With the aid of Barometer and Digital compass, GPS unit can pin point your location, especially the vertical location very accurately, which turns the device in to a dependable sophisticated Navigation device. You can use this with any GPS application not only to drive, but for hikes, hot air balloon travels, air travels and to find your way in multi stores buildings.

Drawbacks

Everything comes with a price, so is Samsung Galaxy Note. It’s an exceptional device yet having few drawbacks. The major one would be its battery life. Normally Samsung devices are having good battery life, yet this one will be having lesser due to the high speed processor and bigger bright screen.

When you increase the size of display, you must increase the size of device as well. Galaxy Note is having 5.3 inch screen so the device is also bigger than Galaxy S 2 which makes it relatively less portable. However it could still fit in to your pants pocket. Other than that it’s much heavier than galaxy S2.

Trends

Mobile Movies

Even with the previous versions of Smartphones there was “Mobile Movie” trend. There are some movie producers that specially produce movies for those devices. However there was no Smartphone capable of displaying standard HD videos. In that case you must use a tablet, which is again less portable.

With the arrival of Samsung Galaxy Note, it opens new opportunities for mobile movies with its standard HD 1280 x 800 pixels screen. Therefore users can enjoy HD videos in a much portable device and of course it will be a huge leap for Mobile Movie industry.

Stylus, Welcome Back!

I was always thinking that stylus is out dated since we have multi point touch screen which can be easily controlled by my finger tips. But if you want to do fine work, the stylus or a similar device would be the perfect choice. Samsung Galaxy Note is bringing the Stylus back to the show as a Smart Pen which convert the device in to a Drawing canvas. With this you will never miss your paper notebook. With the smart pen you can use your own handwriting to make notes digitally.

The device came in to the market just two months ago and it’s already attracted many people around the globe. Application developers will use the capabilities of this device to come up with creative applications. Especially I’m looking forward to see an application using the Barometer.

Finally, this is another giant step by Samsung, the famous South Korean electronic device manufacturer to dominate Smartphone and Tablet device market. They have already made their mark in most of other electronic devices categories and seems like nothing is going to stop them here as well.

Tags: #Samsung #Smartphone #Tablet

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.

Tags: #Facebook

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.

Tags: #Compression #Multimedia

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 1^st 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 3^rd 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/

Tags: #Apple #iOS

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.

Tags: #Design #Web

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 1.5GHz Dual 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.

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