Top Google+ ShortCuts for Better Experience

Google+ is a growing entity that has people busy writing userscripts and Firefox and Chrome add-ons so that they can tweak layouts, add the necessary new tools and change the overall feel and look of the social network. Even though the Google+ interface is solid, the user can have a lot of fun including some great add-ons and tricks to make it easier and more fun to use.

Google+Ultimate is a Chrome add-on that can totally change the look and use of Google+ by placing the status bar at the page top and a sidebar on the left that contains friends and circles available for chatting with both float elements that stay in place as the user scrolls down the page.

Google+Tweaks is another Chrome add-on that exists as a userscript for Firefox user with Greasemonkey installed. Here are 10 reasons why Google+ is gaining so much momentum as it has already crossed over 10 million users. This list includes extensions that are useful and will improve the users networking experience on Google+. These have been chosen from the perspective of a user, even though there are many other extensions.

1. The Chrome Web Store: The extension is a surplus which adds Google+ to pop up windows. With this clever device, you do not have to open the browser to comment or view on any posts.

2. Start G+: It will help the user to share articles written on Facebook or Twitter coming directly from Google+ post interface.

3. Image Sharing: Google+ has Picasa already integrated into it and images can be shared from any albums. A simple extension called Photo Zoom can give the user quick and easy zooming for photos within Google+ Stream. All the user has to do is hover above the image and Photo Zoom will load the picture enlarged.

4. G+ Extended: Shortcuts called keyboard shortcuts are handy and help with improving productivity. This extension provides extra keyboard shortcuts which makes better use of Google+

5. Hiding Wanted Comments: This is where Comments Toggle comes into play. There might be an extended list of comments that may not be interested to the viewer. Comments Toggles will conceal the comments and they can only be viewed by togging from the interface.

6. Google Plus Usability Boost: The extension will add some CSS styling to Google+ interface. It does so by taking each post, grouping them in segments along with comments.

7. Social and Share Buttons: When finding articles on Google+ they can be shared on other social networks by using the Share+ Social Buttons for Google+.

8. Notification Count: This is an extension showing new notifications that have been received on Google+. It can be found on the top navigation bar. The user does not even need to open the Google+ account. When the notification button is clicked, it will actually take the user to the account.

9. Google+ Ultimate: Ported from a userstyle, this extension can remove elements from Google+ accounts when viewed on Chrome.

10. Google+ Helper: All posts on Google+ will receive two links through this extension. One link is to tweet a post while the other is used to translate. Google translate helps the user easily update in other languages.

Tags: Google, Google Plus, Google Plus Shortcuts, Google+ Shortcuts

Source : techtalkafrica[dot]com

Rockmelt social browser launches on iPad offering a ‘fast and fun’ mobile experience

If you fancy a new kind of web browsing experience on your iPad, check out Rockmelt, a Safari "fast and fun" alternative with social media at its core.

Alongside Firefox, Safari, IE and Chrome, Rockmelt is but a small player in the world of web browsers, but with the introduction of its new browser for iPad, that could be about to change.

Founded by Eric Vishria and Tim Howes in 2009, Rockmelt set out to provide a “fundamentally better web experience” by building a browser around how people use and interact with the web today, with a social media focus at its core.

Its ambition has inspired a number of backers to get involved, including venture capital firm Andreeson Horowitz, helping the California-based start-up to raise $40 million to date.

Now it’s moving from desktop to mobile with the launch of a free iPad version that maintains its social media focus, creating a mobile web browsing experience which is more touch than type and a breeze to use.

Imagine a coming together of Flipboard and Pinterest, creating a browser populated with content from your Facebook and Twitter feeds. Scroll down the image-heavy front page until something catches your eye, tap on the item and away you go. Read it without formatting or tap the specs at the top and view the content in its original form on its webpage.

Once you’re done, perform a two-finger pinch to lose it and return to your main page or swipe to the right to save it for later.

You don’t have to go for content from your own social media feeds – tap the browse button at the top of the screen and choose from a long list of other categories, including business, cute, geek, news, science and shopping.

Being a browser with social media at its heart, there are sharing options aplenty. Buttons for Facebook, Twitter and email are all within easy reach, but Rockmelt goes one step further, offering so-called emoticodes such as like, lol, want, wtf?, aww, and hmm for a one-tap response that makes a statement without having to pull up a keyboard.

Yes, it is a browser, so at the top there’s a window where you can tap in an web address if you really must, or a word or phrase to initiate a search on Google. Chances are, however, you’ll be too busy tapping away on the endless streaming content to think about heading elsewhere.

According to a blog post announcing the launch of the app, it took a team of developers eight months to create Rockmelt for iPad, with its main aim to make it fast, fun to use and easy to share content. “It is an entirely new way to explore the web, built for you and your iPad from the ground up,” it says in the post.

It’s definitely worth checking out. If you’re a frequent user of, say, Flipboard, you’ll get what it’s about pretty quick. If you’re coming straight from Safari, it might take a little longer to get your head around. For many, however, it may soon become the iPad browser of choice. You can find out more about it here. 

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Previewing Mozilla Firefox OS, an HTML5-based interface

The upcoming Mozilla Firefox OS is slated for a Q1 of 2013 release, but how is the development coming along? Here's our hands-on preview.

In attendance at the Pepcom Holiday Spectacular in New York City last night was Mozilla Firefox, and we got some hands-on time with the operating system the open-source web browser is currently developing. The Firefox OS (working name, as far as we know) is still in a heavy beta mode, and is built entirely on HTML5. The rep we spoke to demoed the OS using an unbranded ZTE phone, noting that Firefox has stripped the Android out of the phone and created its own operating system from the ground up.

What what we can see, the OS is fully web-based in that every app and functionality runs off the web browser. Making phone calls is equivalent to calling on Skype, taking pictures is akin to snapping flicks with Apple’s Photo Booth, searching straight from the homepage is like having a shortcut to the Firefox search tool bar. There’s also a cartoony game built into the phone that uses a tap to perform actions interface, and it’s clear that the OS still has a bit of a way to go before its scheduled release date early next year.

Mozilla even tried to build a glasses-less 3D rendering that you can see, touch, and move… but this feature was still a bit buggy and did not respond too well to touchscreen interface just yet. We’ll cut it some slack considering it has several months to go, but web developers should definitely gear up for some fun programming time once the open source OS becomes available for your modding pleasures.

The Firefox OS is all part of a collaboration between ZTE and Mozilla to roll out its own system that doesn’t rely on Windows or Android. The finished OS is slated to arrive overseas first, with mobile network operators Deutsche Telekom, Sprint, Smart, Telecom Italia, Telenor, and Etisalat backing the experimental platform, reports Reuters. We hope to catch up with the development team in a few months and see how their work comes along, and whether it’s got something entirely different to offer that truly distinguishes it from the rest.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Firefox OS Marketplace screenshots reveal how Mozilla is approaching the mobile store

Screenshots of the Firefox OS Marketplace have leaked revealing for the first time how the app store looks like.

Previously known as Boot to Gecko, Firefox OS seems to be making significant progress towards its release in early 2013. Naturally, what you see here isn’t final, as the Marketplace will evolve as Firefox OS gets into a release stage.

Back to the marketplace at hand, it features a minimalist design focusing on app categories and quick app discovery by categories. The app details section is very neatly organized, too.

Just as the other popular app stores like the Play Store and the Apple App Store, the Firefox OS Marketplace allows you to view the apps installed on your device. Currently, there are only free apps available, so it’s going to be interesting to see how Mozilla will handle app purchases and refunds.

Firefox OS is expected to make its debut in early 2013 on devices manufactured by Alcatel and ZTE. Don’t forget to check out our hands-on of the Firefox OS running on the Samsung Galaxy S II.

Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com

Firefox 15 for desktop and Android released

Mozilla has released yet another update for the Firefox browser for the desktop as well as for Android. The major change in the desktop browser is that it now supports silent, background updates, which means just like Chrome, Firefox will now download the latest updates in the background and install them without any user intervention.

The Android version, on the other hand, brings an optimized UI for tablets. Other features include faster startup time, redesigned Awesome Bar, enhanced search, ability to close tabs by swiping on them in the tab view, ability to import bookmarks and history from the default web browser, ability to request the desktop version of a website, Find in Page option and support for SPDY networking protocol v3.

One of my main complaint with Firefox for Android remains, however, and that is the weird font rendering, especially on smartphones. Firefox makes all the text absurdly large, which breaks the page layout. You just have to open up reddit and compare it with the font rendering on the stock Android browser to see the difference. Even Chrome does this to some extent but it’s not as bad.

Anyway, you can download the desktop version of Firefox from here and the Android version from here.

Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com

Mozilla rolls out Firefox 15, updated Android tablet app

Continuing to focus on the development of the modern Web browser, Mozilla launched Firefox 15 with significant improvements.

Detailed within a post on the official company blog earlier today, Mozilla announced the launch of Firefox 15 in addition to a revamped version of Firefox for Android tablet devices running Honeycomb. Among the variety of new features in Firefox 15, this version of Firefox finally adds background updating. After upgrading to Firefox 15, all future upgrades to the Firefox browser will be conducted automatically without the need for any user action. This feature has been widely available within Google Chrome for quite some time and simplifies the updating process for the novice user significantly. The new updating feature basically allows Firefox to automatically download updates to the software, apply the update while the browser is currently in use and load the updated version after the user eventually restarts Firefox. 

In addition to silent updates, Mozilla has also optimized Firefox 15 for any user that has installed a large amount of add-ons by preventing the majority of memory leaks. Prior to this update, memory leaks from both high quality and suspect add-ons would dramatically slow down the browser for users.

According to a blog post created by Nicholas Nethercote, he stated “Over the past year, Mozilla has made great progress in reducing Firefox’s memory consumption.  However, the excessive memory consumption caused by add-ons with memory leaks has remained an ongoing problem. Firefox 15 fixes that problem.  We have confirmed, via in-house testing and from real-world telemetry data, that it prevents the vast majority of leaks that occur in existing add-ons.”

Beyond the memory improvements, the development team behind Firefox 15 has improved support for game creators working with WebGL. After adding support for compressed textures, game developers should be able to utilize higher-resolution textures within 3D games that have been built to play within a Firefox browser window. To prove the concept of 3D gaming within a browser window, the team at Mozilla created a demo of a 3D first person shooter called BananaBread; a game which was running in the Firefox browser without the help of any plugins. However, the game is also playable within any browser that offers the same features; Google Chrome for instance.

On Android tablets, Mozilla has launched a new version of Firefox that offers a significantly faster start-up time as well as faster page loading. After Firefox users upgrade to the new version currently located on the Google Play Store, they can use Firefox Sync to link up personal details from their desktop version of Firefox and find information like bookmarks, browsing history and passwords on the redesigned Awesome screen. 

In addition, Mozilla has added a feature that allows a user to switch between a mobile version and Web version of a site more easily. Within the browser menu, users will find a setting called “Request Desktop Site” and that can be tapped to bring up the Web version of any particular site. Other features that have been added to this new version of the Firefox browser for Android tablets include the ability to use ”ctrl-F” to find something on a page, a tool for selecting text and tabs that can be closed with a simple swipe.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Move over Chrome, preview of Firefox for Windows 8 expected in September

Mozilla will release a preview of Firefox for Windows 8 in September, complete with Modern UI styling and windowless Flash.

Mozilla already announced plans earlier in the year to offer a Modern UI (formerly known as Metro) version of its popular browser, but now new details are beginning to emerge, including a few carefully placed screenshots like the one above.

Brian R. Bondy, a developer working on the project, posted an update to his blog outlining Mozilla’s progress and goals for the fall release.

“Work on the Metro style enabled desktop browser has progressed steadily and things are looking really good,” Bondy writes.

According to Bondy, a preview version of Firefox will be available first as a beta release, planned for later in the year. The preview will be styled as a “combined classic + metro browser” with classic desktop user interface elements for tabbed browsing and navigation.

The Mozilla team still has a lot of work to do before beta release, but a few features have already been successfully implemented. Some are of little interest to the average user, referring to programmer-specific details. But others like a built-in PDF viewer (no need for a plug-in), an option to view a page on the desktop when in the Metro version, windowless Flash, and auto-populated search results below the URL bar are all promising.

Add-ons will not be included in the initial release when in Metro-mode — much like IE’s Metro browser — but Mozilla hopes to enable them eventually. Syncing between the desktop and Metro versions of the browser is also in development. Bondy hopes to find some sort of local sync functionality requiring zero set-up, but says he and the rest of the team can always default to the current syncing solution if needed.

Based on some screenshots posted by developers working on the project, Firefox for Windows 8 will borrow a little inspiration from its Android version with a sprinkling of Modern UI on top. The simple URL bar at the top of screen makes the design look neat and clean, though it’s oddly located at the top rather than the bottom — Microsoft’s preferred position. The tiled bookmarks are a welcome addition as well, an improvement over the traditional drop-down menu.

Google may have beat Mozilla to the punch on Windows 8 with a Chrome dev release tailored to the Modern UI design, but from what we’ve seen and read so far, it seems Firefox will do a much better job of competing with Internet Explorer’s tiled interface than Chrome, which basically ported its desktop design to Windows 8. 

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com