Sunday, November 10, 2013

Android 4.4 KitKat review




Android 4.4 KitKat review



Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2061282/android-4-4-kitkat-review-an-only-slightly-better-android.html

But the plastic surgery is incomplete. While iOS7 is easily identifiable by its flat bright colors and lightweight fonts, and Windows Phone carries on with Live Tiles, the KitKat interface has no single recongnizable trait. Yes, it's flatter and brighter, but what isn'tthese days? Worse, the redesign seems pushed out the door too early. Scratch beneath the surface, and you'll find built-in apps and menus that haven't been udpated to the new look. There's a lot to like in Google's first name-branded OS release, but I can't help but this sweet treat isn't quite ready to be unwrapped.

A shiny, vibrant new interface

The Notifications bar on KitKat is no longer a solid color and instead blends in with the rest of the screen, while the application drawer makes better use of the real estate.
Here it is, Android users: your newly polished, flatter interface. Google did away with the technophile neon blue-and-black color scheme and adopted a lighter, whiter palette that looks and feels friendlier and borrows some of its look from competitors like Windows Phone 8 and iOS 7.
Select from wallpapers, place a widget, or tamper with the settings panel by holding down on the Home screen.
Though I only used it on the speedy quad-core Nexus 5, screen-to-screen transitions in KitKat feel smoother than in previous versions of Android, and icons are bigger and more detailed. Even the application drawer feels like a big breath of fresh air; you can no longer peruse through widgets or jump into the Google Play store from there. Now if you want to add a widget, all you have to do is hold down on the Home screen to bring up a menu that lets you add widgets, customize the wallpaper, and choose your launcher. This action feels more intuitive than past versions, which require that you dig through the application drawer to do anything to the Home screen besides change the wallpaper. It's a perfect example of Google's minor design improvements.
The rest of the interface remains seemingly untouched, however. The Notifications shade has new icons, but the Settings panel looks the same. Minor apps, like the Calculator or News & Weather, appear neglected. It's almost as if Google rushed through Android 4.4 in an attempt not to fall behind its competitors. Not that it will matter much, since only a small portion of Android users will get to experience the new interface in its native state. The vast majority will see whatever skin Samsung, HTC, or LG imposes on them.
The Notifications shade features new icons, but overall it retains the same look as Jelly Bean.
If you've used the Chromebook Pixel, you'll notice that the interface is somewhat similar, a clear indicator that Google is moving toward a universal set of design guidelines to bind all of its products. For now, consider KitKat's new interface an introductory course into what's to come in Google's future.

"Here's what we're doing with your data"

KitKat really pushes Google's services on you, and desperately wants to collect your data, but it also makes it clear what it's collecting, how it's used, and gives you more options to opt out.
Android 4.4 features a new Locations panel that is more explicit about which apps are utilizing location services and for what purpose. From the Notifications shade, you can click through to the Location settings and choose, on an app-by-app basis, whether to allow Location services or not, and how your location should be determined. If you want more accuracy, you can combine GPS, Wi-Fi, and mobile network towers. If you want to save battery, turn off GPS. Or, use only GPS should Wi-Fi or mobile networks be unavailable. You can also peep which applications made recent location requests, as well as edit the individual Google location settings for any apps that make use of the data.
Notice, too, that the Settings panel remains dressed in Jelly Bean's dark interface, and it doesn't really match up with what the rest of KitKat has going on in the design department.
KitKat offers more information about how Android and other apps are using your location.
The Google Settings application first introduced in Jelly Bean is stuffed with more options. Now you can check up on your advertising ID, a semi-permanent alpha-numerical tag attached to your Google account to let the company know which ads to push out to you. You can also opt out of interest-based ads and control the ones that are delivered to you, and when you tap on those options Android will point you to Google's official FAQ on the matter.
Find out what else is going on with your information from the Google Settings app.
Google has certainly taken a step forward by offering a separate settings panel for your Google account, but they're difficult to parse, and it's unfortunate that they're sequestered away from the device's main Settings panel. It would have been better if Google could somehow tuck these options under the Accounts section of the regular Settings panel, keeping everything in a single logical location.

The oft-forgotten Dialer

We've reached the point where the phones in our pockets are so far removed from the phones of yesteryear that updates to the app that actually makes phone calls are worthy of praise. In KitKat, Google dedicated resources to an application that is often forgotten on other platforms, pegging the dialar as a marquee feature.
Android 4.3's Dialer app is plain and simple, but 4.4's aims to be a little more contextual.
The Dialer app sports the new interface and opens with your favorite contacts front and center, as well as your recent calls, instead of that boring grid of numbers. Google has finally acknowledged that we rarely make calls on our phones by dialing numbers on a keypad. Thankfully, Google made it easier to search through your contacts by name, making that ability the first thing you see.
Once you press send to call a business, you'll see Caller ID pop up.
You can also look up places of business based on a search term. It didn't work too well for me in the beginning, but after a few tries it managed to eventually bring up places related to my inquiry. The screen can get crowded with information, though, when you're just trying to call a friend or family member. When I typed in "Mom," it also brought up the numbers for the parking garages near the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ("MOMA"). I don't like the long listing of extra numbers, but at least the information was useful.
The Caller ID function works, too, but an image will only show up if the business or person has a Google+ profile. The interface for this function also looks like it reverts back to Jelly Bean, as evidenced by its black options bar.
Beginning early next year, Google will also show you the Google+ profile for incoming calls—even those who are not in your circles—essentially turning the app into a full-fledged phone directory. It's clear that Google wants you to use its social networking service for connecting with others. Whether this will translate into more true Google+ users remains to be seen, though the company is certainly trying to convert Android users into Google+ users.

Google Now, now, now!

In KitKat, Google Now resides in its own Home screen panel, similar to the way BlinkFeed takes up a panel on the HTC One's Sense UI. To get to it, all you have to do is swipe over all the way to the left—or you can shout at your device, “Okay, Google.” You'll have to wake up the screen for this to work; Google didn't just give the whole world the MotoX's best feature.
Google Now continues to be Android’s strongest feature. In KitKat, you can customize it without waiting for the Cards to pop up by scrolling down to the very bottom and tapping the wand icon. You can input your favorite sports teams or stocks, set up your most frequented Places, and choose your preferences for everything else, like when other Cards should appear.
There is also a dedicated Reminders panel that lists past, present, and upcoming reminders, and you can easily add one through voice or text input.
The more tightly integrated Google Now is more than a gentle nudge to use the service for all of your searchable needs. Google is almost forcing you to gravitate toward it now that it's a part of your Home screen.
Peer into the settings and you can customize Google Now to your liking, without waiting for Cards to pop up.
The new features in Google Now may possibly see their way over to other versions of Android in a future update, but for now these enhancements are only available on KitKat.

It's the little things

I’ve always appreciated Android's little things—the minor enhancements that you don’t normally read about in an advertising campaign, and the things you don’t realize are there until you start digging for them.
Tap and Pay and Google's Cloud Print services are now an integrated part of the Android operating system.
Just as was rumored, Google integrated its Cloud Print services directly into the Android operating system. You can now access the printer settings from the Settings panel and print documents to any cloud-enabled printer. You can also use Google Cloud Print to save a document to Google Drive.
Then, there is the Tap & Pay feature, which works with the Google Wallet app and lets you do things like pay for groceries where NFC is supported. It is also available from the Settings panel, though you don't actually set anything up within that screen, but in the seperate Wallet application.
Frequent readers will also appreciate that Google now offers the ability for some of its applications to run in full-screen mode. The next time you're engrossed in a new novel, your mother's text messages won't distract you.
KitKat now features an easy-to-use Fullscreen mode for apps like Google Books.
Google also improved the step detector and step counter platform within KitKat, though you won't really notice the benefits until third-party developers start implementing it into their applications.

KitKat is pretty good 

From its list of features, KitKat sounds tasty, and Android 4.4 is certainly a step in the right direction. Its interface is bright and inviting and the newly added secondary features like Cloud Print integration and a new Dialer application should help make stock Android even more consumer friendly. You also have top-level access to Google+ and Google Now, so there's no excuse not to take advantage of Google's most hottest features.
A lot of popular phones will get upgraded to KitKat in the next couple months, though Google has stated that the voice-activated search and some Home screen features will remain exclusive to the Nexus 5 for now. Hopefully by the time KitKat makes its way to your device, Google will have tied up some the loose ends—adopting the new design in all of its core apps and consolidating the myriad of new settings. Or, it can continue to torture us like it did with Jelly Bean by making only incremental changes to the entire Android package with each release, spacing out core app updates by months.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Google Analytics Blog: Google Analytics Enhancements for Mobile Apps

Google Analytics Blog: Google Analytics Enhancements for Mobile Apps: November was a busy time in Google Analytics. In particular, the Mobile App Tracking Team has a few things to announce. EasyTracking Libra...

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Gmail web or imap ?

Whats your preference when you use Gmail ? do you use web or IMAP ? Initially i thought using IMAP is a great Idea and easy . But having the zeal to know the Technology Beat!! i have subscribed to different RSS feeds ( on Browser , Email client etc ).


But after using gmail web for a while now i started liking the web ( gmail ). i see all webclips i like on the top of my emails , all my emails threads are organized at one place , redundant content in the email replies are removed and many more ...

recently they have introduced gmail labs .. which is lot more fun try it out .
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/introducing-gmail-labs.html

--CardSharper

Friday, December 28, 2007

Mind Boggling !!

Robot relieves Rubiks rage

I really like to play around with Rubik's cube... amazing that people have designed robos that can complete the puzzle . Great !!

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Ten Rules for Web Startups

I like this article, worth reading by every aspiring entrepreneur

Source: "http://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp"

#1: Be Narrow
Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would potentially be useful. Most companies start out trying to do too many things, which makes life difficult and turns you into a me-too. Focusing on a small niche has so many advantages: With much less work, you can be the best at what you do. Small things, like a microscopic world, almost always turn out to be bigger than you think when you zoom in. You can much more easily position and market yourself when more focused. And when it comes to partnering, or being acquired, there's less chance for conflict. This is all so logical and, yet, there's a resistance to focusing. I think it comes from a fear of being trivial. Just remember: If you get to be #1 in your category, but your category is too small, then you can broaden your scope—and you can do so with leverage.

#2: Be Different
Ideas are in the air. There are lots of people thinking about—and probably working on—the same thing you are. And one of them is Google. Deal with it. How? First of all, realize that no sufficiently interesting space will be limited to one player. In a sense, competition actually is good—especially to legitimize new markets. Second, see #1—the specialist will almost always kick the generalist's ass. Third, consider doing something that's not so cutting edge. Many highly successful companies—the aforementioned big G being one—have thrived by taking on areas that everyone thought were done and redoing them right. Also? Get a good, non-generic name. Easier said than done, granted. But the most common mistake in naming is trying to be too descriptive, which leads to lots of hard-to-distinguish names. How many blogging companies have "blog" in their name, RSS companies "feed," or podcasting companies "pod" or "cast"? Rarely are they the ones that stand out.

#3: Be Casual
We're moving into what I call the era of the "Casual Web" (and casual content creation). This is much bigger than the hobbyist web or the professional web. Why? Because people have lives. And now, people with lives also have broadband. If you want to hit the really big home runs, create services that fit in with—and, indeed, help—people's everyday lives without requiring lots of commitment or identity change. Flickr enables personal publishing among millions of folks who would never consider themselves personal publishers—they're just sharing pictures with friends and family, a casual activity. Casual games are huge. Skype enables casual conversations.

#4: Be Picky
Another perennial business rule, and it applies to everything you do: features, employees, investors, partners, press opportunities. Startups are often too eager to accept people or ideas into their world. You can almost always afford to wait if something doesn't feel just right, and false negatives are usually better than false positives. One of Google's biggest strengths—and sources of frustration for outsiders—was their willingness to say no to opportunities, easy money, potential employees, and deals.

#5: Be User-Centric
User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's still undervalued and under-invested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board. Better to iterate a hundred times to get the right feature right than to add a hundred more. The point of Ajax is that it can make a site more responsive, not that it's sexy. Tags can make things easier to find and classify, but maybe not in your application. The point of an API is so developers can add value for users, not to impress the geeks. Don't get sidetracked by technologies or the blog-worthiness of your next feature. Always focus on the user and all will be well.

#6: Be Self-Centered
Great products almost always come from someone scratching their own itch. Create something you want to exist in the world. Be a user of your own product. Hire people who are users of your product. Make it better based on your own desires. (But don't trick yourself into thinking you are your user, when it comes to usability.) Another aspect of this is to not get seduced into doing deals with big companies at the expense or your users or at the expense of making your product better. When you're small and they're big, it's hard to say no, but see #4.

#7: Be Greedy
It's always good to have options. One of the best ways to do that is to have income. While it's true that traffic is now again actually worth something, the give-everything-away-and-make-it-up-on-volume strategy stamps an expiration date on your company's ass. In other words, design something to charge for into your product and start taking money within 6 months (and do it with PayPal). Done right, charging money can actually accelerate growth, not impede it, because then you have something to fuel marketing costs with. More importantly, having money coming in the door puts you in a much more powerful position when it comes to your next round of funding or acquisition talks. In fact, consider whether you need to have a free version at all. The TypePad approach—taking the high-end position in the market—makes for a great business model in the right market. Less support. Less scalability concerns. Less abuse. And much higher margins.

#8: Be Tiny
It's standard web startup wisdom by now that with the substantially lower costs to starting something on the web, the difficulty of IPOs, and the willingness of the big guys to shell out for small teams doing innovative stuff, the most likely end game if you're successful is acquisition. Acquisitions are much easier if they're small. And small acquisitions are possible if valuations are kept low from the get go. And keeping valuations low is possible because it doesn't cost much to start something anymore (especially if you keep the scope narrow). Besides the obvious techniques, one way to do this is to use turnkey services to lower your overhead—Administaff, ServerBeach, web apps, maybe even Elance.

#9: Be Agile
You know that old saw about a plane flying from California to Hawaii being off course 99% of the time—but constantly correcting? The same is true of successful startups—except they may start out heading toward Alaska. Many dot-com bubble companies that died could have eventually been successful had they been able to adjust and change their plans instead of running as fast as they could until they burned out, based on their initial assumptions. Pyra was started to build a project-management app, not Blogger. Flickr's company was building a game. Ebay was going to sell auction software. Initial assumptions are almost always wrong. That's why the waterfall approach to building software is obsolete in favor agile techniques. The same philosophy should be applied to building a company.

#10: Be Balanced
What is a startup without bleary-eyed, junk-food-fueled, balls-to-the-wall days and sleepless, caffeine-fueled, relationship-stressing nights? Answer?: A lot more enjoyable place to work. Yes, high levels of commitment are crucial. And yes, crunch times come and sometimes require an inordinate, painful, apologies-to-the-SO amount of work. But it can't be all the time. Nature requires balance for health—as do the bodies and minds who work for you and, without which, your company will be worthless. There is no better way to maintain balance and lower your stress that I've found than David Allen's GTD process. Learn it. Live it. Make it a part of your company, and you'll have a secret weapon.

#11 (bonus!): Be Wary
Overgeneralized lists of business "rules" are not to be taken too literally. There are exceptions to everything.

Friday, October 05, 2007

Installing Ubuntu Or Fedora From A Windows Or Linux System With UNetbootin

I really liked this , Start installing linux without CD / DVD from windows . UNetbootin allows windows users to quickly start installing Linux on there machine without have a CD / DVD .. looking forward to try this out when ever i get a chance

"Introduction : UNetbootin allows for the installation of Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuse, Arch Linux, or Debian to a real partition, so it's no different from a standard install, only it has the advantage that it needs no CD. This is meant for people who want to install Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuse, Arch Linux, or Debian but don't have a CD-R to burn, lack a CD writer, or they want to install on a computer that doesn't have a CD-ROM drive, like an ultra-portable laptop.

UNetbootin uses a Windows or Linux-based installer to install a small modification to the bootloader (grldr and boot.ini for NT-based systems, grub.exe and config.sys for Win9x, or grub on Linux), uses the bootloader to boot the netboot initrd and kernel, then uses that to download and install Ubuntu directly from the internet, no CD required. After Linux is installed, the modification to the bootloader is then undone."


http://lubi.sourceforge.net/unetbootin.html


Thursday, October 04, 2007

On Page Search Engine Optimization

Source: http://www.websitepublisher.net/article/on-page-seo/

On-page SEO is anything that you do to your site files themselves in order to rank better in the search engines. This differs from off-page SEO, which is primarily concerned with gaining links to your site from other sites.

You need both on-page and off-page SEO to rank well, the best on-page SEO isn't going to get you anywhere without good incoming links. And the best incoming links in the world can't help you if your site is crawler poison.

On-Page Optimization Checklist

1. Descriptive literal title tag that includes your keywords.
2. Descriptive literal meta description tag that includes your keywords and entices clicks from readers
3. Meta keywords tag that includes your main keywords, minor keywords, misspellings, and words you may wish to target but that are not commonly found in your content. Don't stress out too much when making it.
4. Clean, coherent, HTML or CSS markup with as little markup coding as possible, externally included files for CSS definitions. Fast loading, accessible, and compatible.
5. Source code formatted so your most important menu items are read first.
6. Descriptive literal ALT & TITLE attributes for images & anchor tags (links) that include your keywords.
7. No use of frames for public content you want search engines to see.
8. Conservative use of javascript, do not use it to display important content.
9. Conservative use of Flash as an option for viewing your site, never a requirement.
10. Normal HTML based navigation alternatives if form based navigation must be used.
11. Descriptive literal heading tags (h1, etc) that include your keywords with good density and are used properly to sectionalize content.
12. Effectively keyword rich content that is descriptive, literal, and goes into great detail.
13. A fully optimized and accessible menu.