Celebrity Nerds: Oprah has an EVO 4G and you don’t

Celebrity Nerds confirms what you always knew, deep in your heart of hearts: that stars are nerds like us. Send in your own confirmations of this fact right here.

Continue reading Celebrity Nerds: Oprah has an EVO 4G and you don’t

Celebrity Nerds: Oprah has an EVO 4G and you don’t originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 May 2010 15:23:00 EST.

Adobe shows off prototype Android tablet running Air and Flash ‘flawlessly’

Well, here’s something of a surprise. In addition to demonstrating Flash running on phones like the Nexus One and Palm Pre at the now-happening Web 2.0 Expo, Adobe also has a prototype Android tablet of some sort on hand that, according to Zedomax, runs Flash and Air apps “flawlessly.” Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be any details at all on the tablet itself, and judging from the looks of things, it is a prototype in the truest sense of the word (check out the other shot after the break). It does seem to deliver the goods when it comes to Air and Flash, however, with it able to run Wired’s Air-based magazine app and play YouTube videos without so much as a hiccup, although we’d definitely like to see it in a few more taxing situations. See for yourself in a pair of all too brief videos after the break.

Continue reading Adobe shows off prototype Android tablet running Air and Flash ‘flawlessly’

Adobe shows off prototype Android tablet running Air and Flash ‘flawlessly’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 May 2010 20:44:00 EST.

Steve Jobs publishes some ‘thoughts on Flash’… many, many thoughts on Flash

Steve Jobs just posted an open letter of sorts explaining Apple’s position on Flash, going back to his company’s long history with Adobe and expounding upon six main points of why he thinks Flash is wrong for mobile devices. HTML5 naturally comes up, along with a few reasons you might not expect. Here’s the breakdown:

• It’s not open. “While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.” Man, that’s some strong irony you’re brewing, Steve. Still, we get the point — HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript are open web standards.
• The “full web.” Steve hits back at Adobe’s claim of Apple devices missing out on “the full web,” with an age-old argument (YouTube) aided by the numerous new sources that have started providing video to the iPhone and iPad in HTML5 or app form like CBS, Netflix, and Facebook. Oh, and as for flash games? “50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free.” If we were keeping score we’d still call this a point for Adobe.
• Reliability, security and performance. Steve hits on the usual “Flash is the number one reason Macs crash,” but adds another great point on top of this: “We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it.” You’ve got us there, Steve, but surely your magical A4 chip could solve all this?
• Battery life. “The video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software.” Steve Jobs is of course H.264′s #1 fan, and it’s hard to blame him, since he cites 10 hours of H.264 playback but only 5 hours with software decode on the iPhone. Still, those “older generation” sites that haven’t moved to H.264 yet are pretty much the exact same sites that aren’t viewable with HTML5, which means we’re being restricted in the content we can access just because some of it doesn’t perform as well.
• Touch. Steve hits hard against one of the web’s greatest hidden evils: rollovers. Basically, Flash UIs are built around the idea of mouse input, and would need to be “rewritten” to work well on touch devices. “If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?” That doesn’t really address the Flash-as-app scenario (that’s point #6), but it’s also a pretty silly sounding solution to a developer: your website doesn’t support this one UI paradigm exactly right, so why not rewrite it entirely?
• The most important reason. Steve finally addresses the third party development tools situation, but it’s really along the lines of what we were hearing already: “If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features.” We doubt this will end all debate, but it’s clear Apple has a line in the sand.

He concludes in saying that “Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice.” Basically, it’s for the olds. And you don’t want to be old, do you? Follow after the break for the whole thing in brilliant prose form.

Continue reading Steve Jobs publishes some ‘thoughts on Flash’… many, many thoughts on Flash

Steve Jobs publishes some ‘thoughts on Flash’… many, many thoughts on Flash originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:34:00 EST.

Know If Strangers Can See Your Facebook Photos

If you have uploaded some private photos on Facebook thinking that only friends can view those photos, here’s something you should know (and check).

Some of your photo albums on Facebook may even be visible to people who aren’t connected to you on Facebook. For instance, I am no friend of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg but I can still see some of his photo albums on Facebook though they aren’t immediately visible on his profile page at facebook.com/zuck.

How Your Facebook Photo Albums Become Visible to Strangers

This 60-seconds long video screencast demonstrates how your personal photos on Facebook can become visible to strangers.

Step 1. Log in to your Facebook account and open the profile page of any Facebook user whose pictures you want to see. Alternatively, you may use the search feature in Facebook to directly open the profile of any person.

Step 2. Copy the following line of code to the clipboard and then paste it into the address bar of your web browser where that Facebook page is open.

javascript:(function(){CSS.removeClass(document.body,%20'profile_two_columns'); tab_controller.changePage("photos");})()

If that person has previously shared any of her photo albums or profile pictures on Facebook using the default privacy settings, their albums might show up on your screen as well.

The photo albums won’t appear on their regular Facebook profile page but as soon as you copy-paste that simple code, the results might sometimes surprise you.

What’s the fix?

To make sure that none of your Facebook photo albums are visible to strangers, create a dummy account on Facebook, open your profile page and then copy-paste the same code. If you see the following message, consider yourself safe:

There are no photos to display. Photos of may not have been tagged, or may not be visible due to privacy.

To prevent your Facebook pictures from showing up on the screens of strangers, go to this page — facebook.com/privacy – and set the privacy option of every photo album, that you want to hide from the world, to either “Only Friends” or a select group.

The default privacy setting, when you create a new photo album, is “everyone” – most people don’t change the defaults and that’s why their photos can get exposed through the above JavaScript hack.

Thanks Rishabh for the tip.

Here are some more related articles on Facebook:

• Upload photos from a mobile phone to Facebook
• Download all your Facebook photo albums with a click
• Cross-check your Facebook privacy settings

Know If Strangers Can See Your Facebook Photos

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Maths Teacher Reveals his ‘Video Shadow’ Trick

It’s rare to find teachers who have a good sense of humor but Matthew Weathers, who teaches Math at the Biola University in California, is definitely an exception.

In this video, you can see Matthew taking a Math class as usual and suddenly there appears a shadow on the projector screen that rearranges his desktop icons won’t even let him shut down the computer.

The video was obviously an April Fool’s prank, a very clever one though, and it immediately become viral on the web registering over half a million views on YouTube in less than a week.

How the “Projector Shadow” video was made?

If you are curious to know how the Maths teacher made that brilliant shadow video of himself, here’s the trick in his own words.

Matthew used a basic video camcorder, a personal voice recorder, screen capturing program (he suggested Jing) and some video editing software (Video Studio, Adobe After Effects, Motion, and Final Cut) for the video.

It’s not just about the tools though, you obviously need to be creative and a bit tech-savvy to imitate this.

Maths Teacher Reveals his ‘Video Shadow’ Trick

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

How to See the Ratings of any YouTube Video

If you haven’t been to the YouTube website recently, you should because they have completely redesigned the video pages. The new design might load a little quicker on slow connections but it looks too minimal and even incomplete to me.

Anyway, this story has nothing to do with the color scheme or the layout of the redesigned YouTube website – its about an extremely important feature that some feel has gone missing in the new design.

YouTube (old) had a star rating system that would let anyone with a Google Account rate YouTube videos on 1-5 scale. This simple feature saved us from wasting countless hours on YouTube because if a video had low user ratings, you  immediately knew it was not worth your time and you could skip to the next one.

YouTube has now replaced the “star rating” system in the new design with a “Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down” rating system that gives you only two choices – you either like a video (5 stars) or you don’t (1 star).

Most user prefer to see the ratings of a video before hitting the play button but for some unknown reason – may be to boost page views – YouTube is no longer displaying the ratings of videos on their pages. If you rate a video, the overall ratings appear but not otherwise.

Fortunately, YouTube has not dropped the ratings completely and there’s a simply way by which you can see the ratings of any YouTube video without having to rate it. Just click the drop-down arrow next to “views” of any video and you’ll find what you are looking for.

Alternatively, you may install these extensions for Chrome and Firefox and you’ll get the star ratings back in the main video page just like the good old YouTube design.

An advantage with extensions is that they’ll add star ratings to videos displayed in the YouTube search results as well so they’re more handy.

Related: Star Ratings Widget for your Blog

How to See the Ratings of any YouTube Video

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.