Our digital world ……
There’s a big update coming to Walt Disney Imagineering Blue Sky Cellar at Disney California Adventure park on Wednesday, Feb. 29. “The Road to Cars Land” will be a sneak preview of the plans for Cars Land, featuring a model of the land, maquettes of some of the new ride vehicles, and sketches and early concept art.
via Disney Parks Blog.
Nova Launcher has made it’s way out of the beta stage and into the Android Market. This Ice Cream Sandwich launcher is chock full of features you won’t find in the stock launcher, and comes highly recommended by our own Android Central forums Super Moderator Cyber Warrior. A look at the feature list and we see why:
Custom homescreen grid
Scrollable dock
Scroll effects
Infinite scrolling
Custom folder icons
Backup/Restore
Custom app icons
The paid version offers up even more, like gestures, dock swiping, and the ability to hide apps in your app drawer.
If you found the stock Android launcher in ICS a bit lacking, you should really give Nova Launcher a look. It requires Android 4.0 and both free and a paid $4 version are available in the Market
via Android Central.
To utilize Foursquare to create pin map, just follow these instructions:
Login to your Foursquare profile from an internet browser
Now that you’re logged in, go to your feeds page. To find your feeds from your profile, you can click on “History”, then scroll down to the bottom of the page and find the RSS icon to access your feeds.
Copy the .kml feed (the second one) and paste it into the Google Maps search bar. Before you start the search, add “?count=5000″ to the end of the feed url (minus the quotes). You can edit this number to your liking; it just specifies the number of check-ins that will be displayed.
Now your pin map should be displayed. If you just wanted to view it for yourself, you’re done. If you want to display it, you can click “Link” in the upper-right corner and grab the HTML embed code. Then you can put it on a website, like I’ve done below.
That’s it! You now have a digitized pin map. Since Google Maps is pulling data from your check-in feed, a new pin will be automatically added to the map every time you check in. If you’re only interested in tracking your travels by city, you can simply check-in once at each place you visit. However, you might find yourself sucked in to Foursquare’s other features and start checking in everywhere. If you do, make sure you check your privacy settings to make sure you’re comfortable with them.
via collegeinfogeek.com.
Apple has once again called Samsung into court. This time it’s about the Galaxy Nexus and four patents that Apple says it infringes. The patents in question are:
U.S. Patent No. 5,946,647: a patent for data being used as a hyperlink
U.S. Patent No. 8,086,604: a unified search patent
U.S. Patent No. 8,046,721: a slide-to-unlock patent
U.S. Patent No. 8,074,172: a word completion patent
Apple is requesting that the Samsung Galaxy Nexus be blocked from sale in the United States because it violates these patents. Should the court find in favor of Apple, a ban against the Galaxy Nexus would be put in effect until the final court decision.
Could it happen? Certainly. But if it does, it won’t go into effect any time soon, it would only affect stores inside the U.S. selling these products, and no jack-booted thugs from Cupertino will come pry your Nexus from your hands. We can’t be sure how the courts will act, but all of these are pretty shaky patents, and once again Apple is not going after Google directly — even though the Galaxy Nexus has a pure vanilla version of Android. The only certainty here is that the patent system is broken and only serves the company willing to spend the most in the courts.
It’s time for Google to step in and put a stop to this bullshit. The first patent in question is the same one that was upheld against HTC in a move that shocked the tech community at large, essentially giving Apple the rights to the hyperlink — something invented over 20 years ago by numerous companies that aren’t Apple.
The other three are just as laughable, or would be if not for the fact that Apple was allowed to secure the patents at all. Every single one of them has existed as prior art long before Apple became relevant, yet a patent was granted each and every time. This is the core of the problem. You can’t blame Apple for trying, it’s cheaper to litigate away your competition than it is to out-innovate them. And make no mistake — that’s exactly what’s going on here. Apple wants Android to go away, and a look at any chart that shows market share will tell you why. It’s a shitty way to get ahead, but it’s too easy not to try. It’s going to take a tech giant to change the way this all works, and we know nobody can count on Apple or Microsoft to do it, because this is their system, created the way they like it, and making them rich. If Apple is afraid to go after Google, Google needs to go after Apple instead of sitting on their laurels waiting to ride in and save the day at the last minute.
via Android Central.
Introducing Chrome for Android
In 2008, we launched Google Chrome to help make the web better. We’re excited that millions of people around the world use Chrome as their primary browser and we want to keep improving that experience. Today, were introducing Chrome for Android Beta, which brings many of the things you’ve come to love about Chrome to your Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich phone or tablet. Like the desktop version, Chrome for Android Beta is focused on speed and simplicity, but it also features seamless sign-in and sync so you can take your personalized web browsing experience with you wherever you go, across devices.
Speed:
With Chrome for Android, you can search, navigate and browse fast—Chrome fast. You can scroll through web pages as quickly as you can flick your finger. When searching, your top search results are loaded in the background as you type so pages appear instantly. And of course, both search and navigation can all be done quickly from the Chrome omnibox.
Simplicity:
Chrome for Android is designed from the ground up for mobile devices. We reimagined tabs so they fit just as naturally on a small-screen phone as they do on a larger screen tablet. You can flip or swipe between an unlimited number of tabs using intuitive gestures, as if you’re holding a deck of cards in the palm of your hands, each one a new window to the web.One of the biggest pains of mobile browsing is selecting the correct link out of several on a small-screen device. Link Preview does away with hunting and pecking for links on a web page by automatically zooming in on links to make selecting the precise one easier.A nd as with Chrome on desktop, we built Chrome for Android with privacy in mind from the beginning, including incognito mode for private browsing and fine-grained privacy options tap menu icon, ‘Settings,’ and then ‘Privacy’.
Sign in:
You can now bring your personalized Chrome experience with you to your Android phone or tablet. If you sign in to Chrome on your Android device, you can:View open tabs: Access the tabs you left open on your computer also signed into Chrome—picking up exactly where you left off.Get smarter suggestions: If you visit a site often on your computer, youll also get an autocomplete suggestion for it on your mobile device, so you can spend less time typing.
Sync bookmarks: Conveniently access your favorite sites no matter where you are or which device you’re using.
Chrome is now available in Beta from Android Market, in select countries and languages for phones and tablets with Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich. We’re eager to hear your feedback. Finally, we look forward to working closely with the developer community to create a better web on a platform that defines mobile.
Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome and AppsCross-posted from the Chrome blog and on the Mobile blog
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