Indika’s Web Log

Google’s highly anticipated Nexus One “superphone” is released. During the demonstration, Google showcased a variety of the phone’s features, including a very impressive new photo app, voice input, and more.

They’ve now posted a handful of videos showing off each of these features, which we’ve embedded below.The most impressive video of the bunch is called Web Meets Phone. It’s sleek, stylish, and has catchy music — and was clearly inspired by Apple’s hugely successful iPhone ads. Google’s video weighs in at a hefy 1 minute 54 seconds, which obviously makes it long for your average TV commercial.  Still, given the production values of the clip, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google starts running a shorter version of this on TV. It may even splurge for a few extended showings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6COwgigJ-g&feature=player_embedded

Nexus One: The Big Picture

The phone looks more like the iPhone than any other phone on the market. There is no physical keyboard like the Android-powered Motorola Droid, and the tradeoff is a much slimmer design. The phone is 11.5 mm deep, slightly thinner than the iPhone 3GS at 12.3 mm. It is also slightly lighter than the iPhone 130 grams v. 135 grams). The package comes with the phone, a removable battery, 4 GB Micro SD storage card (expandable to 32 GB), USB charger and microphone headset.

The Nexus one has four functional touch buttons at the bottom of the screen (back, menu, home, search) and a navigation trackball pointing device. It also has physical power and volume controls. But most of your interaction with the phone will be through the gorgeous 3.7 inch 480 x 800 OLED capacitive touchscreen. This is the best mobile phone display on the market today, blowing away the iPhone’s 480 x 320 display. The screen is bright and alive, and an absolute pleasure to use.

This phone is also powered by the Snapdragon 1 GHz core processor, which is more than able to handle the Nexus One’s 3D graphics, multiple applications running in the background and heavy browser use simultaneously. Unlike previous Android phones, there is no slowdown or lag when you push the phone’s performance, and less of a need to kill applications to keep the device humming.

On the downside: all this hardware bling is an energy hog. The screen will self adjust brightness and Google is smart about turning down the processor when it’s not being used. But I’ve found battery life to be woefully brief, even by iPhone standards. Officially the phone has up to 7 hours talk time, 250 hours standby, 5 hours of 3G Internet use, 7 hours of video playback and 20 hours of audio playback. Unofficially, I was able to kill the fully charged battery with 1.5 hours of continuous gameplay (Robo Defense) on the full-brightness screen. Be prepared to keep this phone near a charger at all times. You can easily view what’s using the battery, though (the screen is 71% of my current usage), and then adjust the hardware or software usage to maximize battery life.

Overall the Android is a superior mobile device, particularly when paired with Google Voice. Google is calling this the first of the Super Phones. And they may not be exaggerating all that much.

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Google has launched Site Performance, an experimental feature in Webmaster Tools that shows you information about the speed of your site and suggestions for making it faster.

This is a small step in our larger effort to make the web faster. Studies have repeatedly shown that speeding up your site leads to increased user retention and activity, higher revenue and lower costs. Towards the goal of making every webpage load as fast as flipping the pages of a magazine, we have provided articles on best practices, active discussion forums and many tools to diagnose and fix speed issues.

Now we bring data and statistics specifically applicable to your site. On Site Performance, you’ll find how fast your pages load, how they’ve fared over time, how your site’s load time compares to that of other sites, examples of specific pages and their actual page load times, and Page Speed suggestions that can help reduce user-perceived latency. Our goal is to bring you specific and actionable speed information backed by data, so stay tuned for more of this in the future.

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Yahoo released a “final notice” on Wednesday reminding GeoCities users that the free site creation service will be closing up shop later this month.

Yahoo is closing its GeoCities personal home page service, and with it will go an era of self-expression on the Web that’s largely been replaced by social networks and blogs.

GeoCities rose to power during an era when publishing on the Internet meant setting up your own Web site. GeoCities simplified the process by helping people sidestep the complications of registering a domain and learning how to program HTML, the language that describes Web pages.

“On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and file,” Yahoo wrote in a statement to GeoCities users.

The company said any GeoCities user that wants to maintain the site will be able to port it to Yahoo’s Web Hosting service, which would cost $4.99 per month for a year and $9.95 per month afterward. GeoCities Plus customers can port their sites to Yahoo Web Hosting at no additional charge.

Yahoo first announced that it would be closing GeoCities in April. At the time, the company didn’t divulge when the service would finally close.

Yahoo wrote on its GeoCities Help page that its decision to close the site was rooted in its desire to help its “customers explore and build relationships online in other ways.”

GeoCities’ closure marks an end of an era for the Web. The free site-building service, which Yahoo bought in 1999 for $2.9 billion, was a precursor to many of the self-publishing and social-media tools Web users employ today.

As someone who used GeoCities to create his first personal site, I find it a bit sad to say good-bye. That said, it’s about time.

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Google is now giving webmasters the ability to prompt users for automatic translations of their pages. With the new website translator gadget, site owners can paste a short snippet of code into their websites and instantly increase their reach to up to 51 languages.

The gadget will automatically detect a user’s preferred language, and if that user’s language settings differ from the content on the gadget-enabled website, a frame will appear over the web page, prompting the user to click a button for instant translation of all text content.

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Think you can make a better fast-booting, Chrome-focused OS than Google? Want to craft a custom Linux system that boots from a USB stick? SUSE Studio gives you 15 GB to do exactly that, and you do it all online.SUSE Studio is what powered the fan-made “Chrome OS” we posted yesterday, which, in that case, was a semi-stripped-down system loaded with the developers’ version of Chrome, Google webapp links, and OpenOffice. If speed and cloud computing aren’t your bag, you can create a fully functional system with Firefox, 3D graphics, and whatever apps you can find installed. Want your system to start up with an AWN dock and Launchy keystroke launcher running? Not a problem.Even if you don’t know all that much about Linux, it’s pretty easy to build a system you can boot from a USB stick or live CD/DVD, run inside a virtual machine program, or actually install it—or, heck, even test it out in your web browser.

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There are a few things that can be done in times of grave emergencies. Your mobile phone can actually be a  life saver or an emergency tool for survival. Check out the things that you can do with it:

1. Emergency
The Emergency Number worldwide for  Mobile  is 112.

If you find yourself out of the coverage area of  your mobile; network and there is an emergency, dial 112 and the mobile will search any existing network to establish the emergency number for you, and interestingly this number 112 can be dialled even if the keypad is locked. Try it out.

2. Have you locked your keys in the car?
Does your car have remote keyless entry?
This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a cell phone: If you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are at home, call someone at home on their mobile phone from your cell phone.

Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end.

Your car will unlock.

Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you.

Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has  the other ‘remote’ for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).

Editor’s Note: It works fine! We tried it out and it unlocked our car over a mobile phone!’

3. Hidden  Battery  Power
Imagine your mobile battery is very low. To activate, press the keys *3370#
Your mobile will restart with this reserve and the instrument will show a 50% increase in battery.

This reserve will get charged when you charge your mobile next time.

4. How to disable a STOLEN mobile phone?
To check your Mobile phone’s serial number, key in the following digits on your phone: * # 0 6 #

A 15 digit code will appear on the screen. This number is unique to your handset. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe.

When your phone get stolen, you can phone your service provider and give them this code.

They will then be able to block your handset so even if the thief changes the SIM card, your phone will be totally useless.

You probably won’t get your phone back, but at least you know that whoever stole it can’t use/sell it either.

If everybody does this, there would be no point in people stealing mobile phones.

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Regular expressions are a very useful tool for developers. They allow to find, identify or replace text, words or any kind of characters. In this article, I have compiled 15+ extremely useful regular expressions that any web developer should have in his toolkit.

 Topics Covered

• Regular expressions syntax
• PHP regular expression functions
• Validate domain name
• Enlight a word from a text
• Enlight search results in your WordPress blog
• Get all images from a HTML document
• Remove repeated words (case insensitive)
• Remove repeated punctuation
• Matching a XML/HTML tag
• Matching an XHTML/XML tag with a certain attribute value
• Matching hexadecimal color values
• Find page title
• Parsing Apache logs
• Replacing double quotes by smart qutotes
• Checking password complexity
• WordPress: Using regexp to retrieve images from post
• Generating automatic smileys

Here is the complete article

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Cheat sheets and reference guides are useful for both beginners and advanced web professionals.

They can be used to help you remember syntax or as a tool to aid in memorization.In this post, we aim to cover the reference guides for all of the most commonly used platforms, software and coding languages.

In this web article you’ll find a compilation of the 30 most useful and well-organized cheat sheets, checklists and reference guides.

This is a Great resource for all of us. Here is the Article

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Here is the newest YouTube sensation — Evian’s roller-skating babies. Check out the full video:

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Ok. So google is working hard developing its new Crome OS. And according to the latest google announcement they will start with a browser based OS for netbooks and likes then expand from there to larger notebooks, desktops and even to servers. They plan to make this a Open source project and relies the souce for developers.The key determinants of this OS is

• It will be designed for speed, simplicity and security.
• The user experience is Web-centric.
• The OS will be based on Linux, with the Google Chrome browser running in a new windowing system.
• Apps will run inside Google Chrome–the Web is the platform.
• It will run on x86 and ARM CPUs.
• Data will live in “the cloud,” so that it’s accessible anywhere.
• Chrome OS will be free, which means advertising.

It’s too early to say what impact this will have on the other well established OS’s. However I’m skeptical about this as googles Android OS targeted towards the mobile devices did not get the broad acceptance I thought that it would  and also I believe Linux has much to offer when it comes to operating systems If the computer manufactures can embed a powerfull brower on the boards frimware (Like Asus Has)  then thats what we really need. However the webservers will still be powered by Linux and Windows Servers.Dont get me wrong. I love google and google has reliesed so many great tools for developers and users. Google Search is simply the best. Microsoft’s bing will have a very very hard time even to come closer to google. (Can’t google with bing can you )But I would go with linux for now.

Also if anyone is interested in starting a Crome OS blog or something the the CromeOS.net is available as of today (07/09/2009).

More on the Subject

• Why we need to chill about ChromeOS

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