Technoholik

Mark Zuckerberg and his team always comes up with some new exciting and mind-boggling features for Facebook audience. Today, Facebook team via their Official Twitter account has reported a new surprising feature which helps a Facebook user to tag his/her friends in an entirely different manner inside a Facebook post.

Previously, Facebook users were able to use this feature by typing the ‘@’ sign followed by a friend’s name, but now there is no need of ‘at sign’ for tagging friends in a post, by the introduction of this new feature a user can tag a friend by simply writing his/her name and selecting it from the drop down menu.

The picture below will guide you in 3 easy steps on how it actually works:

Step 1: Type your friends name starting with a capital letter: for example ‘Jeff’ instead of ‘jeff’. (Note: If you begin writing a friend’s name with a small letter, then this feature will not be able to display you the drop-down list of friends)

Step 2: Select the friend you want to tag from the drop-down menu and press right click or enter button:Following this step will create a hyperlink to the selected friend’s profile in your post. (Note: There is no limit of tagging friends in a post, which means you can tag as many friends as you want, until you reach the character limit)

Step 3: Shorten your friend’s name: Now this is something unique, the feature let you erase the first name or last name from the tag – for example, you tagged Jeff Kanter, now you can either keep ‘Jeff’ by removing Kanter or alter it other way around by saving the tag as ‘Kanter’ and deleting Jeff.

However, this new feature is not been introduced in Facebook app for Android, iPhone and other Smartphones. Let us know if you would like developers to add this feature in Facebook application for Smartphones and Tablets by Commenting in the Box below.

Notification Center, wireless sync, iCloud are the headline features of iOS 5. But as everyone knows these aren’t the only features that the next version of iOS will bring. The recently released iOS 5 Beta 2 hasrevealed that iOS 5 will bring a new boot animation for your iDevice, the video of which is attached for your viewing pleasure after the break.

The thing that is different and unique about this boot animation is that it shows a glowing Apple logo and only appears when an iDevice is booted for the first time or is restored from iTunes. Is the new boot animation magical? We await your response in the comments section

So you upgraded your iOS firmware to iOS 4.3.1 which Apple rolled out and are now looking to go back to iOS 4.3? Listed after break is an easy to follow guide which will enable you to downgrade iOS 4.3.1 to iOS 4.3 in no time.

Downgrade iOS 4.3.1 to iOS 4.3

Pre-requisite

• iOS 4.3 SHSH

Step 1: Download iOS 4.3 for your iDevice.

Step 2: Put your iDevice into DFU mode following the guide posted here.

Step 3: Open hosts file in Notepad. The file can be found under C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\ and locate “hosts” file. Add this  74.208.105.171 gs.apple.com in a new line. Windows 7 and Vista users are advised to launch Notepad as an administrator. Once you have added the required line to hosts file, save the file.

Step 4: You now need to restore your iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch to the desired firmware. With iTunes open, move your focus towards the left sidebar of iTunes and click on your phone icon. Press and hold the left Shift key and then click the Restore button. You can now stop holding the Shift key.

Step 5: iTunes will prompt you to provide the location of the firmware file you downloaded in Step 1. Point the iTunes to the appropriate location and click Open.

Step 6: Move away from your machine for some time and let iTunes do the downgrade work for you.

Step 7: In case your iDevice gets stuck in Recovery mode, download TinyUmbrella and use the Exit Recovery button.

Looks like some of the Skype crew might've had a sleepless night to please owners of the Nexus S 4G. If you'll recall, June 30th saw a major update to its Android app enabling video chat on four devices; although the Nexus S was part of the club, its door was locked for Sprint's 4G variant. That's quickly changed, however, as the team's set loose a hotfix to grant it access -- this despite initially stating we'd have to wait for a "future release." You can grab the app from the Android Market if you haven't yet, and be sure to let us know how it goes in comments. Oh, and for those anxious Thunderboltowners? We'd recommend not holding your breath until after the 4th of July holiday.

Back in August 2010, Facebook rolled out a location aware feature called Facebook Places. At the time of the announcement, it was a US only feature and Facebook promised to roll out the feature gradually for other countries. Since the rollout was gradual, some countries still await the feature to go live for their region. If you can’t wait any longer then we have got just the thing you are looking for which follows after the break.

Here is what you need to do to get Facebook Places up and running on your Android handset right now:

Step 1: Launch the browser on your Android phone.

Step 2: Type touch.facebook.com in the address bar and press Go.

Step 3: A pop-up screen will appear asking you to share your location. Tap the Share location button.

Step 4: A new page will open where you will see the Places Tab.

Step 5: Switch to the Places Tab and let the Check in fun begin.

Once you activate the Facebook Places functionality using your mobile browser, the Places option in the Facebook App will start working by magic. Currently, it is limited to viewing your latest check-in only. May be the complete functionality needs an app update to start working.

Not so long ago, we shared with you the not so good news of iOS 4.3 severely draining down the precious battery life of the compatible iPod touch and iPhone models. Today, we have a possible fix for the painstaking issue thanks to @iThinkiTweeted. More on this after the jump.

You can fix (temporary fix if you may) the serious battery drain issue by resetting your network settings, for which you will Go to Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings.

Andrew, who suggested the fix applied it with success on his iPhone 4. We ourselves can’t verify this as we haven’t updated our iDevice to iOS 4.3 for jailbreak and graphical glitch reasons. If you are running iOS 4.3 on your iPhone or iPod Touch, and can verify this for us, we will be very thankful to you.

What's that in the sky? A bird? A plane? Oh, it's just some junk floating around in space, posing major threats to our military's spy satellites. To help keep an eye on it, engineers at DARPA, MIT and the Air Force have unleashed a new $110 million telescope that's been in the works for nine years now. The new Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) is capable of delivering wide-angle views of the Earth's firmament thanks to a curved CCD. This allows for a massive 3.5m aperture and f/1.0 exposure settings, capturing more light in a day that your average scope can in a week. As part of the Air Force's Space Surveillance Network (SSN), the telescope's primary task will be to look out for any microsatellites, meteors or other alien droppings moving at the same speed at which the Earth rotates. The system developed its first images earlier this year and the Air Force may eventually place SSTs all over the world, creating a 360-degree surveillance blanket and going a long way toward keeping our spycraft warm, cozy, and safe from galactic hazards.

Not too long ago, Adobe released the first preview of a project code-named Wallaby, which is a tool that can input Flash project files and convert them to use HTML5 and other new web technologies. Google’s latest lab project has a similar purpose, but works in quite a different way.

Visit the Swiffy lab page and you will be asked to upload a SWF file, which their tool will then convert into a version that uses HTML, JavaScript, CSS and SVG; taking advantage of some of the latest web standards. Currently their output will only work on WebKit-based browsers such as Google Chrome and Apple Safari.

Swiffy converts the imported Flash animation into JSON, which is a JavaScript-based plain text data format. This data is read by the pure JavaScript Swiffy runtime, which then renders the animations described by the JSON object as SVG, making use of newer features offered by HTML5 and CSS3.

Last night, a friend of mine asked me for a way to get rid of the not so well received Facebook Photo Theater mode. While I helped him, I thought why don’t share the Facebook Photo Theater pain killer with you guys as well. Get the solution after the break.

If you do your browsing using Chrome, then all you need to do is install the Revert Facebook Photo Viewer extension for Chrome and you are good to go. The extension doesn’t require any interaction from you whatsoever and does its work silently and efficiently.

Facebook Photo Theater View went live in February 2011 and as many of you know lets you view photos in Theater mode which is basically a picture with an annoying black background.

While smartphone consumers are still taking their time to embrace Windows Phone 7, Microsoft appears to be having more luck with developers. The mobile platform has reportedly crested the 25,000 app mark for Windows Phone Marketplace, according to at least one tracker site.

WindowsPhoneAppList puts the number at 25,076 right now, slightly ahead of another app tracker WP7AppList. That’s up from an official count of 11,500 apps announced in late March. It’s a far cry from Apple’s 425,000 iOS apps and Android Market’s 200,000 apps, but it’s a pretty impressive showing for a platform that just launched in November but has struggled to convince users to sign on. Gartner estimated that Windows Phone 7 mustered just 1.6 million in estimated sales to end users in the first quarter.

The new app milestone shows that Microsoft is seeing some results from its efforts to line up developers and make it easy and attractive for them to build apps. Even without a large user base, developers are apparently getting in on the act, perhaps in anticipation of bigger things to come. WP7AppList shows that new apps spiked in late May and early June.

Crysis 2 players will be happy to note that Crytek has released the new CryEngine 3 Sandbox Editor, allowing them to create their own maps, mods, and content for the award-winning franchise.

The crymod.com mod community has also been re-opened, allowing fellow Crysis 2 modders to share and discuss their work. Interested Crysis 2 players should head to mycrysis.comor crymod.com for more information, and to download the package.Giving a fair amount of control, Crytek will be providing additional tools with the package, including plugins for Maya and 3ds Max, Poly Bump, FMOD Designer, and more. For beginners, sample content has also been provided to help build and edit.

Though Facebook was ultimately not in the mix to buy Skype, the relationship is still going strong and will reportedly result in Skype’s video chat service finally coming to Facebook next week.TechCrunch reports  that Facebook’s“awesome” announcement July 6 will include word that desktop Facebook users will be able to conduct video calls via Skype.

Updated. Hulu’s Facebook Connect integration apparently isn’t going as planned. The ability to log in is offline as of this writing, with many people reporting issues with the sign-in option earlier today. According to some, those issues led some users to be signed in to other people’s Hulu accounts, exposing their user account data in the process.

Near field communication, or NFC, allow for simplified transactions, data exchange, and connections with a touch. Formed in 2004, the Near Field Communication Forum (NFC Forum) promotes sharing, pairing, and transactions between NFC devices and develops and certifies device compliance with NFC standards. A smartphone or tablet with an NFC chip could make a credit card payment or serve as keycard or ID card. NFC devices can read NFC tags on a museum or retail display to get more information or an audio or video presentation. NFC can share a contact, photo, song, application, or video or pair Bluetooth devices. The 140 NFC Forum members include LG, Nokia, Huawei, HTC, Motorola, NEC, RIM, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, AT&T,Sprint, Rogers, SK, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Intel, TI, Qualcomm, and NXP.

Essential specifications

NFC is a set of short-range wireless technologies, typically requiring a distance of 4 cm or less. NFC operates at 13.56 MHz on ISO/IEC 18000-3 air interface and at rates ranging from 106 kbit/s to 848 kbit/s. NFC always involves an initiator and a target; the initiator actively generates an RF field that can power a passive target. This enables NFC targets to take very simple form factors such as tags, stickers, key fobs, or cards that do not require batteries. NFC peer-to-peer communication is of course possible, where both devices are powered. A patent licensing program for NFC is currently under development by Via Licensing Corporation, an independent subsidiary of Dolby Laboratories. A public, platform-independent NFC library is released under the free GNU Lesser General Public License by the name libnfc.

 

Uses

Emerging NFC standards allow customers to quickly purchase products and transfer secure information by touching devices. NFC allows companies to reduce staffing, printing, and point of sale costs. Globally, 100 million people use mobile payment outside the U.S., but only 3.5 million use the technology in the U.S.

Social networking

Those of us who were excited about the Galaxy S II, but weren’t willing to invest so much for a phone, will probably be happy to know that a cheaper alternative is around the corner, and when it arrives, will be much like the Galaxy S i9003 was for the Galaxy S i9000. Spotted for pre-order online over on Swedish carrier, Three, the device is called the Galaxy Z.

With the same design as the Galaxy S II i9100, the Galaxy Z i9103 features near identical specifications, apart from a different, smaller display; a slower dual-core processor; less inbuilt storage; and a lower quality camera.

The device is also not as slim as the SII, wider at its slimmest by about 1 mm, at 9.5 mm. Not shabby at all for a cheaper alternative to the current-gen top-end offering, but of course, a price figure would help that assessment.The Samsung Galaxy Z has a 4.2-inch Super LCD display instead of the S II’s 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus offering; comes with aNvidia Tegra 2 1GHz dual-core processor instead of the 1.2GHz Exynos dual-core processor; features 8GB of inbuilt storage in place of the 16GB and 32GB offerings; and, has a 5MP 720p HD camera instead of the 8MP 1080p HD camera.

As it has a Tegra 2 dual-core processor, we don’t expect it to retail at the Galaxy S i9003’s price level of course, but enough to become a serious option for potential i9003 purchasers. The Galaxy Z has been announced at an pre-order price of 3995 Swedish kronor (roughly Rs. 28,000). We’ll keep you up-to-date on any further leaks or official announcements.