Gallery Excluder: Exclude Unwanted Folders

In our 50th post last week we promised we will do a post on how to exclude images/folders from showing up in your smartphone Gallery, and we remember this was the second most demanded post by our readers. So, although we don't do app details/reviews that much; here is one for our lovely users.
Gallery on your smartphone is home for your so loved pictures so it makes much sense not to clutter it, or at least not show much clutter in there. Its a problem if you start seeing some annoying photos or unwanted folders that may just put them out of place or make you realize its time you deleted them. And of course when you have your phone syc'ed with cloud storage or web albums, why have them show up here all the time!
So, while it may not be a good idea to delete the pics/folders rest you need them to be on your all-time-carrying device; hiding them from the show is a better option as many of us would agree. Gallery Excluder does just that!!
Gallery Excluder is an Android app that you may use to customize the view in your smartphone Gallery; hide unwanted folders. Here is a quick walk-through of the app which is available as a free download as well as a paid version.
Before we show you the actual inside of the app, make sure you read what the guys at Gallery Excluder had to say with this caution message :)

Just a small precautionary message, less you forget that you hid the folder and worry why your Gallery isn't showing it up!! Before blaming the stock Gallery app, just make sure to check the settings in the Gallery Excluder.
Your Gallery Excluder Home is by default your mounted sdcard. So you see all the directories and sub directories in here. Just click the one you don't want to show on your stock Gallery and you are done. The magic is that the directories clicked here will have a .nomedia file placed in them, thus removing there visibility from the stock photo Gallery.

A few more options in the menu:

Changing the theme is a bit customary but none the less, its here if you need. Just click the Settings from the Menu as shown above and you may choose from a lighter to a dark theme options.

So, nothing of a great bit of work to remove some clutter from your Gallery and find it nice and in juts-what-you-need format!! Visit here to download the app to your Android device!! And since we know you guys are real geeks, here is a straight download link for your smartphone, just scan this QR and you are good to go!

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Google Drive To Drop-Box?

Google finally launched the much awaited cloud storage service: Google Drive. A place whee you can store your files, access them anywhere, share them with friends or colleagues and also work on the files simultaneously. Simply put, upload and access all files in the Drive.
Google Drive comes with a free space of  5GB which can be extended to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month and even 1TB for $49.99/month. Also as a gift for a premium account as you upgrade your Gmail account storage also gets expanded to 25GB.

[Image Credit: Official Google blog here...]


People familiar with the other cloud based service(and a competitor now for Drive) Dropbox would be familiar of how work with these kind of things. Like Dropbox, Drive also creates a folder on your Mac or PC. Then its just the way you normally do with your folders, pick and drop files in to it and the items in the folder gets sync'ed to the cloud storage on its own. Now share them or use them from any other system or, if you are and Android user, from your Android device using the Google Drive Android app. Bad news for you if you are currently a BB, iPhone or Windows user who wishes to use the cloud with this Google service, as the app is currently not available for these devices.

Where is my Google Docs?
We are not sure why Google chose to do it this way, but once you add Google Drive to your account, Docs automatically disappears. Or rather is replaced by Drive. And don't expect that surprise or confusion to go away just yet, Drive does some rearrangement of some of your stuff!

But Great Search Capabilities and Integration
So while there is some confusion and disappointment on smartphone users part (although this one was initially expected with Android being a Google' lap), there is some real nice work done as well.
Google Goggles image search is included in there for you to use it just the way you are used to with this service. So for example you put an Eiffel tower photo on the Drive folder and then do a search from any other of your sync'ed devices and you will see how good the integration is of Goggles with Drive. But yes, with Google already saying that the Goggles is in early stages, don't expect it to work if try to find any images that you took on your last holiday with your girl friend. It should get better over time, is what Google has to say!
If you are familiar with Dropbox, you should know that syncing files and folders on multiple devices means each device will have to download the sync'ed files and folders and once you update them, they will be sync'ed to your cloud storage. Google preferred it a bit different here with Drive, as many of us expected anyway. The files are not downloaded to your devices, rather what you see in your Drive are the links to your files and folders and once clicked they open in the browser. Nothing different from what we are used to in Docs.

Early days yet and don't worry if you are not able to kick start your Drive yet. It's rolling off steadily and should soon reach you. In the meantime its good to know that for those of you for whom Drive is already there, you should also have the Google plus integration as well. That is to say you can now share images on Google plus from your Drive folder as well. And should we know the search giant any better, Gmail integration will be on its way soon!!

If you are a lover of cloud based services, or love creating a sync of your files/docs over multiple devices that you may use, try giving Drive a try, and since this is Google's service you never know when in the near future you see Drive items figuring in the Google' search :-p

Thanks to all our readers for the support and yes, since it was the other in demand topic, watch out for "way to exclude unwanted image from Android gallery" as that will be our next topic for a post. Till then Happy Crunching !!!

Milind Shrivastava

Post Credit:

One of our regular readers and the one who suggested this topic first, Milind is a software engineer by profession and is himself a blogger. You may follow his life events on his blog All in a day
Connect with him either on Facebook or on ApnaCircle for his professional life.

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Dropbox Allows Easy Public Sharing

So, what's new in this and why is this on our site? Lets start by the latter. We are covering this news as Dropbox updated the Android app as well and we use (both web and app version) the service a whole lot than we initially thought we would. As for what's new in Dropbox providing a share feature; well we agree Dropbox seems to have always had the share feature but there is a subtle upgrade to this feature that we just loved the moment we noticed it!

Previously you were allowed to share folders with people who were already using Dropbox and thus you could just provide them with the shared folder with permissions either to only read or make changes as and when they required. Now you could share a folder, a file or an image just like it was a public item; and to anyone you wish to share it with!
That's essentially making it public!!
What's more that this shared item, because of the way its been shared, can only be read by the person it has been shared with. So, she essentially can't change anything in the folder being shared. And it works like we always wanted things to, without you required to make any update to the Dropbox that you may be using on your personal computer. Here are a few screen captures from our system.

Its as easy as this, just right click on the folder or file you want to share and from the Dropbox submenu choose Get Link. The moment you choose this option you will, in your browser, see a public view of the shared folder or file. Copy the URL from the browser and you are ready to share it with whosoever you may want to!!

And don't worry, they provided a nice way to remove the sharing if and ever you wanted to do it. Just go to your Dropbox site home page and click on the Links icon no the left vertical bar. You will see a page similar to this where you may click on Remove to do the obvious!

Easy as you would like!!

And the same updates are available on the Dropbox' Android app as well. Just the similar features as you see in the screen captures from our Android device:

Don't ask us what if you see some copyright material in the publicly shared folder. The guys at Dropbox already took care of it ;). While viewing the shared item, you will see a small copyright flag at the bottom right corner, clicking on which should take you to this page where you should be able to report any infringement.

Enjoy the new feature and Happy Crunching!!

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Facebook Android App Updated

If you haven't yet updated your Android device to the new version of the Facebook app or aren't aware of the availability of the new version, here is a quick FYI for you. The new version of the app is #1.9 and here is the link to play store where you can download the app. And, yes just a little more, here is the change log for you:

- Improved performance and various bug fixes
- More messaging features like creating group messages and adding friends to existing group conversations
- Shortcuts to share photos and messages right from your home screen

With the quick injection above, now just sit for the details on the updates :). The new update comes with couple more icons to sit in your device's app drawer. Just like you see in the image here: Facebook app now has camera and messenger shortcuts for quick photo and message sharing. This update to the social media app tries to bring more of the web UI features to the mobile version. So for example in the messenger app, you will now have the option to start a group conversation. And also the features that were on the separate Facebook messenger app like seeing when your friends are online or on their mobile devices. The contact sorting app is more interesting and useful now with the basis of sorting now is the people you interact with most. 

With the new camera app icon, there will be some confusion if you already had the separate app previously installed. It's because this new update doesn't update the camera app icon (nor does it removes the old app), rather it puts another app and its icon in your app drawer. This may lead to confusion as quite a few users have complained about.
The good thing is that you now can either take snaps from this app or use the snaps from your camera gallery to share them with your network. You may also see what your contacts are uploading.

The actual app now has a share text box right from the app's main UI window. The camera button at the top does the same work as the new app icon introduced. More simpler to share the posts and your snaps with your contacts.. Although the message quote icon at the right top of the first screen capture above is sort of useless, you click on it and the focus comes to the posts text box. The second capture in the screen above shows that you also have a few more options now with the updated app.

Our Views
Try the new app and you will see it getting a few new features that users are used to on the web version of Facebook. So far in the 3 days the reaction in the users have been mixed as you may see in the comments/ratings in play store for the app. There have been some crashes issues as well, but more so on the confusion of the old and new camera app in the app drawer. A minor issue with the size being taken with these new updates. We did notice a little issue with the time it was taking to log out of the app. During the 1hr after the update on a couple of our devices, it was taking 2 to 3 min for the app to log us out. A restart did fix the issue however. Try and let us know what you feel about the new updates.
Finally we will leave you with the screen capture below to show you that the new Facebook update have the confirmation pop up button reversed, like it is now around the whole of the ICS. Here is an article confirming the reversal. 

 

Update 05/052012: As of version 1.9.2 the extra icons were removed from the app drawer. Wonder what FB has in mind there!

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Affiliate Ads For Blogger

The picture above explains pretty much what is there about this topic. But there is one bad news apart from the main topic's good news that you see here. We will go first with the good news details and then briefly discuss (rather mention) the bad news right before we end the post!
Through your Adsense account you can now make money by promoting relevant products in your post. Once your blog readers see those ads and go on to buy the advertised product you in turn, as the owner of the blog displaying the Ads, will get the commissioned income in return.
The set up is pretty spoon fed for you. You will need to have an Adsense account for your blog. Don't have one? Click here to get started mate!!
Ok, so with your Adsense account already in place, start writing a new post (when you are ready of course). You will see the  Advertise Products widget/gadget in the Post Settings panel but, only if you blog matches available Ad categories. All you need to do then is select your Ad from the gadget and done. You and your readers will see the Ad (Affiliate Ad) once you publish the post. All you need to do now is wait till some of your readers like the product that you are advertising and buy it. You will be paid however through your Adsense account and you will not have to run the Adsense Ads for making profit through this feature :).
Google however, puts a disclaimer that mere signing up for an Adsense account doesn't guarantee that you will qualify for the use of the feature.

This is what the announcement said (for more details click here):
When you post about a brand or product from a featured advertiser, the Google Affiliate Ads for Blogged widget will help you to display an affiliate ad in your blog, which can be a text link, a product image, or a banner. You may earn commissions when someone clicks on your ads and makes a purchase on the advertiser’s site, going beyond “payment per click” to “payment per action” and extending the influential relationship you have with your audience. 

The bad news is that Google has opened this feature only for the US blogs. Any blogs based out of other countries will not get to see the feature when they draft a new post. At least as of now. Hopefully Google will be opening this up internationally soon. After all Adsense is famous outside of US too. Google listening ??

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When Facebook Added Microformats

Late last year Facebook very quietly added support of microformats to its data download feature. In case you are not aware of the data download, Facebook allows you to (in real essence) backup your all data from the social network, including your photos, any urls that you may have shared, all your wall posts and comments etc etc...
Previously the exported data was just a zip file bundled with all the data from your profile. Making it nothing more than a simple backup since all you could do was keep it safe. What use was that we do not know ;). This, as obvious, was useless for app developers (and for an otherwise user) since you couldn't import the data to any other app or program. For those who are not aware of the tiny info (and link) that sits in your account settings here is the path: Account-->Account Settings (General Account Settings)-->Download a copy of your Facebook data-->Start Archive

Once you start the process your archived data will be ready to be downloaded. Now just wait for a mail from Facebook and once you get it click on the link in the mail and you will have all your data with you. Facebook already warns that the contact details of your network will only contain the contact names, unless the contact himself/herself has allowed Facebook (in the settings) to use their email addresses in which case the contact data will have the mail Ids as well.

[Image Credit: One of our regular reader Deepak Arora!]
Coming back to the microformats, with their use Facebook has provided a format that is more consistent with the rest of the web and opened gates for app developers to be able to use Facebook user data outside of the site itself and its APIs. But that comes with a warning issued to developers for they are to only use the data after a user downloads its social data and submits the archived data for usage, rather than accessing any user's data through any app interface, trying to do so will have Facebook disable the app itself!
Facebook seems to be using the hAtom(wall posts and comments, including permalinks and published dates), hMedia(all your videos and audios including all the titles and comments) and hCard(profile and contact data, only names like we said earlier) microformats. Follow the links to read more about them but for now the info provided here in brackets should give you a fare idea on what data the formats provide you.
Good idea on part of Facebook to be using the microformats since all other major services like Twitter and Blogger were already using it when Facebook started on this. Making it more consistent haan Mark!!

Deepak Arora

Post Credit

Works with ApnaCircle.com and lives in Faridabad, India. Deepak is a very regular and interactive reader of our posts. Loves to get involved and share ideas. Currently is on a lookout for a nice Android Phone in the market. Suggest him some if you know of some good Android smartphones in the market, preferably those that are upgradeable to Android ICS(ver. 4.0.x)
Connect with him either on ApnaCircle for his professional life or add him to your circle on Google plus.

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Facebook Timeline Profile Pic Size Increased

Some time back there was news doing the rounds when Facebook made its photo viewer pretty much the same as the one that users were used to on Google plus. And then while it was just like yesterday that we detailed on the cosmetic changes that Google made to its social network, we were still thinking of why Google chose to put that size for the profile pic and quite a contrast for the cover photo. Well, it seems we will have to pause that thought for a while since Facebook gave us some food for thought here. Just days after the search engine giant's social media product got (as we said earlier) a whole bunch of cosmetic changes. 
On details, unless you are a brand page on Facebook; your profile pic that occupies the bottom left corner of your Facebook Timeline cover photo (in fact dropping a little below it) has grown without you (in all possibilities) noticing anything weird. This happened a few days back. The profile pic which measured 130 x 125 pixels just ta few days ago has been given a size of 166 x 160 pixels. Enough of a noticeable increase but we are sure it went pretty much unnoticed. Have a look at the two screen shots from one of our reader's Facebook Timeline...

See the changes? Yes, the profile pic got bigger. And we love the way Facebook rolls out these small, subtle yet interesting updates to the platform suggesting a coincidence on the updates that its biggest challenger made a few days back :)
The pics that we are talking about is still the preview sort of your main profile pic that you can see once you click on this pic that has been a part of your Timeline cover. The change has been made only on your Timeline and not anywhere else.

However, people like us who have a brand page on the social media platform were ignored for no reason it seems. The brand pages Timeline pic were left unchanged and are still the same size as they were before this change.

Our Views

Facebook does have a habit of making small changes every now and then to be discovered suddenly by their users. Which is not that bad considering it to be a much of a over burden to be providing an announcement every now and then for the small updates being made. But in this case we think the option of announcement made sense. Especially since the concept of Timeline and the cover photo had quite a few out there getting their designers cap on and creating all those wonderful symmetric covers and in process cutting out the profile pic from the it. Not that this size change will undo all that effort but it will surely put quite a few of the cover photos look out of symmetry.

This problem/issue that we stated above may be the reason of why brand pages were left n the first place. Putting a brand cover out of symmetry would have more of an impact than a standalone personal profile.

Did you notice any profile's Timeline cover going out of symmetry because of this change in size? Or any of your friend going nuts over this update from the social media giant? Let us know in the comments and till then Keep Crunching!!


Update 4/19/2012:
It seems Facebook has plans for the brand page profile pic as well. We received this announcement from Facebook for our blog page with them. As you see clearly, the date has been set t April 26, exactly a week from now. So all you who have pages there on the network, gear up and get a nice bigger picture for your brand pages. The size will be 160 x 160 pixels and will sit at 23 pixels from the left and 210 pixels from the top of the Page.

Hemant S.

Post Credit

A Software Engineer belonging to Rajasthan, India and currently put up in another lovely city of India, Pune.
Hemant works with one of the leading software companies in India, Tata Consultancy Services. And he is yet another of our readers who is a proud owner of an Android Phone!! Connect with him on Facebook for his day to day life!

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Facebook Email And Timeline Address To Merge

Hopefully by now you all have your user ids chosen in your Facebook settings. Facebook has announced that it will soon start updating the different user addresses on site to make them more consistent. Which simply means that the address which is so much part of your timeline URL and the one that people send mail to you on Facebook will be the same after this change is rolled out, which should be soon. The announcement came last week from the company itself.
This move is obviously to push more its long forgotten email service that (when started) was tipped to be more than doing the rounds. Don't think the email and messaging service have turned out the way the social media giant expected it to and thus the move.
Facebook has already started to push notifications to users who haven't specified the email addresses through the choosing of the Facebook user id and in process are still not using user-friendly timeline URLs. The notification as per Facebook will look something like this:

For those users who already have specified the Ids, the process and work behind the scenes remains not-bothering. For a background on the services, you may remember that Facebook in 2009 started allowing users to choose a custom name thus making it simpler for you and your friends/family to remember your URLs easily. Then later in 2010, they launched the messaging services (in competition to already famous Gmail, Yahoo etc) in its effort to let users send messages to their contacts from outside of the Facebook domain. The move of unifying the Ids may well be to remind the users that there are services that Facebook provides that you may have already forgotten about!!
And oh by the way, if you haven’t already chosen an address/Id for yourself then just click here and its all yours to choose. Happy Crunching!!

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Google Plus Gets New Look

In its attempt to be on top of the social media with its so much in news product; Google Plus; Google rolled out a new look to it last week. The move was slow to start and in a 2 day span virtually everybody was rolled over to the new look. Towards a simpler, more beautiful Google is how guys at Google put it, who now claims that the new look has been rolled over to around 170 million users. Seems the platform is being used by quite a few out there. Here is the introduction to the new improved platform.


New Look
Here is how the new look is:

You will notice a new ribbon floating on the left of the screen and a lot of white space (just below You Might Like) on your right. We will discuss about them both in detail. But for now this is how the new Google Plus stream looks like.


The Ribbon
You now see a ribbon on the left side of your screen, with all the options that previously sat on the top bar of the page.
As you see on the image on the left here the options are now nicely aligned in a vertical way for you to use. Jumping from one to the other just makes you feel like a no refresh kind of a thing and that you just jumped layers. The best part of this ribbon is that Google now allows you to reorder the options in that ribbon to your choice. Just drag your important or most used ones on the top of the ribbon; the rest go down the order automatically.
The ribbon as a whole stays intact with only the center part of the page rolling as you scroll down the page, looking a steady look. There is an option of adding more like the pages that you have from the More option available at the end of the ribbon. The new thing to notice on this ribbon is that the Hangouts now have a new home. Separate from the others, something you will love if you are a regular user of the feature.
Similarly the Explore feature now provides you the options like the Trending on Google Plus and What's Hot feature plus suggestions on whom to follow. You may also do a video chat with a maximum of 9 users at once. Watch out for the slider available at the enter of this page that lets you choose how much of What's Hot news to show on your stream (or Home Page).


Cover Photo To New Profile Look
We saw cover photos being a hit with the FB timeline and now on same lines it seems Google Plus has the same feature, although with some subtle changes as we discuss next, but here is the look for you...

The one that you see on our profile is the default cover provided by Google plus. A little smaller than the one you are accustomed to on FB timeline. You may choose the photo for a size of 940 by 180px. The other option is to have the look like you had previously with your multiple photos chosen as the display. This is how you choose either of the options:

The option at the top Choose a template is where you toggle both the looks!


Your Circles
This is how your Circles page look like now.

Don't forget to see the Actions menu in the pic above. You may increase or decrease your circles size. Although we find it a bit useless and think it rather should have been a size already chosen by the app.


Mini Profiles
We now also have a mini profile look for the users to look in to. Here is how it looks like:

Ripple View
Now see the how the news/share/post is floating down the stream with what Google now calls is the Ripple View:

From a post, just drop the arrow on the top right to see the last option on the drop menu that comes up. Click on the option to go to a Ripples page where the system tells you who all has shared/re shared the post and some more statistics as you go down the page. Enjoy the new stats page:) 


The much discussed: White Space
The content seems to have moved to the left of the screen, leaving out a lot of white space on the right side of the page. Since the new look there have been a lot of criticism on why the space have been left out. If you wanna follow the debate yet, the trending is with #useofwhitespace or #usesofwhitespace. Here are a few ones that we captured for you:

Our Views
The new look is more cleaner than the one we were used to previously. The Ribbon and Ripple effect are cool as well. The #useofwhitespace is a problem for now and Google yet hasn't come with any explanations on what it may be left out for. Not that anybody expects Google to say any word though!! Speculations are doing the rounds with all sorts of news from using that space for some kind of Ads to what not. As we said, keep a track of all that with #useofwhitespace or #usesofwhitespace. 
We will wait to see as the new look shapes up and what Google comes up with but for now it seems like the space may well be left out for the chat windows that you may have open and they will not (unlike previous look) interfere your stream view. Enjoy the chatting with the stream very well visible without any overlap of these two.
The changes are not yet there for the tablets and smartphones, they may be next in line though. And by the way if you think you lost your saved searches, don't forget to look at the More options at the top of your Home page; you have them all grouped there!
Let us know how you like the new look and what you think are the best uses of the white space out there. Happy Crunching till then!!

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Viadeo Raises 24 Million EUR

Viadeo, the French parent company for ApnaCircle, and the closest competitor to LinkedIn announced today the realization of a fundraising round of 24 Million EUR. This is believed to be the largest European Tech investment in the past 12 months. Viadeo is currently the world's 2nd largest PSN after LinkedIn is still a leader in France and China. Its Indian partner company ApnaCircle is the leading Business and Career Networking site in the country.
The fundraising round was through a pool of investors to boost its growth in the emerging markets like China, India etc. The whole group through which this raiser was realized consists of French Sovereign Wealth Fund, Allianz, Jefferies, Middle Eastern private funds, and its existing institutional shareholders, Idinvest and Ventech. Dan Serfaty the CEO of Viadeo which is headquartered in Paris had this to say:


We're a global society where critical business connections span multiple languages, geographies and cultures. We have always been laser-focused on our 'multi-local' approach, which goes beyond simple translation and focuses on catering to, and understanding the business and cultural needs of each market. This approach has awarded us tremendous growth and success in both European and emerging markets.


As is quite visible the focus is n a multi-local approach which saw Viadeo making in roads in to the China market through Tianji and Indian local market through their leader ApnaCircle. Both companies seems to making a very fast progress based on the business model followed by the Viadeo group as a whole. Tianji has been in particular making quite a progress with its total user base at 10Mn and it went from 100, 000 to 500, 000 user per month. The fund raiser will surely be a boost for the group(especially in the emerging countries as already specified), but what remains to be seen is the strategy that Viadeo and its partner companies would be adapting in order to compete with LinkedIn, who is by far the leader in the Professional Networking arena with around 150 million users as of Feb 2012.
Dan Serfaty has already hinted that the company is currently not looking to go public. The plans for an initial offering were already left out at May last year to focus on the emerging markets expansion. The news of Viadeo IPO was in circulation when LinkedIn went public some time back. It will however be interested to see if the strategy now is also being around the matter.

While LinkedIn was making all news since some time, its to be noted that Viadeo group has seen a raise in its total member base. The count is now at 45 million as can be seen from the signup or registration page of the site. The group is to be noted has been profitable since 2009 and have offices in France(Paris), US(San Francisco), China(Beijing), India(New Delhi), Spain (Madrid & Barcelona), Italy (Milan), Russia (Moscow), Mexico (Mexico City) and Senegal (Dakar). As a groups the company houses a staff of around 400 people.

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Facebook Buys Instagram

A photo sharing app, a social media giant, food for bloggers like us ;) and a lot of whys and what-fors!! Not a tough puzzle is it!! All combined together to create a deal that many experts are putting as a defensive one: Facebook bought the 2yr old photo sharing app Instagram for a whooping 1bn USD. The deal marks the biggest one in Facebook history in terms of money spent.

Although all smart phones allow the social sharing from nearly all of their camera apps, so why was this deal important? In a way the social media giant just bought a camera, just that in this case the camera happens to be very famous in the recent past, supposed to be generating a lot of traffic and somehow was viewed as one of the competitor to the social media company as far as the photo sharing and collection goes. Doesn't matter that the deal was worth a billion in US dollars and the amount just seems like a drop in front of the Facebook's IPO evaluation.

Instagram has generated a lot of buzz with its nearly 30 million user base producing quality content. Not only the app is famous with the Apple iPhone/iPad users but it also found the long awaited love from the Android community as well, just like we stated in the previous post on Instagram. The quality of images being shared on Instagram is very well known and in that way the step from Facebook seems pretty obvious and sensible. Comparing the images shared on either we know the winner would be obvious as far as the quality parameter is concerned. Facebook gains from this deal vary from parameter to parameter on which you start analyzing the move. All in all we thought the below ones apply well from which ever point you think about the deal, obviously from Facebook's perspective. The photo sharing app CEO and team would be happy to be part of a company that has been the leader of sorts in social media and as it stands right now it seems that will stay the same. And obviously the amount settled for the deal is well worth for a no revenue company.

1. Facebook being a leader in the browser world and not so much in the mobile area, would love some authority in there. No doubt Instagram has proved in couple of years since the start that it pretty much is able to do that.
2. As of now, user could share photos taken from Instagram but now a) Facebook gets to keep the content generated and b) it comes directly to them from the mobile ecosystem to their platform possibly via Open Graph.
3. Facebook to Instagram to third party apps! Instagram should have some third party app developers tied to them, these will now be part of Facebook indirectly and thus creating a new  way for the social media giant to (may be) use the Facebook Credits in a manner that it works pretty well than it does now.
4. Lets accept that photos for Facebook (of whatever quality trend) are a huge interactive points for the user base on their platform. Buying a platform that works so well with photos will not only make interactive freak out but for sure will improve the quality to no bounds.

You think we missed out in the list any points that may be more important to the realization of the deal, let us know in the comments!!

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Instagram On Android: Who's NOT Loving It

Ever heard any Android user complaining about the iPhone app? Don't think we have! OK, and what about the reverse? Before you reach for an answer, we have one for you right here. 
Android and iPhone have always been a tussle ever since Android started its recognition journey in the smart phone market. You could get virtually all the apps on an Android device that are available on an iPhone. The only thing seems missing was the photo sharing app called Instagram. That too was made available around a couple weeks back. The introduction was welcomed by Android community but possibly not as much as it was hated by their neighborhood. From whatever we see in the tweets (and other sources) iPhone users are seriously not loving it.

If you think we are playing a prank, here is an Evidence for you ;) Apart from the tweet itself, another interesting point to note is the bottom part of this pic. After all , 665 isn't too small a number ;)

So why is it that we are seeing a sudden outburst for as small a thing as a photo sharing app? Well for one, its not just a photo sharing app and secondly (and most importantly) its about the taste that both community users are drawing a line in the social connection medium. We will try and explain, but only a little...

When you as an individual start seeing flaws that other people normally tend to ignore or live with, you are generally seen as an individual with a taste of their own. This kind of personality trait in Steve Jobs transformed Apple in to producing quality products; something that we all agree iPhones are!! The deducing theory was that as an owner of an iPhone you are in the same league to people who have great taste or at least one that is better and above to others out there. So while the iPhones are still up as far as their price ranges are concerned, you will see Android phones easily available with the low cost pre and post paid plans.

We wont go in to the details much here, but you get the idea, right ;)

The outburst have been severe and although we weren't able to find the other side of the story, the Android community is (as of now) busy counting the initial rise in the number of Android users registering with the app. It is like the iPhone community was considering the app as a copyright within their own world and now they see their best known rivals in close proximity.

Belong to Android or iPhone community? We would love to hear you views. As for our Crunchers, they belong to both communities and currently are enjoying following each other. We will leave you with a more collective image of the outburst. Hope to hear from you soon in the comments section. Till then Happy Crunching!!

[Image Source: Twitter from respective Users, Handles visible from the images]

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Android ICS Rolling Again

Sometime back (nearly 2 months now) we put a post introducing the new Android version that may be due this summer. Code named Jelly Bean! We did mention at that time that Google is yet to roll out the ICS (currently at version# 4.0.4) to all types of devices and in more countries than it did at that time. Well, the news is that Google has announced its rolling ICS OTA updates (again) to more devices and in more countries as well.
You may remember that the OTA for version# 4.0.3 was put on hold due to the issues that users reported in bundles; especially the battery life. This was somewhere in December 2011. As a result quite a few Android users and fans were left out of the initial update season. Since then many blogs (including Google' official forums) and sites were thudded with questions and posts on what was going on and when the rollout will start again. No one seemed to have a clue and Google was mum. Neither the ones who got the OTA were happy (with the issues) nor those who didn't get the update. Questions, questions, and then a small period of silence.
If you are the one waiting, then we bring some good new for you. You should by now either already have received the OTA update or should pretty soon. Google last week officially announced that it is restarting the ICS rollout to nearly all the devices. As the word is, the update will be of the most up to date version available right now: 4.0.4

As a reminder your device needs to running on the stock build for version 4.0.3 or the Gingerbread (2.3.x) in case you still are not using ICS to receive this update. You will as usual see a OTA pop up like the image on your right. The Nexus S (GSM version) should be getting the updates first, still a doubt over the Nexus 4G version but Google hasn't said anything about a NO on this yet(nor a YES). If you are looking for a list of what's new on ICS, read on.


New Font and Spell Checker

The new font called Roboto is specially designed for high resolution screens and brings a magazine-like feel to the whole smartphone interface. Besides this new font you will see the new spell check and the word suggestion interface in your messages and everywhere else as well. As you may see on the left image, wrong spells will be red underlined and the moment you will select the word the system will present you with the spell suggestions.
You also have the option of adding this new word to dictionary in case you are not interested in the suggestive words. You all have the same way of doing this like it was in 2.3.x by double taping the word (partially visible in the image)


Notification Bar and the way to dismiss

With ICS you get a notification bar which is slightly different from the one that you were used to in earlier versions. No major changes apart from the settings button that you see besides the date. Clicking the settings button will open up the system settings for you to make any changes that you may require.
The new change you will see is the fact that you are now able to dismiss individual notifications right from this bar. So instead of  clicking a X and send all notifications away, just slide each individual notification bar towards your right to dismiss it.


Screen Captures
Major major update as far as Android users are concerned. You are now able to capture your screen and it just takes 2 sec to do it. No apps required and no extra settings. Just hold down the volume down button and the power button (both at the same time) as you are ready to take a shot. The capture is by default saved to your internal storage and you are able to view it from the notification bar, right after you capture it. Once there, just open or share as er your convenience.


Instant Voice
Still some work to do before we really start the comparison with Siri but unlike other versions of Android which support voice commands, Android 4.0.4 will not take very long to transcribe your words. Just speak it in and it instantly transforms it into text.
All dictation errors are underlined just as we showed you in the message type image above. Just tap them like you would and replace them from the suggestion list presented to you.


Android Beam
Based on NFC (Near Field Communication) it allows two Android smart phones to securely exchange Web pages, contacts, media or even applications. Once ready with the share item, just tap both smart phones (ideally back to back) and the app decides the rest. It is based on NDEF Push technology.


Mobile Chrome
The new version comes with a brand new Chrome mobile Web browser. It syncs with your

desktop or laptop Chrome bookmarks, it can save pages for offline reading, and it can open up to 16 tabs at the same time. We show you 3 tabs as they are visible in the image to your left. 
Just click on the plus sign at the top right on the screen as and when you decide to open a new tab. Closing a tab is as simple as clicking the cross on the tab itself.


Camera with Panorama Mode
ICS has some great new camera features, a brand new camera UI, options to edit your images using multiple effects right after you click them and it captures images at a ridiculously fast speeds, probably the fastest among smart phones. Don't just believe us, try it!! Video recording modes have also improved along with support for a time lapse mode and as a plus you now get the Panorama mode. Nexus S users will still fume over the nonavailability of the zoom feature. But we really are not sure how Google and Samsung could do tat w/o and hardware changes. So as it stands now, zoom will be missed badly.


Mobile Data Usage
If you are the one who uses smart phones to make extensive use of network data for streaming content, synchronizing data, downloading apps, and more, then Android has met with your needs of metered data plans in this version. Find the Mobile Data usage setting and you are on the move.
Try out the new features and let us know how you liked or disliked them. As for us, we are thrilled to have received it on nearly all devices owned by our crunchers. They sure are enjoying the update, how about you? Got it already or are still waiting, let us know in the comments!!

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