Scooopy – Scoops about Gadget, Mobile & Technology
Web
Mozilla Labs Weave 1.0 RC is now available
Dec 27th
Mozilla Labs Weave 1.0 RC is now released.
What’s changed since Beta 3?
- Faster startup times for Firefox and Fennec
- Make tabs available immediately when setting up another computer
- Automatically use the synced lightweight theme (Firefox 3.6+)
- A few more bug fixes related to changing passwords, mobile bookmarks, etc.
Release Notes
- Upgrade all your clients to the latest version
If you are using Weave Sync on multiple computers, you will need to update all of them to the latest version. Weave Sync requires that you use the same version of the addon on all your computers that you want to synchronize data to/from. - Hosting Your Own
If you are hosting your own Weave server, you’ll need to add an apache alias line for the 1.0 URL – your old server will still handle the same API.
More Information
For information about previous versions as well as the latest development snapshots, check out the changelog
Opera Mini 5 Beta 2 is now available
Dec 15th
Opera Mini 5 Beta 2 is the next generation of mobile browsing which runs on almost every phone.
Top new features
Tabbed browsing
Browse several Web sites at the same time, while easily jumping from one to another.
Speed Dial
Get to your favorite Web page with just one click, with a set of visual bookmarks when you open a new tab.
Opera Link
Synchronize your bookmarks and Speed Dial between your mobile phone and desktop computer.
Download manager
Manage downloads right from the browser. Pause and resume downloads to suit your needs.
Feature details
Innovative and easy-to-use
1Living up to our vision of providing the best Internet experience on any device, Opera Mini 5 boasts a powerful new user interface. Merging the best from our desktop browser together with new innovations for mobile phones, Opera Mini is advanced, yet highly intuitive to use.
Faster
Time is precious. Opera Mini compresses pages by up to 90% before being sent to your phone, meaning faster page-load times than in other mobile Web browsers.
Full Web in your palm
2When visiting a Web page, Opera Mini displays the overview of the page and suggests where to begin your reading before you zoom in. Opera Mini also detects when you are on a Web page designed for a mobile phone and displays it optimally.
2
Full Web in your palm
Page zoom
Control default text size on Web sites. Depending on your mobile phone screen size, often text can be too small or too large to be viewed easily. Control the default zoom level from 60% to 200% directly in Opera Mini 5.
Built for speed
The new Opera Mini lets you search for text within a Web page, so you can get to the information you need even more quickly than before.
1
Innovative and easy-to-use
Speed Dial
Get your favorite Web page with just one click. Speed Dial is a set of visual bookmarks you see when you open a new tab, like a dashboard for your online life. To add a new page, simply click an empty dial, and Opera will make suggestions based on your browsing history and bookmarks.
Mobile view
Fit content to your mobile phone. Mobile view intelligently reformats Web pages into a single column eliminating the need for horizontal panning. Changing to Mobile view is accessible though the Settings menu.
Password Manager
4There is no more hassle with those hard-to-enter usernames and passwords. Opera Mini 5 will remember your credentials, and you can log on to your favorite Web sites with just a single click. The passwords are stored on your phone for your convenience.
4
Password Manager
Tabbed browsing
Browse several Web sites at the same time. Check your e-mail in one window, Facebook in another and, Twitter in a third, all while being able to jump easily from one tab to another. With a touchscreen phone, you can enjoy even easier tab switching with visual tabs. On keypad-style phones easily mange desktop-style tabs in the Opera Mini user interface, above the address bar.
Power scrolling
Scroll at warp speed using your phone keypad or by dragging the page on a phone with a touchscreen.
Touch and keypad
3The user interface has been designed for both touchscreen- and keypad-style mobile phones. With a touchscreen, you can enjoy even easier navigation with our new zooming and kinetic scrolling.
3
Touch and keypad
Adaptive zoom
On a touchscreen phone panning has become even easier with adaptive zoom. When panning quickly around a zoomed-in page the panning momentum creates a more intuitive and easier to-navigate experience.
Landscape mode
Browse in the way that is most comfortable to you. Landscape mode allows you to view Opera Mini 5 on your phone in landscape.
Download Opera Mini 5 Beta 2 to your mobile phone
To try Opera Mini 5 beta 2 visit the address m.opera.com/next, using your phone’s default Web browser, or download it to your computer. It is completely free.
Mozilla Labs Ubiquity .05 is now available
Dec 15th
Mozilla Labs releases a new experimental beta version of Ubiquity.
Ubiquity is a time-saving Firefox extension that simplifies common web activities by letting you give commands to Firefox. Ubiquity includes about 80 commands for speeding up common web activities (searching, translating, mapping, emailing, etc.), but also provides an API so you can write your own commands using Javascript. You can also share the commands you write, and subscribe to commands shared by other users.
To make it easy for users to run these commands, Ubiquity provides a unique pseudo-natural-language input method: You type what you want to do, and Ubiquity guesses what you mean and suggests the best-matching commands. For instance, you can select some foreign-language text on a web page, hit a hotkey to bring up the Ubiquity interface, and type “translate” (or just type “tr” and let Ubiquity figure out that you mean the translate command); then hit enter to have the selected text replaced, right in the page, with a translation to your language.
Download Ubiquity – Experimental beta version!
Facebook has just reached 350 Million Users
Dec 2nd
Facebook has just reached 350 million users and will soon be making some changes to serve our growing community.
An open letter from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg:
It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we’ve built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.
Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.
Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.
However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.
The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.
We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.
Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we’ll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You’ll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you’re finished, we’ll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you’re done you’ll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.
We’ve worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone’s needs are different. We’ll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you’re sharing with online.
Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.
