With Microsoft’s latest operating system looming large on the digital landscape – set for a public beta launch at the end of the month – casualties are beginning to emerge.

It turns out that the launch of Windows 8 could see Microsoft’s iconic Start button going the same way as Clippy.

Now a mainstay of personal computing, the Start button was launched 17 years ago amidst a massive advertising campaign featuring the Rolling Stones song “Start me up“.

With Windows XP/Vista and 7 installed on a huge portion of PCs worldwide, the Start button has become a design icon that is effectively synonymous with the Redmond based software giant.

Sadly in Windows 8, rumours are that Microsoft has decided to kill off the Start button, with the space to be occupied by what is being called a “hot” corner.

In essence this will equate to moving the mouse pointer (if on a PC) into the corner which will fire up the new full-screen Metro-style start screen. Tablet users will be able achieve the same result by flicking their finger to the same bottom left corner of the screen.

Windows 8 will perhaps sport the most radical interface overhaul since Microsoft jumped from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, and killing off the Start button will arguably free up more on screen real-estate.

From a cursory play with the new interface at Microsoft’s CES stand recently, the new interface may have impressed, but it is likely that many long term Windows users will find it baffling.

For first time users the news is potentially worse as there’ll be no visual cues for returning to the full-screen start menu of Microsoft’s newly minted Metro interface.

With the Windows 8 public beta due out in a couple of weeks, the Start button could possibly reappear by then, rumours are that die hard windows users shouldn’t get their hopes up.

So will there be a wake held for the soon to be deceased Start button? Will there be much of an outcry?

This remains to be seen, but the good news is that the Windows key on the keyboard of most PCs will still have the same function as it has today under Windows 8 and will pop up the Start screen – which should at least provide a solution for some frustrated users.

There exist quite a few online services that let you convert files from one format to another. You upload the source file, specify the output format and within seconds, the converted file in the desired format becomes available for download. That’s easy but there are somes limitations with this approach:

1. When you want to convert a file, you have to upload it to the file conversion service. This is not an issue when you are converting files from the desktop but how do you upload files from iPhone, Android or any other mobile browser.
2. Sometimes clients will send you files in obscure formats as email attachments. In order to convert those files in a format that your apps can understand, you will download the attachments to your desktop and then upload them to the file conversion service. That’s work.

Zamzar, a popular tool for converting files online, has added a new option that lets you convert files by email itself. You can forward your email attachments directly to Zamzar, without downloading them to the desktop, and they’ll be converted in no time.

Convert Email attachment into Different File Formats

To get started, you need to forward the input (source) files to a specific email address like format@zamzar.com where format represents the file type of the desired output format.

For instance, if you have a Word document that you want to convert to PDF, you can send the file as an email attachment to pdf@zamzar.com. If you have a PDF file that you want to convert into an ebook, the corresponding conversion address would be epub@zamzar.com or mobi@zamzar.com depending on your ebook reader.

Here’s a complete list of input-output file formats that are currently supported by Zamzar. You can convert documents, presentations, ebooks, videos, audio files, archives and more.

In my test, the converted files were delivered quickly and the quality of the converted files was impressive. There’s no need to create any account at Zamzar and you can convert files up to 1 MB in a single batch. You may go for a pro account to convert bigger files that starts from $7 per month.

One more thing. You can only upload files by email and initiate the conversion process but you’ll still have to visit the Zamzar website to download the converted file. It stays on Zamzar servers for about a day and their download page is actually very confusing when accessed on a mobile phone.

This story, Use Email to Convert Files into Different Formats, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 10/02/2012 under Convert, Email, Internet.

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After the late Arfa Karim raised the nation’s pride by becoming the world’s youngest Microsoft Certified Professional, another Pakistani wonder child has made history after creating seven Microsoft and Google certified computer operating systems in a suburb of Abbottabad.

The 14-year-old student, Sikandar Mehmood Baloch, lives in Bilal Town in Abbottabad. Sikandar not only became a certified expert of 107 computer engineering languages at a young age but has also received certificates of his achievements from Microsoft and performed work for Google. He has also received 25 certificates as acknowledgement of his unique work performed for Google, the biggest search engine in the world. Sikandar is studying in the 9th grade in a local school and has made many Linux Systems (From VVS1 to VVS7) and developed an indigenous anti-virus system as well. He created a world record at the age of nine after making his first operating system. He works with many websites and earns over $70 dollars daily.

As some of you may know, this tech blog and my personal blog are both powered by WordPress software. What follows is a complete list of WordPress plugins that work behind the scenes to add new functionality to these sites that’s otherwise not available in the vanilla version of WordPress.org.

These are all free and open-source plugins and you can find them in the WordPress plugin repository.

The Best WordPress Plugins for your Website

1. Search Regex – This adds extremely powerful search and replace capabilities to your blog. You can find and replace almost any kind of data stored on your WordPress site including post titles, excerpts, comments, and meta data. It even supports regular expressions.

2. Redirection – If the URL of an existing post has changed or if an external site is linking to a non-existent page on my site, I can create redirection rules and automatically forward all the incoming traffic to the right pages.

3. Bing 404 – If someone lands on a 404 page for which redirection is not yet enabled, this plug-in will display links to relevant article on the error page. For example, a 404 page like labnol.org/googledocs will have links to my Google Docs articles.

4. WordPress SEO – This is probably the only SEO plugin you need for your WordPress blog. It helps you create better titles, you can block duplicate pages (like archive pages) from search bots, and it also adds the necessary meta tags required for more search-friendly Google snippets.

5. Hyper Cache – This is a caching plug-in for WordPress that will help reduce the load on your web server by saving pages as static HTML files. WP Total Cache is another popular caching plugin though I prefer Hyper Cache for its simplicity.

6. FB Open Graph – This plugin will insert the necessary Open Graph meta tags to your blog’s header so that you blog posts look good and have the right snippets when they are shared on Facebook or Google Plus.

7. 404 Email Notifier – This sends you an email notification as soon as a visitor lands on a 404 page on your WordPress website. The email messages have details about the visitor’s IP address, what browser they are using and the referral URL that led him to that broken link.

8. SlideShare – This helps you easily embed SlideShare presentations in blog posts with the help of short codes – see samples.

9. Smart YouTube – This lets you embed YouTube videos in blog posts using standing video URLs and the embedded player can be customized. It adds a thumbnail of the embedded video in the RSS feed and the same plug-in can also be used to embed videos from Facebook and Vimeo.

10. YARRP – The related posts plug-in adds links to old stories that may be contextually related to the content of the current story. It also helps expose your archived content to search bots.

11. WP Optimize – Use the WP Optimize plugin to clean-up your WordPress database tables. It can remove post revisions, trash spam comments and also optimize your MySQL tables so that it works more efficiently and also consumes less space.

12. WP-DBManager – This plugin will help you backup your WordPress database manually or you can set up a scheduled job for automatic backup and the database files will be sent to your email address at set intervals. Advanced users can use WP-DBManager to run SQL queries against their WordPress database without the phpMyAdmin tool. There are other plugins that can save backups to Amazon S3 and Dropbox.

13. Debug Queries – Is your blog slow? Use the Debug Queries plugin plugin to determine which MySQL queries are taking more time to execute and thus slowing down the blog. Debug Bar is another related plugin org that shows PHP warnings, queries and other helpful debugging information in the WordPress admin bar.

14. Auto Post Thumbnail – WordPress added support for Post Thumbnail Images in WordPress 2.9 but if you have been using WordPress for long, thumbnails may not be associated with your old posts. Use the Auto Post thumbnail plugin to automatically generate thumbnails for such posts using the first image found in the post content.

15. Regenerate Thumbnails – When you change the default size (height and width) of post thumbnails (or featured images) on your blog, you can use this plugin to regenerate thumbnails with the new dimensions.

16. Google XML Sitemaps – Since you want Google and other search engines to know about each and every page of your WordPress website, you need an XML sitemap and this plug-in lets you generate one in a click.

17. XML Video Sitemap – The plugin generates an XML Sitemap for your WordPress blog with all the YouTube videos that are embedded in your blog posts. I am also using XML Sitemap for Images and XML Sitemap for Mobile.

18. Date in a Nice Tone – This plugin offers an alternate way to display dates in your blog posts. It displays the amount of time – like “a few days ago,” or “in the last month,” or “over a year ago” – that has passed since a post or page was published.

19. SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – If you regularly embed code snippets in your WordPress blog posts, this plugin will help you highlight the syntax of the source code in different colors for more comfortable reading. Supports all popular programming languages.

20. Pubsubhubbub – This will help you beat content scrapers using Fat Pings. When you publish a blog post, it will instantly ping Google and that is a strong signal to the search engine that you are the original author.

21. WP-Associatizer – This plug-in will automatically rewrite any Amazon URLs in your posts to use your Amazon Associates ID.

22. Template Tag SC – WordPress offers numerous template tags – like wp_list_pages() or wp_tag_cloud() – that you can use in your theme files. The plugin will help you insert the sam template tags directly in your blog posts or pages using Short Codes.

23. Login Logger – This plugin logs the IP address and the exact date & time when a user logs into your WordPress dashboard. It also keeps track of any unsuccessful login attempts. Use this plugin in combination with Limit Login Attempts to automatically lock out users after they have made ‘n’ unsuccessful login attempts.

24. CF Shortcode – This helps you insert custom fields inside your WordPress posts using the visual editor. This comes extremely handy when you want to add custom JavaScript inside your WordPress posts.

25. Advanced Excerpt – The post excerpts in WordPress are fixed at 55 words and often displayed with [...] ellipsis at the end. This plugin lets you to specify a custom length of excerpts, you can get rid of the ellipsis and the excerpts can be configured to have full sentences so that there are no weird cuts.

WordPress Plugins – Retired but Useful

The first version of this list was published in 2010 and since then, I have removed or deactivated a few WordPress plugins. Here’s why:

1. WordPress.com Stats – I am using Google Analytics to track site stats and therefore it doesn’t make sense to have another tracking program for the same goal.

2. Akismet – The comments on this site are powered by Disqus and they seem to offer decent spam protection on their own.

3. WordPress PDA – This plugin helped serve the mobile version of this site based on their browser’s user agent. Digital Inspiration now uses a responsive design and thus the same site is served to both desktop and mobile users.

4. WP-Paginate – The paginate plugin provide better navigation and also helps search engines find and crawl deep content on your site. The new design of this site has pagination built-in and therefore this plugin is no longer necessary.

Also see: Essential Linux Commands for WordPress Users

This story, WordPress Plugins that Power Digital Inspiration, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 08/02/2012 under WordPress, Software.

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Facebook has rolled out a Google+ style photo viewer that displays user comments and ads next to the picture in an overlay window. Thus, you don’t have to scroll the page to read the comments and the photo viewer adjusts itself as you re-size the browser window.

Switch to the Old Layout of Facebook Photos

If you are viewing any photo in Facebook and would like to use the classic layout – where photos are displayed on a separate page and not inside a pop-up – you can do that in a couple of ways:

• While the photo viewer is active, press F5 on your keyboard (or hit the “reload” button in the browser) to refresh the Facebook photo page. This should open the photo without the overlay.
• Or go to address bar of your browser, remove the string “&theater” from the photo URL and hit Enter.
• Or the easiest option is that you hold the CTRL key while clicking the thumbnail of any photo on Facebook and this should open the corresponding photo in a new tab but without the lightbox effect.

Please see the following screencast for details.

This story, How to Get the Classic Photo Viewer in Facebook, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 08/02/2012 under Facebook, Internet.

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Microsoft will align its next major updates of Windows, both for phone and computers. Windows Phone 8 & Windows 8 will have several features and architecture in common like networking stacks, security and multimedia architecture.

It is also being reported that Windows Phone 8 will support multi-core processors, multiple screen resolutions, SD Cards and even C/ C++ programming. It is also worth noting that Windows 8 & Windows Phone 8 will both run Metro apps, hence harmonizing the user experience over various Microsoft devices and reducing the time in learning curve of the user.

In a video, Joe Belfiore, manager of Windows Phone for Microsoft, said that the intention is for developers to be able to

“re-use, by far, most of their code” when moving behind the desktop and smartphone platforms. This should also help Microsoft to seamlessly transition many of its existing PC developers to mobile, resulting in a much larger pool creating apps. (Quote Courtesy: Mobile Business Briefing)

If the unification of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 occurs as planned and some applications could be used in both platforms while others easily portable,  there is no doubt that a lot of developers will be attracted to develop apps for Windows based devices and hit maximum customers by a single app. This will also support the Windows Phone marketplace which has considerably lesser apps as compared to Apple Store and Android Market.

All of it depends on Microsoft’s ability to pull off the coup and change the app marketplace forever. However, if it fails to do so, Microsoft will lose credibility and will be left far behind Google and Apple especially in battle to attain superiority in the mobile and tablet platforms.

Skype Lite was a Skype application for java enabled phones which they had published in 2009 is no longer available for use. Company has withdrawal Skype Lite and Skype Windows Mobile version simultaneously because they want to give more good environment to there users. Therefore Java phones are no more able to make use of Skype in any way.

Here are some Quotes from Official site.

Unfortunately, Skype Lite – a version of Skype for your mobile phone – and Skype for Windows phones are no longer available for download from our site…………….We felt that Skype Lite and Skype for Windows phones were not offering the best possible Skype experience.

See the link for more information: Skype Lite info.

Yes, You can’t run Skype on Java Enabled phones like Nokia 2700 classic, 5310, X201,  X203, Qmobiles. because all these phones use old Skype Lite Mobile .jar application that is now discontinued and unavailable officially by Skype. Its mean Skype Lite is illegal and unavailable for use on any java enabled portable device.

This mean Qmobiles or any java enabled phone has old Skype Lite version that is useless after the withdrawal of Skype Lite. There is no alternate Skype application for Java phones and Qmobiles currently.

I hope Skype will do some thing for Java enabled mobile phones users, they should do! because java is most common platform for portable device applications.

News for software developers who want to sell their software locally online! Wi-tribe has just announced the beta launch of wi-tribe Bazaar – Pakistan’s first Buy and Sell software portal – as a platform where Pakistani software developers can sell and monetize their software. The portal, as all things wi-tribe, is slick and the User Interface is very simple to use. This is in beta so developers are warned that there might be a few bugs – and these should be reported so that they can be fixed.

The basic categories that they have defined in the portal include:

• Anti-virus & anti-spam
• Business
• Communication
• Games
• Graphics
• Internet & Networking
• Mobile Applications
• PC Widgets
• Systems Utilities

So all a software developer has to do is fill in the details in the online application form, mention the price, provide a description, the OS the app runs on and send it to w-tribe alongwith a sign up fee of Rs. 1000. According to the information on the portal, wi-tribe will get a contract to the developer within 7 days. In accordance with the contract, the developer will get 65% of all revenues minus taxes. There are some pre-requisites though. The software must have had a minimum of 100 downloads and should have been on the portal for at least 3 months. The shopping experience for buyers is very simple – add to shopping cart, use the scratch card and download! You can also create a wish list if you are not sure how many products you want to end up buying.

According to Ali Fahd, Director Marketing wi-tribe, the wi-tribe Bazaar is powered by wi-tribe scratch cards, allowing the purchase of software through scratch cards available at over 600 locations throughout Karachi, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore and Faisalabad. There is no hassle or requirement of credit cards or other e-commerce payment methods. Understanding the Pakistani market, they are aware of the fact that consumers in Pakistan are familiar with scratch cards and use them frequently for various services. So why not software?

“wi-tribe Bazaar is our effort to support, encourage and proliferate the local IT industry and software developers in particular,” says Ali Fahd. “We understand that there are a lot of developers with products that they would like to sell in the local market. We are also aware of the challenges in monetizing software and applications (apps) in Pakistan. With wi-tribe Bazaar, software developers will enjoy a significant portion of the revenue share as the main beneficiary. The software and apps can be priced at Rs.100, Rs.250, Rs.500 or Rs.1,000 by the developer. wi-tribe Bazaar also offers hundreds of free applications, which will support developers in building and reaching a larger market.”

Currently, wi-tribe Bazaar supports Windows Desktop and Mobile Apps for Android, Blackberry and Symbian. It is a robust platform for selling any windows software and mobile applications such as games, system utilities, wallpapers and customized themes. The platform is open to all types of developers who would like to bring either their commercial product or even a final year university project to their target market, says Ali Fahd.

wi-tribe state that they are only acting as a catalyst by providing the platform. To help build a local ecosystem of software and apps, wi-tribe has taken a conscious decision to open the platform to all – not just to wi-tribe users. They will aggressively market the wi-tribe bazaar in Pakistan.

Test drive the beta version at http://bazaar.wi-tribe.pk.

Provide feedback on the Bazaar to support.bazaar@wi-tribe.pk.

If you have enabled keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, you may have noticed that pressing the J key selects the previous (older) message in your inbox while the K key moves you one message up to a newer conversation.

The same j & k keyboard shortcuts can be used for navigating items in Google Reader, for moving between tweets on Twitter.com, and it even works with Tumblr.com.

So why do developers commonly assign the k and j keys for moving up and down respectively and not any other key combination?

When Bill Joy created the vi text editor for Unix, he used a ADM-3A terminal and its keyboard didn’t have any dedicated arrow keys (see illustration above). Instead the keys h, j, k and l were inscribed with arrow symbols and these keys, in combination with the CTRL key, were used for moving the cursor on the screen.

The keyboard layouts have changed (they got dedicated arrow keys) but the same j & k keys are still popularly used for moving the cursor up and down inside the vi text editor. And since most developers have their roots in the Unix world, they implemented the same shortcut inside their web apps.

Wikipedia has more details on the history of vi and the HJKL keys.

This story, Why do Gmail and other Web Apps use j & k Keys for Navigation?, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 01/02/2012 under Keyboard Shortcuts, Internet.

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Finally there is some great news for all Skype fans waiting to get the official app on their Windows Phone 7 handsets. According to WP7Labs, an anonymous tipster spilled the beans by maintaining that Skype Beta app for Windows Phone 7 will soon be available for testing among Microsoft employees. It has been a long time since Windows Phone 7 users are looking for a way to get Skype working on their phones. We believe that this Skype release will be a proper app allowing the users to make calls, video chat and IM.

The original text of the email, that was sent to Microsoft employees, reads:

href="http://aliwaqas.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/skype.jpg"> style="background-image: none; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding-top: 0px; border: 0px;" title="skype" src="http://aliwaqas.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/skype_thumb.jpg" alt="skype" width="595" height="111" border="0" />

Apparently, it is clear from the email excerpt that Skype app for Windows Phone 7 will come loaded with all pre-requisites and essential hardware support. We believe that sooner or later, Skype for Windows Phone 7 screenshots might start making it to web-sphere. We are keeping a keen eye on these developments and we will update this post once we get more information or any leaked screenshots of Skype app for Windows Phone 7 handsets. In the meanwhile, you can head to href="http://wp7lab.com/news/microsoft-dogfooding-skype-beta-for-windows-phone/"> WP7Labs for further details regarding this development. And in case you happen to be one of the MS employees reading this post, then we invite you to fill us up on any further information that you might have in comments area.

The official release of Firefox 10 may just be a couple of hours away but if you can’t wait, the new Firefox 10.0 installers are now available for download on Mozilla’s FTP servers.

Here’re the direct links to download Firefox 10.

For Windows (15.1 MB):

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/10.0/win32/en-US/Firefox%20Setup%2010.0.exe

For Mac (31.4 MB):

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/10.0/mac/en-US/Firefox%2010.0.dmg

For Linux (18 MB):

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/10.0/linux-x86_64/en-US/firefox-10.0.tar.bz2

The above links point to the English (US) version of Firefox 10.0 but if you looking to download Firefox in a different language, either change the “en-US” string in the URL to your own locale code or use traverse the FTP directory manually starting with ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/10.0/.

Firefox 9 is a memory hog (at least on my Windows machine) and that’s one area where Mozilla needs to work really hard. Let’s see if things have improved with version 10.0.

This story, Download Firefox 10 from Mozilla FTP Servers, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 30/01/2012 under Downloads, Mozilla Firefox, Software.

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