Raise Your Marketing IQRaise Your Marketing IQ

This is the Bejeweled Blitz 3.0 (latest version) cheat. To begin, you need to be using Firefox as your web browser. Next, you will to install a Firefox Extension, which you can install by going here: thecybershadow.net Now, open up facebook and start a new game of Bejeweled Blitz. This extension enables some debug hotkeys which allow you to control the game and edit the game board: 1..7 turn gem under cursor into a gem of the respective color F turn gem under cursor into a flame gem S turn gem under cursor into a star gem R turn gem under cursor into a rainbow gem M turn gem under cursor into a score multiplier gem N turn gem under cursor into a normal gem Backspace removes gem under cursor Delete removes gem under cursor, but does not remove its sprite (causes glitches) B activates blazing speed mode (all matches trigger an explosion) F9 pause the game F9 (while paused) advance one frame Shift+F9 unpause game F1 show FPS and FPS history (debug information)

iPhone/iPod touch: TouchMouse is a free application for the iPhone/iPod touch that, when paired with its accompanying control software on your Mac or Windows computer, turns your touchscreen into a mouse and keyboard.

Once you download the software to your iPhone or iPod touch and pair it with the server software—Logitech has versions of the TouchMouse Server software available for Windows XP, Vista, and 7 as well as Mac OS X—you’ll be able to use your device as a mouse for controlling your computer. The interface allows you to click the mouse buttons, move the cursor via the touch screen, and pull up a small keyboard to enter text on the computer.

While such an arrangement isn’t a practical replacement for a full-out wireless keyboard, it is a great tool for presentations or for pairing with one of the awesome media centers we’ve highlighted. If you have another app for turning your iPod touch or iPhone into a remote or clever things to do with them once you have them set up as remotes, let’s hear about it in the comments.

OnLive promises nothing less than the moon and the stars: the service wants to stream games to you via your laptop or lower-end computer on their own proprietary hardware. We’ve seen tech demos and speeches at shows, but how does it work in practice? Ryan Shrout, from the website PC Perspective, had the fine luck to have access to the beta, and he has shared his thoughts with the world. No surprise: lag is an issue, as are graphics.

Running the games was just as easy on the system as promised. “You are seeing OnLive running Burnout: Paradise on my local system using just under 60MB of memory and anywhere from 4-7 percent of the CPU power,” Shrout wrote. “My system is running on a Core i7-860 so that is a bit lower than the total system consumption you’ll see on slower systems, but that is obviously much lower CPU horsepower than would be required to play these types of games locally.” In terms of bandwidth, the system was using around 1Mb/s.

The games were running at 1280 by 720, and the expected issues became reality. “The input lag on UT3 was so noticeably bad with the mouse and keyboard that I would call [the] game simply unplayable. I often found myself overshooting the mouse movement by half a screen, moving well past my intended target because the cursor didn’t stop when I did.”

The problem wasn’t nearly as bad when played with an Xbox 360 controller, but Shrout found the graphics were sharper when played locally. The graphics aren’t anything to phone home about, the lag was noticeable, and the resolution wasn’t set very high. When something sounds too good to be true… that’s usually a hint about the final product.

Of course, there is one large gotcha here: “I first have to admit that I don’t actually have a beta account with the OnLive service; instead a friend of a friend of a friend passed to me their login information after I requested it in order to write a preview of the technology.  Why is this a note-worthy point to make?  There is a chance that OnLive is only selecting beta members that are on ISPs close to their current data centers and as I live outside that area that could affect my experiences with cloud-based gaming.” So there is that aspect to the writeup.

Be sure to read the whole writeup for all the details. And now an honest question: is anyone surprised?

NetDevil has nailed the LEGO feeling in its upcoming MMO LEGO Universe—you can tell from the character creation screen. You start with a minifig, and you get to choose the eyes, the mouth, different arms, and illustrations on the chest. As you move the pieces around, the arms and legs flail. In the screen where you choose which character to play, the other minifigs look hopeful, although they sometimes swat at the cursor. When you choose one to play, he or she celebrates, and the rest kick the ground, dejected.

“Everything is moderated,” I’m told as we put our name in. We’ll have a generic name until the name is given the thumbs up. The game is aimed at young boys, “but like LEGO itself, we’re really shooting for kids of all ages,” the representative outside the booth tells me. I begin to lope around the world with my newly created character, building things. In a game about Lego bricks, who exactly is the bad guy?

Back in November, Apple introduced the ability to see what songs were available in the iTunes store through your web browser, but it looks like they’ve finally added the pièce de résistance (or rather, the thing that really makes this useful)—30-second song previews. Before you click through on a link that’ll open up iTunes, you can hover your cursor over the title of the song in a browser preview to bring up a play button, allowing you to confirm that the song in question is really what you think it is. If it is, you can hit the link to view it in the iTunes store and buy it. If you don’t keep iTunes open all the time, but if you want to check whether something’s available, it’s likely a quicker solution than opening up iTunes just to preview a song.

Filed under: iPod Family, Cool tools, Hacks, Found Footage, iPhone, Jailbreak/pwnage

What happens when you combine two amazing jailbreak utilities on the iPhone? You achieve remote mouse based support! iPhone developer Lance “ashikase” Fetters, author of the amazing Backgrounder jailbreak app, wrote a VNC style extension for the iPhone called MouseSupport. It provides a floating window with a virtual cursor that can be controlled with synthesized pointer events.

A second utility, developed by Matthias Ringwald, is called BTstack Mouse. It integrates with ashikase’s MouseSupport and Ringwald’s open source BTstack implementation to provide iPhone/mouse integration. The video shown here uses Apple’s Magic Mouse to demonstrate the BTstack Mouse extension. BTstack Mouse will shortly be available on Cydia and will retail for free.

So why does this all matter? Who cares about using a mouse with an iPhone when most people have perfectly usable fingers? Where does a mouse fit into the iPhone world? This effort is part of a larger project to create a nomadic computing environment on the iPhone. To put yourself into the right mindset, try thinking of an iPhone as a portable pocket-sized Unix system instead of as a mobile cell phone.

Practical work-ready peripherals that can move as you move, without need for carrying along a laptop, act as an important part of that vision. You can be on the go with just the phone itself — as you know, a naked iPhone offers a perfectly usable mobile solution for light computing needs — or you can start accessorizing to upgrade your computing efficiency.

By providing hooks for these accessories, the iPhone opens itself up to better desktop-style computing in addition to its existing mobile tools. In the end, when the vision of this project is fulfilled, you’ll be able to move the iPhone between desktop set-ups where it can connect itself into a “dockable” Bluetooth-enabled work system, to your pocket on the go, to a lightly-accessorized system for coffee house use.

TUAWFound Footage: iPhone/Mouse integration originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

The control and shift keys have long been the imprecise means of selecting multiple items on a Windows system. The How-To Geek’s blog away from Lifehacker reminds us that, as with Vista, Windows 7 users can use check boxes instead.

As always, the How-To Geek’s site has an extensive, step-by-step screenshot guide to flicking on the check box selection tools in Windows 7. For those who know their way around, however, the process is simple: Enter “folder options” in the Start menu’s search bar and hit Enter, click the “View” tab on the resulting window, and then check to enable the “Use check boxes to select items” option. Hit Apply and OK, and you’ll see check boxes pop up next to the items you’re hovering next to with your cursor.

As we look ahead to 2010, we’re hoping it’s the year the web becomes a truly great platform for working and connecting online. Here are five things we’d like to see fixed for that to happen.

Photo by Morten Lund.

Over-aggressive Flash and widgets

One week after your first time ever opening a web browser, you knew how it worked. Text that was differently-colored and turned your cursor into a little pointing hand was a link. Images could also be links, and content and advertising usually have distinct barriers on the page. When sites get annoying, they blur the lines.

Festering squarely at the bottom of the barrel are “search” and “preview” bubbles that automatically pop up when your mouse glances past certain topical words on blogs and news sites. Sometimes they’re double-underlined, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they simply offer a graphical thumbnail of the page you’d travel to if you clicked, and sometimes they promise “explainers” that are nothing but ad-infested, self-linking nightmares. In any case, they break and cheapen the web’s promise as a reasonable, if loosely organized, center for information. It’s akin to walking through a library, glancing at the Young Adult fiction section a few rows over, and then being startled by a sales representative for the Twilight books, leaping up from beneath a counter and screaming “LEARN MORE ABOUT TEAM JACOB!”

That’s just one example from a different corner of the web, but it’s something you can see in a sadly large number of interactive sites. “Share this” buttons that expand to take over text space when you cursor barely taps them, screen-covering slide-outs asking readers to “Subscribe to our newsletter!” or “Take our survey!”, videos that automatically play when you mouse over them (or simply arrive on the page)—they all come from a desire to fudge how interested a reader is in the supplemental stuff around the content. We know our own site isn’t entirely void of sometimes aggressive Flash-based advertising, but on the editorial side just over the business wall, we envision a future in which readers can expect a consistent, calm reading experience on most any site on the web—and browser add-ons like AdBlock Plus, FlashBlock, and their ilk aren’t crucially necessary.

Contact miners

If we think a webapp is a crucial convenience, and one that our friend and family need to get in on, we’ll tell them. I know I’ve pushed a number of grudging friends, and a patient spouse, into Google Voice, Brizz.ly, and Evernote, but I did it when the thought occurred to me, not while signing up.

Too many webapps offer to make it “easy” to “find contacts who are already on X,” and then ask for your Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook, or other sign-in credentials. You already know who you want to “connect” with on most sites, but if it’s somehow convenient to pull in everybody from your massive contacts list, and then un-check the folks you don’t need ties to, it’s up to you to decide whether it’s worth handing over a sensitive password (and then, maybe, immediately change it).

But most eager webapps don’t stop there. For all the contacts that aren’t on XYZNet, they’d like to email all of them, let them know that you’ve joined up, and ask them to connect with you, be your friend, share your reading list, etc. No webapp has any reason to do this. It’s spam, pure and simple, and it preys on those who are too hurried or overwhelmed to look before they click “Next,” and the bulk odds of getting hundreds of people every day to do what their contacts are doing. If you’ve got a good product, it will get noticed, people will use it, and the people who respect those early adopters will follow suit. If you play a numbers game based on little white webapp lies, you’re MySpace.

Webapps without mobile versions

A well-made, thought-out iPhone app is a great thing, and there are great device-specific apps for Android phones, BlackBerry units, and other platforms. But having a mobile site and service that’s fast, functional, and universally accessible is the most powerful tool of all.

Google could, by all means, make a killer Gmail app for the iPhone, and already has an Android app that many users swear is worth the price of admission alone. But nobody knows what the future brings, and having a platform that’s accessible to just about any web-capable phone, while being fast and feature-packed, is the smart investment. Intern Whitson is, for example, planning on getting a Droid phone very soon, which means having to give up on accessing uber-helpful personal finance site Mint.com on the go, since there’s nothing in the way of an Android app, or usable mobile site, at the moment. For every great webapp out there, this will be an endless problem going forward as new mobile browsers—tablets, e-readers, heck, even in-dash car screens—come along, but it’s a straight-forward fix.

Sites that don’t remember, block password saving

Pushing a button that does nothing is a universal route to madness. Likewise, offering “Remember me” check boxes, and denying a browser’s built-in ability to save passwords, is becoming the newest way to make your webapp unliked and, in fact, kind of hated.

Most modern operating systems have a username/password login, and offer encryption controls for applications and data. Firefox, among other browsers, offers a Master Password that prevents unauthorized use of saved passwords. If a webapp thinks it can protect your data by regularly—or, worse, completely randomly—signing you out, it is sorely mistaken. Focus should be put instead on preventing DNS hijackings, improving password recovery protocols, cutting off brute-force password attacks, and similarly back-alley methods. Online banking sites, sure, we can understand the skittishness—but come up with better non-text solutions instead of forcing customers to install extensions for easy JavaScript hacks to fix the problem.

Walled gardens

This is the simplest, but most dire, demand of any application that allows you to—and, in fact, encourages you to—create data, connections, contacts, and more: let us take it all out.

Google’s Data Liberation Front is an initiative by the search firm to force discussion on the topic of data portability. Before you use a webapp, and before a webapp designer starts offering sign-ups, a few questions should be asked:

1. Can I get my data out at all?
2. How much is it going to cost to get my data out?
3. How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?

And the ideal answers are:

1. Yes.
2. Nothing more than I’m already paying.
3. As little as possible.

Webapps vary greatly on how they adhere to these ideal data provisions. Looking at Gina’s roundup of free tools to back up online accounts, it’s plain to see that there are apps that offer simple, universally useful data (WordPress, Tumblr, most Google apps), apps that offer data if you know where to look (Twitter), and apps that make you hunt down backup solutions that aren’t officially supported (Facebook). As such, many people remain non-committal about working in the web, because it’s hard to say just how long-term some platforms can be, given their closed-off nature.

---

What webapp annoyances make you question the web as the place where you’ll work in the future? What would you change about your favorite webapps if you had a team of programmers and a week off to work on it? Let’s hear what’s on your web wishlist in the comments.

Ubuntu’s ambient notification system, styled after the Mac Growl interface and first arriving in April’s 9.04 release, can be very helpful. They can also be very annoying in their default position. This config editing work-around moves them elsewhere.

An Ubuntu Forums user details a few steps that move Ubuntu’s notifications from the upper right corner of your desktop to the lower left. The top right corner seems like the best place to stash notifications, until you realize that they block the mouse from clicking on any controls can get in the way of certain apps, and stay around longer when you hover your cursor over them.

The fix requires downloading and installing the source code for the notifications, and might require dealing with additional dependency installations if you get back errors on trying to install the source code. After it’s done, however, your notifications now appear in the lower left, and they’re less intrusive on your desktop experience.

Windows only: Most laptop owners have experienced the frustrations of a spastic cursor when your wrist grazes the touchpad. Free, open-source utility TouchFreeze disables your touchpad as soon as you start typing, re-enables it when you stop.

Photo by AlishaV

Although you can always go to your Control Panel and then to Mouse Properties to disable your touchpad the long way, it still means you have to turn it back on when you’d like to use it. TouchFreeze makes things a little easier, and as long as you’re not doing any heavy photo editing that might necessitate the simultaneous use of the touch pad and keys, this should be a winner of a program for you.

TouchFreeze sits in your system tray and simply turns off the touchpad when you start typing. It’s a dead simple, free, and open-source program that works with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003/2008, Windows Server 2008, and Windows 7.