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Filed under: iPhone, MobileMe, iPod touch

Apple’s MobileMe site at me.com used to be completely useless on the iPhone or iPod touch in Mobile Safari — you’d get a splash page telling you to set up your contacts, calendars, and mail accounts, but that was about it. No webmail access, no direct access to galleries, iDisk, or even Find My iPhone. Apple introduced standalone apps that addressed some of these shortcomings (iDisk and Gallery), but there was still no way to access Find My iPhone unless you resorted to workarounds.

Things have improved somewhat with the new MobileMe page. Instead of simply admonishing you to set everything up on your Mac or PC, MobileMe now provides you with a link to instructions for setting up mail, contacts, and calendars. There’s also links to download the iDisk and Gallery apps from the App Store. What’s most useful about the change is you now have the ability to use Find My iPhone from an iPhone.

This might seem dumb at first — “If I have my iPhone in my hand, why do I need to find it?” you may ask — but if your household has multiple iPhone users and one of them leaves an iPhone at a pub, until now your only option was to dash home and try to find it on your computer. Now, you can access all the Find My iPhone features right at the moment your friend or significant other gets that wide-eyed, “I just misplaced a paycheck worth of electronics!” expression on his or her face. You can send an immediate message to the iPhone to get that loud, pinging submarine noise, which just might help you find the iPhone before you even leave the pub.

Find My iPhone is still only available as part of a yearly $99 MobileMe subscription.

TUAWFind My iPhone now works in Mobile Safari originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft Dreamspark has recently added new applications to its arsenal of Microsoft designer and development tools. Expression Studio 3, Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R2, and XNA Game Studio 3.1 are all now available as no-cost downloads to all eligible high school and university students. Previous versions of these programs are no longer available for download from Dreamspark.

Microsoft currently has the following 16 tools available:

Originally posted 2009-08-21 00:48:28. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Jessica Faye Carter is an award-winning author and columnist. Her company, Nette Media develops social media technologies for women and multicultural communities, and she blogs at Technicultr.

The expression of community has changed considerably since the emergence of social media technologies, but its basic foundation — the notion of individuals exchanging information, ideas, and opinions — remains firmly intact. Today, one of the most widely-used tools in developing these types of exchanges online is WordPress, the popular blogging and publishing platform. Part of its appeal is the ease with which users can build advanced functionality into their sites with plugins. If you’re interested in building a community around your site, there are plenty of third-party add-ons that can help create one.

These 10 WordPress plugins add features that will help you to engage your user base.

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Highlight Your Best Content

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1. Featured Content Gallery – If you’re not an expert in programming or design, Featured Content Gallery makes it easy to highlight images, posts, or pages anywhere on your site. It comes with a sleek and contemporary design that is fully customizable through the WordPress dashboard, so that you can integrate your highlighted content seamlessly with the rest of your site.

2. Popularity Contest – Your users will want to know what’s popular and interesting to their peers in the community and the Popularity Contest Plugin can help. It keeps track of the most popular posts and pages on your site and acts as a leaderboard that directs users to the most active content in your community. You can customize the point values assigned to user actions on the site, such as comments or views, and display the results easily in a widgetized-sidebar.

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Facilitate User Engagement

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3. Viper’s Video Quicktags – Including video in your community is easy using Viper’s Video Quicktags. Just enter the URL of the video in the prompt box and see a preview of the video right on your screen. Then specify the dimensions and other customizations you’d like to add and see your final product before saving it into your post. Supported video sites include YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo and others.

4. WPtouch – Part of keeping the community vibrant means letting your users take it with them. You can go mobile with your community using WPtouch and avoid building a mobile website or the costs of developing an iPhone application. You can control the mobile user interface by allowing the browser to automatically route users to the interface of your choosing — your site or the WPtouch interface, which looks similar to an iPhone app. You can also show or hide post excerpts and customize the icons and general appearance of your mobile site.

5. Disqus Comment System – Nothing stops a potential commenter in their tracks faster than having to set up a user ID and password in order to leave a message on your site. At the same time, most of us would like some sort of authentication process we can use to identify and correspond with other users as we develop our communities. The Disqus Comment System allows users to engage with your site using their Twitter, Disqus, Facebook, OpenID or selected other accounts. This prevents users from having to set up new accounts while allowing for authentication. Bonus: the Reactions feature allows you to include the social component of user feedback into your comments.

6. Customize Your Community – Customize Your Community (CYC) provides some useful options for those building communities in WordPress. It allows you to re-brand the WordPress pages for registration, logging in/out, and lost passwords, as well as the user profile pages. In addition to giving your community a standardized look and feel, CYC helps with a long-standing navigational issue in WordPress: it automatically directs “subscribers” to their profiles and bypasses the WP backend entirely.

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Measure on the Fly

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7. Clicky – While Google Analytics provides you with a long-term perspective on your site metrics, Clicky gives you instantaneous feedback. The dashboard includes traditional site metrics, but also offers cool features, like “Spy”, which pinpoints the location of current visitors on a map. It’s an easy way to get a snapshot of your site’s current activity and, in conjunction with Google Analytics, gives you a comprehensive overview of your site’s activity.

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Improve User Navigation

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8. Breadcrumb NavXT – Your users aren’t exactly Hansel and Gretel, but they still may occasionally need help navigating your site, particularly if it’s content-heavy. Breadcrumbs are usually located just below a site’s primary navigation system and look something like this:

Home » Dance Music » Saint Etienne » Method of Modern Love

Breadcrumb NavXT, the successor to Breadcrumb Navigation XT, improves your site’s navigation by building this kind of virtual breadcrumb trail for your users to follow. This way, users will know where they’re located on your site. This plugin may require customization, depending on your theme; check out the Advanced Options section of the plugin’s homepage for additional instructions.

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Monetize It!

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9. Advertising Manager – If you were previously using the Adsense Manager plugin, you’ve probably noticed that it hasn’t been updated in a while. That’s because it has been succeeded by Advertising Manager, which is recommended unless you are using WordPress version 2.5 or earlier. The renamed version supports a broader group of ad networks in addition to Google AdSense, such as Adify, AdBrite, and several others. It also imports your AdSense Manager settings, for users of the previous plugin.

10. WP125 – Do you prefer a more hands-on management style for your advertising? WP125 allows you to do everything from arranging the ad display so that it fits your site design to setting timelines for ads (they can be removed automatically or manually at expiration). It also provides a placeholder for empty ad space, which you can switch to your own customized version.

Do you have another plugin that’s been helpful to you in building your community? Share your favorites in the comments below.

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More WordPress resources from Mashable:

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WordPress Themes: “Top 12 Stunning WordPress Themes“, “30+ WordPress 3 Column Themes,” “20 WordPress 4-Column Themes,” “30+ WordPress 1-Column Themes,” “10 Unusual & Original WordPress Themes”

Plugins: “50+ WordPress Plugins for Multimedia,” “30+ WordPress Plugins for Statistics,” “30+ WordPress Plugins for Comments,” “30+ WordPress Plugins to Get More Blog Readers,” “Top 10 WordPress Plugins to Promote Your Social Media Profiles”

Miscellaneous: “WordPress God: 300+ Tools for Running Your WordPress Blog,” “The 7 Weirdest and Wackiest Uses for WordPress“

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Reviews: Clicky, Disqus, Facebook, Google Analytics, Google Video, Twitter, Vimeo, WordPress, YouTube

Tags: community, Lists, plugins, Wordpress

We love to see your workspaces—when we get a chance to see your whole workplace it’s an extra special treat. Today we’re peeking into a Hong Kong laundromat remodeled to be a photo studio.

Lifehacker reader cjdillon1989 has had the unique experience of converting a run-down factory in an industrial district of Hong Kong into a really striking studio. He writes:

I work in an industrial space in Hong Kong that used to contain a commercial laundry.

The space has two main attractions. It’s huge-about 3,500 square feet-and its high ceilings, southern exposure and large windows mean we get lots of natural light. We took advantage of the space and the light to create a studio that we rent out for photo, video and film shoots.

The neighborhood is gritty and was home to several hundred small factories before most of them moved to southern China. Despite the grit, the view from my window is green and several hundred egrets live in the trees outside my window.

The experience of buying and renovating the space became the basis for a book about Hong Kong property.

It’s a great creative space, and I love the expression on people’s faces when they see the interior for the first time!

Check out the photos below to see the before pictures, shots of the reception area and workspace, and the studio space.

If you have a workspace of your own to show off, throw the pictures on your Flickr account and add it to the Lifehacker Workspace Show and Tell Pool. Include some details about your setup and why it works for you, and you just might see it featured on the front page of Lifehacker.

The new iPod Nano is also one of the world’s smallest video cameras. We think it could be a game changer. As it turns out, it could also create a new kind of privacy problem.

A fitness chain in Minnesota has banned the new Nano from locker rooms in an effort to protect members from the possibility of photos or videos being taken with it.

Banning cameras in health clubs – including phones with cameras – is not a new idea as there’s obviously a major privacy risk in allowing them. But the Nano’s small size – 3.6” x 1.5” – and ubiquity as a music player do make it a challenging issue to police.

According to Pioneer Press, Life Time Fitness, the chain that’s proactively banned the new Apple device from locker rooms, will still allow it to be used as a music player in the gym’s workout area. That seems like a reasonable position, consistent with other regulations regarding cameras.

But as video cameras become more pervasive on even smaller devices, the issue of people being filmed without their knowledge could become a more common problem. On the other hand, to modify an old expression, cameras don’t film people, people do.

Do you expect health clubs and other places where serious privacy violations (like a hotel) are possible to step up efforts to ban mini-cameras, or does the issue come down to people simply respecting each other’s privacy (and in some cases the law) and showing good etiquette? Share your thoughts in the comments.

[via AppleInsider]

Tags: apple, ipod, ipod nano, privacy

By now, you’re no doubt well acquainted with the Albert Hubo Einstein robot developed by the mad scientists at KAIST, but some researchers at the University of California, San Diego has also been working on their own Einstein bot for the past little while, and they’ve now managed to teach it some new tricks. While the bot has previously been able to display a full range of expressions through some pre-programmed facial movements, it’s now able to teach itself how to smile or display other emotions thanks to a new trial-and-error technique dubbed “body babble.” That apparently works by comparing Einstein’s attempts at an expression with some facial recognition software, which provides Al with some positive feedback each time he manages an actual expression. Did we mention there’s a video? Check it out after the break.

[Via Switched]

Continue reading Einstein robot learns to smile, teaches us how to feel

Filed under: Robots

Einstein robot learns to smile, teaches us how to feel originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft has launched the next wave in its battle to provide the dominant platform for web media and applications with the release of its Silverlight 3 platform, and of Expression 3, its tool for building web applications.

Silverlight 3 actually became available for download yesterday, but today is the official push. The company says Silverlight has now been downloaded onto one in three computers, up from one in four computers when Silverlight 2 was released late last year. When I spoke to Vice President of Developer and Platform Evangelism Walid Abu-Hadba last night, he predicted that Silverlight will be installed in one out of every two computers by this time next year. That’s still much lower than the most recent numbers I’ve seen about Adobe’s more established Flash platform, but it’s impressive since Silverlight has only been available for about two years.

Also impressive is the relatively fast release cycle. Microsoft often waits years before releasing new versions of its products, but Silverlight 3 is coming out less than a year after Silverlight 2. The new Silverlight 3 and Expression 3 features highlighted by Microsoft include: Expression Sketchflow to quickly build protoypes of web apps, the ability to access Silverlight apps outside your web browser, and “smooth streaming” for efficient streaming of high-definition video (demo here).

You can read more details of my conversation with Abu-Hadba here; the comments most relevant for the Silverlight launch are his take on Microsoft’s strengths versus Adobe’s. Abu-Hadba argued that Microsoft’s strength has always been in the developer community, while Adobe is more designer-centric — and as the two companies’ web platforms go head-to-head, that developer base will be a crucial advantage.