Daily Bits

Arnold Zafra

Five Useful BlackBerry Apps for Moms on Mother’s Day

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Thinking of giving your mom a bouquet of flowers on Mother’s Day?  Forget it. Your mom is not going to use it and will most probably just let it  wither away, especially if your mom is a BlackBerry user. Come to think of it, why not just give her some useful apps that she can enjoy using on her BlackBerry device.

We’ve scoured the BlackBerry App World in search of the most useful app that moms who use BlackBerry will appreciate and enjoy and we’ve found these five apps.

1. Viigo


This BlackBerry app will help your Mom keep tabs of what her family is into and what she is into herself.   This app will provide your Mom with every information that every member of the family is interested into. Be it sports, fashion, recipes and more, all she has to do is tell Viigo and the app will deliver up-to-date information whenever, wherever. (Download link) [Read more…] about Five Useful BlackBerry Apps for Moms on Mother’s Day

Five WordPress Plugins for Integrating Facebook to your Blog

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Facebook recently made some waves into the social media scene when it launched the new Facebook social plugins – a set of tools that would enhance your reader experience on your blogs and websites. But prior to this, if you want to integrate various Facebook functionality to your WordPress blogs, you can already do that through various Facebook-relate WordPress plugins.

Here we give you five Facebook WordPress Plugins that will help you integrate some Facebook functionality to your WordPress blogs.

1. Facebok Social Widgets

This WordPress plugin allows your users to have an engaging social experiences within your blog. It is hosted by Facebook so your blog readers can still participate in your blog discussion even if they haven’t signed up for your site.  This plugin allows you to add the following social plugins to your blogs – like button, activity feed, recommendations, like box, facepile and live stream. (Download link) [Read more…] about Five WordPress Plugins for Integrating Facebook to your Blog

Twitter Awareness Among Americans Exploding Exponentially

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Another day, another report. This time it’s from Edison Research/Arbitron Internet and Multimedia Series detailing on Twitter awareness among Americans. Key findings of the Edison report revealed that awareness of Americans on Twitter increased significantly from 5% in 2008 to 87% in 2010.

The study, which was a result of three years of tracking data from a nationally representative telephone survey of 1,753 Americans conducted in February 2010, also showed that Twitter and Facebook both have almost the same awareness (Facebook has 88%) but in terms of usage, Twitter is still behind Facebook. There are now 7% Americans of the 17 million Twitter users who actively use Twitter, while 41% actively maintain a Facebook account. [Read more…] about Twitter Awareness Among Americans Exploding Exponentially

Survey Says: Smartphones are Being Used for Travel

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Today’s smartphone will not be called as such if  it isn’t smart enough to perform day-to-day functions that affects our lives. One proof? – the plethora of mobile applications available on various platforms. These mobile apps vary from the most useful to the most absurd ones. One  app which smartphones are supposed to come in handy is for travel purposes.

There are various travel-related apps available on various smartphone platforms. But are these applications being maximized by users? Compete’s analysis of available data shows that indeed, smartphones are being used for travel purposes. The bad news is, the usage is not significant enough, leaving more room for, growth perhaps?

Compete’s study utilized behavioraly targeted surveys that asked smartphone users whether they use their smartphones for travel research and booking.  Surprisingly, 69% of the respondents to Compete’s survey said that they do not use their smartphone’s for travel purposes and 78% said they don’t use smartphones for travel booking as well.

Quite interestingly, the survey also revealed that respondents see their smartphone’s usage more for post-travel bookings. These pertain to following up room availability, check-in time and other travel-related activities that you need to do.

The survey thus revealed that smartphones are not replacement tool but rather additional tools that aid users in their travel-related needs. And smartphone’s usage to follow-up bookings and other travel-related purposes are still growing despite the relatively low usage.

The fact is smartphones can be used in various ways that we can possibly imagine. And one of these is for travel bookings and other related information.

via Compete

Google Redesigns its Image Search for Android and iPhone

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How often do you search for images on Google mobile? Well, if you do this a lot, you would have been annoyed by how hard it is to scroll through image thumbnails on your Android 2.1 phones or iPhone. Well, say goodbye to the old ways and welcome the newly refurbished Google Image Search for mobile which was just rolled by Google.

So now when you see the thumbnail images, you’d noticed that these were squared to maximize the number of images that can be displayed on the small screen of the iPhone or any Android 2.1 devices. In addition, you can also now do the swipe gesture to scroll through the next or previous pages of search results. Or even tap the large, stationary “next” and “previous” page buttons. Finally, the speed at which images appear were also enhanced display them as quickly as you browse.

Meanwhile, as you view the images on the mobile search results pages, this is now made larger through a special image viewing page wherein a black background image emphasizes the image and the buttons fade after a few seconds. This allows you to see images with little distractions. And you can also easily browse through the images by swiping from picture to picture, just like how you normally do it when browsing for photos on your iPhone Camera library or Android photo gallery.

To try Google’s new image search for mobile, simply point your phone’s browser to google.com and tap on the “images” link. This feature is available in 38 languages worldwide.

Firefox aka Fennec for Android Looks Good, Saves Web Pages to PDF Too

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Although it is just a “pre-alpha” build you can see outright that Mozilla’s browser for Android phones nicknamed – Fennec or Firefox for Android has the makings of a pretty good if not great mobile phone browser.  One of Fennec’s developer’s slipped out some details about Fennec for Android and while it’s full of precautionary statements, I went ahead and installed the browser on my Nexus One.

The download and installation process went well without any hitch. Right after installing, I immediately fired up the browser – puff!  My phone’s screen goes blank. So, I rebooted my phone and fired up Fennec again.  Then there it was, rendering the startup page for Fennec on my Nexus One’s screen. I immediately type it some sites and noticed how fast the pages loaded up considering that it was still a “pre-alpha” release.

Now for some key features of Fennec or Firefox for Android that we should all look forward to:

Saving web pages into PDF – This is something that caught immediately caught my attention. This would come in handy for some offline reading of pages later on.

Tab Browsing History – You’d see this pop out from the left-most side of your screen. A pretty neat way of saving your browsing history and accessing them again later on.

Weave Sync – This looks like a pretty interesting feature. It will let you share bookmarks, browsing history, tabs and password between your Fennec on your mobile phone and Firefox on your desktop.

Some bugs

Fennec for Android is still buggy at this stage and that’s pretty understandable since it is just a pre-alpha release. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t use and evaluate how good it is right now.

One thing that I noticed that the browser lacks and which I hope the developers will work on before the public release are pinch-to-zoom and +- controls for zooming on web pages.

Overall, Fennec for Android is a promising mobile browser that could give Opera Mini and the others a good competition.

To download Firefox for Android pre-alpha release, scan the QR below.