Talented photographs and photo editors abound. I’m not one of them. I use my trusty point and shoot, and every now and then I can impress myself with a lucky shot. I also can’t work the Photoshop magic that some professionals can weave every day. If I want to tweak an image, I need a simple tool. “Simple” is a word that describes iSplash, a Mac photo app that is a one-trick pony. That trick, though, is pretty cool.
Windows 7 has some handy windows management functions, such as dragging a window to the left side of the screen to have it snap to fill the entire left half of your screen, or dragging it to the top of the screen to fill the entire screen. If you want even more functionality, whether it be on Windows 7, XP, or Vista, check out Chameleon Window Manager.
Have you ever worried that your email account was hacked? I had a scare recently that turned out to be unfounded, but it got me looking into ways to further secure my Gmail account. I had heard of Gmail’s two-factor authentication before, but had only dabbled in it. I now have two-factor authentication activated on both of my accounts, and it is pretty unobtrusive, and adds significant security to my account.
![iPhone 5 Thief Doesn't Know Who He’s Messing With... Just Ask Conan [VIDEO] | 40Tech](https://www.40tech.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/image6.png "iPhone 5 Thief Doesn't Know Who He’s Messing With... Just Ask Conan [VIDEO] | 40Tech")
You might remember the whole “iPhone 4 prototype swiped in a bar” fiasco. You’re probably aware that history has recently repeated itself with the iPhone 5. What you might not know is what Apple is planning to do about it. Never fear, however! Conan O’Brien and the good folks at Team Coco have put together a commercial that shows exactly what fate awaits the intrepid thief — and it ain’t gonna be pretty.
If you were Apple, what sort of fun things would you have in store for the prototype thief? How about the dumbass who let it happen – again? Presuming that it’s not all some sort of weird publicity stunt, of course.
Source: The Next Web
Though the initial excitement of Google+ has worn off, millions of users are still using the service and more people connect every day. For its part, Google has been working hard at bringing the preview social network closer to a production offering, adding social gaming without annoying people, verified accounts for prominent users and famous folk, and ironing out their sign-up rules (the heavily debated real name only policy). They have also been paying attention to their mobile apps, finally adding post sharing into the Android app. iOS users had to wait a bit, as is per usual, but the much awaited update is now available in the app store.
But is development coming along too slowly to keep up interest?
Personally, I’m a huge fan of Google+. There are a lot of innovative uses that are cropping up — cooking classes via hangout, blog replacement, collaborative writing groups; Evan and I are even putting together a hangout-based pen and paper roleplaying game, cementing our geek status once and for all. Google+ is also a fantastic place to meet and converse with new people, focusing on like interests over general broadcasting, which makes for better conversation and better relationships.
The problem is, I’ve started to notice that my streams are starting to degrade. People appear to be less active, less conversant, or generally gone and gone. This could be due to the end of the summer — people are getting busier as the school season and work focus heat up — and it could be part of the overall ebb and flow of a new product. It could also be that Google is taking too long to get their service off the ground and into the hands of the general public.
Gmail was in beta for years, and to the point that it was really more of a long-standing joke than anything else, but the Internet back then was, if you can believe it, less fickle. With the world takeover of social networking and subsequent obsession with real-time streams, the attention span of your average user is practically gnat-sized. And let’s not forget that, in order to get noticed in the massive amounts of information flowing through the digital-verse, bloggers and people in general tend to gravitate toward sweeping sentiments of “wow this is awesome” build-up and “it’s never gonna make it, and here’s why!!!” doom and gloom statements. And yes, I realize that it wouldn’t take a stretch if the imagination to lump this post in with them, no matter what I say t the contrary. The point is, it makes it really hard to accurately gauge if a service will live or die.
To top things off, Facebook hasn’t been sitting about with thumbs in nethers, either. They’ve been paying attention to what people like about G+ over Facebook and have been making changes to how their own streams work, attempting to make it easier to share with those you want to share with, and even (finally) updating their mobile apps for new sharing and privacy options.
I say again, I’m digging Google+ — but I dug Google Wave, too. I think that Google’s push to integrate Plus into their overall offerings will help keep things moving, but I have to wonder: if users as a whole notice their streams downgrading in quality and movement, will it start one of those slow spirals into web oblivion?
It’s been a few months now, what are your thoughts?
