Blue Bugle: Mobile, Desktop & Web Technologies

Remember we reported the shutdown of Google Reader a few days back? It used to be one of the Google services that reached a few million people instead of a few hundred millions as Google wants its products to. Hence, the search giant decided to shut down the reader application, putting millions out in the street. We were gladly rescued by a overwhelmingly simple feed reader application known as Feedly . Feedly Feedly came and conquered. It does have an interface with which you can import all your feed content directly from Google Reader itself. Since it was one of the early adopters of Google Reader refugees, it had a major boost in its traffic and user stats. With is iOS and Android apps, Feedly beckoned the readers who were desperately looking for a platform to place their feeds. And it worked. The application had a boost in traffic so tremendous that it had to make internal changes. Now the Feedly cloud application goes through regular maintenance and feature updates...

Today let me discuss about encryption a little bit. You may know that the government agencies, hackers, and companies are capable of eavesdropping into your communications. It doesn’t matter how you transfer files and emails, they are always under the threat of wiretapping. How do you hide your data? There is only one way you can safeguard from data stealers. That’s by using a software application to encrypt your files and folders. One of the best encryption software out there is being reviewed in this article. The program is known as Encrypt4All  available for trial download. Encrypt4all is a complete encryption software program that can encrypt and lock files, folders, documents in various formats, etc., into an archive with bit-by-bit encryption methods. One of the major advantages of Encrypt4all is that it has the capability to work with many different file formats, some of which include documents, text files, PDF, mp3, videos, Flash, etc. This is not a big advantage as the...

In the 90’s one of the most popular online things was the Yahoo! and AOL online chat rooms. When social networks started appearing and gained popularity, chat rooms slowly died. In December last year, Yahoo! shut down its popular chat service. We can chat right inside Facebook or Google Plus or Gmail. This has become quite so common these days. What is making news in this sea of social networking sites is the new information that Facebook is building chat rooms for its users, who are counted to be more than a billion. The biggest competition to FB chat room will be Google’s own Hangouts feature available on Google Plus. Facebook is testing out a new feature known as ‘Host Chat’ that will help you create and host chat rooms within FB. This being said, there are a number of chat applications already within Facebook. OpenChatRoom, LiveChatRoom, etc., are third party apps available in Facebook for the same purpose. These chat applications are not however so popular although they are ...

Taiwanese OEM, Huawei is kind of popular these days, thanks to its Ascend Mate smartphone, Ascend P6, and MediaPad range of tablets, which have some of the largest Android screens in the market outside Samsung. Huawei, like Asus, has now come up with a tablet, 7 inch tablet that can make phone calls. You may remember Asus FonePad, a pad that is a ‘Fone’ too. Here is Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue, another pad that is a phone too. Technical Specs Here are the major technical specifications of Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue. Display : 7 inch capacitive touch; 16 million colors; 600x1024 pixels Processor : Quad-core 1.2 GHz K3V2 (Huawei owned HiSilicon) Camera : 3.15 MP; no front-facing Memory :  1 GB RAM Storage : Internal 8 GB; expansion slot provides up to 32 GB Dimensions : 193.8x121.3x9.5 mm Weight : 335 g Operating System : Android 4.1 Jelly Bean Battery : Non-removable Lithium-Polymer 4100 mAh Connectivity : HSDPA/HSUPA 42 Mbps downlink; mini-SIM; no LTE The techn...

You have probably already read our reviews of HTC One  and Galaxy S4 . These are the best and brightest of the currently available Android smartphones on the market. These smartphones have the best display, processors, graphics options, memory, storage, and of course high price. They come with Android 4.1.2 and 4.2.2 respectively, with HTC’s and Samsung’s special skin on top of Android. Google releases its Android OS and licenses it out to all these smartphone manufacturers, who decide to change the OS in the way they want and skin it up with their own designs. Although these designs are quite amazing, people are still pretty interested in Google’s own non-customized Android as found in the Nexus line. The latest Nexus device is LG’s Nexus 4  that has its own disadvantages, such as lack of LTE for one. Now, however, you are getting an option to get a Nexus-like operating system on one of these premier devices, HTC One and Galaxy S4. Here are the Google Play editions of the...

Are you a fan of Apple Macintosh computers? Do you run Mac OS X Lion or Mountain Lion? Are you planning on upgrading to Mavericks? You should be wondering about the viruses, malware, and Internet security on Apple Macintosh systems. It is appalling to know that there are many threads online talking about antivirus on Mac, and some so-called ‘experts’ say there is no need for an antivirus on Macintosh. They couldn’t be more wrong. Although there are very few viruses affecting Mac in comparison to PC, there are. Viruses and malwares are increasing in the Mac domain as well, and Apple is getting concerned about them quite a bit. Hence, it is imperative that you install an antivirus and Internet security application on your Mac computer. Recently, NYTimes Bits posted  about widespread virus attacks on Macintosh. Here is an image showing the major malware and viruses on Mac. In this time, you very much need to get a very good antivirus and Internet security application for M...

After you purchase a new computer, you may set up a new operating system, Windows 7 or Windows 8. Probably the system comes with the OS preinstalled. But the real job comes after this. You will have to change the system settings, install your important programs from the previous computer, and create an environment that looks exactly like your old PC. This is a time consuming, tedious, mind-numbing job, if you know what I mean. Is there a way to automate this process? Is there a way to transfer all your programs and settings with a few clicks at best? Is there a great way to get your new PC behave exactly like your old one out of the box? There is. Laplink PC Mover Pro  is a Windows application that will transfer all your settings from old computers to new ones. Here, watch this animation: Moving your programs and settings from the old PC to the new one is as simple as a few steps. 1. Install Laplink PC Mover on both computers first. The installation is pretty straightforw...

Google protects your web browsing with its Safe Browsing technology without even your knowledge. If you are using Google as a search engine , you are automatically protected by Safe Browsing. This is the engine that warns you about a website and gives you notification as to whether or not the content is safe for browsing. All Google products, including the browser, Chrome, are already provided with Safe Browsing technology. It is also available in other major browsers including Firefox and Apple Safari. Recently, Google published this transparency report  that raises some genuine concerns over the way we browse the Internet. It seems the websites that have been hacked pose more threat to us than those which have been intentionally built to hack. In our previous interactions regarding Java  and other software products, we have mentioned quite a bit about web security. It is pretty important that you do two things—update software that you have on your system and keep a very ...

If you have been in a situation in which you desperately wish you could go back in time and hear something again, then you are in luck. Here is an app called Heard  that can record anything that your iPhone’s mic picked up, up to 5 minutes back. The slogan of this app itself is quite explicit: “Turn your iPhone into a time machine!” Heard starts working as soon as you open it, by capturing everything through the mic. It stores the sounds into a tiny buffer that can store up to five minutes of audio. It simply refreshes to include fresh audio from the surroundings. Whenever you want to store something you heard, you simply push the big button to save. All those snippets of conversation you saved will be available in the library from which you can share it on Facebook or by email. The app can listen from the background and can set the buffer size to 12 seconds, 30 seconds, one minute, or five minutes. This is quite a useful app for most people. If you simply want ...

The latest innovation from Samsung is the ATIV Q tablet, a streamlined 13-inch tablet that is extremely powerful and not that chunky for a tight competitor to the likes of Microsoft Surface Pro. It is thin, extremely powerful, and has a large brilliant QHD resolution screen, which is higher than Full HD. QHD is 3200x1800 pixels, while FHD is 1920x1280 pixels. Let’s take a brief look at this device. Technical Specifications The tablet-laptop mash-up is not yet in the market. We may update this post as it is made available in the market. Here are the brief technical specifications of the tablet. Display 13.3 inch; 3200x1800 px (the highest in the market); 16 million colors Processor Intel Haswell Core i5 processor (details unknown) RAM 4 GB Graphics Intel HD 4000 Storage 128 GB SSD Battery life 9 hours of usage Operating system(s) Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean; Windows 8 ...

Adobe’s PDF is a highly popular document format. Portability and printability are two of the most important aspects of PDF that make it popular. In this short article, let me explain to you how you can convert a Word document, created with Microsoft Word (any version) into the PDF format. Step 1: First of all, download and install an application called  SodaPDF . This is the best PDF creation software in the world. It can not only convert documents from Word format, but also from almost three hundred other formats, including HTML, PPT, RTF, TXT, etc. Step 2: Open SodaPDF application, and click on the top, ‘Create and Convert’ tab. Here you have several different options to create PDF documents from. The option you need to select here is ‘Create from Any File’. Step 3: Browse to the document that you want to convert. You can browse any of those three hundred formats, which include the Word documents as well. All different versions of MS Word are supported by SodaPDF, and...

Rumors have been floating around about the next flagship BlackBerry 10 model, successor to Z10 , called A10. It is rumored that the new smartphone, along with certain other models may arrive by the end of the year. The first indication of the A10 model that is rumored to be codenamed ‘Aristo’, came in an interview with Thorsten Heins, the CEO of BlackBerry with CNET. Last year, a UK fan site of BlackBerry published this image of what seems to be BlackBerry A10 specifications, leaked. From the image, you can see the A10 device probably has a larger 4.6 inch display, the same quad-core Snapdragon processor as in Z10, 2 GB of RAM, etc. The specs are not quite different from Z10’s. Recent rumors however talk about a larger 5 inch BlackBerry A10 that involves the next version of BB10 OS, possibly version 10.2. Also, some say the RAM will be higher at 4 GB or so. We don’t yet have any clear indication of what the specs will be of this model. Also, in CrackBerry forums, earlier, th...

I have been studying the new iOS 7 for a few days now, and it seems apt to make a post about it right now. It has been more than ten days since Apple introduced the latest edition of the legendary mobile OS in the World Wide Developer Conference. For such a long time, iPhone and iOS have been in need for a formidable software update. iOS 7 is that update. For how long can Apple keep competing with a more streamlined open-source operating system like Android? While new mobile operating systems, such as Windows Phone and BlackBerry 10 , were making an entrance, iOS stayed the same. While innovative user interfaces were being ported on top of Android by device manufacturers like HTC and Samsung, iOS stayed stale and strong. Time has finally come for it to stay stale no longer. This is what motivated the operating system update. The person who was in charge of iOS and the desktop operating systems in Apple was Scott Fortsall, who left Apple after the Maps fiasco . Lately, the hardwar...