New Google Logo and Navigation bar

Google is starting to rollout a new logo and navigation bar.

New Flat Google Logo

Ironically the new logo looks flat and simple - following the iOS7 paradigm.The previous logo is shown below. For now some people might see the old logo, but I guess they are rolling the changes slowly, probably looking for early feedback from the users.

The old logo

And the much disliked black band across the top with links to all Google services is gone. It is now replaced with an App drawer button.Next to the Sign in button below, you can see what looks similar to the Android app drawer button from which you can launch google apps.

New home page with app drawer.

Check if you are able to see the new design..

Opera

Long time followers if this blog might know the fact that I have a particular soft corner towards the web browser Opera. (One among a few percent of opera fans in three world, I guess).

Opera has always been the innovation maker in the field of web browsers. I started using opera (version 7 or 7.5) at a time when internet explorer had killed off Netscape and a budding Firefox was in the market. It will be difficult to convince me that Firefox is a superior browser but I will choose it any day over Internet Explorer. IE is in my case gives the worst user experience. IE has successfully made a bad name for itself that even when sone reviews say version 10 and 11 are good and stable, I no longer bother.

So taking about Opera's innovations, I think it was the first browser to offer multiple tabs. That was very ingenious and useful. Other browsers followed and IE in particular took a long time to  implement.

Mouse gestures, voice control (you can ask Opera to item a new tab etc.) Themes, plugins / extensions (not sure if opera or Firefox was first for these).

For a long time I never saw Google's home page thanks to Opera, as I could do all my searches from the

address bar using "g ", you will bypass the home page and go directly to the search list.This can be extended to any search engine as well as create our own custom search terms and everything.

Opera introduced a new menu system, which was straightaway copied by Firefox. This dispensed with the normal menu system on old windows and added an Opera button at the top left which opened down the main menu.

Opera included a mail client (removed in version 15), a torrent down loader, integrated notes, password manager (which is encrypted, I learnt that Firefox used to store them encrypted).

A couple of features exclusive to Opera are Turbo which speeds up browsing on slow networks.

Later came Speed Dial, Tab Stacking, Private browsing and private tabs (I haven't seen private tab in any other browser yet), ability to pin tabs etc.

The most striking innovation that I felt useful as a Web Developer was "Opera Dragonfly". It was the first time that such a tool was available to see how web pages are handled by browsers. 

The list is almost endless with the features given by Opera, that it would easily over whelm  a novice user. Still I recommend using Opera as your secondary browser, if you prefer using Chrome or FireFox as your primary one.

Check out InFewBytes on Facebook or Opera : InFewBytes for more tips on using Opera. Opera offers a lot of stuff under the hood which might baffle a new user, so look out for tips and tricks from the e-book mentioned in the above link.

Additional Read
Check out the Best Desktop Browser and Opera 10 Alpha for other posts on Opera in this blog.

Message Counter 2: Open source android app

Message counter 2 is an open source android app which displays the count of sms received from each contact. The development on this app is basically for educational purposes

The app is developed by a single developer during his free time, among other projects. So there is not much dedicated support but all efforts will be made to add new features and fix any issues.

The latest update includes features, improvements and optimizations. As well as experimental support for French language.

Download the Android app from the Play Store.

Get the Source code from GitHub.
Facebook Page

Message counter privacy policy

Message counter (the "app") does not collect offer share any personal information.

For displaying the data, the app accesses your contacts and message databases stored in the phone. However these information is not stored or shared.

The privacy policy for the app has been updated on 29 July 2013.

If you have any questions or concerns, please submit a comment or send an email to aeapplabs-support at live.in

Bing Image Parser

How many people have noticed the different images that are displayed on the home page of the search engine Bing? I used to visit the Bing homepage just to check the image each day. As an aside you can get some trivia on the US version of the site.

It was then that I had an idea to see if there was a way to automate the way to see different images that are provided by Bing. After a search, done ironically, on well "Google" (Searching on Google is like second nature for me), I was able to get an RSS feed URL for the Bing images, and able to parse it using a small Java application.

The reason behind choosing a source which gives data as RSS is that it is a standard. What the core of this application does is parse an RSS Feed. The other functionality like console, ability to save image and other settings are built around this core. So essentially this can be reused to parse other RSS Feeds.

The UI is not very fancy, it is a invoked via command line and there is a windows shell script that can be used to run it easily. (Make sure you have Java runtime installed). If you don't want the source code, you can grab a build file (zip file with the application and shell script file) from GitHub.

After getting the build file, extract it to a folder, edit the "settings.properties" file and run the "run-biotd.cmd" file. If you are opting to save the images to disk, make sure that the folder specified exists.

The entire eclipse project is now available at GitHub and licensed under the "Apache License Version 2.0" at the link below.
https://github.com/midhunhk/the-bing-image-of-the-day-parser

Build no 0.4.5 is available at
https://github.com/midhunhk/the-bing-image-of-the-day-parser/blob/master/BIotD/builds/BIotD_0.4.5.zip

Make sure to check these out and watch out for future updates. You can use this source code to parse any other RSS feed response and make an awesome app, so don't wait up.