How to apply gradients to text or object in Flash

• Go to file
• Select New
• Choose OK
• Type text using 'Text' tool
• Click outside the text
• Right click on text and select 'Break Apart'.

• Do one more time, right click on the text and select 'Break Apart'.
• You will see like;

• In color panel you will see 'TYPE' 
• Choose 'Linear'

• To change or delete color hold that button and drag outside.
• Like in text you can apply gradient in different shapes like oval or rectangle.

#Twitter Hashtag features in Blogger

The #twitter hash tags were not envisioned when twitter was started. Users invented the use of  it and thus was implemented later to tag tweets. This gave rise to the concept of trending topics, which ultimately has given twitter a new power.

A lot of bloggers use twitter as a medium to push the contents via social media.

Now that tweets without #tags are hard to find, bloggers have  started embedding the hashtags {me too :(} 

Embedding the hash tags on the title not only make the title look ugly, it also defeats the purpose of having labels on the posts.

It would be wonderful if labels on the posts could be picked (by services like friendfeed or twitterfeeder) so that it would automatically add the hashtags as per the label. Or even better, Google could do it for blog*spot et al.

Twitter and Freedom #snakeonthetown

http://bit.ly/holY3Z

Call it the influence of the tweeting-freedom, the disappeared egyptian cobra has been found tweeting about her funny side.

She now has more than 150K followers; despite could not be located and ironically follows the only one: http://twitter.com/TheBronxZoo.

It will be interesting to see where the twitter account holder takes it to. I hope it just stays on its funny side without biting anyone.

The zoo explains:

The difficulty is that the 20-inch, pencil-thin snake, which is months old and weighs less than 3 ounces, has sought out a secure hiding spot within the Reptile House. The holding areas of the Reptile House are extremely complex environments with pumps, motors and other mechanical systems. In this complex environment, she will likely remain in hiding and not move until she feels completely secure. As her comfort level rises, she will begin to move around the building to seek food and water.

Well, following her shall not be crime!

http://twitter.com/BronxZoosCobra

Search is dead! time for social search

http://bit.ly/idxnNH
Yes, searching has become irritably daunting task.
Have you ever tried searching some keyword and found that the lower links displayed may have higher relevancy than the upper ones? Or the second/third link was more relevant than the first one?
The time is for decision-search. not search-search.

Social Search:
I do not think that the concept of social search is new in anyway.

If you wanted to  go to a restaurant, what would you do?
The first thing is search the restaurant. The second thing that immediately comes into your mind is what I am going into/for?
For the best experience, we ask friends who have been there. In today's internet dominated by social media, searching for such relevant ideas would be definitely a nice input for making decision on whether we would like to check it or not.
One more layer of work here might be the layer of social recommendations. Say, your friend says that the customer services of the garage is not good enough. Would you try it? You would not want to go to the places where your friend have not been treated well.  As your experience might turn out to be similar. Thus those places can be filtered out from the results.

Recommend:
Recommend could be another nice feature. Based upon the social search parameters, the machine learning algorithm can recommend the nearest results. For example, if I am searching to buy a printer or computer I would first love to talk to a geek next to me. Based upon his recommendation, I can be assured that I am getting the best out of my expenses. Thats how the social recommendations work. This can be easily adopted into present-day internet dominated by social networks.

Applications:

• Amazon search for books.
• Google/yahoo/bing Search or say twitter/facebook search
• google/yahoo/bing map with social search layer.
• reading circle

One example would be the "like" button of facebook. "Like" is approaching towards creating such database. Since, people never have hesitated to click on the like button; they are helping create a huge database of "like". Once we have access to all the likes, the next would be Recommend. I wrote about it  here...http://bit.ly/hPHIS6

TLDR: Google goes+1 http://www.google.com/experimental/index.html

One of the presentation that I liked about social circle: @p186: people should be able to say it anonymously.

The Real Life Social Network v2

View more documents from Paul Adams

How to change image color in Flash

• Go to 'File'
• Select 'Import'
• Select 'Import to Stage'
• Select picture and double click on picture to open.
• Select the size of picture
• Go to 'Modify' tool and select 'Convert to symbol' (picture should be selected)
• 'Convert to symbol' box will appear
• Give name 
• Select 'Movie Clip' button
• Press OK
• Select 'Filter' (near properties)
• You will see +sign, click on it
• Choose 'Adjust color'
• You can try Bright, Contrast, Saturation and Hue whatever you think looks good
• When you move 'Hue' you will see the color change in picture.
• You can tween the images to get cool changes.
• 
  

Bluetooth Mouse and Key board unresponsive in Mac

This seems to be problem in Mac running versions 10.6.6 and later.

My bluetooth Mouse, bluetooth  trackpad and bluetooth keyboard did not respond after the Mac went into sleep mode.

I am not sure what exactly is the problem. However, I can tell u what fixed my problem.

• First I changed the battery, just to make sure that they are not running low on batteries. Did not work as I just changed them last week.
• Search shows some results that you need to go to your HOME folder and then navigate to Library>Preferences and delete com.apple.bluetooth file and restart. Did not want to do that.
• Another suggestion was to clean the cache @ HOME>Library>Cache. Did not want to do that either.
• So, I just put the computer to sleep by going to apple  menu and woke it up after 32 seconds by pressing the power button once. Voila! It worked.

Smart Robotic Birds and Insects

http://bit.ly/htT3HK

From Bio-mimic to real life design.
Amazing!

3 D printing is set to revolutionize the world of  prototyping.
Here is a flight demonstration of an untethered 3D printed flapping hovering ornithopter from the Cornell Computational Synthesis Laboratory. http://ccsl.mae.cornell.edu/ornithopter

NST: Nepali Standard Time

Nepali Standard Time is GMT + 5:45 which is among few weird time zones who differ by quarters of hours from standard GMT fashion [http://www.worldtimezone.com/faq.html].

Bye Bye Digg, Hello Reddit

Digg.com was one of the news source for me. Now, I am making a switch   to reddit.com.

No win for simplicity.

It takes few minutes before getting oriented into it. Once familiar, it is very simple and easy.

Here are the rules:
http://www.reddit.com/help/reddiquette

A graph:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=reddit,+digg&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0&

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/g8jiq/reddit_whats_a_littleknown_site_you_think/

Note:

I wrote this in Nov 2010, then buried it as it needed a lot of polishing. I wish I had published it. I am publishing it anyway.... 

Google Blogger can Improve on nav-bar

Google's Blogger has potential area to be worked on and developed.

The nav-bar has been there and have been more or less ignored to the extend that many prefer to hide it instead of keeping it.

Few usages:

1. Get me the "next blog"  by similar tag/subject.  Make visiting "next blog" credit based. Put some incentives on visiting next blog.  It is similar idea to MyBlogLog or even stumbleupon, but worth trying!
2. Bring Friend connect to Nav-bar. The follow and share has been added but has not impacted the audience yet.
3. Fuse the above two ideas!

All the best!


EDIT:

They just announced a new dashboard.

Connecting Samsung Galaxy S to Mac

Connecting the Samsung Galaxy To The Mac

1. Mass Storage

•   Home Key > Menu Key > Settings
•  Applications
•  USB settings
• Tap on Mass storage 

This will allow the phone to be used as USB device for storage.


2. Setting USB Debugging

•   Home   >  Menu   >  Settings
•  Applications
•  Development
•  Tap on USB debugging
•  ...

Plug the   USB cable  into the Mac with the other end
plugged the other end of the cable into the phone.
Pull down the Notification bar and tap USB connected
Tap Mount


 A visual guide at:
 http://ars.samsung.com/customer/usa/jsp/faqs/faqs_view_us.jsp?SITE_ID=22&PG_ID=2&PROD_SUB_ID=557&PROD_ID=558&AT_ID=306671

From Like button to Recommend in Facebook

It might already be there on the air.

Facebook's Like button can be generalized to create some product called "Recommend".

Say, if you liked apple, orange and banana, you may also like mango... How about strawberry?

Similarly, if you liked a blog post or article tagged as "politics", then you may also like another post with the "world news" tag in it.
Something like that.

I know that Amazon already has it. I am not sure if Facebook has it.

One could also scan the user's cache to recommend the items from their history. Sounds intrusive? Well, did not you (already) give up the idea of anonymity by Liking it??  If you liked google's adsense, you will (also) probably like this idea.