FLASH ON MOBILE- ADOBE WAY

Watching TV on a mobile can be a frustrating experience

Adobe has announced a plan to try to get its Flash player installed on more mobile devices and set-top boxes.

Dubbed Open Screen the initiative lifts restrictions on how its multimedia handling software can be used.

Adobe will stop charging licencing fees for mobile versions of Flash and plans to publish information about the inner workings of the code.

In taking this step Adobe hopes to repeat on mobiles the success its Flash technology has enjoyed on the web.

Video deal

Adobe estimates that its Flash player is installed on more than 98% of net-connected desktop computers.

The Open Screen plan will build on Flash Lite - Adobe's version of its multimedia player designed for mobile gadgets - that is already on millions of handhelds.

The ultimate aim of Open Screen is to make it much easier for TV and film makers to send their content to mobiles and on other devices such as set-top boxes.

It aims to do this by creating one flexible player technology that can run on any small-form device but only demands that developers write code once for it.

At the moment trying to get games or video on to different devices can be frustrating because of the plethora of hardware and software quirks on each gadget.

Adobe's four-step plan involves ending license fees; removing restrictions on the use of files in SWF and FLV format; publishing detailed information about the program interfaces for its Flash player and opening up information about its Flash streaming technology.

The move is the latest in a series that are aiming to open up Flash and get more devleopers working with it.

It is also part of the larger plan for Adobe Air - an overarching code development system that aims to bridge the gap between web and desktop applications.

Adobe said it was working with Arm, SonyEricsson, Nokia, LG and other gadget makers on the Open Screen initiative as well as content partners such as the BBC, MTV and NBC.

Adobe faces competition from Microsoft which is trying to get Silverlight - its answer to Air - on to mobiles too.

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MENU MAKING IS LOT EASY FROM NOW.

Create more advanced, complex and exciting DHTML Menus with the press of a button by using the NEW “Multiple Rows and Columns” feature. added in the Group Style Editor’s <Type> property in AllWebMenus!

Examples:

Multiple Rows:

Multiple Columns:

Note: In this demonstration AllWebMenus DHTML Menu Maker version 5.1 build #734 was used.

The choice of AllWebMenus as your DHTML menu / JavaScript menu maker offers you the highest possible standards and qualifications:

• Powerful customization (hundreds of combinations) View examples of menus
• Cross-browser support
• Addins/extensions for popular html editors (view entire list)
• All UNICODE languages/symbols fully supported (international menus) new!
• Floating Images - Use this feature as extra decoration for a special occasion (anniversary, holiday etc) or as a part of a theme
• Multiple Column/Row menus
• Use HTML code on selected menu items to achieve enhanced formatting or advanced functionality
• Database-driven or programmatically generated menus on server-side environments, such as PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, ASP, ASP.NET, etc. (Server-Side Menus API)
• Web menu Theme Packs and Templates
• SEO (search engine optimized) menu implementations
• Innovative User Interface - Simplicity and ease of use
• Continuous upgrades and company commitment, accurate customer support

View complete features list as well as examples of menus you can create with our DHTML menu generator.

Floating Images can now be added to any of the items of your DHTML menu, allowing for even more creative menu implementations.

- The fact that a “floating image” appears above the item’s layer gives it the opportunity to exceed the item’s area!

- Have a look at the following examples, where we have decorated one menu for Christmas and another for the Basketball’s finals by just adding a “floating image” on the items you want and for any of the three states of the menu (Normal, Mouse Over or Mouse Click):

AND

Does Google have the key to monetising online video?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt came out earlier this week saying that he hasn’t yet figured out the perfect solution for making money from online video. His comments come after Google’s earnings report revealed that the $1.65bn acquisition of YouTube is yet to reap the kind of financial rewards that were hoped for.

But across the board, advertising in online video is something that still hasn’t been addressed properly, and the PCTV market is going through an interesting phase. Lack of content has already forced the once heralded Joost to retreat to the US and niche content areas. Hulu is doing well with content, but finding many of the same issues with advertising as the rest of the market. Meanwhile others such as Vuze are hoping that a technology advantage in delivering high-def content will help them gain cut-through.

But while different online video providers are fighting to carve out their own niche, none has yet addressed the major issue for driving advertising revenue - and that is finding a genuine format and solution that works for advertisers - and educating them about it.

Schmidt was typically cryptic about what answers Google has planned saying only that top secret new products would be launched this year and that the advertising format - whatever it is - will be valuable to consumers as well as advertisers themselves. He insisted they will go far beyond the in-line text ads, overlays and top and tail ads that are already common with online video.

Until then, plenty of others are just playing catch-up and trying to squeeze more value out of a model that is far from perfect. Warner Bros has just announced that it will offer its DVD film titles online, on-demand on the same day they release the DVDs, which is progress, but a long time coming… Will Google come to the rescue?

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Social Networking in Plain English (Licensed Version)

Post your comments

WHAT'S RSS AND HOW TO SUBSCRIBE IT?

We’re often asked for a definition of RSS feeds. Instead of listing lines of definitions and examples, we thought this didactic 3.5 minutes video from CommonCraft provides with a good answer. Nice Job!

Click To Play

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Bollywood steals cricket Premier show

A light and laser show helped kick start the Indian Premier League

In the end, Bollywood and a spectacular opening ceremony won over cricket in the opening match of the world's first private million-dollar cricket competition.

The cricket in the Indian Premier League opener on a balmy summer evening at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore on Friday night was one-sided - the Calcutta team whipped the hosts Bangalore by an embarrassing 140 runs.

There were star players aplenty on the field - two stellar Indian captains, Rahul Dravid and Saurav Ganguly, Australia's Ricky Ponting, India's new fast bowling sensation Ishant Sharma, South African star Jacques Kallis, and Indian pace bowler Zaheer Khan.

But the presence of Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, also the owner of the Calcutta team, overshadowed the cricket.

King Khan

Fans gaped at their superhero as he blew kisses, cheered and danced precariously on the ledge of an upper tier stand.

There were a few serious cricket fans in the packed stadium

Men and women, young and old, whipped out their mobile phones to take fuzzy pictures of Khan as he opened champagne to celebrate his team's win.

When local spectators were asked by a television reporter who was the hero of the opening match, they screamed "Shah Rukh Khan".

As this worship of King Khan, as he his known by his legions of fans, continued, 26-year-old New Zealander Brendon McCullum decimated the opposition's bowling.

He scored 158 of Calcutta's 222 runs and single-handedly took the match away from Bangalore, owned by airline and brewery baron Vijay Mallya.

The game did not match the dazzling opening ceremony.

The 55,000-seater stadium was almost at capacity and was afire with cheerleaders from America and stilt-walkers from Holland.

A violinist performed in a blinding fog of laser and light show, in what looked like a cross between a corny musical and a Pink Floyd concert.

Websites gamble on their future

Good gambling strategies can pay off for websites

Running an online shop can be a brutal business because the net is the ultimate level playing field.

The sheer number of competitors selling any and every product or service means shop sites can struggle to make themselves stand out in the crowd.

In a bid to keep up with the pace an increasing number of websites are turning to insights that have emerged from studies of how to gamble on fruit machines.

Running an online store and gambling on a one-armed bandit may seem to have little in common - beyond the near certainty that you are going to lose money - but there is an affinity that might not at first be apparent.

Research into the so called "bandit problem" has produced techniques that ensure theoretical gamblers get the best possible return.

These techniques funnel most cash into the machine giving the current best payout. But they hedge this bet by pumping some coins into other machines to see if they produce a higher return.

FREE WEBSITE TEMPLATES

If you are not satisfied with ready-made blog and website templates and want to build your own design, having a bare-bone structure might make it easier. We’ve created a list of top ten tools to help you create that basic structure to kick-start your creativity.

CSSEZ

CSSEZ is an online template generator for Wordpress and Movable Type blogs. You need to register at the CSSEZ site in order to use the tool. There are some good features with which you can choose between one to four columns for your blog, define the column width, padding, margin, border, font and link styles. You can upload your background image or create one with the image maker.

dotemplate

dotemplate provides 12 free templates that you can choose from. You can choose one and go on to customizing your selected template by changing the color, font, text, position of text, etc. in the background, container, footer, menus, and boxes. You can apply effects like drop shadow, gradient, and round corners. When you are through customizing, you can download the template on your system. This is quite a convenient tool for those wishing to create their own templates without much HTML knowledge. However, an option for uploading your own images would have made this tool better.

Drupal Theme Generator

Drupal Theme Generator is a MS Excel based theme generator for Drupal sites you can use to create PHPtemplate and Xtemplate themes for your Drupal sites. The tool is free yet feature rich with some cool ones like random color theme generator, previewing your theme on your system, HTML color assistant, and integratingCSS, JavaScript, PHP , and HTML code in to the themes from an external file, etc. There are also nine themes that you will get when you download the tool.

Eris’ Template Generator

Eris’ Template Generator provides 11 skins for your blog with three column options for each skin. It supports Diaryland, Diary-x, Movabletype, old Blogger, Wordpress, B2, and a free HTML site templates. You can add your tagline, meta tags and include links to to the index, archives, email, notes, profile, buddylist, and last 5 entries for Diaryland, last 10 entries for Movable Type, calendar for B2, blogroll for Wordpress, XHTML compliant and content copyright notices, webrings, chat screen names, and buttons.

Firdamatic

Firdamatic is an online template generator for old Blogger and Movable Type blogs. You can select from the two column or three column options. Simply enter the information on the relevant boxes on the online form and click generate template. You can add your site name, title image, and choose the font and font color as well.

HTML PHP CSS Website Template Generator

HTML PHP CSS Website Template Generator is an online tool to create a PHP site template, along with its CSS and HTML files. You can customize the style sheet, header, sidebars, header, and footer by adding your font, color, margin and alignment preferences on the template generator’s online form. You can then generate the scripts, which you can copy and save for your use.

PsycHo

PsycHo is an open-source online template generator for the old Blogger, PersianBlog, and BlogFa platforms. You can set your page title, body background color, title background, description, text, spacing, and choose from four column options. You can preview your template and get the code in raw html. It’s simple to use and also works well for those without much HTML knowledge. The good part of PsycHo is that if your Internet connection breaks in between, you can still work on and complete designing your template. This is a good tool but needs to support more blog platforms like the new Blogger and Wordpress.

Templatr

Templatr provides you more than 20 layouts, and formatting options for various page elements including pages, header, footer, titles, margin, padding, border, and more for your Wordpress blog. It also provides you an upload tool with which you can upload your site graphics. You can download the template on your system once you are complete.

Weebly

Weebly is a neat site template generator with more than 15 pre-built designs. You can choose one of these designs and customize them by adding various elements like ads, feed icons, maps, contact form, define the text and picture layouts, columns, add Google and YouTube videos, etc. Once you are through, you can publish the site on your custom domain. Quite handy for all those who wish to make a quick personal site.

Wordpress Theme Generator

Wordpress Theme Generator is a cool online tool that will enable you to create your own custom made Wordpress themes without the need to know much html and css languages. The tool provides options to choose your blog name, site body size, sidebar location and size, add a third column, menu layout, color and text schemes, and add tag cloud, archives and search box. You can upload your site logo online and link to it from your template. Once you are through, you can preview your creation and download it in a zip file.

free obituary templates website templates

Lable cloud for blogger. Tag clout to your web site

Well, I being very liberal while labeling my posts, ended up with a long list of labels that was occupying almost the whole of the sidebar. The only solution was a Technorati style tag cloud, rather a label cloud. A Google search, and there it was, a whole lot of links telling me on how to make a label cloud for blogger. But soon it appeared that almost all the pages directly or indirectly ended up linking the same source, which I guess may be the best resource for this. Why not one more page linking to that site? Yeah yeah , that’s the purpose of this post after all. Actually, the code and the steps you need to follow to make your own blogger label cloud is so simple that my label cloud was up and running in five minutes. Just check out for yourself. Its just three pieces of codes that you need to paste in different places of your template code and adjust some minor parameters if you want to and that’s it. Go through the source/documentation to create your own blogger label. Here is the code and setup information to use the Label Cloud in New Blogger. First you obviously have to have a blog on New Blogger, and you MUST be using the layouts templates, (this isn't available for classic templates, or FTP published blogs ) and you must have some posts labeled already. (There needs to be at least ONE label with more than ONE entry or the scripts hit a bug - so have at least one label with more than one entry before starting). Make sure you backup your template before making any changes! Log into Blogger and go to your layouts section. On the 'Page Elements' setup page make sure you have a label widget already installed where you want it (it can be moved around later). Then go to the Edit HTML settings and leave the widgets NOT exapanded. It will make things easier to deal with. Now the code comes in 3 parts. A section for the stylesheet, a configurations section, and then the actual widget itself. The first part to put in is the stylesheet section. The following code needs to be copied and inserted into your stylesheet, which in the layouts is marked out by the tags. Easiest thing to do is find the closing skin tag

FIREFOX THE FOX WAY. SHOWS OUT THE FLASH URL EMBEDED ON WEB PAGE

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com Like that embedded flash animation or game on a website and wanted to have it on your hard disk. You can do that if you are on Firefox. Its very simple, just load the webpage with the embedded flash animation on Firefox and go to Tools -> Page Info. Select the Media tab on the page info box. A list appears which lists all media contents on the webpage like images, sounds, flash etc with details like address of the file and the type. Scroll through the list and identify the flash file embedded on the page you want to save. One hint would be that its extension is .swf and it would be listed as 'Embed' type in the list. Once you find out the embedded flash file, select it and click on 'Save As' button below the list to save the file on your hard disk. __

WATCH YOUTUBE ON YOUR MOBILE (ANY MOBILE YOUTUBE) FREE

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com Photo

Wonder how to play youtube videos in your mobile or iPod or PSP? Well just convert the youtube video to a format they recognize and play. There are many options available to convert the online videos (youtube, google videos etc.) into different formats for your PC or for your ipod or mobile etc. Here is a list of a few most used services that lets you convert online (like youtube) videos to a format of your choice for your PC or mobile.

Vixy

Vixy.net allows you convert a Flash Video / FLV file (YouTube's videos,etc) to MPEG4 (AVI/MOV/MP4/MP3/3GP) file online.

http://vixy.net/

Zamzar

Convert FLV to 3gp , aac, avi, iphone and many other formats.

http://www.zamzar.com/

VideoconvertX

Convert from youtube directly to ipod, iphone or any other format you may want.

http://www.videoconvertx.com/

Converttube

Convert and download online videos direct to PC, iPod, PS, Mobile

http://converttube.com/

Flv2Mp3

Convert your FLV files (YouTube's videos) to MP3

http://www.flv2mp3.com/

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WHAT IS GREASEMONKEY AND WHAT IS MEAN TO GMAIL AND OTHERS?

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com Enhance your web experience with Greasemonkey You may come across Greasemonkey scripts which does something useful but are clueless what the heck is Greasemonkey. If you already know about Greasemonkey, well go ahead and check out some other post on my blog, but if you don't know read on. Greasemonkey is a FireFox extension which once installed in FireFox lets you install scripts that make changes to Web Pages. Many times you wish for some feature while browsing your favorite site which isn't there. Like a download link to download videos when you browse YouTube. Install a Greasemonkey script and you'll have that feature. There are thousands of scripts available for various websites and if you know a bit of coding, you can build your own script. The summary is, Greasemonkey provides you with additional functionality for any web page by making on the fly changes to it. And as the scripts are persistent, the changes made to the web page are permanent. So what's you are waiting for. Go ahead and install this awesome extension and add that little feature to your favorite web page you were always wishing for. Download Greasemonkey Find thousands of Greasemonkey scripts Build your own Greasemonkey script. Tutorial and guide

Thousands of Greasemonkey scripts are available for download out there. But its very hard to find scripts which are really useful. There are way too many scripts to perform the same task. Here I have tried to compile a list of some useful scripts for Gmail. If anybody knows of any scripts which was left out, please be kind enough to comment on it.

Gmail Beautifier 2.31

Hides/Shows ads in Gmail, widens email body, removes beta from Gmail logo (disabled by default), & gives buttons a better look.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8212

Gmail Filter Assistant v0.17

Add an embedded filter management module in message display page, which makes adding a filter much easier

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7997

GMailTo

Forces all mailto links to open in GMail

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/5722

Folders4Gmail

You love Gmail, but you miss folders to sort your emails? Organize your labels in a folder-like hierarchy with the Folders4Gmail userscript.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8810

Gmail Addons

Addon any functionality to the gmail interface. The script comes with Calendar and Chat. (This script replaces 'Enhance Gmail')

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/19956

Multi-Login GMail, YahooMail, HotMail

Add a drop-down box with your ID's to the WebMail login form.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/5110

Gmail Reply To All Button

Adds a "Reply to All" button to Gmail main interface.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8812

Gmail Show Details

Always show details in the most recent message of a gmail conversation. "Details" include the from: reply-to: to: cc: date: subject: and mailed-by: headers.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/12202

Google Notebook + Gmail Addons

Adds Google Notebook to Gmail

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/20136

Gmail Word Count

Adds a button to count the number of words in your current draft. Goes in as a text link to the left of "Check Spelling."

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/16117

SpamTracker Email Address Generator for Gmail

A script to insert an email address like 'youraccount+currentdomain@gmail.com' so that you can easily filter your Gmail, track who's sending you spam, block senders if necessary. Press "F9" if you're in a text box to insert the email address.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/12876

Gmail Signature Float

Moves your signature in Gmail to the top of the message rather than the bottom

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/21748

Gmail 2.0 Multiple HTML Signatures

Automatically inserts HTML signatures into your Gmail messages based on which address you are sending from.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/21665

Gmail Mark Read Button

Adds a "Mark Read" or "Mark Unread" button to Gmail pages (active only when mail items are selected).

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/689

Google Mail Customize

You can customize Gmail interface. Works with Gmail (older and newer versions) and Google Apps Mail.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8326

Modified Gmail Macros v. 2.0

Extra (customizable) keyboard shortcuts and macros for Gmail 2.0. Based on the work of Mihai @ persistent.info. Version(date): 20080214.1

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/14189

How to create Firefox extension from Greasemonkey scripts Here's an online tool which converts a Greasemonkey script into a FireFox extension (XPI). Its very easy to use, just enter details like GUID, creator name, extension version etc and copy paste the content of the user script and hit the 'Compile' button. The XPI file would be available for download immediately. Once you install the extension into Firefox, you can take advantage of the script even without Greasemonkey. __

Free RSS/Feed Icons

www.youthsprouts.blogspot.com

If you are bored of the same conventional RSS/Feed icons, there are many different styles of buttons available which you can use for free in you site/blog. browse through the sites listed below and find the one button for you! Free Glass Style RSS/Feed Icons Web 2.0 style feed buttons Feedicons from zeusboxstudio Rss Icons Orb Standard Feed icons 30 Free Vector RSS Icons Buttons for RSS, Feeds, and XML in various styles.

FREE FREE FREE __