Archive for December 26, 2011

Like most people, I love dogs. But also like most people I am completely irresponsible — Like, I can’t even keep my iPhone consistently charged let alone take care of another creature (Yeah I know, I’d be a great mother, we’ve already discussed this).

This being said, wouldn’t it be so cool if you could own a dog, but for a limited amount of time? Like you wouldn’t have to commit to it forever or anything — because that is just asking too much —  but maybe you could just borrow it. I don’t know where I’m going to be waking up TOMORROW let alone a MONTH FROM NOW, so if only there were like a Dogbnb, where you could temporarily have like, a dog? To pet.

Well move over Rover.com, apparently Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky is already on top of this, and has secured the domain Dogbnb.com. Hahahahahahahahahahhahahahaha, smart.

I totally asked Chesky if Dogbnb was a joke (or more likely, a place to board pets while people travel), but he hasn’t responded to my email. Whatever. So who wants to let me borrow their puppy?

• AIRBNB

Founded in August 2008 and based in San Francisco, California, Airbnb is a community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique spaces around the world online or from an iPhone device. Whether the available space is a castle for a night, a sailboat for a week, or an apartment for a month, Airbnb is the easiest way for people to showcase these distinctive spaces to an audience of millions. By facilitating bookings and financial transactions, Airbnb makes…

Learn more

Image: Ellis Hamburger, Business Insider

See Also:

How Samsung Just Screwed Over About 10 Million Of Its Android Phone Customers

21 Secret Tips And Tricks To Get The Most Out Of Your Brand New Android Phone

Anyone Else Having Problems With Apple’s iMessage?

Good question.

However, if you want an honest opinion, it’s usually best to go straight to the source. A former GM who used to work on Windows Phone 7 for Microsoft, Charlie Kindel, took to his personal blog today with some thoughts on why Microsoft’s mobile efforts seem so stagnant.

It boils down to carriers, manufacturers, and the companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft who make the operating system are all locked in this big three-way pissing contest to see who gets the most say in marketing a device.

According to Kindel, Android is crushing iOS and Windows Phone 7 when it comes to marketshare simply because its open platform allows manufacturers and carriers to get away with whatever they want, while cranking out dozens of devices a year.

And yes, that means bloatware, nasty skins, and fragmentation on your Android phone. But it also means carriers get to promote the hell out of those phones thanks to their massive marketing budgets.

Here’s Kindel:

Google has been wildly successful with Android (at least in terms of units) because Android was built to reduce friction between all sides of the market. It ‘bows down’ to the device manufactures AND the carriers. It enabled device manufactures to do what they do best (build lots of devices). It enabled carriers to do what they do best (market lots of devices). It enabled users tons of choice. My hypothesis is that it also enables too much fragmentation that will eventually drive end users nuts.

On the other hand, although Windows Phone 7 can be licensed to any device, Microsoft has a set of specs each manufacturer must follow in order to ensure the best user experience. It’s not as perfect as Apple’s approach of designing both the hardware and software, but it’s a whole lot better than letting manufacturers and carriers run wild and causing a massive fragmentation problem where even phones that are a barely a year old miss out on the latest updates.

Microsoft’s approach seems nice and balanced. It evens the power struggle between the carrier, manufacturer, and OS developer. Unfortunately, as MG Siegler points out, it may be too late:

But Apple could also afford to do this because they were first to market. When the iPhone launched in 2007, the other smartphones on the market were shit. There was no actual competition for the iPhone. The first Android phones that launched over a year later were a joke. 

Contrast that with Windows Phone which launched far too late into the market. Kindel never mentions it, but you simply can’t downplay that fact. Had Windows Phone launched in 2007 or even 2008, the story would have been different. Instead, it launched in late 2010.

I think next year is going to be the make or break moment for Windows Phone. The long awaited Nokia Lumia 800, which is an excellent device, will finally arrive in the U.S. With it comes all of Nokia’s marketing might that Kindel thinks Windows Phone is missing. If Nokia delivers a dud, it could easily take Windows Phone down with it.

UPDATE: Robert Scoble jumped into the conversation, so I figured it would be prudent to include his thoughts on why Windows Phone 7 continues to stink. Scoble thinks it’s because Windows Phone still doesn’t have the vibrant app ecosystem that you find on iOS and Android:

Now, let’s look at the ads on TV right now. There’s all sorts of people saying to get their app, including the local TV news departments. Do they talk about Android? Yes, of course. iOS? Of course! Windows Phone 7? Hell no. RIM/Blackberry? I haven’t heard that in an app advertisement in, well, forever.

So, when a consumer goes into a carrier store to buy a new phone, what is going on in the back of her/his head?

Android=safe.
iOS/iPhone=safe.
Everything else=not safe.

I agree, although I think Scoble downplays the Lumia’s importance. Yes, it’s going to be tough for Nokia to convince developers to start cranking out apps, but Google went through the same thing with Android. And they seem to be doing a lot better now.

Image: nfographic by- Shanghai Web Designers

Click for the chart

See Also:

An Incredible Look Inside A Vanishing Kingdom In The Remote Mountains Of Nepal

Incredible Things That Happen Every 60 Seconds On The Internet

Anyone Else Having Problems With Apple’s iMessage?

In recent months, everyone has been a-buzz about how Facebook and texting are replacing email for the next online generation and how Facebook’s on its way to replacing Google as the most valuable and richest Internet company.

And perhaps both those things are true.

But it’s time for a bit of perspective.

Earlier, we published a chart of many of the amazing things that happen every 60 seconds on the Internet, including:

• 13,000 hours of Pandora music is listened to
• 20,000 new posts are posted on Tumblr
• 25 hours-worth of videos are uploaded to YouTube
• 370,000+ minutes of voice calls are made on Skype
• And so on…

And included in that list were three statistics that put the rise of Facebook, the plateauing of Google, and the death of email in context.

Every minute, according to this chart, there are 695,000 status updates on Facebook. 695,000!

That’s a big number.

But it’s the same as the number of searches that are conducted online every minute. And Google makes a lot more money per search than Facebook makes per status update.

And as for email…

In the same 60 seconds in which 695,000 Facebook status updates are posted, 168 million emails are sent.

That’s 240 times as many.

There’s presumably a lot of SPAM in that email number.

But it seems safe to say the death of email is not exactly imminent.

SEE ALSO: Here Are All The Incredible Things That Happen Every 60 Seconds On The Internet

Image: Dan Frommer, Business Insider

See Also:

15 Apps Apple Just Killed With iOS 5

Take The Full Tour Of iOS 5 Right Now

When Apple announced its latest operating system upgrade a few months ago, there was one feature I was excited about:

iMessage.

This was the iPhone-to-iPhone texting tool that would allow iPhone owners to circumvent the ridiculous fees the carriers charge for text messages.

Instead, iPhone owners would be able to text each other via iMessage for free, no matter how many texts they sent.

iMessage sounded cool, but I didn’t bother to upgrade my iPhone’s OS immediately, so I forgot about it. Then, last week I finally upgraded–after spilling a cup of tea in my previous MacBook (long story) and deciding it was time to get started with iCloud.

Anyway, after I upgraded, I found I was automatically using iMessage when texting with folks who had iPhones.

And, initially, it appeared to work fine. It was just like texting, except with some blue text-blurb windows instead of the regular green.

But then, suddenly, I found that I was in the dog house at home over having not done something I was supposed to have done, even though I didn’t know that I had been supposed to do it. And when I inquired about that–about how I was supposed to have known–I learned that I was supposed to have known because of the text message I had been sent. And when I protested that I had never gotten a text telling me what I was supposed to have known, I got the look that said “Like hell you didn’t get that text.”

So I checked my iPhone again. And I really hadn’t gotten that text. And I didn’t get that text until the next day, when it showed up as though it had just been sent.

And then, today, I got a repeat iMessage from the same person four times in rapid succession.

So it seems like iMessage was seriously on the fritz.

I asked my Twitter followers whether they were having any problems with iMessage. Of those who responded, about half said that they had been having similar problems. The other half said everything was perfect.

So, based on this small sample, it seems like Apple’s having some glitches with its carrier-circumventing texting-killer iMessage.

Anyone else seeing this?

SEE ALSO: Take The Full Tour Of iOS 5 Right Now–Including The Misfiring iMessage

Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’re re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Google’s response. Google is now telling Liz Gannes at the technology blog All Things D that there is no product being developed. That’s a real shame, if that’s the truth of the matter.

Gannes writes:

When a report emerged this morning of a new social network focused on nuanced sharing called Google Circles, the company said it was not launching anything this week at SXSW. But such a product is not even under development, according to the people supposedly developing it.

Google’s Chris Messina, who had been pegged as one of the leaders of Circles, told me directly today that he “didn’t know what [the story] was talking about.”

A trusted source with credible information, among several conversations I’ve had, lead me to draw the conclusions I did. I tried to frame them with some cautious caveats, but now Gannes is being told something different. To be honest, this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been told that a story I broke “was not based in fact” only to see something pretty darned close get confirmed later. I guess we’ll see about this one.

There’s plenty of evidence indicating that Circles is very real, of course. For example, one RWW reader found that if you look at the Buzz tab on a Google Profile with no linked media accounts, the page reads “nothing shared, try adding more people to your circles.”

And now to return to our previously posted report. These details may in fact be a picture of what Google is going to do. They may instead be simply what Google ought to do. Take your pick, we’ll know in time, I suppose.

A Matter of Personas

With Circles, I believe that Google will attempt to accomplish something critics from the blogosphere, academia, SXSW 2010 keynoter danah boyd, privacy watchdogs and others have all called on the social networking world to do: to allow our online communication to respect the same boundaries that our offline social lives do.

School and work, friends and family, the sacred and the profane; we’ve always been able to communicate different things to different people in different circumstances. Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks have collapsed all those contexts into one big bucket. We speak to our “friends” all at once, no matter what we might want to say to one group of people or another. And thus we often feel less comfortable than we might saying anything at all.

This fundamental discomfort has been, many people argue, a limiting factor in the growth, reach and depth of online social interactions. If that problem could be solved, there are big new ways that the online world could grow and evolve. This has been a more sophisticated understanding of privacy, not just as a public/private dichotomy but as a matter of contextual integrity of communication, that we and others have been calling on Facebook to adopt for almost two years.

The development of Circles is likely heavily influenced by the work of ex-Google social technology researcher Paul Adams. Adams has written a book called Social Circles, which will be released this Summer and he published a widely read slide deck about what is wrong with social networking: specifically the lack of respect for context and personas. (The Real Life Social Network) Adams worked on User Experience at Google for four years, but just months after publishing his influencial presentation he left Google for Facebook.

Courting Developers

Given who is working on it, I expect that Google Circles will be as developer friendly as other Google social products, but with a much greater emphasis on design and usability.

Messina and Sposato both have strong backgrounds in working with developers and APIs. Messina was trained as a visual designer and created the full page ad in the New York Times announcing the launch of Firefox, then went on to become a leader in the open web community. His work has included co-creating the international unconference phenomenon called Barcamp, helping build OpenID federated identity system, leading the Activity Streams movement for an interoperable social network user activity data system and initiating the use of #hashtags on Twitter. When he joined Google in January 2010, we wrote extensively about his life and career.

Right: Messina posted this photo on Foursquare today of posters promoting Google’s hacker event at SXSW.

It is nearly inconceivable that Messina would be involved and the effort wouldn’t be a standards-based platform play. If Circles is unveiled at SXSW, the timing couldn’t be better from a developer relations perspective. Google can position itself as going exactly the opposite direction Twitter is. Twitter saw its biggest outpouring of criticism yet when it told developers on Friday that they should not build any more basic interfaces, clients, for using Twitter. It remains to be seen how that will play out, but if a major social network wanted to try to lure developers to build on their platform, this could be a good time to start talking about it.

Google Tries Again

Google has launched many different social efforts over the years but has remained far behind Facebook and Twitter in its efforts. Social networking is an important technology for Google to find success with as it’s a key way that people spend time online and that targeted advertisements are delivered to those people.

Google Buzz felt overbearing and bolted on. It also got privacy terribly, terribly wrong. Google Wave was more confusing than collaborative. Google’s Open Social interoperable widget platform was hugely hyped as a distributed Facebook killer, but it now primarily focused on enterprise social networks.

Reports emerged last June that Google has been working on a secret social project called Google Me.

In December a screenshot was leaked to TechCrunch showing a new toolbar item on Google.com called “Loop.” (Loop seems similar to Circles – I think Circles is better.) I believe that Circles will be a toolbar level service as well.

It’s hard to think of a stronger angle to take than support for contextual integrity of communication and conversation, of personas in social networking.

Google has tried and failed in many other (though not all) social efforts. Bringing some of the best thinking and the best innovators in the world to a new effort to tackle one of the world’s biggest problems is very ambitious.

Presuming that the things we’re hearing are true (I believe they are), then we’ll follow up with in-depth coverage of Google Circles once it’s launched. That may be tonight, it may be as far in the future as the Google IO developer conference in two months – but I believe we are going to see at least some parts of it today. More clear than the timing is that this is definitely happening: Google is putting some of its most innovative social thinkers behind a major product called Circles and focused on personas.

Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’re re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Google’s response. Google is now telling Liz Gannes at the technology blog All Things D that there is no product being developed. That’s a real shame, if that’s the truth of the matter.

Gannes writes:

When a report emerged this morning of a new social network focused on nuanced sharing called Google Circles, the company said it was not launching anything this week at SXSW. But such a product is not even under development, according to the people supposedly developing it.

Google’s Chris Messina, who had been pegged as one of the leaders of Circles, told me directly today that he “didn’t know what [the story] was talking about.”

A trusted source with credible information, among several conversations I’ve had, lead me to draw the conclusions I did. I tried to frame them with some cautious caveats, but now Gannes is being told something different. To be honest, this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been told that a story I broke “was not based in fact” only to see something pretty darned close get confirmed later. I guess we’ll see about this one.

There’s plenty of evidence indicating that Circles is very real, of course. For example, one RWW reader found that if you look at the Buzz tab on a Google Profile with no linked media accounts, the page reads “nothing shared, try adding more people to your circles.”

And now to return to our previously posted report. These details may in fact be a picture of what Google is going to do. They may instead be simply what Google ought to do. Take your pick, we’ll know in time, I suppose.

A Matter of Personas

With Circles, I believe that Google will attempt to accomplish something critics from the blogosphere, academia, SXSW 2010 keynoter danah boyd, privacy watchdogs and others have all called on the social networking world to do: to allow our online communication to respect the same boundaries that our offline social lives do.

School and work, friends and family, the sacred and the profane; we’ve always been able to communicate different things to different people in different circumstances. Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks have collapsed all those contexts into one big bucket. We speak to our “friends” all at once, no matter what we might want to say to one group of people or another. And thus we often feel less comfortable than we might saying anything at all.

This fundamental discomfort has been, many people argue, a limiting factor in the growth, reach and depth of online social interactions. If that problem could be solved, there are big new ways that the online world could grow and evolve. This has been a more sophisticated understanding of privacy, not just as a public/private dichotomy but as a matter of contextual integrity of communication, that we and others have been calling on Facebook to adopt for almost two years.

The development of Circles is likely heavily influenced by the work of ex-Google social technology researcher Paul Adams. Adams has written a book called Social Circles, which will be released this Summer and he published a widely read slide deck about what is wrong with social networking: specifically the lack of respect for context and personas. (The Real Life Social Network) Adams worked on User Experience at Google for four years, but just months after publishing his influencial presentation he left Google for Facebook.

Courting Developers

Given who is working on it, I expect that Google Circles will be as developer friendly as other Google social products, but with a much greater emphasis on design and usability.

Messina and Sposato both have strong backgrounds in working with developers and APIs. Messina was trained as a visual designer and created the full page ad in the New York Times announcing the launch of Firefox, then went on to become a leader in the open web community. His work has included co-creating the international unconference phenomenon called Barcamp, helping build OpenID federated identity system, leading the Activity Streams movement for an interoperable social network user activity data system and initiating the use of #hashtags on Twitter. When he joined Google in January 2010, we wrote extensively about his life and career.

Right: Messina posted this photo on Foursquare today of posters promoting Google’s hacker event at SXSW.

It is nearly inconceivable that Messina would be involved and the effort wouldn’t be a standards-based platform play. If Circles is unveiled at SXSW, the timing couldn’t be better from a developer relations perspective. Google can position itself as going exactly the opposite direction Twitter is. Twitter saw its biggest outpouring of criticism yet when it told developers on Friday that they should not build any more basic interfaces, clients, for using Twitter. It remains to be seen how that will play out, but if a major social network wanted to try to lure developers to build on their platform, this could be a good time to start talking about it.

Google Tries Again

Google has launched many different social efforts over the years but has remained far behind Facebook and Twitter in its efforts. Social networking is an important technology for Google to find success with as it’s a key way that people spend time online and that targeted advertisements are delivered to those people.

Google Buzz felt overbearing and bolted on. It also got privacy terribly, terribly wrong. Google Wave was more confusing than collaborative. Google’s Open Social interoperable widget platform was hugely hyped as a distributed Facebook killer, but it now primarily focused on enterprise social networks.

Reports emerged last June that Google has been working on a secret social project called Google Me.

In December a screenshot was leaked to TechCrunch showing a new toolbar item on Google.com called “Loop.” (Loop seems similar to Circles – I think Circles is better.) I believe that Circles will be a toolbar level service as well.

It’s hard to think of a stronger angle to take than support for contextual integrity of communication and conversation, of personas in social networking.

Google has tried and failed in many other (though not all) social efforts. Bringing some of the best thinking and the best innovators in the world to a new effort to tackle one of the world’s biggest problems is very ambitious.

Presuming that the things we’re hearing are true (I believe they are), then we’ll follow up with in-depth coverage of Google Circles once it’s launched. That may be tonight, it may be as far in the future as the Google IO developer conference in two months – but I believe we are going to see at least some parts of it today. More clear than the timing is that this is definitely happening: Google is putting some of its most innovative social thinkers behind a major product called Circles and focused on personas.

If you’re looking to set your New Year’s resolutions, you know that there aren’t any checks and balances to make sure you’ve completed them, unless you’ve published them to the web and fear the backlash of being called a failure or quitter.

One site wants to blackmail you into completing a task, while holding a compromising photo over your head during the process. The twist? You set your own goals, upload your own photos, and your friends get to decide whether you’ve successfully completed the task or not.

Aherk!, a simple web app, wants you to set your own ticking time bomb and achieve your goals out of pure fear of public humiliation. Will anyone actually do it though?

Lose 10 lbs or post a pic of your arse

Accountability might be the last piece of the puzzle that’s holding you back from reaching all of your goals. Aherk wants to be that accountability, and then some. You can add as many tasks with deadlines to the site as you want, and for it to be effective you’re supposed to upload a photo that you really don’t want anyone to see. Up until the deadline, your friends can vote on whether you’ve hit your goal or not.

In regards to the photo that you’re supposed to upload, Aherk refers to it as “The Bomb Photo”:

This is the photo that we will upload to Facebook if your friends tell us that you’ve failed to achieve your goal. For Aherk! to be effective, it needs to be something that you really don’t want to see posted on Facebook.

And if you think that you can just change your mind later, not so fast, Aherk won’t let you edit or delete the goal or photo once you’ve added it:

While it’s a cute idea, I don’t think this is something that I’d actually do. As Alex Wilhelm, our in-house prankster at The Next Web, puts it:

What if your friends are $@, and just say no to %@# with you?

Good point. But if you do trust your friends to vote on the up-and-up, this might be a fun way to get some of those goals out of the way that you keep skipping over every year. Beware of what you upload though, because if your fail your goal, the photo will be posted publicly for all of your friends to see.

In the end, it might be worth it.

➤ Aherk!

Once upon a time, the iPhone was a simple thing. You flipped it on, slid the unlock switch, and what you saw was what you got.

Since then, things have gotten a bit more… layered. That’s not to say they’ve gotten any harder to use; iOS just has a ridiculous number of hidden bonus features now that are in no way immediately obvious to the untrained eye. Given that yesterday was Christmas, I’d wager that the number of untrained eyes out there is at an all-time high.

If you consider yourself something of an iOS expert, this list isn’t for you. If the terms “jailbreak” and “rooting” have any sort of secondary, technical connotation to you, you can almost certainly skip right over this. This one’s for the curious newbie; the moms, pops, and younger siblings of the world; the Android converts who may be feeling a bit out of place. It’s a collection of things I’m regularly surprised to find that other iOS device owners don’t know. If it’s not for you, you almost certainly know someone who it is for.

The App Switcher:

You’re blasting around in Jetpack Joyride when your better half asks you to find a proper eggnog recipe. What’s the quickest way to get to Safari? You could head back to the homescreen like a chump — but if you’ve had Safari open recently, there’s a waaaay speedier route: Double tap the home button. Tada! Meet the App Switcher.

The first page of the app switcher shows your most recently opened apps. Scrolling to the right will take you back even further in your app history.

As one of the most requested features leading up to its introduction in iOS 4, it blows my mind how often I meet long-time iOS owners who have absolutely no idea the App Switcher exists.

Closing Broken Apps:

Apps break. It happens. Alas, due to the way iOS freezes/unfreezes apps rather than actually closing them (thus allowing quick-switching between running apps), you’ll occasionally find yourself with an app that you just can’t seem to un-break. What should you do? You’ll need to reset your device, right? Naaaah.

Go to the homescreen. Double tap the home button (to bring up the App Switcher). Find the icon for the app you need to close and hold your finger on it for a second or two. Tap the - that shows up next to it. Relaunch the app from the homescreen, and it’ll be just like opening it up on a freshly reset device.

(Note: With very few exceptions (and unlike what you may be used to with your ol’ laptop) you never need to manually close iOS apps to make your device “run better”. Thanks to the aforementioned freezing/unfreezing process, any app that you’re not actively using has very little effect on your device’s performance.)

The Hidden App Switcher Buttons:

The App Switcher is something of a swiss army knife. It switches! It closes! It slices! It dices!

Beyond the aforementioned, the App Switcher has one more neat trick: a sort-of-hidden bonus page with myriad one-click shortcuts. On the iPhone, it’ll let you lock your screen orientation, pause/play/go back/skip tracks in whatever app is currently playing music (or immediately jump right into that application, instead.) On the iPad, it’ll do all of the aforementioned as well as let you adjust the volume and display brightness.

To find it: double tap the home button to bring up the App Switcher — but rather than swiping to the left to see more apps, swipe to the right from the first page.

The Notifications Center:

This is another one that Apple doesn’t seem to be explaining well enough, as I’ve met more than my fair share of long-time iPhone owners who go wide-eyed when they first see it used. For anyone coming from Android, the mechanism is pretty much second nature (Apple essentially cloned the feature wholesale.)

Beginning with iOS 5, iOS keeps a running list of your recent notifications so that you can easily jump to any app that needs your attention.

To bring down the notifications drawer, simply swipe down from the very top of the display. Waiting there will be all of your recent (unread) texts, any messages that your applications have queued up, and a few configurable widgets (weather, stocks, etc.) You can adjust what shows up in this drawer in Settings Notifications.

The Camera Shortcut:

We’ve all been there: that once in a lifetime moment is happening right before your eyes, and your only means of capturing it is with your phone’s camera. By the time you get it out of your pocket, unlock it, get to the homescreen, launch the camera app, and wait for the camera to boot up, the moment is gone. Opportunity lost, and now everyone is mad at you.

As of iOS 5, you can access the camera right from the lockscreen (you don’t even have to unlock it! Don’t worry, though: you can’t access your older photos this way. Your booty pics are safe.)

To quick-jump to the camera: from the lock screen (the screen with the “Slide to unlock” bar), double tap the home button. You’ll see music controls pop up on top, while a camera icon appears directly beside the unlock bar. Tap that, and you’re immediately inside the camera. (Note: this only seems to work on the iPhone and camera-enabled iPod Touches. It’s a no go on iPad.)

Got any more easy, kinda-hidden tricks that new iOS device owners should know? Drop it in a comment below.

Bonus Tricks:

• To take a screenshot in any app, press the home and power button simultaneously for just a second. The photo will be stored in your camera roll. Holding the buttons too long will reset your device, so stop once the display flashes.
• In nearly all applications, you can scroll to the top of long pages (such as long websites, or long emails) by tapping the status bar (read: the bar with the clock.)
• Use iCloud. Seriously. It takes a second or two to set up (2/3 people I’ve watched setup iPhones recently skipped it), but it’s absolutely worth it if only for the photo/contact backup.

The hackers at XDA Developers have been hard at work trying to port Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich onto the Android Kindle Fire. The first success was made in early December when a limited version of ICS was run on the Fire. Last week there was a breakthrough in what the XDA coders are calling a “pre-alpha” of the fire running an actual version of the newest Android OS. See the video below.

Are you an astronaut? Did you pack extra Twinkies for your trip to the International Space Station? If so, NASA might be on to you, my friend.

Kidding aside, it’s critical to keep an accurate tab on the weight of those in space. This is due to the simple fact that muscles have a lovely habit of atrophying when not in use. And in space, where resistance is lower (but not quite futile), the muscles attached to the bones and ligaments of our glorious astronauts tend to shrivel.

Of course this is combated with exercise and the like, but that isn’t a perfect fit. That in mind, the ground crew keeps numbers on what their suspended charges weigh. The problem is that scales, as we know them here, don’t work in null-gravity. Tools have been built to measure weight, but they are imperfect.

Enter The Kinect

As it shakes down, the Kinect might be a useful replacement for the current system. The work of Carmelo Velardo, the man with a Kinect plan, is described thusly by New Scientist:

Along with colleagues at the Italian Institute of Technology’s Center for Human Space Robotics in Torino, he used the Kinect’s depth-sensing ability to create a 3D model of an astronaut. Then the team ran their calculation using a statistical model that links weight to body measurements based on a database of 28,000 people. Velardo’s estimates are 97 per cent accurate, corresponding to an average error of just 2.7 kilograms, which is comparable to the current method used on board the ISS.

If that doesn’t make your inner-nerd melt with excitement, you need to dig up your soldering iron; it has been too long.

However, actually getting things into space is fantastically expensive, and so the chance of the Kinect making it to space in the short term is slim, but this sort of thing is exactly what people don’t understand when they complain that something is either ‘pure science,’ or ‘just a toy;’ oftentimes the line between the two is vague, if it exists at all.

For more NASA, be sure and check out its new weather satellite system.