Novocained » Aditya

NovoTalk – Free Google Chat (Gtalk) on Windows Mobile

Aditya — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:40:49 +0000

This is my first public release of an application that I made for Windows Mobile. I use Google Chat a lot, and felt the need of an application specific for that , which didn’t require third party registrations. There are a couple of them which connect directly to Google chat, but are paid. This is a restricted beta (for now), which I will provide on first come basis. Developers are welcome to share thoughts and help to improve this product. The aim is to develop a Windows Google Chat client replica for mobile platform.
Public Beta will be available shortly after the initial testing is complete.

Application Features

(v0.1 Beta)

● Text messages
● Avatars
● Finger Touch/Scroll Friend List
● Marquee for long status messages
● New email notification
● Tab based Chatting
● Notification on new Message (sound + vibrate)
● Detect Invisible Users
● Friend list sorted just like Windows client (Gtalk) on basis of availabilty and name.
● Cool GUI

Features to be worked out for next release (in order)

Invisible mode support
Show/Hide Offline Contacts
Adding, removing and authorizing friends
Account Registration
Smilies in chat window
Better & Faster GUI (Designers, heartily welcome to submit ideas)
File Transfer (Jabber as well as Google’s implementation of Jingle, developers are welcome to work on this feature)
Automatic Updates
Search for a friend in list
Themes

Additional Information

● Call feature seems to be a distant addition. It is not well documented by Google, but it definitely will be added to NovoTalk.
● I have no plans to release the source code, until I feel that this application is out of Beta. So yeah, at the end it might be an open-sourced application, but it will definitely be free.

● NovoTalk requires .Net Compact Framework 3.5 to be installed on your Windows Mobile.

Important

● This application works properly only on for QVGA devices(240×340), although later version might support other resolutions/smartphones
● Version 0.1 Beta, will collect the MD5 hashes of device IMEI’s to keep a track of the number of testers. No personal information will be collected.

Login Screen Connecting Screen Friend List with Available

Friend List Settings Friend List Busy Status Multi Tab Chat Screen

Report Bug Suggest a feature Donate

You can request for a early BETA version in the comments below.

Update Gtalk status from Spotify

Aditya — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 22:05:14 +0000

Spotify is an excellent free P2P music streaming service that is currently available to residents of UK, France and neighboring countries. Most of the Gtalk users like to update their status with the current track that they are listening to. Gtalk supports Windows Media Player, Winamp and iTunes. Now that Spotify is becoming a craze, I thought of making a small application to update the Gtalk status directly from the current track from Spotify.

This application is written in C#, and hence will require the latest .net Framework to be installed on your machine. At present only windows version of Spotify is supported as official Gtalk application is not available for other platforms. Feel free to post bugs and improvements, although its a small application.:)

This is a early version, hence there might be some bugs. Please report them at aditya[at]novocained[dot]com

SCREENSHOT

EDIT : This app somehow fails to work when you select “Current Music Track” option from Gtalk. Set the status to “Available” or “Busy”

Fake Twitter Invites

Aditya — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:01:20 +0000

If you are not a Twitter user, this implies more to you. Symantec has warned internet users about malicious email from “invitations@twitter.com” which contains an attachment. If this attachment is downloaded extracts email addresses from your computer and then copies itself to shared folders and removable drives.

The subject of this e-mail is “Your friend invited you to twitter!” similar to the mail that is actually sent fro Twitter when a friend invites you, but the original Twitter mail does not contain any attachment. This attachment is name Invitation Card.zip for deceiving users but it actually is W32.Ackantta.B@mm – a nasty, email address-harvesting worm.

Surprisingly this has got nothing to do with Twitter, or does not even target its users. It just uses the popularity of Twitter to spread . Simply delete such mails without downloading the file.

Orkut for your mobile phone

Aditya — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:51:58 +0000

Finally, the wait is over! I am so happy to know that Google has officially launched an app for Orkut for mobile phones! This application is J2ME based which means you dont need any high end phone to be able to use this application.

Here are some of the features :

Read and write scraps
Status updates
View photos
View friends and phone contacts in the same list
Access scrapbook, photos, and friend list while offline
Take and upload photos
Call, message, or share photos with friends and phone contacts

This will be a good initiative as users like me will be able touse orkut from office as well . I will post an update/feedback as soon as I get my internet working at my place .

No more branded links in tweets?

Aditya — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:23:10 +0000

Today I noticed something really strange at Twitter.When I saw the tweets posted by me from my own application, they were branded as “from web”.

The issue has been resolved by Twitter and the branded links can be seen again,guess it was some technical glitch.

Also tweets from other applications didn’t have application names in it. What’s going on Twitter?

All the application names were replaces with “web”. My application uses Oauth, still its name was replaced. I think its something to do with all those applications out there that have flooded the internet. Was my purpose of making a new application defeated?

I will update this post once I get to know about this issue!

All new plug-in, skin you Firefox browser

Aditya — Sat, 23 May 2009 11:21:47 +0000

Someone’s been shopping! Firefox got all new dresses via the Personas plugin. This plugin is developed by Mozilla Labs and allows firefox to change its appearance in a single click.You must be wondering that we already had themes for firefox what’s
the catch here?

Well, Themes consists of packages to modify your icons,fonts and menus of the browser. Whereas personas changes the gray background of menus giving it a cool appearance. Also, its one time download plugin unlike themes in which a new package always needed to be installed.

This plugin allows skin selection on category basis. The skin can be changed by just clicking on the icon in the lower left on the browser’s status panel.

You can just visit the Gallery after installing this plugin to get some skins. What’s more interesting is when you take your mouse pointer over an image for the skin, the skin automatically gets changed in your browser!

Here are some of the skins

Designer: googlonAdded: 4/1/2009

10,710 active daily users

view details »

Designer: MaDonna

Added: 4/2/2009

7,356 active daily users

view details »

Mozilla Firefox

Designer: CoreXE

Added: 4/6/2009

Just a Firefox Persona.

19,492 active daily users

view details »

Designer: Sean.Martell

Added: 12/18/2008

19,105 active daily users

view details »

New Sony Playstation with Motion Sensor.

Aditya — Fri, 01 May 2009 21:09:50 +0000

If you are a Playstation fan, and all your Wii owning pals tease you for the Sisaxis technology of your box, then here is a news.

Sony's new motion sensor technology!

Sony is planning to unveil a new and much better motion sensing controller that was in the pipeline since 2007 , the year when the patent was announced by Sony. It is being heard that this technology will utilize a video camera and LED’s to track the player’s movements.

The hand held will be able to differentiate coloured lights and also detect the shape and angle od each light. What more it will also track the movements in the vertical(technically Z-axis), making it very accurate! There are romours that it will be launched in E3 2009, i.e around June 2-4.

Simulation of a real brain?

Aditya — Fri, 01 May 2009 20:56:25 +0000

How far can technology go to recreate a mammalian brain? Well if its AI you are talking about, its not even .0001% of what the real brain is capable of achieving.

Neurons in a mammalian brain (Image courtesy, The Blue Brain Project)

I had a look at an interesting project, the Blue Brain Project, whose aim is to reverse engineer the mamallian brain to obtain the mechanism of its working through detailed simulations. To simulate these the project uses IBM Blue gene supercomputer! Biologically speaking our brain is made of many neurons that transmit the information in electronical pulses.

The interesting thing here is that they have been able to recreate a virtual pack of neurons that respond simliar to our brain! Rather than trying to create a model of the whole brain at once, the Blue Brain Project is attempting to accurately model a single NCC in a rat’s brain. If they can create an artificial column that responds the same way that biological ones do to electrical impulses, they’ll be on the right track to building a good model.
I am sure that much more will be achieved in future where we will actually see AI androids that we saw in iRobot

Check out the Blue Brain Project

Windows 7 release date leaked.

Aditya — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:59:33 +0000

Windows 7 has created much anticipation amongst the Microsoft users for its ’stability,eye-candy,virtual xp mode’ amongst others.

Windows 7 to be release somewhere near October Mid?

It has been confirmed by an Acer executive that one of their products, Acer Aspire Z5600 PC will be launched on 23rd October 2009 that will be preloaded with Windows 7. Now thats some news! So you should expect the release date to be somewhere near it. Also, if you purchase a system with Vista 30 days before the release of 7, you will be eligible for free upgrade too. The RC1 of Windows 7 is already doing rounds on MSDN and TechNet.

Look out at this post for more news on release date.

Zoom images in Wordpress using Magic Thumb

Aditya — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:12:53 +0000

I came across a great tool called Magic Thumb. It is a neat way of enlarging thumbail images using a JavaScript effect similar to a lightbox.

Features

Enjoyable – clever effect that people enjoy using.
Fast – the large images download after the page has fully loaded.
Easy – integrate it into your website in minutes.
Customisable – change the speed, keyboard behaviour, colors.
Accessible – if JavaScript is disabled, the large image opens as link.

One good thing about it is you don’t need to load a new page or use popup windows. It just loads the images immediately on click.

The user experience is rich – people like the web 2.0 lightbox enlarge effect. Users appreciate that it is immediate – the large image enlarges on click without waiting for it to download. This gives a better experience than waiting (as with an AJAX lightbox that requests images on demand).

You can display an unlimited number of images on a page. Large images have large file sizes, so be sure to compress your images with a good ratio of size to quality (aim for a JPEG filesize of 30-70kb). You can use JPEG, PNG or GIF.

You can request a free license if you use it for non-commercial purpose like me.

Check out more here.