This is where Rock Melt comes in. Rock Melt is a socially savvy web browser that connects to your facebook account to bring you all your friends and status messages directly to your browser without needing to stop what you are doing. Aside from the awesome name and logo, the application its self is pretty good for a beta. This is not the first socially savvy browser in the world, one very popular social browser is flock.

Flock has not done so well over the years and has not become much of a hit at all. Rock Melt hopes to change this, they have very good funding, and a great team behind it working on some cool features.

Features

integration, integration, integration.

Rock Melt provides excellent integration with facebook and twitter. The whole browser is actually plugged directly into facebook and requires a facebook login to use it. The integration is completely secure because it goes through Rock Melt’s encrypted server connections.

facebook.

As i have already mentioned the facebook integration gets an A+. There is a static left sidebar that shows you all your online facebook friends. You can click on their picture and start chatting, view their recent activity or write on their wall. You can also add your important friends to your starred favorites. On the top of the left sidebar you can post a quick status update to twitter or facebook, log out or go offline.

Plugins, Feeds, Twitter and more facebook.

Moving over to the right sidebar we have your plugins, twitter feed facebook feed and a interesting website feed feature. If a website with a rss feed is detected you can easily add it to the sidebar and get updates and quick access to new content. The twitter and the facebook feed are nothing special, just a continuous feed of all the updates with a update count on the bottom of the icon.

Interesting UI note:

all update windows, chat windows and such can be snapped off so you can take them with you across your desktop. Much like a standalone social media app.

Search Area:

The first half of the search area is filled with a standard url field that will search Google if you enter some text and hit enter. In the middle their is a Share button which can post to twitter or facebook. And all the way at the end is another interesting feature, a dedicated search box. This doesn’t work like most dedicated search boxes, this search box will overlay the Google results in a small window over your current page without sending you to a search engine.

Bookmarks

nothing special

Under the hood:

Rock Melt is based on the Google Chromium project which is also what Google Chrome is built on. That means the whole Internet will work and it will work fast.

Conclusion

• Great facebook integration
• Good status updating
• Great rss integration
• Nice User Interface
• Great browsing engine (webkit, Chromium)

In the latest update to Adobe Flash Player, Adobe has added along with a few other teaks “Support for multi-touch and gesture-enabled content. What comes to mind with multi-touch…? Ah the iPhone! Oh and Android. One big problem with flash content on mobile devices has always been that flash is a very pointer oriented platform. Meaning it relies on a mouse for all its hover effects.

Now with multi-touch and gesture-enabled content developers can get cracking with their new feature and make them restaurant sites more touch friendly in the future.

1. People can get very agitated when they can’t find what their looking for, and when they see that you have posted a thread in a forum and come back later to say its ok now and you fixed it without posting how you did it.  So to combat this, post in enough detail how you fixed the problem.  Heck if you have a blog make a full length blog post and link of to it! but do NOT spam.

2. Don’t keep repeating the question! Ok we get it you have the same problem. But they are people who just want to find an answer. if you don’t know how to fix it refrain from posting at all.

3.  Found the answer? Help others out by posting to unanswered forum threads a link to where you found a good explanation/fix/answer etc.

4. Don’t troll. Ok you’re looking for some sort of  cheat for a video game, one of the posters has mentioned how to do this on his PS3 and you go ahead and leave a reply “Ha! ps3 sucks! fa!g” . Well that’s not nice is it? How would you like it if someone punched you in the face?. Forums are supposed to be a nice clean environment and if it was my forum you were trolling on I’d have you banned, and so would many others.

5. Last but most certainty not least, don’t double post! At least do a search! How hard can it be? Do your research before you post, please. But if you come across a double post, don’t start trolling on the thread. Saying that it has already been answered. The question might be slightly different.

And that’s the top 5 top tips.

Via: Tek411

Messenger.

Messenger got a nice redesign which brings many new social features to the table. It integrates a large number of services you can pick and customize into a single feed, much like[blippr] friend feed[/blippr]. Once you add a account you can easily change your privacy settings for each service from the live.com online interface.

The messenger interface has changed slightly. All the buttons have moved to a single row under the text area. The block button has changed to a “Appear Offline to this Person” which i prefer since it works better for the way i personally block people. There is also an “Always on top” button to keep the window “Always on top”. An awesome new feature that comes with the beta is tabbed conversations! I can finally cut down on those millions of what windows i have open and have all my conversations in one window much like a tabbed browser.

The main application has two modes/layouts, you can have the huge feed of all your friends or you can switch to the compact chat only view in the top right. A few of the old features like themes settings have been moved to the drop-down menu. Finally, you can easily enter a preview links before you post them as your status.

sync.

sync is a very cool program. It’s completely new to this generation of essentials and has two uses.

First of all it does what it says on the can, it “syncs” you can select folders to sync to your 25gb of Sky Drive cloud storage. This works much like the popular sync program, dropbox. It’s also much easier to sync documents and IE bookmarks with the cloud and multiple computers.

The second feature remote desktop connection. You can connect to your computer over th internet and use it just like you where right there. Much like services like TeamViewer or GoToAssist.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ci46MjpReI

Photo Gallery / Movie Maker.

These two apps haven’t changed much they have just got better integration with Facebook, youtube, skydrive and other services. One cool feature Photo Gallery got though is photo tagging just like on Facebook. And the cool thing is when you upload the photo to skydrive or Facebook the tags are preserved.

Mail.

Not much has been done to mail either the only big change is it’s much easier to integrate other email accounts like Yahoo! Mail or Gmail.

Writer.

This is one of my favorite apps. Writer allows you to post to your favorite blogging platform (Blogger, Spaces and WordPress!). Has some cool plugin support and a great blog theme fetcher which will automatically set it’s self up to look like your blog. And to prove how cool it is, this post was written in live Writer.

There are plenty of other great applications that can capture your screen very well, such as BB FlashBack which many YouTube screen-casters use. There are also some good gaming recorders like Fraps which captures games in the highest frame rate possible without slowing down your system too much like Camtasia Studio or BB FlashBack. For you mac guys out their, ScreenFlow is for you. It offers a lot of cool features and customization, but i still recommend  Camtasia:mac which I reviewed. And finally for all you guys who just want a simple easy to use recorder with no fuss that is completely free, theres CamStudio.

As for my background music i get most of it from ClearBits (aka: legaltorrents.com ). But if you have your own music you would like to hear in the background of my videos don’t hesitate to drop me a line at alpha@alphacomputing.net

Camtasia Studio is extremely powerful and I go over most of my edits and features I use about half way through the video bellow.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3Fdqp_Prws

I currently own a 8gb [blippr]iPod[/blippr]Touch 3g which does not fully support all the features. So i booted up synced up and started up my iPod, expecting my wallpaper ( a very minor feature ) new folders, the new safari integration… But i was left very dissatisfied. All Apple is giving us is an ad filled OS. The only feature we get for older hardware that worked well is the iAds platform. On older hardware, we don’t get wallpaper, multitasking and “descent” folders. All of which i could do very well on the same device while it was jail broken. Why the evil doers at Apple can’t give me a wallpaper and folders that work well, i don’t know. You’re probably wondering why i think the folders are so bad. Well it’s because while everyone was in oar when Steve Jobs showed them off on the iOS4 demo a few months ago he skipped over the fact that you can only have 12 icons in one folder! Thats right, less than a page of apps is a single folder. I cant even scroll through them like i could on the popular Categories app available through Cydia on a Jail Broken iPod and iPhone.

In conclusion, if your currently on older unsupported hardware, don’t upgrade. Stay with your jailbreak and be happy. I know what my next phone will be

So once you have added User Agent Switcher to Firefox you can go up into Tools and click on “Default User Agent”. You should have some default user agents like IE and the iPhone. We need to add the iPad ourselves so we click on “Edit User Agents” inside the “Default User Agent” menu. Here we click on “New” and then “New User Agent”. It should ask you to fill out a few fields. You can enter any user agent for any device you would like, there’s a good list of user agents over at Wikipedia if you would like to try that, but we are going to continue with the iPad.

You should still be in the “New User Agent” window. In the Description enter iPad . For the user agent paste this in:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10

Then for the App Name: Mobile Safari
And app version: 5.0 (Macintosh; en-US)

Click ok and go back into “Tools>Default User Agent” and choose your new user agent “iPad”. Now go around the web and any site that has separate iPad site should load up. BUT, not all iPad functionality is supported by FireFox because the iPad ships with Safari which renders things slightly differently and has full HTML5 support.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOzjZ4byRfQ

Thanks for reading and feel free to share if this was helpful or interesting. Fun fact: The word “user agent” was used 30 times on this article.

[cb type=”product”]iPad[/cb]
[cb type=”product”]FireFox[/cb]

This service uses the YouTube API which means it imports all the music from YouTube which means it is pretty fast. You can search for any artist, band or album you fancy and when you start playing the song the video will begin playing in the side and player controls will load beneath. If you click on an album you will get a new tab open (in muziic) where it will display the songs in that album and give you the option to share that album with your friends over twitter, facebook, MySpace, Digg etc.On the left you can create playlists so you can listen to your favorite songs without interruption.

Another great feature is their desktop client which is available for Windows (for now) and has a slick black look. Functionality is the same. But since they do have the web player you don’t ever need to download anything. Just as long as you have flash you will be fine. For your portable music experience they have a iPhone app. It has all the basic functionality of the desktop and web apps and even has continuous playback.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtxE8W94EYs

So that’s how to get your music free fast and legally. If you have found this post helpful feel free to share with your friends because “sharing is caring”.