Two years ago Friday — Jan. 27, 2010 — Apple unveiled the iPad to the world. At the time, critics and analysts were quick to mock the name, criticize the devices shortcomings and predict that while the Apple name would sell the product, it wouldn’t create a new market.

Boy, were they wrong. The device was an immediate success, quickly becoming the fastest-selling gadget of all time.

Even those of us who were bullish on the iPad have had our expectations blown out of the water.

As a company, Apple just had its most successful financial quarter ever and sold 15.4 million iPads. Apple CEO Tim Cook says he can envision a time when the tablet market will be larger than the PC market, at least in numbers of units sold.

Looking at the trends in computing — especially with the rise of Ultrabooks — the merging of the tablet and the computer into one device certainly seems possible. Some Windows laptop makers are already attempting such a hybrid, with mixed success.

Two years after its introduction, the iPad has not only created the modern tablet market, it has had a transformative effect on publishing, education and entertainment. The rate at which the iPad has become a widely-adopted piece of technology — from the car service in my neighborhood to hospitals to airlines — is staggering.

Read Full Article

Facebook has done it’s darndest to take over your digital life. The massively popular social network has your photos, videos, a news feed, apps and games and even instant messaging. Seeking further ubiquity, Facebook is bringing its Facebook Messenger IM feature to Windows 7 as a desktop download.

While Facebook Messenger may play second fiddle to chat services such as Google’s Gchat, Facebook Messenger has amassed a horde of dedicated users — not to mention the millions of people that use Facebook every day.

Of course, the software isn’t entirely surprising. Facebook Messenger for Windows 7 was recently leaked to the interwebs as a private, unauthorized download. Facebook is fighting fire with fire by releasing an official version of the download which you can get here through a direct download. Facebook Messenger has been available as a mobile app for some time but this is the first (official) release for a Windows desktop.

Read full article

 Facebook subscriptions are about to blow up! At Le Web, Joanna Shields, VP and Managing Director for Facebook Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), announced that the company is planning to roll out a “Subscribe” plugin for all websites.

The plugin will allow a website’s visitors a one-click way to begin following all of the news from an individual reporter, public figure, politician, celebrity, or anyone else who wants to post public updates via their Facebook user profile. You may recall that Facebook launched its “subscriptions” feature earlier this fall at its annual f8 conference.

The button, available as an optional addition to your Facebook user profile, introduced a Twitter-like functionality to the social networking service. It introduced one-way friendships (at last!) where a user could follow someone, like a public figure, celebrity, politician, journalist, etc., without that person having to “friend” the subscriber in return. This benefits both parties – the subscriber who wants to use Facebook to receive the news, and the public figure who wants to reach their audience on Facebook, but isn’t a brand or company deserving of their own Facebook Fan Page.

Read full article

Among certain circles (my family, some of my coworkers, etc.) I’m known for my Googling skills. I can find anything, anywhere, in no time flat. My Google-fu is a helpful skill, but not one that’s shrouded in too much mystery — I’ve just mastered some very helpful search tricks and shortcuts and learned to quickly identify the best info in a list of results.

Sadly, though web searches have become and integral part of the academic research landscape, the art of the Google search is an increasingly lost one. A recent study at Illinois Wesleyan University found that fewer than 25% of students could perform a “reasonably well-executed search.” Wrote researchers, “The majority of students — of all levels — exhibited significant difficulties that ranged across nearly every aspect of the search process.”

That search process also included determining when to rely on Google and when to utilize scholarly databases, but on a fundamental level, it appears that many people just don’t understand how to best find the information they seek using Google.

Read full article 

Word on the street is that YouTube has a slick new design. It’s a revamped homepage with some pretty tight Google+ social integration and content discovery features.

But if you’ve fired up your trusty Internet machine and the new YouTube hasn’t yet appeared for you, don’t fret. Our friends at The Verge have figured out an easy way (via Google+ user Mortiz Tolxdorff) to turn on the new features right the heck now.

At present, the trick only seems to work in Firefox and Chrome. Open up your browser’s development tools:

In Firefox: Ctrl + Shift + K (Win) | Cmd + Shift + K (Mac)

In Chrome: Ctrl + Shift + J (Win) | or Cmd + Alt + J (Mac)

Then add this string of delicious and nutritious code to the console:

Close your development tools, then reload The YouTubes. Voila! A fresh homepage for videos.

It’s been a huge week for digital music lockers. First Apple made iTunes Match available to U.S. customers, then Google Music launched. These two services are competing with with Amazon’s Cloud Player (which is integrated with the new Kindle Fire) in a new realm of cloud music storage.

The three major contenders offer similar products with a similar mission: Allow users to buy new music and access existing libraries from multiple devices, via the cloud.

Here’s how the services compare to one another in terms of ease of use, pricing, mobile accessibility, and track selection.

A disclaimer: I am a Mac owner. As a result, my desktop experiences are based around Mac OS X Lion. Windows integration may differ. For this test I used the new HTC Rezound, the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 and the Amazon Kindle Fire.

Read full article

Feeds are the easiest way to view updated content, whether it’s through a feed reader or outputted onto a web site. There are many different types of feeds, such as RSS or Atom, and many different ways display them on your site, such as using MagpieRSS to parse an RSS feed in PHP. However, you can also display feeds on your site using JavaScript, so in this post I’m going to be talking about a feed format called JSON and how you can use JavaScript to parse it out and display it.

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a data format that is easy to read and language-independent, meaning you can parse it using any programming language. Both Yahoo! and Google have been offering data from their sites in JSON format for the past couple years. A good example of this is Flickr. Anyone with a Flickr account can access a JSON feed of their photos. Read more

The F-Layout relies upon various eyetracking studies for it’s foundational concept. These scientific studies show that web surfers read the screen in an “F” pattern – seeing the top, upper left corner and left sides of the screen most… only occasionally taking glances towards the right side of the screen. These eyetracking studies argue in favor of placing the most important elements of your site (branding, navigation, call to action) on the left side of the design. Read more