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Socialbakers – is a Facebook analytics website that provides a wide range of statistical data on different aspects of the world’s largest social networking website. With Socialbakers, you can check out various quantitative Facebook traffic data on different countries, pages, brands, apps and developers, and advertising. Read more: Socialbakers: Provides Detailed Facebook Statistics & Analytics

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Notifications

This is one thing that Android users have been rather smug about, but iOS 5 levels the playing field and does more. Notification Center is a pull down screen available at any time. It basically amalgamates all of your notifications onto one screen that’s “always on”, and even adds little weather and stocks displays.

Not only that, but notifications are no longer intrusive. Instead of blocking the screen and pausing your current app, the notifications are displayed at the top of the screen. You can still click them to go straight to the app in question, or you can pull down the full notification view to see any others.

The notification view on the lock screen has also improved greatly, breaking up various sections of notifications and allowing you to swipe to access any of them straight away – rather than unlocking the phone, finding the app which the notification was from, and opening it from there.

Lock Screen Camera Button & Photo Editing

Since one of the primary uses of your iPhone is to take pictures, there’s a new single click photo app access button from the lock screen. Not only that, but the volume up button can now also function as a shutter (something which was previously available in a third party app – then ripped out by Apple on the basis it would confuse users!). It’s a welcome addition, but certainly nothing revolutionary.

You can also now focus and hold to lock in that auto exposure/focus setting, so moving around won’t mess up your scene.

Along with the slightly upgraded camera app comes some basic photo editing in the Photos app. Red-eye reduction, one-click enhance, and crop/rotate can now all be performed from within the app, something which has been possible with third party apps but was missing from the core functionality.

Twitter Integration

I can’t say I’m excited about this, but some of you might be. There’s now a single sign on mechanism for Twitter in the iOS settings, and tweet buttons and functions all over the place, with a nice little “tweetsheet” with letter count-down, optional location and photo.

iMessage

I expect this feature is going to be overlooked, but it sounds to me like a huge middle finger up at the ridiculous charges from mobile carriers for SMS messaging. The new iMessage app is an enhanced messaging app for inter-iOS 5 communication, and as such will use your regular (and MUCH cheaper) data plan rather than regular SMS charges. With full multimedia capabilities, it also adds encryption and read notification. Obviously, you can still send multimedia messages to users of other phones, but those will be subject to your regular carrier charges.

Another amazing feature is that this completely bridges the divide between iPad, iPhone and iPad touch – since iMessage will work on wifi or 3G networks, messaging is no longer tied to a mobile carrier. Though it hasn’t been announced, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this making its way to OsX, or at least be interoperable with iChat for true Apple cross-device messaging.

iCloud

iCloud is an automatic wireless syncing service with lots of core functionality that’s set to replace the aging and costly Mobile.me service. In fact, you get a free @me.com address with service, and it’s completely free with iOS 5. For this you’ll get 5GB of storage included – however, it’s important to note that your purchased music, books, apps, and photostream don’t count towards this total allowance – so the 5GB is exclusively for settings and documents.

One absolutely stunning annoucement is that for $25/year, your iCloud will “match” all your current ripped songs with 256kbs DRM-free versions in the cloud – far, far cheaper than any similar services and completely avoiding the need to upload your files at all. This is quite incredible, and considering iCloud will save me $99/year on mobile.me services alone, I think $25/year for upgrade cloud versions of my entire music collection is quite a good deal.

We’ll cover the new iCloud feature in detail closer to launch.

Wireless Syncing & Computer-Less Setup

Wait, did I just mention wireless syncing? Yes! Not only do your documents, photos and apps now automatically sync using iCloud, but you no longer need to connect to iTunes to sync your music and videos. This also fixes a long time annoyance of new iPhone users that they must connect and sync to iTunes once before they can even use their new phone – now it’s usable straight out of the box.

Reminders

Potentially killing all the current to-do list apps in one fell swoop, Reminders is a location and time aware list app that’s an entirely new core application for iOS 5. Apart from being a simple list maker, location awareness is able to set reminders dependent upon your current location.

For example, by adding a reminder “phone Jane when you leave London“, your device will set up a perimeter around London, and give you a location reminder to “phone Jane” when you physically leave the perimeter set up. Time-aware also adds some simple time commands that have been built-in to iMail for a while, such as “meeting with bob at 3pm Thursday“. In short, it’s a highly intelligent list maker, to-do list and scheduling app.

With so many exciting new iOS 5 features, I can hardly wait. Is iCloud going to be a DropBox killer? Will wireless syncing give iOS the ultimate edge over Android? I just haven’t got the space to cover all the new features and apps, so stay tuned as we continue to highlight some more incredible new features. What are you most looking forward to?

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Team Crossword – created by Microsoft FUSE labs, is a way to group-solve crossword puzzles (though you can play individually too). Connect your Facebook account, log in and get started with any of the crossword puzzles listed on the site. You can also invite your friends to play the same crossword. Read more: Team Crossword: Solve Crosswords With Friends Online

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Here’s a brief overview of some of the apps we’ll be looking at today:

Mesh

Sync files and folders across the Internet, between both your own PC’s, your Live Skydrive, or friends and family PC’s too. This also works with Mac OSX.

Remote Access

Control your PC from anywhere in the world!

PhotoFuse

Make perfect group shots by combining the best bits of various shots.

There’s a whole suite of apps included in the download that actually do a whole lot more besides, but I’ll leave that up to you to discover them all or for future articles.

Getting Started

Head on over to Windows Cloud and hit the large Get Started button at the top right. If you’re running Windows 7, you should be shown a download button, so go ahead and do so.

I’ll be installing the full selection of apps on my main PC, as well as adding just the Mesh app to my Windows Home Server and Mac, so you’ll get a good overview of all the cool stuff included.

You’ll also need a Windows Live ID, so sign up here if you don’t already have one. You can use an existing email address – you don’t need to sign up specifically for a Windows Live one.

For those of you wanting to interact with your Mac too, there are OsX versions of Mesh, Remote Desktop Control & Messenger for HD video chat.

Mesh: File Syncing Across Computers

Once it’s all installed and you’ve restarted, open up Start Menu -> All Programs -> Windows Live -> Windows Live Mesh and sign in using the details you signed up with earlier.

The first thing I’ll do is choose a folder to sync, and set it up so that my photos folder is synced across PCs as well as my home Mac. Do this on each PC you wish to sync, and start with just one folder to test it out.

Once you’ve added one folder to sync, it should be listed when you sign in on a different machine. You can choose to either sync it to the same location (like My Pictures), or choose a specific folder to keep it in sync with (the screenshot below is from the Mac version).

Once you’ve a got a few machines set up, Mesh will start automatically syncing them all. You can see a progress report if you click on the folder to expand the view:

My test set of about 300MB of photos took less than 5 minutes to sync across 3 local systems. Of course, syncing across the Internet may take longer – but that’s still a pretty incredible speed, I must admit.

To share the folder and sync to friends and family instead of your own Windows Live account, you need to expand the view as above and click on the Shared With: Just Me link. You’ll be taken to the Live Devices site when you can invite up to 9 other users to sync the folder with, where it will then appear on their Mesh app.

Remote Control

Also available for Mac in the form of Remote Desktop (you’ll need to know the IP address to connect to though). On the Windows side you can manage this also using the Mesh app. Just click Remote at the top of the screen to be shown which devices are available and how to enable it on the current computer.

Be aware that when you connect remotely, the user is logged off on that PC locally in order to prevent concurrent access. Once connected, you’ll be presented with a regular login screen.

Understandably there is a little lag when connecting over the Internet, but on a local network for upstairs/downstairs PC control it’s incredibly responsive. If you’re using Internet Explorer, you can even connect directly from within the browser by using the Windows Live Devices online management portal.

PhotoFuse

Though I do love my Mac for full photo management, it’s little features like this that make Live Photo Gallery that little bit more appealing. PhotoFuse is designed for group shots, and allows you to take the best bits of two photos and merge them together. To do so, open Photo Gallery and locate the group shots you want to use, then highlight them and select PhotoFuse from the Create menu.

Use the selection tool to highlight which bit you’d like to change, and the popup will show you the choices you have.

The results are pretty good, allowing you to ‘fix’ those precious memories. Of course, the software can’t make someone smile, but it can take the best bits and merge them all together.

Conclusion

That’s all we’ve got time for today, but I would encourage you to download the full Windows Live Essentials / Cloud pack and see all the other goodies in there. The file syncing functionality is perhaps the best around, and you aren’t limited to whatever Dropbox gives you. I’m also impressed that Microsoft has included certain Mac versions of the apps, something which would have been unheard of in the past – great news for any of us running a mixed device network.

Do you make use of any other Windows Live apps or Mesh in your home network? Let us know how you use it, and what your favourite app is in the comments! />
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The Magic Of Middle-Click

Middle-clicking actually does two reverse actions. It can either be used to close an instance of an application, or open a new instance. How so, you ask? Check out this screenshot to understand:

In other words, if you middle-click the icon, you get a new instance of the application. If you middle-click the Aero Peek thumbnail, the current window is closed.

Run As Administrator

To run an application from the Windows 7 taskbar as an administrator, left-click its icon while holding down the Shift and Ctrl keys. Windows will pop-up a UAC prompt asking for Administrator privileges, and once you confirm, the application will run with elevated rights. Note: if the application is already running, Windows will simply open a new instance of it, not elevate the existing instance (this cannot be done, technically).

Change The Size Of Aero Peek Thumbnails

This next trick does require a download, but it’s free, tiny, and you have to run it just once. It’s an application called Windows 7 Taskbar Thumbnail Customizer, and it lets you set a slew of parameters affecting the taskbar thumbnails:

For my own system, I simply opted for larger thumbnails. I find them very handy, especially when I’m a bit farther than usual from my monitor. Windows Taskbar Thumbnail Customizer doesn’t require administrative privileges, is mobile and free, and once you run it and set the parameters to your liking, you can even remove it from your system.

Disable Aero Peek For The Desktop

A few days ago, a friend of mine (who is a Windows 7 novice) made an interesting complaint. While working on her laptop, all windows would disappear every now and then. She would just be merrily typing away, and all of a sudden, poof go the windows, and it all vanishes. Needless to say, she was frustrated. I then looked at her setup, and the mystery was solved. She was using an external mouse, and every now and then she would nudge it with her wrist while typing.

The cursor was close to the bottom-right area of the screen, where the Aero Peek hotspot for the desktop can be found. Whenever the mouse hovered over this hotspot, all windows would indeed “disappear” (become transparent), and the desktop would show through. It wasn’t obvious to her where the cursor is, because it was virtually off-screen.

When something like this happens, you can simply disable Aero peek for the desktop, like so:

This is the bottom-right area of the taskbar (which is vertical in my case). Simply right-click the Aero Peek hotspot for the desktop, and a menu pops up, letting you disable it. Simply uncheck “Peek at desktop“, and you’re good to go. The windows will now stop “disappearing”.

Your Turn Now

What crucial Windows 7 taskbar tricks did I miss? What’s the first thing you show your novice friends when they start using Windows 7? Let us know in the comments! />
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But email, like everything else in life, has constantly evolved since the first email was sent over ARPANET in 1971.  No longer are we restricted to what Microsoft offers.   Today we have a wide variety of choices including the ever popular Gmail.  Instead of only having the paid Outlook for desktop emails, you can also choose from free and open source alternatives such as Thunderbird.  But email is perhaps now under threat from the rise of other forms of popular communication such as social networks and SMS text messaging.

Below is an infographic, produced by Microsoft, which shows the Evolution Of Email.   Let us know what you think of it and if there is another email fact not shown below.   Where do you see email heading in the future?   Can it fight off the likes of Facebook and Twitter?   Or is its days numbered?

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TomTom Live Traffic – Staying in touch with traffic conditions can be a great help when you need to reach a destination fast. Here to offer live traffic conditions from streets around the world is a wonderful web service called TomTom Live Traffic, a free to use web service that lets you view live traffic conditions from around the world. Read more: Tomtom LiveTraffic: Check Live Traffic Conditions Online

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