Info Pioneer

L et’s say a company is about to launch a new product and, as is the standard practice, they have pre-briefed a select group of media outlets and bloggers about the news under an embargo. The launch date is close and writers have already prepared their news stories so that they can push them as soon as embargo is lifted. And then something strange happens – one media outlet publishes the story ahead of time thus breaking the embargo – intentionally or unintentionally. Find Who Broke the News Embargo? Broken embargoes can be frustrating for journalists and bloggers as the limelight (and page views) often shifts to the news publication who did not honor the embargo. If a news embargo gets broken, here’s a simple way that may help you determine the name of the publication that broke it in the first place. Step 1. Go to google.com/realtime and type a few words from the story headline. Step 2. In the timeline, click an area where you have minimal number of tweets around that story. That’s...

T his may surprise some BlackBerry users. Do you know that your BlackBerry has a log file where it keeps a detailed record of every single action that you perform on the device including your incoming and outgoing phone calls? To view the log file of your own BlackBerry, go to the home screen, hold the ALT key and press LGLG. If you are using a BlackBerry Storm, display the keyboard in portrait view, hold the number key for while to lock the number keyboard and then type ,5,5 to display the phone log. Your BlackBerry Call History is in the Debug Logs These debug logs may sometimes help you troubleshoot issues with your BlackBerry but there’s one related issue that you should be aware of. Even if you remove the SIM card from your BlackBerry and manually clear all the phone call logs, one can easily read your dialed and incoming phone numbers list from the debug log. This won’t be an issue for most BlackBerry users but if you ever plan to giveaway or sell your old phone, remember to clea...

D id you know you can undo a sent e-mail in Gmail? It’s a lesser known feature, but Google just made it even better than it was before. When it first launched, you were given a 5-second window during which you could hit “undo.” Now that’s up to 30 seconds, Google Operating System discovered . The feature is hidden from most users who don’t know where to look, so here’s a quick guide to avoiding social and workplace faux pas with the click of a button. Be aware that the feature is part of Gmail Labs, though. That means it’s still in testing and it might not always work as intended. Go to Gmail Labs Since the Undo Send feature is part of Gmail Labs, you’ll have to navigate to the Gmail Labs page to activate it. Load up Gmail and look in the top-right corner of the page. Between your e-mail address and Settings you’ll see the green Labs icon. Give it a click. Enable “Undo Send” and Save Your Changes   You’ll be presented with a list of features Google is testing in Gmail. Some are ve...

A s smartphone sales continue to soar, more and more developers are focusing their efforts on building applications for mobile devices. Whether it is a native application or a mobile-optimized website, mobile innovation is taking place at a breakneck pace. Native applications still have their place, but increasingly, the number of different device types, operating systems, and screen sizes make developing optimized mobile web apps more and more enticing. Historically, there has been a trade-off between the rapid, iterative, cross-platform nature of web applications versus the more standard UI, support for gestures, and multi-touch and hardware optimizations on the native side. Fortunately, a number of different frameworks are making it easier and easier for developers to create mobile web applications that look and feel more like native apps. Here are six examples. If you don’t see your favorites on the list, add them in the comments below. 1. Sencha Touch In June, Sencha, formerly Ex...

I f you ever get an email message in your Inbox that includes multiple file attachments, you can easily download all the attachments to your hard disk as a single zip archive with a click. Such a feature is available in all popular email clients including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and even Microsoft Outlook. However, let’s now consider a slightly different problem. You have multiple emails that contain multiple attachments of multiple types and you now want to download them all (the attachments) to a local folder? How do you do this? Well, here’s an easy workaround. Step 1. Go to drop.io and click the “Create a Drop” button. Drop.io is now a paid service but you can still create temporary accounts for free. Step 2. You’ll be assigned a unique email address for your drop.io account. Copy this email address to your clipboard (it’s listed in the right sidebar). Step 3. Go back to your email inbox and forward all the messages, that you would like to download, to your new drop.io email...

A s the number of your Facebook friends and apps you (and them) are using increases, your Facebook news feed and wall can turn into one big mess. It’s nice to communicate with your friends, but if you can’t find useful posts amidst all those silly apps, or your real friends amongst all the unknown people you’ve befriended, it’s time to clean up your Facebook profile. Facebook offers extensive options for fine tuning what individual applications and people can see or do on your Facebook profile, but if you haven’t been following all the changes (and Facebook likes to change often), you might feel lost in all the options. I've offering a rundown of the most efficient ways to make more sense of your Facebook experience. Hide Them From the Feed! The simplest way to control what shows up in your News Feed is to click “ Hide ” on an item you don’t want to see. Facebook will ask you whether you want to hide that person or page, once you confirm it, you won’t see anything from them again...

P hotoshop’s wide array of cloning tools is the cause of many of the absolute best and worst works created with the application. In a skilled and experienced hand, these tools lead to phenomenal results. In the hands of a careless artist, Photoshop cloning can be disastrous to the credibility of the result. This article introduces the several cloning tools available in Photoshop and goes over the proper usage and best practices of each. The Clone Stamp Tool The Clone Stamp tool is the oldest and most widely known of the cloning tools. The basic concept is that you duplicate certain portions of an image using a source, destination and brush. Use the “Option” key (”Alt”) to set the source. To clone out the name on the tombstone above, you would select a source that shares the texture of the area you want to replace. In this case, the area around the words provides an ample source of stone texture from which to clone. To begin, simply click on the preferred source area while holding down...