Advantages

The 10 Most Useful Features of iOS 4

This is a guest post by James Adams. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.
The new OS for the iPhone promised to bring many new features to the table, further positioning the sleek little gadget as the best in the world. You can send email, play games, and call friends, but iOS 4 allows you to do it more easily. Here are just ten of the new features.
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1. Custom Dictionary
Are you constantly seeing words that are spelled correctly highlighted because they are in your field? Now, you have a custom dictionary at your disposal. The dictionary has been updated in iOS 4 to rival the one that was issued for the iPad. You can add your new words to the OS’ dictionary.

2. Folders
With folders, you can put your iPhone applications together based on the criteria that you specify. You don’t have to bother with the clutter of having applications everywhere. You can even custom name the folders.

3. Email Scheduling
Don’t worry about going through the hassle of shutting down your mail application just to open your calendar. You can do these tasks simultaneously with the new OS. You can have your email open and then open a new application simultaneously to set a date in your calendar.

4. YouTube Zoom and Rotate
Now you can choose the way that you want your YouTube videos played. If you want to show everything in portrait mode, you have that option available. You can use the portrait mode for small clips to get a taste of the video and then shift to landscape to get the best picture. You are also able to zoom in on the parts that you want to get a better view.

5. Locking Rotation
This feature allows you to pick an orientation and have your iPhone stay with it. You will no longer have to contend with applications firing up without your permission. You can lock your iPhone with the press of a few buttons, and release it just as easily.

6. iBooks
You can shop for books any time that you want to on the iPhone. iBooks gives you a virtual library at your fingertips, making downloading new books fast and easy. Whether you’re on the road or just sitting at home, you’ll always have a book to read.

7. Web and Wikipedia Search
At one time, you could only search internally through email. Once you’ve put iOS 4 on your phone, you can search through Wikipedia and the Web to find all of the things that you need. This makes the iPhone even more of a must-have gadget.

8. Continuous Wi-Fi
Your iPhone will now stay connected so you don’t have to go back and forth with restarting applications. Your music will keep playing in the background if you’re streaming. Your Skype will stay up even when the phone itself goes dark.

9. Photo Rotation
Take the photos that you want, then resize them to your needs. Your pictures can be resized to four sizes: small, medium, large or actual size. You can rotate the pictures to your pleasure, customizing it for easier transportability.

10. Playlists
Playlists are now available to the iPhone users using the iOS 4. You can create a playlist, add or remove songs, and arrange your music to your liking. You can control your music more easily at the touch of a button.

With the new iOS 4 features, you have more functionality at your fingertips. Check them out at your own risk, you might be playing with your iPhone for hours.

This article is contributed by James who is a staff writer at a leading supplier of ink cartridges where he covers new product releases such as the HP 901XL ink cartridge as well as writing about art and design on their blog.

Digg.com to replace its SHOUT feature

Digg.com has decided to replace its infamous Shout feature with Share the story on Twitter, FaceBook and email. And this feature is expected to be rolled out to all users this weekend.

Its inevitable for Digg to give importance to Twitter and FaceBook which has grown up so fast.

Many bloggers and online marketers feel that this move from Digg will be welcomed happily by its users.

This move has both advantages as well as disadvantages:
Advantages:
1. There will be constant exchange of traffic between twitter, FaceBook and digg. This is advantage for Digg, as people will not forget Digg over time 🙂
2. We feel connecting with people as more fun in Twitter and FaceBook than to be friend in Digg.com, where the main intention to make friendship may be to get more Diggs!
3. This gives more reasons to join Twitter and FaceBook, if you yet don’t have an account.
4. Now we can expect the end of monopoly of Digg power users! Now it may be the turn of Twitter power users 🙂
But we can convince a twitter user to re-tweet our tweets, if the story is really interesting. But in Digg, people will most probably ignore our requests as 90% of them would be spam 🙁
5. Spammers can not easily target Twitter and FaceBook users, as we are more choosy in following someone. And others can’t hurt our privacy.

Disadvantages:
1. We can not connect with like minded people on digg!
2. We need to be popular somewhere else to get our article to the front page of Digg!
3. We may start getting more spam mails than ever before, if not handled properly.
4. Spammers may try more innovative means to spam Twitter and FaceBook.

We can already see the integration of Twitter, FaceBook and EMAIL as means to share the stories in DIGG BAR. But the Digg bar wasn’t received by digg users happily. Only way Digg can improve itself is by constant testing, testing and testing, and implementing things according to user feedback.

What do you feel about this move from DIGG ?.

Know This Before Using Google Custom Search Engine

There are many advantages of adding Google Custom Search Engine to your wordpress blog.
Some are listed below..
1. People are used to search in Google.com and they will not find it difficult to do the same in your blog.
2. You can monetize the search results using Google Ads. [Optional]
3. Ability to give options for users, to search only our blog or the entire web.
4. We can know exactly what people are searching in our blog using the search engine.
5. Looks more professional. SERP can be hosted on our own site or Google.
6. Easy to integrate and use.
7. More features. We can include Refinements/Labels at the top of the result page.
8. Highly Customizable. We can customize the look and feel of the result page. We can put our logo instead of Google logo and link it back to our main site/blog. Font colour and the placement of ads can be controlled by ourselves.
9. We can control the type of ads appearing on our search result page, by including Search engine keywords, Site description etc. The ads will match to the keyword of search as well as to the keywords that we have included. We can even block competitors advertisements.
10. Can include the results from multiple sites/blogs.

Caution:-
We have seen many bloggers using CSE(Custom Search Engine) and their SERP(Search Engine Result Page) is violating the Adsense policy, by showing additional ads on the SERP.
Here is what Google has to say about it..

Can I show ads on AdSense for search results pages in my own site?

We ask that you don’t place any additional ads on pages with framed search results. However, you’re welcome to place an AdSense for search box on the page so your users can continue to search if they haven’t found what they’re looking for.

Now without wasting much of time, Create a CSE and put it on to your blog, if you haven’t done yet.
There are two ways to do this.
1. Login to your adsense account and goto “AdSense Setup” tab and click on “AdSense for Search”. Further instruction are self explanatory.
2. Goto Google Custom Search Engine and click on “Create a Custom Search Engine”.

The advantage of using the 2nd option is, we get “Advance setup features” and more customization options. So we recommend using CSE.

To connect your Custom Search Engine account with Google AdSense, visit the Make money tab in your search engine’s control panel.

Fill in the form with the email address that you use with your AdSense account, your zip code, and the last 5 digits of your phone number. Google will use this information to connect your Custom Search Engine account to your AdSense account and you can start making money immediately.

Now you make money by monetizing the search result page and your readers will be comfortable searching what they are looking for. So its a win-win situation 🙂