pop ups
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Pressure-sensing PC technology knows when you're busy, blocks notifications accordingly
We know better than most that when you're working to a deadline, constant pop-ups, notifications and pings can be a real pain. Our frustrations might soon become a thing of the past, however, with some help from boffins at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Japan. They are working on technology which monitors keyboard pressure and silences those distractions until it deems you're not busy, showing over 80 percent accuracy during volunteer testing. Understanding that quiet time is also appreciated for other tasks, they plan to use similar techniques to spot when you're staring intently at that report or -- more importantly -- attending to a beverage. It's still early days for the project, but if the stress-saving tech ever spawns a product, we'll take two please. [Image Credit: Getty Images / Jean Louis Batt]
Facebook's new Recommendations Bar pops up, just wants to be liked
Facebook's Recommendations Box sits passively on many websites, allowing us to engage or ignore as we see fit. But too much of the latter option has led to something slightly different: the new Recommendations Bar -- a pop-up variant which, when integrated by your favorite page, plugs site-specific links based on your friends' thumbs and shares. The Bar is similar to the in-house recommendation pop-ups we're all familiar with, but adds a like button for posting the current page to your timeline. It shouts much louder than the Box, so it's no surprise that in early tests the new plug-in produced a three-fold increase in click-throughs. In this case, privacy wasn't an afterthought -- Bar integration, like the Box, is at the site's discretion and sharing pages is very much on your terms. Just try not to accidently hit that like button during your daily scan of Bieber's homepage.
Google adds HTML5 Gmail and Gtalk notifications for the desktop, makes you envy Chrome users
Oh, come on, Google! If you're going to give us desktop notifiers for our favorite email and chat clients, you've got to play nice and let us have them on more than your own browser, right? To be fair to the Chrome maker, it's standardizing the code it's used in its new HTML5 alerts so that other browsers can soon use it too, but as of today, you'll need to use the Google-sanctioned webscape navigator if you want its sweet new pop-ups on your desktop. We gave them a quick try and they're delightfully quick, with Gtalk message alerts updating themselves to the latest one received instead of stacking up and threatening your sanity. Hit the source link to learn how to enable the new notifications.
iPhone Tip: Tap and hold on a link for a description popup
Safari on the iPhone might be slightly limited in some areas (for example: you can't double-tap contacts in Meebo to begin a chat), but we're discovering all sorts of useful goodies that I don't remember Jobs or the Apple videos ever highlighting. In this screenshot of my iPhone (sorry I couldn't snap a better quality pic), I've tapped and held my finger on a link in Safari, which invoked this handy popup with the name of the linked page, as well as the actual URL. This is a very useful way of translating the typical status bar UI in desktop browsers so it is still accessible on the iPhone for the times you need it, and yet it doesn't take up any valuable real estate during most of the times you don't.
