This morning while posting something on Facebook I noticed a new popup that grabbed by attention. It was a small lock next to the share button and upon clicking it I discovered some real handy new privacy settings.

You now have the choice to customize with who you would like to share certain statuses or links you post. A nice addition is the fact that you can customize it to a degree where you can only allow a selected few friends to see the status or link, or disallow a selected few friends from seeing it.

This sure is a great feature and one that was needed a long time ago. I see the ladies gossiping even more now via Facebook.

So the web is currently flourishing with posts on how awesome the new Apple iPad is, but is it really that awesome?

It’s no secret I am no Apple fanboy, in fact the closest I have gotten to owning a Apple was the Granny Smiths in my kitchen. Its not that I can’t afford it, it just there is always something lacking when it comes to functionality in Apple products and I always find that there is something better for either the same price or cheaper.

Last year when I had to choose a new phone I was torn between the iPhone or the HTC Hero, eventually went with the Hero and the reason was simply that the iPhone and multitasking is just not big friends and I haven’t looked back yet on that decision I made and thought maybe I should have gone with the iPhone.

There I was last night, tuning in on the live streams and blogs awaiting this awesome product, after 45 minutes just closing everything in disappointment without listening further. What I saw was just an oversized iPod Touch renamed as the Apple iPad.

The bezel is just plain huge, sure you are saying its to prevent touching the screen accidentally while holding the device. I you don’t want to touch the screen then don’t buy a touch screen device. Then Steve Jobs went and said the iPad was there to do things better like browsing the web and consuming digital media. How can the iPad do this better when it doesn’t even have flash support? And the fact that the iPad does not support MKV format for high definition video also lost me. Not that I would use it for watching videos or playing music, that’s what I have my LCD and Home Theater system for.

Was the iPad designed for portability? I for one would think so as it is something between a laptop and smartphone, but don’t think it will replace either. The iPad has no built in camera so there goes shooting some movies or pics on the go, and typing a full article on a touch screen device that takes up half of the screen? I would rather stick with my netbook for that.

One good thing that I would say the iPad could be good for is to bring competition to the eBook market, and clearly Apple is targeting that market with their release of their iBook store. I bet new Kindle users are kicking themselves in the head right now.

In all I don’t see the Apple iPad replacing my netbook or smartphone anytime soon, and I certainly won’t be carrying another device around with me. The iPad does have that nice look as do all the other Apple products, but when it comes to functionality I won’t just buy one yet.

Looks like the guys over at MAD TV predicted the Apple iPad long before Apple even knew it would launch it.

Popular technology blog TechCrunch was hacked around 10:30 pm on monday and made it back online about an hour later but then went back down again for several hours before it was restored.

Now this morning it has happened again, and this time with some cheeky messages regarding the new welcome page ad.

Technology blog TechCrunch hacked again

When twitter introduced its geolocation functionality to the world everybody was wondering what it would be useful for, now the answer is here.

Twitter recently started to roll out its new local trends functionality to new users day by day and today I just got my local trends activated. What local trends does is make use of twitter’s geolocation functionality to see what twitter users are tweeting about in specific areas. This will enable you to see whats trending in your area and not just the whole world.

Unfortunately the local trends currently does not have any South Africa cities to choose from, but twitter clearly states the following: “Don’t see your location? We’re working on it.”

Follow me on twitter here or check out TweSMS my new twitter to SMS notification system if you are on twitter.

Up until now the only way for you to run Mxit on your PC was to either to use Pidgin for Windows with Mxit pc support or to use the Mxit Evo PC client.

How nice would it be if you could offer your visitors the comfort of using Mxit straight from your website without installing any software? Well now you can with Mxit’s Evo Web Widget. The Mxit web widget makes use of silverlight technology and enables you to customise the look to suite your sites needs.

How do you get your hand on the Mxit Evo web widget? Just click here and follow the instructions to embet Mxit’s web widget into your site.

With my latest project TweSMS I decided to go the json route with the twitter API. Now if you have worked with the twitter API before you would know that twitter has some serious big id values thus it was important to store these values in big int fields in the database.

I first discovered the bug when I had to get mention ids from twitter and saw that every time I get the same id returned, the id returned was 2147483647 the maximum value a 32 bit integer can store. After some investigation I found that the php5 json_decode function converted big int values to a normal 32bit integer. With the help of some regex I soon came up with a fix for this, the fix is to convert the integer to a string.

function jsonIntToStr($json){
$pattern = “/\”id\”:([0-9]+),/”;
$replace = “\”id\”:\”$1\”,”;
$new_json = preg_replace($pattern, $replace, $json);
return $new_json;
}

To use this replace id with the json fields you are trying to convert to string and call it like this json_decode(jsonIntToStr($jsonstring))

I few weeks ago I started on a project called TweSMS, a twitter SMS notification system for people that does not have coverage with twitter’s own SMS notification system.

The project was inspired by Rafiq Phillips from Web AddiCT(s); and soon after that I started coding on basic functionality. Today I am proud to say that the system is improving immensely with every new feature being rolled out.

Yesterday saw the release of mention notifications as well as the ability to receive notifications from selected friends only. The changes has been implemented and the testers are testing away and giving feedback along the way.

Features to come include the ability to receive SMS messages only during certain times of the day as well as the ability to use your own Clickatell account to receive SMS messages.

If you are interested in partaking in the TweSMS testing send an email to TweSMS, there is a few places open still.

Back in November 2009 I was doing my usual evening routine of surfing the Internet and working on some client sites when my wife suddenly called me over with much excitement in her voice. “I want that camera” she told me.

She was obviously talking about the first digital camera in the world with dual LCD screens, a large 3.5″ touch sensitive LCD at the back and a smaller 1.5″ LCD perfect for that self portraits. That next weekend we set out to the stores to try and get hold of one of these good looking cameras, but after driving around for almost the whole day and several phone calls it was obvious that nobody either stocked it or knew about it.

After a few weeks I got hold of Samsung JoinTheClique via twitter and they got hold of one for me at the Samsung Store in Canal Walk. BTW you can stand a chance to win one of these ST550 cameras by joining their Facebook page or following them on twitter.

Right after buying the ST550 camera we headed to the closest store to go buy some AA batteries, but upon opening the box I soon discovered that the ST550 does not make use of disposable batteries but has its own battery. Another thing I instantly noticed is that the ST550 made use of a microSD card so all the normal SD cards I had was pretty useless, lucky for me the ST550 came with a 2GB microSD card included.

Features

As well as the dual LCD screens, the ST550 also boasts a 12 mega pixel sensor with 4.6x optical zoom that is also optical stabilised to avoid camera shake. The large 3.5″ LCD screen on the back of the ST550 is touch sensitive, which enabled Samsung to remove all physical buttons ensuring for a larger than normal LCD screen. The front LCD screen is almost invisible to the eye until you turn it on, it also has a child mode that displays pictures to ensure your child’s attention is where is should be to take that beautiful picture. The ST550 also boasts smile detection and face detection capabilities which enables you to let the camera take photos automatically when it picks up smiles or enabled it to focus on recognised faces.

Design

When it comes to looks the Samsung ST550 is a real stunner. Dressed in glossy black with a vibrant coloured lip in various colours it looks really sexy, the wife decided on the purple one.

With the missing buttons on the back it makes it a little bit more difficult figuring out where all the settings is located on the touch screen. But once you actually sat down and read the instruction manual navigating the touch screen menus is a real breeze. As with any touch screen greasy finger marks are always visible on the screen and you will find yourself time and again wiping it clean, same goes for the glossy black finish on the front. The screen is really huge using 95% of the available space on the back of the ST550 and that makes it worth dealing with the clean wiping now and again.

The front LCD as mentioned is invisible to the eye until turned on, turning the screen on however can be bit of struggle if you have bigger fingers with the small menu buttons on the touch screen. Here Samsung could have opted for a double tap on the front screen functionality rather than going through the menus on the back.

Performance and Image Quality

The ST550 has with its 12 mega pixel lens offers produces good quality images but not the best for a 12 mega pixel camera, and the the lens could have been made a little wider as taking self portraits you often struggle to get all the faces in.

When it comes to battery life I really did expect a bit more, because of the special battery included with the ST550 you must ensure that your camera is on charge every time you are not using it as the battery life can’t keep up with a full days shooting. Charging can also be a bit of a hassle as the charge cable is really short, however you can charge the camera not only via the wall but also via USB.

When it comes to video the ST550 is capable of capturing 720p, HD Ready, videos at 30 frames per second with mono sound. Unfortunately you cant use the front LCD to capture self portrait videos.

Value for money

When it comes to price, the ST550  is certainly not the cheapest camera out there. Going for around R3,500.00 you would think that you are paying for both LCD screens and not two screens for the price of one. Good news is that there is a lower end model available, the ST500, retailing for about a R1000 cheaper and the only difference according to Samsung JoinTheClique on twitter is a smaller LCD screen, 0.5″ to be exact.

Regardless of the high price I would still say that the ST550 has a kind of fair price for the features is boasts.

Conclusion

There is a few things Samsung could have done better on the ST550, however the ST550 is a true showcase of innovation from Samsung thanks to its dual LCD screens.

With smile detection, blink detection, face recognition as well as a image editing mode where you can modify the photos you already took, the ST550 is a real 21st century camera and the first in its class. I would highly recommend the ST550 just because of its front LCD screen and the fact that it has smile recognition. This camera is really a ladies camera and its showing as my wife is really enjoying the ST550 and taking pictures with it.

The ST550 gets two thumbs up from me.

You can get more info on the features and specifications of the ST550 here

Since I got my HTC Hero in December last year I have always been browsing the Android Market and Web for some cool apps, and I think this is really one of the coolest apps out there. Cool and extremely geeky.

So you are in a hurry and you lost your keys somewhere in the couch where you were chilling, no problem! Just get your Android phone and fire up the Metal Detector app and swipe it over the couch, it will start vibrating when it passes the keys.

The Metal Detector app works on all Android models that has the built-in magnetometer that is used for the compass. Wow sorry normal Apple iPhone users, I believe only the iPhone 3Gs has this functionality.

Here is a video demonstrating the Metal Detector App

Android users get your Metal Detector App for free from the Android Market, just search for “metal detector”. BTW if you haven’t got a Google Android based phone yet, you can win one at Web AddiCT(s);