No Flash For Jelly Bean 4.1 & Older Android After 15 August

Last November, Adobe announced its withdrawal from making flash player for mobile browsers because it has decided to focus on HTML 5 that would allow developers to package native apps through Adobe Air for all the major app stores.

But now as an implementation of the decision, Adobe has announced to remove the Adobe Flash Player from Google App Store “PLAY” after 15 August 2012. Moreover, it has also planned to restrict the updates of Flash Player to that of the older versions of Android devices that would have Flash Player already installed in before 15 of August. So if you have not installed Flash Player as yet and you also don’t want to lose it forever for your Android device then hurry up and get your version downloaded from Google App Store now, before the time runs out.

 Lastly bare in mind, Adobe Flash Player would not be a part of new coming Android Jelly Bean 4.1 OS because Adobe as a company has not developed & tested its Flash Player for this new OS.

Android 4.1 Jelly Bean Features

Google has launched its highly anticipated Android Jelly Bean 4.1 OS which is said to be a discerned step ahead of previous Ice Cream Sandwich OS. Speculations suggests that it will turn the Android devices into a completely different yet burgeoning experience because it is enriched with a lot of comfortable features & enhancements as mentioned below;

• Faster user-interface when rendering graphics along with improvement in perceived aspects of the on-screen visuals
• Better screen refresh rate because jelly bean would let the graphics processor, central processing unit and display to run in parallel. This would result in increased appearance smoothness
• Remarkable touch screen experience as jelly bean would help in anticipating your finger movements at each screen refresh and accordingly draw display around that position which means you will get a more reactive response. Moreover, CPU would run at full speed unlike previously, when you touch the display in jelly bean. This would help in running the new OS even smoother
• Home screen widgets would automatically resize and now, would be able to reformat their own layout & positioning around a new incoming widget which was relatively different in Android 4.0 OS
• Ways through which you could remove the items from home screen has changed in jelly bean. Now all you need to do is, hold the item you want to delete and then flick it off
• More accurate and relevant dictionaries would be part of text input in jelly bean along with an intelligent keyboard. Moreover, new prediction algorithm would guess the next word even before you start typing it
• More support for different languages including Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Thai and many others
• Jelly bean also adds extra features to camera app of Android 4.0 ICS. When you take a picture, a new animation would show the entrance and exit of the picture. Moreover, now by tapping on the camera screen, a filmstrip of images would appear to easily scroll through
• Expansion in usefulness of Beam NFC, now you can even transfer your pictures & videos and can automatically pair an NFC enabled Bluetooth device, all this can be done by just tapping your phone and head-set respectively
• Jelly bean has also showed improvements in notification feature i.e. now you can respond to a missed call directly from the missed call notification. Moreover, Gmail notifications would show more information without even opening up the Gmail app. More people can now be contacted through a calendar notification with a set of customized responses. Apart from that, now it is also possible to comment or like someone’s foursquare check in without any need of entering the app
• Improvements in Google search feature, through jelly bean you can witness better voice searching in your Android device which would understand natural language even faster than before
• Google Now is a differentiated feature which has the capability of bringing in the revolution because it will provide the user with right kind of information at a right time, automatically, by keeping track of user movements over the phone. It acts more like your personal secretary, to guide you with right amount of information

How to add watermark to documents using GIMP and LibreOffice Writer

You may sometimes want to add a watermark to your documents to claim your authority. There are, of course, many different ways to do the trick but in today's article, I will show you how to do it using two popular open source applications, GIMP and LibreOffice Writer. Both applications are pre-installed in Linux Mint 13.

Step 1 : Create a watermark image using GIMP

 Open an A4 template. Just hit Ctrl + N and the "create a new image" window will appear, then choose the A4 template:

Make the image transparent by going to Layer > Transparency > Color to Alpha:

Next, use the text tool ( the A letter icon on the toolbox window) to create your watermark text. Select the proper font, color and size for your watermark. If you want to put watermark on the entire document , I suggest using a big font size like 200 or 250 and placing the watermark text in the middle of the image. Also lower the opacity (the best value should be around 20%) of watermark text so it will not overlap the document text after you add the watermark:

You can also rotate the watermark text by going to Tools > Transform Tools > Rotate then customize the rotating angle and the position of the watermark text:

Now you have a watermark image, save the image and move to step 2.

Step 2: Add the watermark to documents using LibreOffice Writer

Start LibreOffice Writer and open the document(s) you want to add watermark. On the LibreOffice Writer window, go to Format > Page:

On the Page Style window, click on the Background tab and select the Graphic option:

Click on "Browse" to select your watermark image that you just created with GIMP, choose the type that you prefer and click "Apply" and you will have this result:

And everything is done. Your documents have a nice watermark now.

LibreOffice 3.6.0 Beta 3 Is Available for Download

LibreOffice, a free power-packed open source personal productivity suite that provides users with six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base) is now at version 3.6.0 Beta 3.

LibreOffice 3.6.0 Beta 3 comes with a lot of bugfixes and improvements, among which there are the following:

• Margin values vs SBkc = 0 at the end of the document has been fixed;
• Help for Defaults and Formula option pages (Calc) has been added;
• RTF export of direct run formatting for empty paragraphs has been fixed;
• Incremental search / buffer switching hang/crash have been fixed;
• Collapsing border painting has been repaired.

A complete list of changes and bugfixes can be found in the official announcement.

 Download LibreOffice 3.6.0 Beta 3

Tiny Core Linux 4.5.6 Is Available for Download

Robert Shingledecker announced a few hours ago, July 7th, the immediate availability for download of the Tiny Core 4.5.6 Linux operating system.

Tiny Core Linux 4.5.6 is yet another small maintenance release, which updates various packages and tools, such as:

· Apps GUI was updated to call Busybox md5sum, in order to not conflict with the coreutils extension;
· ScmApps GUI was also updated to call Busybox md5sum;
· tc-restore was updated to support autoscanning, when the “base” option is used.

Tiny Core is one of the smallest Linux distros out there, weighing in at just 10 MB, but still providing a full graphical environment.

The distro is designed to be a highly mobile distro coming with just the bare-bones minimum, Linux kernel 3.x, Busybox, Tiny X, and Fltk.

 Download Tiny Core Linux 4.5.6

Moonrise - another nice dark theme

I just checked Gnome-look today and found  Moonrise, a new dark theme that just got uploaded in June. Moonrise has a dark blueish color theme that empathizes contrast and visibility. It supports both gtk3, gtk 2 and gnome shell. If you like dark themes like me, Moonrise should be included in your theme collection.

Here are some screenshots of Moonrise:

Click here to download Moonrise