GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Digital Inspiration’s Amit Agarwal has a clever Dropbox-based solution for printing documents from a smartphone or tablet, whether your printer’s down the hall or thousands of miles away.

The idea is so simple, you’ll be amazed you haven’t thought to try it yourself. Dropbox is a popular utility that allows users to sync and share files on different computers. Most smartphones have built-in Dropbox applications, and many mobile applications are now integrating Dropbox for remote syncing and storage. You can also add files to your Dropbox account via email or the web.

In this solution, use any of those means to get the file you want printed into a shared Dropbox folder — call it “PrintQueue” — that you’ve set up for this purpose. Your print-capable computer uses a script to monitor “PrintQueue”, automatically print its documents and then move them to a different folder. (Agarwal calls this second folder “logs”; I’d call it “Completed Jobs”). If you’re a clever hacker, you could even add scripts to send a remote notification that the print job has been completed.

For Windows, Agarwal has a downloadable VBS script that will set this up for you; as he notes, there are different scripting solutions for Mac OS X or Linux too.

Once you’ve got this rigged, the immediate use case is to send a document wirelessly from a smartphone or tablet to a local printer. And it is kind of magical to stand there and watch the whole process unfold, as in the video above.

But think beyond that. Suddenly, your printer is capable of networking with any computer, anywhere — with any phone, anywhere — that you approve and authorize. This is potentially so much better than hooking up a computer to a wireless router or navigating the virtual bureaucracy of an office printer network. It’s way better than a fax machine.

This could be one future of social networking and file sharing: instead of big, ad-cluttered feeds that push photos, status updates and Farmville notifications or anonymous networks that chop files into bits and reassemble them, imagine friends and acquaintances broadcasting to each other, wheels within wheels, each with different levels and fields of access. Designating someone a “friend” might not be worth very much in this cockeyed world, but automatic remote access to someone’s printer still means something.

Print Files from any Mobile Phone using Dropbox [Digital Inspiration] via Gizmodo

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Discovering new apps in the Android market, which now has over 100,000 titles, has become increasingly difficult. So an independent app store is using social networking to help you find what you really want.

AndSpot has introduced social networking features such as activity feed, profiles and recommendations so its customers can find new apps based on what their friends like, instead of trying to find apps by category.

The site is now in private beta and will be launching publicly next month.

“The current paradigm of how marketplaces work isn’t in the favor of users or developers,” says Ash Kheradmand, one of the co-founders of AndSpot. “It works in the favor of apps like Facebook, Twitter and Pandora but not anyone else.”

An average user sees less than 99 percent of the apps in the Google Market, says AndSpot. And when users do find apps, they have little beyond basic comments and average ratings to go by.

Users are tired of scrolling through lists of apps to get ones that may be useful to them, says Kheradmand. Bringing social networking to an app store could help solve some of those problems, he says.

Unlike Apple, which has a tightly controlled official distribution for iPhone apps, multiple app stores can exist on the Android phone alongside the official Android app store, which is called Android Market.

For now, Android Market is pre-loaded on all Android phones. Independent app stores such as AndSpot can be downloaded from the Android Market or a browser. These independent app stores could in theory ink distribution deals with handset makers to get on devices, although they have yet to do so. Meanwhile, the number of apps in the Android market continues to grow making it difficult for users to find apps and for developers to market their programs.

That’s where AndSpot comes in, says Kheradmand, who has applied for a patent on the idea. On AndSpot, users first create a profile with an avatar and add friends. As with Facebook, there is an activity feed that highlights what the apps your friends are downloading. The activity feed also integrates with a recommendation engine, which AndSpot says suggests apps based on what you and your friends are using.

AndSpot also has a discussion board so its users can discuss apps. It will also have privacy settings so that users can choose to share apps, or not share them, depending on which category they’re in.

“You can set it so that you show games apps but not productivity apps,” says Faisal Abid, chief technology officer for AndSpot.

AndSpot says it will let developers keep 80 percent of the revenue from their apps sold through its app store and developers don’t have to do anything additional to publish their apps on AndSpot.

It’s an interesting idea and one where I can see social networking helping the process of discovery of apps. The key to its success as with any social networking site is scale. Unless you can get friends in there, you won’t have enough activity in your feeds to make it worth visiting.

Check out screenshots from the new AndSpot market below.

The discuss feature on AndSpot lets users talk about apps.

A friend's profile on the AndSpot Market

Here's how the app will be displayed in the AndSpot market.

Screenshots: Andspot

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews