Facebook Gifts

Facebook is introducing a new feature, Gifts!

This new feature allows you to send real gifts to your Facebook friends. When I logged in to Facebook this morning, I saw this:

Facebook Gift link on profile

A new entry called Gifts between  App Center and Games Feed. As you can see in the next screenshot, Facebook has made it really easy to send gifts to friends.

How to send gifts to Facebook Friends

You can send gifts in a few simple steps. Browse for the right gift to send to your friend, Add your message and send!

Facebook Wine Gift

They have a decent collection of gift items, from chocolates to cards to variety of wines.

What are the countries supported by Facebook Gifts?
According to their help page:

Counties supported by Facebook Gifts

"Please note, the ability to send or receive a gift is currently limited to people located within the United States. If you are located within the US, you will only see the option to give a gift to friends also located in the US."

So, if you are living outside of US, you have to wait for Facebook to launch this feature in your country.

Some interesting things to know about Facebook Gifts:

• You don't need to know your friend's address to be able to send gifts!
• Your friend won't see the price of the gift!
• They can choose a different size, color or style(if it's available)
• They can even swap it for another similarly priced gift before it ships!
• Your friends gets to decide the shipping address.

Sounds interesting right?  Go to https://www.facebook.com/about/gifts to watch introductory video.Or head to their help page for more information.

Happy Gifting!

How To Take Screenshot In Sony Ericsson Xperia

How to take screenshot in Sony Ericsson Xperia phone(and may be with other Sony Ericsson phones)?

Sounds trivial? Turns out it's not much so. I remember taking screenshot with this phone earlier. All I had to do is just press and hold the power button and I'd get option for screenshot.

Problem started  after I updated my phone to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). The old method stopped working and it took quite a bit of Googling before I found out the new method.

The new method to capture screenshot is little tricky.

Simultaneously hold 'Power' and 'Volume Low' button for ~2 seconds. 

I'll show how to do that in this video.

Blue Re-volution: Nokia Developer Conference 2011

The Nokia Annual Developer Conference is here. It's scheduled for 4th November 2011 at ITC Gardenia, Bangalore.

I got the details from this emailer. Head to the Conference Website for more details.

P.S: This (surprisingly) is not a free event. They charge a participation fee of INR 750!

Syntax Highlighting for Blogs

Code snippets inside blog posts can be very difficult to read if they are written using normal font.

Consider the following piece of code.

int i, sum=0;
for(i=0; i<n; i++)
{
sum = sum + i;
}
Code without any special formatting.


HTML <pre>...</pre> and <code>...</code> can be used to preserve the white spaces and long lines.
Here's the same code put inside a <pre><code> block..

int i, sum=0;
for(i=0; i<n; i++)
{
    sum = sum + i;
}

Structure of the code preserved using <pre> & <code>

This version looks much better than the first one. The monospaced text makes it easier to read.

However, this is not enough. These generic <pre>&<code> do not highlight the keywords in the code snippet. This is where Syntax Highlighting comes into picture.

Syntax highlighting is a feature of some text editors that display text—especially source code—in different colors and fonts according to the category of terms. This feature eases writing in a structured language such as a programming language or a markup languageas both structures and syntax errors are visually distinct. Highlighting does not affect the meaning of the text itself; it's made only for human readers/editors. (Read more on Wiki..)

Let us apply Syntax Highlighting to the above code.

int i, sum=0;
for(i=0; i<n; i++)
{
    sum = sum + i;
}

Now, this looks much better! This is achieved using a third party Syntax Highlighter plugin.
There are many plugins and other tools available on the internet for Syntax Highlighting.

I am using SyntaxHighlighter for this blog. I chose this because it's easy to use and supports many languages. Will talk about plugin integration with blogger in my next post.


Cheers,
Sandeepa Nadahalli

Accessing Local Data Store In GWT/Eclipse Development Environment

Surprisingly, not many developers know that you can browse the local data store in Java/Eclipse/GWT environment.

So, here's how you can  do it. Just point your browser to
http://localhost:8888/_ah/admin/datastore

P.S: Make sure you are Running/Debugging your app while trying this.

Leave a comment if this helped you!

Cheers,

--

Sandeepa Nadahalli