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When will the Rupee symbol be officially released?
Chrome Announces List of Favorite Extensions
Search for Flickr images with Chrome extension

When will the Rupee symbol be officially released?

Posted: 19 Jul 2010 08:25 AM PDT

A few days back India launched a new symbol to represent Indian rupee. This is a proud moment for every Indian as it places us in the elite club of countries like US, UK, Japan who have been enjoying a unique symbol for their currency for past so many years.

Ever since the rupee symbol was unveiled, there has been a lot of confusion as to when will it be officially available on computer, and those who can't wait for that to happen, have already found ways to use it by installing a font developed by Forodian Technologies.

The general buzz is what is making the wait so long? If a small company can come up with a font within a day, what is stopping giants like Microsoft to do so?

To understand this, you need to understand how a symbol makes to the keyboards or to the Unicode list.

To be used as a character, a symbol needs to make it to the "Unicode Standard List" – a list which is maintained by the Unicode Consortium that contains all the symbols that you see on your keyboard or use through short cut keys (like ALT+0128 for €). Once it finds a place in the list, it gets a unique code (like that for €).

To add the symbol to the Unicode list, the Unicode Consortium must receive an application from the Indian Government. Once the application is received, the symbol would be encoded and assigned a codepoint in the next version of Unicode Standards (current version being 5.2.0). The date for the next release of Unicode has not been decided yet, according to their official website.

Only after the symbol gets the unique codepoint from Unicode, companies like Microsoft can use it for their products.

Knowing the way Indian government works, it might take some time before you can actually use the new rupee symbol in your mails or word documents.

For now you can flaunt the new symbol by using the font developed by Mangalore based Forodian Technologies. But since this is not a standard font, avoid using it when sending a document to someone else, because if the person doesn't have the font installed on their system, they will only see a ~ symbol.

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Chrome Announces List of Favorite Extensions

Posted: 19 Jul 2010 05:21 AM PDT

Ever since Google Chrome was launched two years back, it has received love from internet users in a way no other browser ever received. One of the prime reasons for this is the presence of numerous extensions that takes the browsing to the next level. However because of so many extensions, users at time feel at loss in selecting the right extension for their requirement.

At Devils Workshop we have tried to do our bit in removing this confusion by coming up with posts like

5 Chrome Extensions To Enhance your Google Search Experience

5 Useful Google Chrome Extensions for Designers

3 Useful Google Chrome Extensions for Developers

This time Google has decided to help the users in selecting the right extension by coming up with its list of favorite extensions.

Chrome team has listed down their 19 favorite extensions in the official Google blog, which are:

Opinion Cloud: Summarizes comments on YouTube videos and Flickr photos to provide an overview of the crowd's overall opinion. This comes in handy if a video or photo has hundreds of comments and you want to know what others think about it. Instead of going through each and every comment, with the help of opinion cloud you can find the general consensus.
Google Voice: Displays the number of unread messages in your Google Voice inbox and gives you quick access to your most recent messages with transcripts and voicemail playback. It works only in US.
AutoPager. If you are reading an article that is spread across several pages, you no longer have to click Next to continue reading. AutoPager automatically loads the next page of a site as you scroll down.
Turn Off the Lights: Fades the page to improve the video/image watching experience. It supports several videos like YouTube, HTML5, and also work with Picasa, Google Image Search etc.
Google Dictionary: Double-click any word on a web page to see its definition.
After the Deadline: Checks spelling, style, and grammar on your emails, blog, tweets, etc.
Invisible Hand: Does a quick price check and lets you know if the product you are looking at is available at a lower price at some other store. It currently supports retailers in US, UK and Germany, with Canada soon to follow.
Secbrowsing: Periodically checks that all your plug-ins are up to date.
Tineye: This is an image search utility which helps to find exact matches (including cropped, edited, or re-sized images) of an image. So you can find who is using the images from your blog.
Slideshow: Turns photo sites such as Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, and Google Images into slideshows.
Google Docs/PDF Viewer: Automatically previews pdfs, powerpoint presentations, and other documents in Google Docs Viewer.
Readability: Reformat the page into a single column of text by removing sidebars, thus enhancing readability.
Chromed Bird: A nice Twitter client extension that lets you see all your tweets, follow timelines, reply and retweet.
Feedsquares: Cool way of viewing your feeds via Google Reader.
ScribeFire: This is a full-featured blog editor that lets you easily post to any of your blogs.
Note Anywhere: Digital post-it notes that can be pasted and saved on any webpage. When you go to that page again, the notes get loaded automatically.
Instant Messaging Notifier: Get IM on multiple clients which includes MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk, Skype and Facebook.
Remember the Milk: To-do application from popular Remember the Milk. It lets you manage tasks directly from Chrome.
Extension.fm: ExtensionFM turns the web into your personal music library. It indexes every music file that you come across while browsing and builds a music library for you.

The above list consists of extensions for almost all possible scenarios. There might be many other extensions with similar features but being endorsed officially by Chrome team talks about their quality and also makes it easy for the users to find them.

My personal favorite from this list is NoteAnywhere, After the Deadline and Remember the Milk. We have reviewed Remember the Milk in past which you can check here.

Which of the above extensions do you like? Can you think of some other extension that Google might have missed?

-- This Post Chrome Announces List of Favorite Extensions is Published on Devils Workshop .

Search for Flickr images with Chrome extension

Posted: 19 Jul 2010 12:28 AM PDT

Flickr is a great website to search for images online. Many bloggers use Flickr to store screenshots but I personally like using Flickr to browse for cool photographs and images. The only issue it you have to set time out for looking up Flickr webpage and then spending some time looking for that particular cool pic you like.

Flickr image search allows searching for images using your Chrome browser. It displays images in a thumbnail format.

About Flickr Image Search

The extension once added allows you to search for images on Flickr. The images are show up as thumbnails.
This is a great extension for people very active on Flickr and using it extensively.
As a blogger it is useful as I might like this extension to search for copyright free images which can be included in my post. (never forget to link back and give credits if you are using images from Flickr on your blog)

You might like to check out how to share Flickr images on Facebook and also the top 5 Flickr uploader tools.

Try out and install the Flickr Image Search extension and do drop in your comments about your views and any alternatives you might know about.

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