Remember WeChat? Here’s our post on it: Weixin or WeChat. We’ve had a lot of fun with this mobile app, that’s for sure. Now there is a new addition that makes it a bit more fun, if that is possible. WeChat already has voice and video and text, of course, but what if you wanted to disguise your voice a bit, either to hide your real voice or to make your friends laugh? Well, you would add WeChat Voice. That’s how you’d do it.
WeChat Voice, click here, takes whatever message you record then changes it, according to your selection. It’s a bit like taking a photo on Instagram and using one of the photo filters to adjust it. It’s relatively simple now, basically speeding your voice up or down, adjusting the pitch, things like that. We assume that the voice choices will change as time goes by.
This is it!
WeChat Voice is available for both Android and iOS (Apple). As with WeChat/Weixin, the app is totally free. We feel that the app is safe, too. Tencent, the supplier, is a extremely large company in China and has a very good reputation. We never hesitate in using their software.
Android or iOS, choose your poison.
When you go to the WeChat Voice page, you can ever hear one voice selection. Just press the play button:
Press Play and hear one of the voices you can get.
Here’s how it all works. Open WeChat Voice and record your message, choose your filter using the selections provided then export it to WeChat. This is all done automatically. Once you have saved the message, WeChat Voice offers to open WeChat. Then, for a short time, both apps are open at once. You choose the contact you want to send the message to, then the message is uploaded and sent. Yes, it takes a while. WeChat Voice is good for occasional use but it sure won’t be a full-time part of WeChat. It just takes too long!
We can see another way to use WeChat Voice that might make more sense and be just as much fun. If you’re travelling with a group of friends, or simply sitting around in the lunch room, you could have some laughs by recording your voices. Alternatively, you could record a speaker’s voice, let’s say a teacher, and have some fun changing it around a bit.
We got wind of the latest Facebook update earlier this week. After living with it since then, we’re still semi-semi on it. It has some good features but it still seems very busy and cramped. Today’s post will deal with the layout and navigation plus one cool new feature that we’ve discovered.
1.How do you feel? This is silly but Facebook has added a set of smilies to your status updates. Here’s where you start:
Now you can share your REAL feelings! Or simply tell everyone that you’re having a coffee.
Facebook seems pretty happy about their new gimmick, don’t they? Once you get back to your normal status window, clicking on the grey smiley will bring up this:
A wealth of selections to fine tune your mood.
Once you wend your way through these selections and make a choice, then post your status update, this is what your friends see. Clicking on the mood or action you’ve chosen brings up the chance to Like whatever it is that you’re doing, could be drinking coffee or listening to the Beatles.
How many of your friends like coffee? Facebook will tell you.
As you can see, this is just another way for Facebook to get to know you and your friends. Why do they care? Simply because they want to tune their ads to your well-defined demographic. Every time you click like or add a friend or do just about anything on Facebook, your Facebook profile is tuned to a higher level. Think about it. Facebook probably knows you better than your SO! (Significant Other)
2. Post from anywhere: A big part of the new Facebook design isn’t a gimmick, thank goodness. The best part of the change is the ability to post from anywhere on Facebook. Previously, you had to go back to your main Facebook page, your homepage in other words, or your Timeline to post a status update or add a photo or video. Now, you can post from anywhere in Facebook, even if you’re on another person’s page.
This is what you see when you are on your own Facebook page.
See the new button? It’s the word Post up on the top right. Let’s say you are on another Facebook page, a radio station’s page for example. Here’s what happens:
The new status or post menu pop-out.
It doesn’t matter where you are on Facebook, you don’t have to go home to post. Click the word Post and say or share what you will, no problem. We think this is the best part of the new Facebook design, don’t you?
If you have comments or questions on anything related to just about anything, ask us. We’re always looking for new challenges. Better yet, why not Like us on Facebook? Here’s the link:
If you have recently lost your Facebook or Youtube password, here’s a quick way to recover it without going through the ‘Lost Password’ routine on the website. Our example here is for Google Chrome but we think this will work in a similar fashion with Firefox. We recommend Chrome, however.
1. The single ‘must have’ here is that you must have saved the password when Chrome asked you “Would you like Chrome to remember your password?” If this is the case, move on to step 2.
2. In any window or tab, look for the three horizontal lines up on the top right side.
Click on the horizontal lines.
3. Click on the word ‘Settings’ when the menu pops down:
Click on the words Settings.
4. The page that opens up will have the words ‘Show advanced settings’ down near the bottom. Click there:
Click on the words.
5. What you’re looking for now is the Passwords and Forms section. If you have the ‘Offer to save passwords I enter on the web’ box checked, click on the words ‘ Manage saved passwords’.
This only works if you have let Chrome remember the passwords.
6. The next few photos have been edited but you can get the idea of what you’re looking at. The first thing you see is a list of your saved passwords. The website will be on the left while the passwords (hidden) will be on the right. In between is your username for each site. Here’s the first pic:
7. Now, you’re probably asking, “What good is this? The passwords are all hidden.” Well, click just to the right of any password and the word ‘Show’ will appear. Like this:
Click just to the right and choose ‘Show’.
8. Once you click ‘Show’, the password appears. Cool huh?
TIP: As you can see, this trick can be used to recover usernames, passwords and websites. Seems like fun, right? It’s not so much fun if you are on a shared computer, however. Can you see how this little secret can be used against you? Do you really want everyone who uses your computer to be able to access your passwords and usernames? We think not. Suit yourself but on a shared or public computer, we would NOT recommend that you let Chrome (or any browser) save your passwords.
If you don’t want Chrome to remember your passwords, go back to the menu and uncheck the box that reads ‘Offer to save passwords I enter on the web’.
There is another way to recover passwords in Chrome, even passwords that you haven’t saved. We’ll get to that in another post.
Facebook’s latest update popped up on one of our profiles this morning. Here’s a preview, just in case you haven’t seen it yet. Trust us, it’s very different. It’s too new to give a real opinion yet but, so far, we’re shocked at the different look. This ain’t your old Facebook, that’s for sure.
Here’s what greeted us this morning:
Coming soon? Looks like it’s already here.
We clicked on the green ‘Give It a Try’ button and this menu came next:
The process takes a while to load. Be patient.
When everything is loaded, click the ‘Take a Look’ button:
You’d better be sitting down. This is a very different Facebook.
First off, Facebook runs you through some explanations of the new GUI (graphic user interface…in other words, what’s in your face now!):
The new Facebook allows you to choose everything or just some feeds. Maybe this is the ‘less clutter’ part.
You decide what is on your main page. Next up is the ‘Easier to get around’ menu. Nothing new here, even though they say it’s different. The look is different, not the clickables:
Everything was on the left side anyway, right? Is this different?
If you need help, Facebook Help is always there. You can even switch back to the old interface. Notice that it says ‘For a while’. Seems like you have to adopt the new look even if you don’t like it. That’s Facebook for you.
For a while, huh? How long before the old is gone forever?
Here’s the total new look, your regular newsfeed; bigger photos, less clutter but a definite feeling of claustrophobia, at least for us. No open spaces, everything is full of stuff. Makes for a very busy look, don’t you think?
When you see your own page, you’ll get a better idea if you like this or not.
We think it’s very cramped, very tight. The space for ads is much larger. We noticed that right away. Facebook didn’t do this for you, they did it for their ads. Here’s what an app page looks like:
Less room for games but more room for ads.
Up on the right, there is the feed menu. Facebook reminds you that you can choose the types of feeds that show up on your main page:
Everything or just one feed. You decide.
That’s the tour so far. We’ve covered the main page differences here but, as time goes by, we’ll share any other differences that we find. Navigation is very different. If you want to get to your Timeline, you have to click on your own profile photo. Once you’re there, you’ll see bigger ads on the right and lots of open space. We wish the open space was on the newsfeed page instead of the huge photos and clutter. You’ll see a very busy look on your new Facebook, that’s for sure. Share your thoughts with us, let us know what you think.
Please Note: Since we wrote this review, ‘Download FB Album mod’ has changed its settings and asks form more permissions than we feel is safe. Here are the permissions it is asking for now:
Too many permission for a Facebook downloading app.
There is no reason why this extension has to access ALL of your data on websites, that would include passwords, by the way. Nor is there any reason for it to access your other tabs or browsing activity. It seems that the creators are involved in data mining, selling your information to advertisers, etc. Beware! We’re going back to Fotobounce.
We’ve talked about this mod before (read that post here: Download Facebook Albums) but since then, the creator of the software has given us a bit more information about it. The basic or Normal option works fine but sometimes you might want to adjust some of the settings. Here’s how you can do that.
1. This mod only works in Google Chrome. As we’ve said many times, you should be using Chrome anyway. Whatever you do, don’t use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Use Chrome or Firefox. We recommend Chrome.
2. Head over to the Chrome app store. Chrome Store
3. Add the ‘Download FB Album mod’ to Chrome.
4. Open your Facebook account and find an album that you want to download. Up on the top right of your url bar, you will see a new icon. Click it. This will begin the process, after you’ve chosen the settings that you want. Here is the icon:
This icon is only visible when you are viewing your Facebook pages.
5. We discussed the normal settings last time. Basically, you go to the album, click on the icon, choose Normal and a new tab opens. Press CTRL and S at the same time and the page is downloaded complete with all of the photos in a separate folder. This process could take some time, depending on how many photos are in the album and how fast your Internet connection is.
6. Here are the choices available from the drop-down menu:
Normal works fine for us but there are other choices as well.
7. If the album you want to download is large, and there are many large albums on Facebook, you might want to select ‘Without auto load’. If you choose this option, only the photos that are loaded will be saved. Some albums have thousands of photos in them. If you don’t choose the ‘Without auto load’ option, the download would take a very long time, if it finished at all.
8. Some albums have nice descriptions beside each photo. If you click ‘Load Captions’, those words will be saved with the photo.
9. If the download gets interrupted, you can choose ‘Load from specific id’. This is good for large albums, just in case the download stops after a few hundred photos. Your download will start from where it left off before the interruption. There is also the choice ‘Large Album Optimize’ which is good for massive photo albums.
Those are some of the choices available to you. We’ve tried to explain some of them here but you can always check out the official details on the download page.
Thanks for reading! Here are the official comments on the mod, as of May 13, 2013:
Download Steps:
1. Click the Page Actions button in any album/profile
2. Select your option:
●1 -> Normal Download: try to autoload all photos
●2 -> Download without auto load: only output loaded photos( For large album )
●3 -> Load from specific id:
useful when autoload stopped due to error and want to load after the last photo grabbed.
( For very large album to optimize loading speed )
( e.g. 500th -> end not 1st -> end )
www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=123456 <- Enter this number
● -- Load Comments & Friend tag ( Take longer time )
● -- Large Album Optimize ( Save the page as usual )
● -- Compress data ( save more data for option 4 )
Fast: lzw, Extreme: lzma+lzw. Try none/fast if crash occur.
●4 -> Export last album ( may not work for large album )
3. Save the new page opened. ( Press "Ctrl+S" & save with "Web Page, Complete" type )
**ChangeName is used to rename file name to (ascending) order
Steps to change name:
1. Click 'ChangeName'->'Ok' to reverse photo's order
2. 'Auto Zip all' -> Wait & Done! (html is packed inside zip)
OR
3. Save the page with images -> Drag photos you needed
4. Click 'Change Name'
5. 'Zip all files' -> Unzip & Done!
(6. If you want to view generated page offline,save the HTML in zip again to embed the script )
p.s. Please 'Reset' before download another album
a little bit of hi-tech, a little bit of common sense and a lot of fun
