Filed under: Google, Browsers

Don’t have Google Chrome yet? Well, get with the program already! So far, the feature I like the best is the omni bar. In the webcast of the Chrome announcement today, developers called it the “psychic bar.” I don’t know if I’d go quite that far, but it is cool. Basically, the omni bar combines your regular address bar and the search box into one area in your browser. You can type in a web address or something you want to search for. But it’s more than that.

After visiting Download Squad and using the search box just one time, I have the option to search DLS from the omni bar as well. I begin typing in the Download Squad address in the omni bar. Within a few keystrokes, I am told I can press tab to search Download Squad. It can be used on Amazon or any other place you frequently search for things.
Saves time going to the site and then searching. Chrome overall seems to be trying to save you time and put more functions in one place. Instead of going to Google (or Yahoo, or any search engine) and then typing in your search, you can do it all from one place.

Nice, but is it nice enough to make me change browsers entirely? Only time will tell.

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Filed under: Windows, Google, Freeware, Open Source, Beta, Browsers

Google Chrome, the browser from Google that pundits everywhere have been speculating about for years has finally arrived, at least in beta form. So what is it like? Pretty much exactly what you’d expect from Google: it’s a browser, but simplified. Google chose to use the open-source WebKit browseras the basis for Chrome. Strangely, only a Windows version of Chrome is currently available, even though WebKit is the basis for the Safari search engine on the Mac operating system.

During the install process, Google Chrome asks to import your bookmarks, browsing history, and passwords. This allows you to switch to using Chrome almost instantly. Interestingly, Chrome asks whether you would like Google to be your default search engine, or if you would like to specify a different one. Kudos to Google for this; when supplying their own browser, it would be tempting to say “using a Google browser, use Google’s search”.

Here’s a quick walk-through of the Chrome user interface.

Continue reading Google Chrome - Google’s new browser - First Look

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Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Web services, Beta, web 2.0

Brad first reviewed Ping.FM back in march, and the service has come a long way since then. Today, they announced that they’re ready to do away with invites and open up the service to the public.

Before getting my beta code, I really wasn’t all that interested in any of the microblog/status sites that exist. There are just too damn many of them, and I don’t have time to update a dozen sites every time I read or post something interesting. Ping has made that chore so unbelievably easy that I’m now getting some use out of my Twitter, Pownce, Plurk, Friendfeed, Rejaw, Facebook, and myriad other accounts.

Apart from using the dashboard on the Ping.FM website, you can also update via email or IM. All you have to do is add Ping as a buddy in your favorite app, enter a verification code, and any messages you send will be sent to your default list. If you’re an iGoogle user, Ping’s got a gadget for that, too. I’ve talked about their mobile version as well, which I love since it’ll run on any old handheld with wifi access.

Ping is a great service, and I can’t imagine trying to do manually what their service does for me. It’s a winner.

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Filed under: Internet, News, Blogging, Productivity, Google, Mozilla, Social Software, web 2.0

Used to be desktop applications were essential to getting the job done, whatever the job may have been, large or small. Now, with all the nimble web apps to choose from, the idea of firing up a huge application for a small task seems almost, well, unproductive and wasteful.

Yeah, sure, no one is suggesting you do away with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Illustrator, Photoshop, Quickbooks and other heavy hitters. However, there are excellent tools on the web where less, in many ways, is actually more. Here are 10 of my favorites.

1. ScribeFire - essential Firefox add-on for bloggers. Allows you to to easily drag and drop formatted text from the Web into your blog(s), post entries, take notes, and optimize ad inventory, directly through the Firefox browser.

2. Firefox - great web browser whose charm lies in all those irresistible add ons that make the whole interwebs experience that much sweeter. Once you pimp out your Firefox, it seriously is difficult to function on anything else. Yes, there are the crashes and other peccadillos, but they’re easy enough to overlook especially if you are truly in love.

3. Skitch - this is the best, quick image editor and photo sharing web app that is dead simple to use. For quick screenshots and sharing photos, you cannot beat it. For Mac only though. Sorry.

4. Gmail - I’ve done away with Outlook and Mail and rely on Gmail for several reasons: free, 7090 MB capacity, integration with Google calendar, Gtalk, great search functionality, and the portability is sweet.

5. Google Reader - free, powerful feed reader which allows you to share items with your friends and slog through all your news feeds as fast as your bleary eyes will let you. Bonus - I’m playing with Feedly (Firefox extension) which provides a magazine like start page of your feeds with complete Google Reader integration and Twitter and FriendFeed and more. So far I like, but Google Reader is still number one for now.

Continue reading 10 essential web apps for bloggers

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Filed under: Google

On Sunday we watched a short segment on CBS Sunday Morning about Google. The company, 10 years old this month, represents the best of what came out of the dot-com bubble in the 90’s. Today they are madly profitable, focused on their core services and yet, still crazy after all these years. Massages, naps and gourmet food? Why, that’s the kind of hubris that brought down dozens of companies in the first boom, so what’s Google’s secret sauce?

The fact is, Google is known to the mass market as “how to find stuff on the internet.” Their success, like most success stories, is wedded to a fortuitous series of events: the price of computers and internet access dropping like a stone and the democratization of page creation and monetization. That’s a mouthful, for sure. Cheaper computers and easier, faster access made computing and creating pages within the grasp of more people. As more people came online, they saw ways to make money by generating content and running the drop-dead simple AdSense on their pages. From memes to spy shots, Google helped the new wave make their wee blogsfiscally sensible.

What all this brought was brand recognition. The average person uses Google as a verb now, and that really means something. Another happy coincidence was the emergence of mobile and mobile browsing. Now you’ve got a vector of adoption that can reach even more folks who merely see the home computer as a porn/game machine but use their mobile devices every day. So the brand is unquestionably huge, which brings us to Chrome…

Continue reading Why Google Chrome Really Matters

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Filed under: Utilities, web 2.0

Google, Zoho, 37signals and other companies have done an excellent job of demonstrating that some applications don’t need to be desktop based. In fact, web-based calendars, office applications, and chat services offer many advantages over desktop versions like easy collaboration without the need for an Exchange server. But some applications really make a lot more sense on the desktop. Case in point: ShrinkFile.

ShrinkFile is an online file compression and hosting service. Have a large file you want to share with a friend or colleague and want to save them a bit of downloading time? Upload it to ShrinkFile, and ShrinkFile will zip it and host it for free for up to a week.

Sure, ShrinkFile could come in handy if you’re on a computer that doesn’t have WinZip, 7-zip, or another archiving application. But you know what? Practically every major operating system available today ships with the ability to zip files. What’s more, you could save time both downloading and uploading your large file if you just zip it before sharing it using another service like FileDropper or YouSendit.

What do you think? Am I missing something, or is ShrinkFile basically useless?

[via MakeUseOf]

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Filed under: Internet, Analysis

The age-old battle of copyright and artist freedom keeps clanging away in the distance, and are we any better off than we were when DAT machines were castrated in the 80’s? I read a report this morning about a UK band called “Show of Hands” who claims they are dependent upon so-called pirates who download their music and share it with friends. This isn’t much different than Trent Reznor making his music freely available online (and my wife reports the show here in town didn’t look any smaller than the ones in the 90’s — possibly even bigger since Reznor has a new legion of fans younger than us). But the music industry sticks by the mantra “a download is a lost sale, and that is theft.” Or, as TorrentFreak puts it, “there is no such animal as ‘piracy as promotion.’”

Oh really? This sad, antiquated logic continues to do one thing and one thing only: bolster sales of the top-paid performers while creating a chilling effect on artists who would love innovative promotion but fear free samples will incur the wrath of the mighty RIAA, or worse. It’s one thing to send the FBI after some poor schlub who leaks some Guns N’ Roses tracks, or sue the bejeebes out of hundreds of college kids, but it’s quite another to threaten fair trade when artists (who own their own content, thank you) decide to market in ways they see fit.

The only ray of sunshine could be recent rulings regarding Creative Commons which might allow savvy artists to provide music in the manner they see fit, without the RIAA calling fans of the artists a bunch of pirates. Arrr, matey. At the end of the day there has to be some middle ground, but it’s a pity the RIAA and other enforcement agencies see the world in black and white and tend to pull their concepts of ownership from the days when TV’s were also monochromatic.

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Filed under: Design, Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Sometimes you want your mouse to be zippy as possible, allowing you to scroll back and forth across a screen for a quick game of Pong or Arkanoid. But when you’re trying to make precise movements in an image editing application, precision might be more important than speed. If your mouse is too fast, you might have a hard time drawing straight lines, for example.

That’s where SlowMousion comes in. This free Windows utility allows you to select a hotkey on your keyboard or your mouse to hit when you want your mouse cursor to move very slowly. When you try dragging your mouse with the hotkey depressed, no matter how quickly you drag, the cursor will move veeerrrry slooowwwly.

There does not appear to be a way to make the slow movement the default and hti a hotkey for faster motion, so it doesn’t look like SlowMousion will do you much goo in the practical jokes department. But if you need all the help you can get trying to draw straight lines, this little app could come in handy.

[via Lifehacker and Freeware Genius]

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Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services, web 2.0

New web apps often make a lot of claims that just don’t hold up under testing. When I decided to put Quarkbase.com through the paces, I fully expected to be underwhelmed. After all, their motto is “Everything About A Website.”

Holy information overload Batman, this one really surprised me.

Pick a domain and hit search, then give Quarkbase a chance to dig up its research. They say to wait about 30 seconds, though my successful searches worked more quickly. I did get a few failure notices because of high traffic, but I understand why. Quarkbase finds so much information about your website that it’s mindblowing.

What does it find? The domain owner, registrar, creation date, primary language, similar sites (*yawn* so far), traffic rank, blog rank, countries in which it’s popular, description and “official” contact info, people involved, incoming links, and more. Unlike the “similar pages” Google search returns, the Quarkbase suggestions were pretty much right on the money.

But wait, there’s more. It’ll track down numbers on Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Technorati, Reddit, Delicious, and Yahoo Answers. Quarkbase even knows how many times the site have made Digg’s front page. It also generates a list of the most popular recent page and five popular pages of all time based on these stats.

Quarkbase is an incredibly informative tool and undeniably useful for anyone working the web.

[ via FeedMyApp ]

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Filed under: Internet, Video, News

There’s good news today for user generated video sites like YouTube, DailyMotion, and MetaCafe. A federal court in California has ruled that Veoh did not violate the copyright of a pornography company by automatically transcoding video uploaded by a user.

Let’s back up a second here. If you upload copyrighted material to an online video site to share with others without the copyright holder’s permission, you may be breaking the law. But the question of whether the video site itself is violating the law is a bit murkier. The IO Group, which owned the video in question filed a suit agains Veoh in 2006 claiming that the video service could not hide behind safe harbor laws by saying that the user, not the video site was responsible because Veoh took the action of transcoding the video into Flash for online viewing.

Of course, the process of transcoding a video is pretty much automatic, and the judge in this case seemed to understand that Veoh’s action in transcoding the video were about as deliberate breathing. The ruling basically states that as long as a video site can demonstrate that it warns users that they should not upload copyrighted video without permission, removes copyrighted videos promptly when faced with a DMCA takedown notice, and at least makes some effort at sniffing out illegally uploaded videos, the company is lawsuit-proof. Or at least lawsuit-resistant up to a few meters.

[via TechCrunch]

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Filed under: Google

Leave it to Google to step in where others have mishandled the ball. It seems their mobile platform Android is getting its very own App Store ala Apple, except without all that pesky submit-and-pray scenario iPhone devs have been unable to complain about. OK, they can complain, they just can’t share notes on the actual development process. Google is taking the open road here, and it appears there won’t be those issues at Android Market.

From the Android Developer’s Blog: “Similar to YouTube, content can debut in the marketplace after only three simple steps: register as a merchant, upload and describe your content and publish it.” Holy smokes, that’s it? While developers are busy doing the three-step for Google, one wonders what will become of the Great VC Gold Rush currently playing out around Apple’s mobile sexpot.

[via CrunchGear]

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Filed under: Internet, Google

Google has added a simple language translation option to the normal search bar. Simply type “translate” followed by the word and the language you want to see.

For example “translate download into French” or “translate computer into Spanish.” The tool currently works with nine languages including French, Spanish, Italian, German and even Hindi.

This is not a substitute for Google Translator. The tool will only translate one word at a time. If you run into a foreign word you can simply type translate and the word to get a result in English.

It’s pretty simple and could come in handy once in awhile. You can at least learn to say hello in all nine languages while you are bored at work some day.

[Via Lifehacker]

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Filed under: Internet, Video

Beginning September 13th you will be able to watch your favorite BBC shows online, all the time. In the past, the BBC would post shows to the iPlayer and keep them up for only 7 days.

The new format will use series stacking, which basically means as each new episode becomes available, it will stack on top of old episodes. All episodes will remain available online so you will have the opportunity to watch entire series in one sitting or, just catch up on a few weeks of missed viewing.

According to the BBC press office, you will be able to catch up on a maximum of 13 episodes. It doesn’t state if that’s in one sitting or for one series or on the iPlayer overall though. Seems like an important detail to include.

iPlayer use for television shows is limited to those connecting from the UK, though radio programs are available to everyone.

[Via Mashable]

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Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, E-mail, Productivity, Google, Freeware, How-Tos, iPhone

One of the hardest aspects of managing email is keeping track of sent messages where a reply is expected. Do you have this problem? I know I do. Some of the people I correspond with are completely reliable, and I know that if I send them something, I will get a reply within 24 hours and often sooner. But some of my other regular correspondents are not so reliable.

At all.

It’s really frustrating.

Luckily, if you’re a Gmail user, there is a very simply method for keeping track of messages where you are expecting a reply. You see it every day, and you might even be using it for something else.

What am I talking about?

The Starred attribute. With a single key or button press, Gmail allows you to add a star to a message which prominently appears whenever that message or thread is in view.

This process is incredibly simple, but effective. Now, I should first point out that starring an email is for all intents and purposes the same as labeling a message with any arbitrary label. But I think stars work better as an expected response reminder than a label would. So follow along with me and see if you don’t come to the same conclusion.

Continue reading Using Gmail’s Starred items to track expected replies - Emailers Anonymous

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Filed under: Blogging, Analysis

I download and install a lot of applications, and if you’re a regular reader you probably do too. Like anything else that’s free, downloading tends to some with some unfortunate perils. I’m not talking about trojans or malware, just regular run-of-the-mill annoyances.

Capping download rates. Asus…Oh, Asus. Some days I just want to fly over to Taiwan and slap you right in the mouth. Do they not realize that it works out the same whether I download for 2 hours at 9k or 4 minutes at 256k? I actually stopped building with their mainboard partially because of the crappy download speeds.

Falsely advertise as being free. I subscribe to a number of free software feeds, and there’s nothing worse than seeing a cool application show up that someone has called free just to get it listed. You’re not helping your app’s popularity. In fact, you’re probably turning off just about anyone that might have wanted to use it because they’re ticked that the download was either stripped-down or only a trial.

Download a download manager first. Thankfully, I haven’t seen the Adobe Download Manager in quite some time, but there are others out there. I don’t need or want your help downloading. If I need help resuming my download, I’ve got DownThemAll, thanks.

Continue reading My Top 6 Download Annoyances

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