Health News, Tech News, Product Reviews

Explore: Google’s Picasa Moves Onto Flickr’s Turf

On the heels of a major upgrade earlier this week that added facial recognition features to its Picasa photo management service, Google added a new Explore page today that shows off the most popular public photos uploaded by members. In addition to the featured photos, shown in a 3 X 4 grid, the Explore page also shows the most recent photos upload

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DOMINATION: GOOGLE launches web browser…

DOMINATION: GOOGLE launches web browser…

Tags: image, scoop, jpeg, rumor, pictures, gif, information, pictures, gossip, news

GOOGLE plans to launch web browser…

GOOGLE plans to launch web browser…

Tags: images, pictures, image, videos, news, pics, photos, gossip, information, gif

Ebonite the One Bowling Ball - Review

Ebonite the One Bowling Ball - Review

Google Chrome Browser Download

Google Chrome is set to be the third contender in a new round of “browser wars”, competing with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and its rival Mozilla Firefox.

Chrome is touted to be faster, more stable and more secure than the alternatives and was designed specially for next-generation web content – such as video, web-based games, chat and internet banking.

Vice president of product management Sundar Pichai and engineering director Linus Upson said the company’s developers had set out to “completely rethink” the concept of a web browser.

“On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple… Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better,” they said in a post on Google’s official blog.

The announcement comes one day after Google sent a press release about Chrome to journalists in Europe in the form of a comic book, which quickly spread online.

The 38-page comic book attempted to explain the technical concepts behind the web browser in layman terms.

“As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit ’send’ a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome,” Mr Pichai and Mr Upson said.

“As we believe in access to information for everyone, we’ve now made the comic publicly available.
“We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.”

Like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome will be open source – meaning that other developers can contribute to the project or use it as a template for their own work.

Firefox is one of the most well-known examples of the open source code ideology, a principle of software development that states that the technology behind a product be made freely available and that encourages community development.

Google Chrome comic book

The Week in iPhone Apps: Let’s Get Drunk and Talk About Politics [IPhone Apps]

Always a microcosm of the greater world, the App Store this week focused on two things us Americans have been thinking about a lot recently—the upcoming election, and tossing back a few this Labor Day weekend. And with this week’s apps, there’s no reason for your iPhone to be left out.

The political applications, sadly, tend to swing pretty far to the side of app absurdity:

Obama/McCain Inauguration Countdown: Tick down the days to January 20 for the candidate of your choice, complete with rotating quotations and photos. Also useful for reminding yourself that the one and a half years of inane campaign coverage on TV will soon be over. Sadly, they’re a buck.

BAC Calc: Ahh, but here’s some utility for the weekend. A blood-alcohol-level calculator to quantify exactly how hammered you’ve gotten while getting riled up by McCain and Obama quotes with your buddies. Just enter your consumption, alochol volume of your booze, your weight and your gender. But remember kids, the law won’t care if your iPhone says you’re under the limit once you find yourself in the drunk tank. Free

Beer Bounce: And once all your friends go home on Monday night, there’s no sense in stopping the party when you’ve got Beer Bounce, the first virtual quarters game for the iPhone. As you progress through the rounds, difficulty is increased by adding blurriness and staggering to the game. Nice touch! $3

Blofeld: While it has nothing to do with anything, really, Bond fans will have to love the concept behind Blofeld. It places an image of a feline pelt on your phone, and purrs when you stroke it, evil genius style. I can’t believe this costs a dollar, but again, hats off to the concept, especially the icon.

Earthscape: And just when you thought the App Store was only filled with meaningless pap, there’s Earthscape, which brings a great-looking Google Earth-style satellite image browser to your phone. It’s a little laggy at times, and the image quality isn’t as high as GMaps, but a great way to kill a few minutes if you’re stuck in line somewhere. $5

This week’s app coverage on Giz:

• Tris, the free Tetris game, was pulled from the store (voluntarily) for copyright violations. Infinite sadness.
• Our Question of the Day found that a typical Giz reader has spent between $1 and $10 on apps, but with many bigger spenders also responding. Go vote if you haven’t yet.
• A fairly harmless comic app Murderdrome was rejected from the store, and its creators want a rating system for apps to avoid censorship, which is a great idea.
• A quasi-hologram app looked awesome, but later turned out to be just a proof-of-concept simulation, although its creator wants to make it into reality.
• And the Android Market, Google’s answer to the App Store, was officially announced and does not require an approval process to get listed.

This list is in no way definitive. If you’ve spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see what you missed last week and check our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a good long weekend everybody.

45 Beautiful and Creative (WordPress) Designs

In this collection, you’ll find some (45 of them to be exact) of the most attractive, creative designs by talented designers who push the limits of WordPress theming and raise the bar for the rest of us.

Android Market, Google’s App Store, Will Not Require Approval For Applications [Android]

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

The Android Dev Blog today released some shots and details on the Android Market—the Android version of the iPhone’s App Store. Stressing that it’s a “market” (free, open, etc) rather than a “store,” the Google folks have decided to not require an approval process for devs to have their applications listed, unlike Apple’s mysterious black box of approval that even the developers still don’t fully understand. Which is great news for Android devs, but could be quite a handful for Google.

Android Market builds in all of the similar functionalities found in Apple’s version: providing the infrastructure to host apps in a centralized place, versioning and update control, and support for free and paid apps (although the pay apps will not be ready for version 1.0). Apple’s model of a single, all-in-one app repository definitely makes sense over a Symbian or Blackberry approach, with apps scattered across the web. But where Apple has two phones to deal with, Android will eventually have hundreds, so the system will need to be all the more robust to not allow incompatible code that doesn’t require prior approval to crash people’s handsets. Still, iPhone developers have not been overly thrilled with Apple’s development process, so this should be a relief for them. [Android Developers Blog]