If you’re video chatting at night or in an area with limited lighting, you can brighten your face by opening up a blank white web browser window. This is obviously a really simple tip, but it’s kind of fun to see how surprisingly useful blank browser windows can be (like speeding up Safari on the iPhone 3G).
The simplest way to create a blank browser window is to open up about://blank which works in every modern browser.
The idea is probably taken from Photo Booth, which uses an all white screen as a virtual flash of sorts to brighten your mug when you take a picture (you can disable that by holding down the Shift key). I’m guessing it won’t be long until some developers start creating wrappers for FaceTime, iChat, and Skype to have this in some form of native app.
A little less than two years ago we set out to make computers much better. Today, we’re announcing the first Chromebooks from our partners, Samsung and Acer. These are not typical notebooks. With a Chromebook you won’t wait minutes for your computer to boot and browser to start. You’ll be reading your email in seconds. Thanks to automatic updates the software on your Chromebook will get faster over time. Your apps, games, photos, music, movies and documents will be accessible wherever you are and you won't need to worry about losing your computer or forgetting to back up files. Chromebooks will last a day of use on a single charge, so you don’t need to carry a power cord everywhere. And with optional 3G, just like your phone, you’ll have the web when you need it. Chromebooks have many layers of security built in so there is no anti-virus software to buy and maintain. Even more importantly, you won't spend hours fighting your computer to set it up and keep it up to date.
At the core of each Chromebook is the Chrome web browser. The web has millions of applications and billions of users. Trying a new application or sharing it with friends is as easy as clicking a link. A world of information can be searched instantly and developers can embed and mash-up applications to create new products and services. The web is on just about every computing device made, from phones to TVs, and has the broadest reach of any platform. With HTML5 and other open standards, web applications will soon be able to do anything traditional applications can do, and more.
Chromebooks will be available online June 15 in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain. More countries will follow in the coming months. In the U.S., Chromebooks will be available from Amazon and Best Buy and internationally from leading retailers.
Even with dedicated IT departments, businesses and schools struggle with the same complex, costly and insecure computers as the rest of us. To address this, we’re also announcing Chromebooks for Business and Education. This service from Google includes Chromebooks and a cloud management console to remotely administer and manage users, devices, applications and policies. Also included is enterprise-level support, device warranties and replacements as well as regular hardware refreshes. Monthly subscriptions will start at $28/user for businesses and $20/user for schools.
There are over 160 million active users of Chrome today. Chromebooks bring you all of Chrome's speed, simplicity and security without the headaches of operating systems designed 20 to 30 years ago. We're very proud of what the Chrome team along with our partners have built, and with seamless updates, it will just keep getting better. For more details please visit www.google.com/chromebook.
Looking for a way to access your Gmail acount from your Mac’s menu bar? Zentertain’s Mailbox is a lightweight app that does just that, adding an envelope icon to your menu bar that, when clicked, pops open a window containing your Gmail inbox. You can read emails, reply to conversations and compose new emails from within that window, all without having to open up your browser.
The first time you click the icon, you’ll be asked for your login details before being taken to your inbox. Eagle-eyed users of the mobile-optimized version of Gmail for the iPhone will probably be very familiar with the version of the web app that pops up; it looks like Mailbox is effectively just a browser window, and the app is tricking Google into thinking that it is serving the site to a mobile device. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: the iPhone-optimized version of Gmail is nicely-designed, provides access to Gmail’s more advanced features (Priority Inbox, Google Buzz, labels, stars, etc.) and works well on smaller displays — like the window that Mailbox uses to display your inbox on your desktop.
As a very simple, lightweight app that provides speedy desktop access to your Gmail account via your menu bar, it works pretty well. However, if you’re a Google Apps for Domains Gmail user, you’re out of luck: unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work properly with those accounts. Additionally, there are a couple of extra (albeit probably technically hard to implement) features that would turn it from merely being a convenient way to access the Gmail website into a much more useful application. Robust offline access would be really handy, and make the app more of an equivalent to full-featured desktop email clients like Outlook and Apple Mail. Some kind of notifications system for new and unread emails would also be useful — perhaps having a count of unread emails next to the app’s icon in the menu bar, and also having the option of Growl notifications for new emails.
Sandvox 2 has more than five dozen new features and major improvements. This represents a huge leap forward for anyone using a Mac to easily create powerful websites. All of the new features and improvements in Sandvox 2 are designed to give the modern website builder more flexibility than ever.
Under the hood, this new version introduces a completely new architecture and new editing engine, which allows you to mix and match “objects” on a web page in a much more naturally expressive and creative way. For example, photography and video can now both reside on the same page, along with text, custom HTML and whatever else you can dream up.
Sandvox 2 has also leapt into the realm of social media! Now with multiple points of Facebook and Twitter integration, you can keep visitors apprised of your status and drive more traffic to your website by making it easy for them to “tweet” about or “like” specific pages on your site.
Websites you build with Sandvox 2 are now more “modern” than ever before. Any page can pop up a photo gallery on a layer just above it to present a lightboxed slideshow. Hierarchical drop-down menus are automatically built by Sandvox 2 to help visitors navigate your site. Audio and video are playable in a way that’s accessible to just about every computer and browser out there — including iPad and iPhone.
And this is just for starters! New designs and design chooser, an all-new inspector, directly resizable images, drag-and-drop placement of objects on a page, and more!
And need we mention that this is on top of the amazing features that have been part of Sandvox all along: Live editing of your actual website, with no preview mode. Tons of designs to choose from. Everything you need to get your website built, no add-ons required. Easy blogging and podcasting. Build sites that are optimized for getting attention from search engines. And publish to just about any web host under the sun.
Pick a look.Choose from our extensive gallery of designs. Or go with another designer’s creation. Change your mind, change your theme. Learn more.
Mix and Match.
It’s the rule for a better website. Mix it up with text, video, photos, blogs, forms, sitemaps, Facebook, Twitter, or just about any kind of web object. Learn more.
Customize. Expand.Use a chunk of HTML PHP, or JavaScript. Paste an embed link or other snippet. Just because you don't have to use HTML doesn't mean you can't. Learn more.
Publish.
FTP, SFTP, MobileMe, WebDAV... the choice of how, where, and when to publish is yours. Built-in archiving plus automatic RSS features make sharing your blogs and podcasts a breeze.
Info graphics are a beautiful combination of maths, science, art and instruction, all rolled into one. I love the way these graphics convey often complex concepts in simple visual ways.
Apple is the world’s most valuable brand in the post-recession world, says the latest 2011 Top 100 ranking of global brands by BrandZ, a Millward Brown subsidiary of advertising company WPP. The iPhone maker, which last year ranked third, knocked Google, the world’s most valuable brand in 2010. Apple emerged ahead other top brands from a variety of industries such as computers, automotive, telcos, banks and clothing, to name a few.
The organization estimated Apple’s brand value at north of $153 billion, which shouldn’t be confused with Apple’s market capitalization that currently stands at cool $324 billion. Google’s brand value dropped two percent to an estimated $111.5 billion, enough to rank second. Apple earned an 84 percent increase in brand value with successful iterations of existing products like the iPhone, creation of the tablet category with iPad, and anticipation of a broadened strategy making the brand a trifecta of cloud computing, software, and innovative, well-designed devices.
The BrandZ rankings were first published five years. Apple’s brand value in the BrandZ rankings increased 859 percent from just $16 billion in 2006, thanks to the successful business with iOS devices that helped Apple become the world’s most profitable handset maker and the biggest mobile devices company by revenue.
Facebook ($19.1 billion), Amazon ($37.6 billion) and the Chinese search engine Baidu ($22.6 billion) also stand out as year-over-year performers. It’s interesting that Amazon is now the leading retal brand, having beaten Walmart with a 37 percent rise in brand value. Dell fell off the list this year and Nokia lost 28 percent of its brand value, ending at the #81 slot with an estimated brand value of $10.7 billion. Car maker Toyota rebounded to the #1 rank in cars. Total value of the hundred brands on the BrandZ Top 100 list is an estimated $2.4 trillion.
I got tired my desktop and login wallpaper today and went looking for a bunch of new ones. Instead of keeping them to myself, I’ve decided to share the wealth. Without further ado, here are 15 high resolution wallpapers that will make your desktop look beautiful again.
A few quick notes: Click on each image or the link below to get the full size. InterfaceLift doesn’t allow direct linking of images so you’ll need to click through and then select your desired resolution and hit the ‘Download’ button next to it.
Imagine a web where our browsers connected directly to each other to do voice, video, media sharing and run applications, using P2P and real-time APIs, rather than going through centralized servers that controlled traffic and permissions. That's a potent idea and if implemented properly could future-proof a part of the web from authoritarian crack-downs, disruptions by disasters and more. It could also establish a permanent lawless zone of connected devices with no central place to stop anyone from doing anything in particular.
It just so happens that something like that may now be under development in the most official of venues. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced today the formation of a new Web Real-Time Communications Working Group to define client-side APIs to enable Real-Time Communications in Web browsers, without the need for server-side implementation. The Group is chaired by engineers from Google and Ericsson. It sounds like Opera Unite to me (see video below), but democratized across all browsers. It sounds like it could be a very big deal.
Here's how Opera described its Unite technology at launch two years ago. Opera is always several years ahead of its time.
The upcoming release of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion will be distributed primarily as a download through the Mac App Store. This information comes from AppleInsider, who says the following:
The Mac App Store… will become the de facto method for obtaining the Lion upgrade, people familiar with the matter have revealed. Users will be able to upgrade instantly without the need for physical media by purchasing Lion through the Mac App Store.
Distribution of Lion through the Mac App Store for all users is not too surprising considering it’s the primary method for developers to download and install the Developer Preview releases. This is not to say that a corresponding DVD installer will not be released alongside the digital distribution. Last month, a placeholder for a Lion installation DVD showed up on German Amazon, and there continues to be a possibility that Lion will also appear on USB installer keys for MacBook Air and Mac Mini Server users.
