Freeware World

Google seems to be testing a radically changed image search user interface. Reports on various websites say that it might have been around for up to a week… and that it looks a bit like Bing. I just got the new interface this afternoon. And I don’t use Bing.

The new look page focuses entirely on images, removing all the additional data which was previously displayed under each result. That data isn’t gone completely, though. It now displays when you mouseover an image. The page also automatically loads more results as you scroll, kind of like a Twitter app that loads older messages the further down you go. In all, it’s an attractive new way of presenting image search results.

Clicking an image is a different matter, though. This action now loads the source website in an iframe, with a slightly opaque layer on top of it, and the image highlighted and expanded. There’s also a section to the right of the page containing the relevant image’s info. Clicking anywhere in the main part of this page forces the image source page to load. This part of the new UI experience is less positive - it feels like the user is expected to know how it works bef0ore using it.

Expect this interface to continue to evolve as Google continues its tests. The second-step page, which displays the image in its original location, is in particular need of work.

The more I think about it, the more I reckon the Android platform could become the next great portable gaming device.

I’ve just been reliving my childhood with SNesroid, an Android emulator that lets you play Super Nintendo games on your phone. You can use the app to install ROMs of old classics such as Street Fighter II, Mario Kart and Super Tennis on your device, and they play exactly like they did all those years ago. The HTC Desire I used coped perfectly well, providing a seamless and smooth playing experience.

Android gaming is definitely getting more interesting, confirmed this week when I played the excellent Quake 2 port. Many game developers are putting all their efforts into iPhone at the moment but the Apple platform will always be restricted to touchscreen controls due to the nature of the hardware.

Hopefully, it won’t be long before we start to see more Android gaming devices, such as Hard Kernel’s ODROID. When that happens, gamers’ eyes might start wandering away from Apple’s App Store.

Chrome and Opera are now the most forward-looking browsers on the market, while Internet Explorer has come a long way and caught up with the open source favorite, Firefox. 

For years, Firefox, Mozilla’s customizable browser, was the browser of choice for the tech savvy. Add-ons weren’t a new thing, but Firefox’s open source community really took them to new levels, meaning you could pretty much have your browser do anything you want. It looked modern, lean and quick, especially when compared to IE.

Recent updates have been less impressive, and very incremental. It may be more secure and faster every time, but I hardly notice. The design of version 3.x hasn’t changed much, leaving it looking very last decade compared to new kid Chrome and Opera’s flashy version 10.

I wasn’t sure what to expect with Firefox 4, which is promising great change, but my first impressions are not good. Instead of something new, the tabs at the top interface is reminiscent of both Opera and Chrome, and the new orange button has been taken straight from Opera 10. While syncing is promised soon, there’s nothing that really makes Firefox 4 stand out.

Apple’s Safari has the useful and attractive Top Sites and History views, which are really user friendly, while Opera has the powerful Unite, which is a fantastic content sharing tool. Chrome is a streamlined and quick browser that keeps itself out of the way so you can concentrate on the web.

Firefox 4, meanwhile, does look fresher, but it doesn’t look like the game changer it once was. Will you be checking out the new beta?

There is such a thing as too much information. As Google recently discovered with Buzz, helping people connect to and access information instantaneously in ever more imaginative ways isn’t always a big success.

The feeling amongst many was that with Buzz, Google had gone a bit over the top in trying to bring more information and interactivity to the masses. In the end, Buzz ended up being an overwhelming and rather confusing product that failed to live up to the hype.

Google TV is the next big Google product due to hit the airwaves this fall. Having conquered the internet, it was only a matter of time before Google took on the broadcasting world. However, I can’t help feeling that once again Google may have misjudged just how much information users really want and need, how much they’re prepared to pay for Google products and whether mixing the internet with television viewing is necessarily a good idea.

Google TV is a software platform for set-top boxes and HDTVs based on the Android operating system. However, its not an exclusively Google product. The company have teamed-up with Intel, Sony and Logitech to develop it meaning this is one of the most commercial ventures Google have ventured into.

In particular, three issues immediately spring to mind regarding whether it will take off or not:

1. It requires purchasing set-top box

Unless you have a web enabled HDTV, you will need to purchase a set top box to access Google TV. This could be the the first stumbling block as its questionable how many users will be willing to pay for a new set-top box when they’ve already got one for their current TV provider. After all, one of the things that has made Google products so popular is that not only are they great, but they’re free as well.

2. Program searching and recording are no big innovations

Google’s expertise in search technology will surely make searching for your favorite content and programs easier than ever. However, most digital set-top boxes allow you to search and one-touch record programs already. Google are hardly pushing the boundaries by making this one of their key selling points of Google TV.

3. Web surfing via the TV is no big deal or pleasure

You can already surf the web on your TV using browsers built into devices such as Playstations and Wiis. However, how many people really use it on a regular basis? Not many and the reason is because surfing the web on your TV simply isn’t a comfortable experience compared to using a computer. Using an on screen keyboard, reading lengthy articles and navigating without a mouse mean that most people prefer to use their computer for general web surfing. The Xbox, Playstation and Wii have failed to succeed in this area - why should a Google set top box.

Traditionally, Google products have been motivated by a simple desire to make users’ lives easier. However, some suspect that Google TV has been motivated by a desire to make serious money from advertising. It’s not clear the format Google ads will take on Google TV but the company are surely seduced by the fact that TV advertising is where the big money lies. The New York Times certainly thinks so saying that the aim of Google TV is to “ensure that its…search and advertising systems, play a central role.”

That said, there are some exciting prospects to Google TV. The ability for independent developers to create widgets for your TV in the same way as they can for Android phones is particularly intriguing. Imagine for example a widget that can automatically record your favorite sporting events automatically or track when programs made by your favorite director will be aired. And as Android on mobiles has proved, just because Google are new to a particular field, doesn’t mean they can’t succeed where others have failed.

Tune-in this fall to see how this latest venture fares.

Apple and Google may be less friendly these days, but they’ve always had a major similarity. Their designs are clean and minimal. This may not be to everybody’s tastes, but then not everybody’s tastes are good.

iOS and Google.com are both excellent pieces of design where form seems to follow function perfectly, so imagine my horror when I realized both now allow you to stick in your own wallpapers. I know that doesn’t force anyone to do anything, but I think it shows a lack of belief in design.

iOS 4 looks great, and putting a picture of your baby behind it will ruin the aesthetics. Sorry. Designers are professionals who we should trust - when Joe Public is let loose we end up with Pimp My Ride or ‘The Homer“. Henry Ford had it right when he said ‘any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.’

Picture the scene: you go to your local supermarket and buy ten items. As the items are scanned by the shop assistant, each one is logged in a computer database. When you complete your purchase and leave the store, a record of what you bought remains. Although, it’s not actually a record of what you bought at all. It’s a record of what somebody bought.

Next week, you go back to the same store and buy 25 items. Three of these items match three items from last week’s visit. Now the computer knows that you’re likely to buy these three items together. Except that it doesn’t know that: all it knows is that someone might like to buy these three items together.

That same computer receives similar purchase reports from the supermarket chain’s 1,000 stores. Each store serves - say - a thousand shopping visits a day. So each week, one computer receives anonymous market reports on 7 million shopping visits. That data is vital to the supermarket for planning supply and for optimizing its service.

Very few people complain about stores collating this kind of data, and for good reason. The data is anonymous (assuming you eschew loyalty cards). So the focus of collecting this data must be understanding customers’ shopping habits. Not you, singular, but you plural.

The internet works in a similar way. The top 1,000 websites provide a vast amount of services and content, generally for free. Together, the top 1,000 websites employ thousands of people. You might think that these people are volunteers, or that they’re paid by wealthy internet philanthropists complete with top hat and monocle, who fund the web out of the goodness of their own hearts. Of course, that’s not how it works.

The internet is a marketplace, where a lot of the top 1,000 websites are making money despite the fact they offer generally free services and/or content. A large part of the money in this marketplace is generated by advertising, though lots is generated in traditional product sales as well. These two business lines are very different but they share one main need: accurate data about what users are doing. The more data a company has, the better it knows its users.

A website with more than a few million visitors a month will be spending plenty of time analyzing its traffic and visitors, from a technical point of view (shaping traffic, predicting peaks), from a content point of view (”Did the change we made to the homepage affect bounce rate?”) and from a business point of view (”What sort of users tend to convert, and what can we do to boost that sort of traffic?”).

But none of these people will be looking at you personally and saying “Hey, I see Bob’s come in from Google again”. That’s because a major website would need to employ tens of thousands of people just for that sort of snooping data analysis. And frankly, you’re just not worth that much. That is, you - the single user who might be worried about privacy because you read a hundred articles a month on websites that should know better - you, the individual user - are not that interesting from a statistical point of view.

That’s what statistics are all about and once you understand that, you’ll be able to start using Facebook again and sleep peacefully in the knowledge that for a tiny price: a snippet of anonymous data about where you go on the web and what you click… you, an unknown and statistically uninteresting grain of sand - get to use loads of cool websites for free. It’s not a bad deal.

iPhone users can now make to make free Skype calls over 3G, thanks to the latest update of the popular VoIP software. Previously, free Skype-to-Skype calls could only be made over WiFi, but version 2.0 now lets users call any Skype contact utilizing their 3G contract.

Unfortunately, this magical era of free calls to anywhere in the world isn’t going to last. Skype has announced that it is only offering free 3G calls until the end of 2010, so make sure you get all of your talking done before then. The developer hasn’t revealed how much it will cost, but it has said that it’ll be a monthly subscription rather than a one-off fee.

It seems that this isn’t good enough for those freeloading iPhone Skype users. Today, Skype’s App Store page has been flooded with complaints from disgruntled users, moaning that they will have to pay for the service. This is the service that didn’t exist until today. The service that is being offered for free for six months. The service that a couple of years ago no one thought would even be possible, such was the resistance towards VoIP from mobile operators. Ungrateful lot!

In case you didn’t know, today is Quit Facebook Day: a date many Facebook users have chosen to abandon the popular social network. Their reasons? They seem to be  unhappy with the way Facebook is dealing with their data. According to the official statement, Facebook “makes if extremely difficult for the average user to manage their data” - that is, decide what’s visible and what’s not. They’re also worried about “the usage Facebook could make of these data in the future”.

With all due respect, this is just nonsense. If you’re worried about online privacy, why did you join Facebook in the first place? You don’t need to be there, just because everyone else is. Want to find old friends from school or keep in touch with workmates? There are plenty of other ways you can use: email, IM clients, Twitter… not to mention Google’s recent social tools like Buzz and Wave. You can also use these to send interesting links, share videos or exchange messages.

In any case, if you still want to be on Facebook but don’t want to be concerned about privacy, you only need to configure your profile settings accordingly. Luckily Facebook has made it easier for the user - maybe in response to people threatening to quit their service. Simply click the Account link on the top right corner of the Facebook main page and select Privacy Settings.

This will take you to Facebook’s Privacy Settings menu, with four main areas:

1. Basic Directory information. Here you can choose the areas of your profile you want to leave open for everyone or make accessible only for friends, or friends of friends. Your choices here may affect other people’s results when they’re trying to find you.

2. Sharing on Facebook. This is where you mark exactly what you want to share on Facebook. Each of the 9 items can be set to either Everyone, Friends of Friends or Friends Only, so that you keep control of who is seeing what. Facebook also includes some ready-made profiles for this setting.

3.  Applications and Websites. Here you can edit the privacy settings for the Facebook games and applications you’re currently using, as well as control the amount of information available for other apps when your friends use them. Another interesting option is the possibility to preview your Facebook profile as it appears in search engine results.

4. Block Lists. Finally, this is where you can create lists to block certain people you don’t want to interact with on Facebook. You can also block application invites and managed blocked applications from here

Now, if you really want to quit Facebook, go ahead. But don’t use privacy issues as an excuse. With the proper configuration, Facebook is pretty much harmless.

It seems that now more than ever, when the markets speak, the world listens. And what the markets said yesterday is that Apple is now the biggest IT company in the world.

Apple’s market valuation of $221.4bn passed Microsoft’s $218.3bn on the New York stock market yesterday marking a depressing new low for Microsoft and firmly drawing the battle line between Google and Apple - Microsoft is set to be nothing but a footnote in the IT world.

The decline of Microsoft is all the more amazing when you consider that at the beginning of 2000, the company was worth $556bn compared to Apple’s paltry $15.6bn. Then, Steve Balmer took over Microsoft while Apple co-founder Steve Jobs returned like a prodigal son to Apple which almost went bankrupt in 1997 and started the long road to Apple’s recovery. As a result, much of the blame for Microsoft’s decline has been laid at the feet of Balmer who has been helpless in the face of Job’s ingenuity and innovation.

To add insult to injury for Balmer, even more spectacular has been the rise of Google which was nothing but a loss-making search engine back in 2000. It’s now worth $115.bn making it bigger than Hewlett Packard and only a shade smaller than Cisco and IBM. Google is very much in the ascendancy and it’s surely only a matter of time before it leapfrogs Microsoft on the stock market over the next few years.

But even though Google may still lag a few places behind Microsoft financially, it’s already miles ahead in the software world. While Apple has destroyed Microsoft in the hardware stakes with iPods, iPads and the increasing popularity of Macs, Google has destroyed it in the online advertising business courtesy of Google AdSense which has outstripped Microsoft’s loss making Live services. Even in the mobile industry, Microsoft Windows Mobile can’t compete with either Google’s free Android operating system or the iPhone.

Microsoft’s saving grace remains Windows and Office, the two most widely used computer applications in the world. Courtesy of these two products alone, Microsoft still makes more profit that Apple or Google even if its market valuation is plunging. However, the writing is on the wall for these two flagships too. As in the mobile world, why should consumers and manufacturers pay for a license to use Windows when operating systems such as Google Chromium and Google Docs offer a competent free alternative?

Microsoft’s failure to innovate and embrace open source or free software has been its ultimate downfall. In an increasingly competitive and desperate economic climate, both consumers and businesses will ultimately end-up ditching expensive options such as Windows and Office thus finally consigning the company to the history books.

[Header image from Hooray for Change]

A quick glance at the top ten games on Facebook is depressing - all variations on the same theme: time wasting clicking games that offer players customization, but no game. Waiting four hours does not make a game in my book.  Café World,  Pet Society, FishVille? Fishville?? Come on!

Luckily, there are some games which give you a bit of a challenge, and here are my top five:

1: Bejeweled Blitz. Taking one of their classics, with Blitz PopCap really hit on something. A 60 second game is perfect - you can fit a minute in anytime and it’s so short you’ll never get tired of it. Facebook gives it a competitive edge, as you can share your scores and join weekly scoreboards.

 2: Word Challenge. Race against the clock to make as many words as you can from different combos of seven letters. It doesn’t sound amazing, but with friend scoreboards and a well designed points system, it’s pretty hard to stop. Anagram lovers will have a field day.

3: Brain Buddies is a a competitive brain trainer, with four 60 second game areas to play through. Each area tests a different type of intelligence, so it’s no use being good just at logic and no good at visual puzzles.

4: Pathwords. More words? Yes, but this is a goody. There’s a grid of letters, and you string them together where possible to make words, then the whole thing drops down, Bejeweled style, opening up new possibilities. It takes a while to get the hang of, but it’s very addictive.

5: Traveller IQ Challenge. More of a quiz maybe, but it’s fast paced at least. Faced with a map of the world, how closely can you pinpoint cities and places of interest? Really exposes your geography skills, but you’ll learn as you play!