Freeware World

If you’ve dreamed of being Indiana Jones, but find the idea of learning about history and then organizing adventures to go one too complicated, never fear: I have a game that can help:

One Button Bob is a great little flash game that manages to be really inventive, funny and playable, despite only using one button. Take Bob on a treasure hunting adventure, full of killer spiders, monsters, perilous drops and leaps. All you need to play is one button - of course, in One Button Bob, that button will do different things, depending where you are, and that’s what make is so fun to play. The button might mean jump, reverse, or speed Bob up.

The game records how many clicks you make, and if you complete the game, that total will be your score. Can you get a lower score than me? Requires Flash.

Google Reader has already a handy feature to share interesting articles and blog posts in an easy way: the Share link that appears below each item. With this link, as we explained before, Google Reader marks those items as shared and puts them online on an automatically generated web page. However I tend to star items more than to share them - I just find it easier to manage starred articles later on when I want to read or reuse them for any purpose, like Favorites. And the good thing is that starred items can also be shared… even on Twitter! All you need is three user accounts (one for Google Reader, one for Twitter and one for Twitterfeed) and follow these simple steps:

1. The starred items feed is set to Private by default, so first of all you need to go to Settings > Folders and tags and mark it as “Public” from the drop-down menu.

2. Click the View public page link. This will open a website generated by Google Reader with all the items you’ve starred. Right click the Atom feed link and copy the URL.

3. Go to your Twitterfeed account and set up a new feed with the URL you just copied. Tweak settings according to your needs (update frequency, post prefix, number of posts to be published) but try not to take over your follower’s timeline with too many starred items.

4. Twitterfeed will take a while to check your feed and update it for the first time. From that moment on, all the items you star on Google Reader will be automatically published on Twitter.

This afternoon I claimed ownership of The Pentagon, Windsor Castle, and Camp Nou, home of FC Barcelona. Don’t worry, I’m not part of some evil terrorist plot, I’m just playing the new Buzz graffiti game that’s sweeping the World*. The object of the game is to be the first to tag a famous building, government office or monument, using the new Google Buzz feature within Google Maps for Mobile.

Google’s new Buzz geo-tagging feature has today been added to the latest versions of Google Maps for iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices. It allows you to post details of where you are and what doing, for the whole World to see. Your phone will auto-detect your location and you can simply hit the ‘Add Buzz’ button to put your comment on the map.

More interestingly though, you can now search Google Maps for any company or famous building and get an option to ‘Buzz about this place’. And this is where the game comes in. According to the rules of Buzz graffiti, if no one has buzzed about it before, you can claim control of it simply by tagging it with a comment to the effect that you’re the new owner. OK, so go get the new Google Maps for your mobile and start tagging. I’m off to take over all the Starbucks in my town…

*Actually, I’m the only competitor in Buzz graffiti at the moment, but all the more reason for you to start playing, before I take over the planet - mwah hah hah hah!

Yesterday I got a rare chance to travel to Stockholm and meet the team behind the new film streaming app Voddler which is currently only available in Sweden. Next week, we’ll be publishing an exclusive interview with Voddler’s Mathias Tönnesson so watch this space for a fascinating look behind the scenes and for some answers to all of your questions about one of the most exciting applications of the year.

After the interview though, it struck me that Voddler are banking a hell of a lot of their hopes on people being willing to stream content rather than download it whether legally or illegally.

In Voddler’s case, the content is films and documentaries (and eventually TV shows) and the success of the project largely depends on users being happy to stream, rather than own content.

Fortunately for Voddler, the law is on their side in Sweden. It was pure coincidence for Voddler that it was launched last year just as the Pirate Bay trial deemed the P2P file sharing site illegal. Suddenly, Swedes were faced with either breaking the law to download films or turn to more legal methods and Voddler came along at just the right time to take advantage of this.

Technology is also on their side. Internet connections are getting faster and more widely available. Tönnensson explained to me how he’d already been given a preview of Sweden’s next generation 4G mobile network and it streamed Voddler films onto a laptop perfectly with no fixed internet connection. In theory, within a few years there will be little need to physically own films or video content available on Voddler because you will be able to watch them anywhere, anytime absolutely free.

However, old habits may be harder for Voddler change. We’re used to owning data, especially music and films on our iPods, hard drives and even simply for aesthetic reasons around the home. There’s something very satisfying about physically browsing through a DVD or CD collection.

I for one am happy to stream, though. For example, I’ve come to depend on Spotify for most of my music needs and if I had an Android device or iPhone, I’d be willing to pay the subscription fee to use it on the move. But this is only because Spotify offers me almost all of the music I want. As happy as I am to watch streamed movies and videos, it will be very much dependent on Voddler providing the same exhaustive and comprehensive choice of films.

I see no reason to clog-up my hard drive or bookshelves with films and music I’ll probably never watch again. I’m proud to say I’m a swanky streamer and not a downloading dinosaur. What are you?

I’m just going to come out and say it: Google Wave sucks. In fact, I was tempted to use the past tense there, because it’s hard to believe that Wave isn’t dead and buried. The whole experience was so disappointing that I couldn’t help but greet Google Buzz, Google’s latest attempt at web 2.0, with a certain amount of skepticism.

Well, Buzz has arrived in my Gmail, has it made it to yours? There it sits, plonked beneath my inbox, inviting me to “share what I’m thinking”, a sorry-looking cross between Twitter and Facebook. Ok, so it’s barely a day old, but even in the early stages, new services should fill you with excitement and anticipation, not leave you scratching your head and wondering what on Earth Google were thinking of. In fact, this article from ReadWriteWeb is a great rundown of what exactly looks wrong so far.

To those of us who use services like Twitter and Facebook, the concept of Google Buzz is fairly simple, even if we doubt (for the moment) whether there’s a place for it in our lives. But Buzz automatically adds contacts you email frequently, and as we all know, sending an email does not always equal social media literacy or willing. I’m happy to give it a chance and see what the Buzz brings, but not everyone feels the same. The first question from one of my auto-added, technophobe followers, for example? “Ugh, how do I remove this option?!”. I think that just about sums it up….

If you’d like to get a feel for the Vancouver Winter Olympics, Google Earth is a great resource. Google have added 3D models of the city and the nine venues, and you can go on a flying tour of them all.

If you haven’t got it installed, download it here - it’s fantastic. Open the program then click Layers and check 3D Buildings, which will allow you to see all 3D models around the world. To See the Winter Olympic buildings, you can search for them yourself, or download this file which automatically opens Google Earth and takes you on a tour of the venues.

Google Earth relies on your internet connection to load images and you may find 3D models take a few moments to appear - click the pause button to give them a chance to appear. The tour is cool but it misses the newest addition, the Bobsled course - to fly there download this small KML file. It’s one of the best looking models on Google Earth I’ve seen, and it’s a shame there’s not a virtual sled to ride the course!

[Via: Google Earth Blog]

If you’d like to get a feel for the Vancouver Winter Olympics, Google Earth is a great resource. Google have added 3D models of the city and the nine venues, and you can go on a flying tour of them all.

If you haven’t got it installed, download it here - it’s fantastic. Open the program then click Layers and check 3D Buildings, which will allow you to see all 3D models around the world. To See the Winter Olympic buildings, you can search for them yourself, or download this file which automatically opens Google Earth and takes you on a tour of the venues.

Google Earth relies on your internet connection to load images and you may find 3D models take a few moments to appear - click the pause button to give them a chance to appear. The tour is cool but it misses the newest addition, the Bobsled course - to fly there download this small KML file. It’s one of the best looking models on Google Earth I’ve seen, and it’s a shame there’s not a virtual sled to ride the course!

[Via: Google Earth Blog]

I was surprised to learn that the new version of Firefox is 15% faster than the previous version. When I say surprised I actually mean I didn’t believe a word of it. I decided to challenge this figure by putting Firefox 3.5 and Firefox 3.6 up against each other in a series of three benchmarking tests. I also included comparisons with the latest versions of Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer. In the name of transparency, I’ve decided to explain the benchmarking process for each of the three tests I applied. Why not try it for yourself and see which of your web browsers runs the best?

Test One:  Peacekeeper Browser Benchmark

Peacekeeper is a free service that puts your browser through its paces in a series of thorough tests. It checks performance in the following areas: rendering, social networking, complex graphics, data, Document Object Model operations, and text parsing. Each test takes about five minutes and simple involves hitting a button on the Peacekeeper site in the browser you want to test. To make a fair test you should ensure that you just have one tab or window open, and disable or uninstall any extensions you have running.

Peacemaker gives each browser an overall performance score, and you can view a more detailed breakdown of how that score was arrived at by clicking the ‘Details’ link on the graph. Here’s the graph generated by the browser tests I performed:

Test Two: SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark

The second test I performed was the same one run by Computerworld in its tests on Firefox 3.5 and 3.6. The SunSpider JavaScript benchmark is a utility that tests the speed of a browser by running a series of JavaScripts and measuring the speed at which the software process them. It breaks the results down into a series of different categories based on the scripts it ran. These results are a little harder to interpret than the Peacekeeper test, but you can look at the total time and use this as your benchmark for comparing the browsers. Here are the overall times (fastest first) for the browsers I tested:

• Chrome 4.0 - 649.4ms

• Firefox 3.6 - 1415ms

• Firefox 3.5 - 1700ms

• Opera 10.10 - 3051ms

• Internet Explorer 8 - 6346.2ms

Test Three: The Acid 3 Test

The third and final test is much quicker and simpler than the previous two. The Acid 3 Test is used to measure a browser’s compliance with web standards, particularly relating to the Document Object Model and JavaScript. To pass the test a browser needs to attain a score of 100/100 and the final image it displays must match the reference image.

Of the five browsers we tested, only Google Chrome and Opera attained the maximum 100 out of 100. Firefox 3.6 (94) and Firefox 3.5 (93) both almost made the grade. Microsoft should hang its head in shame though, because IE8 only scored a measely 20 out of 100, meaning it falls way short of standards compliance.

Analyzing the results

Our benchmarking supports Computerworld’s claim that Firefox 3.6 is much faster than version 3.5. In fact, according to the SunSpider test we ran, the newer release comes out 17% quicker than the previous version. It’s still not as speedy as Chrome though, which was more than twice as fast as Firefox, and way ahead of Opera and IE.

What’s more, the Mozilla browser performs very well against its competitors in the Peacekeeper benchmark. Again, it’s only Chrome that pips the latest version of Firefox. And again, Internet Explorer is left floundering in final place, this time in a test than examines the overall capabilities of the browser.

So, my advice based on these results is to upgrade to Firefox 3.6 if you haven’t already done so. Better still, install Chrome and use that to browse the web instead. Having said this, ut’s definitely worth running the benchmark tests on your own browsers because the results can vary considerably depending on your setup, the amount of extensions that you have installed, the OS you’re using, etc.

Last night I was reviewing messages in my Gmail account, trying to get them all sorted out and reach the much-coveted inbox zero. I needed Gmail to display only my unread emails so that I could process them one by one, when I realized Gmail didn’t have that option anywhere. Sure you can select all unread messages, but that’s of little use if they’re all scattered over a dozen pages. So I started searching for a solution, and only a few minutes after I found Gmail Advanced Search.

The advanced search options in Gmail let you use special words or symbols – called operators - to filter the messages displayed on your web browsers. It’s a quicker, more accurate way to find certain messages. You can filter you inbox to display only unread emails, only starred emails or only emails that came from a specific sender. What’s more, you can combine different operators and create super-refined filters like “messages from Peter with the word ‘dinner’ in the subject”.

These are some of the most useful operators you can use in Gmail:

• from: - displays messages received from a certain sender: from:peter
• to: - displays messages sent to a specific recipient: to:john 
• subject: - displays messages with certain words in the subject: subject:bbq
• label: - displays messages filed under specific labels: label:work
• in:(inbox, trash, spam) - displays all messages stored in any of those locations: in:trash
• is:(starred, unread) - displays messages you’ve starred or haven’t read yet: is:unread
• filename: - displays messages with a specific attachment: filename:softonic.pdf

I guess it was Nintendo who invented ice levels in platformers, and since then it’s become a video game standard. Whatever you’re playing, you can bet at some point you’ll be asked to continue what you have been doing for the last few hours, but on slippery surfaces. I’m not a fan, possibly with the exception of the snowy levels in Mario 64.

I Hate Ice Levels is an ode to everything we dislike about these staple levels. It’s unbelievably tricky - I got cramps in my fingers after ten minutes playing! It’s meant to be a satire of ice levels, and as such it works well. It’s also a tough challenge for anyone who thinks they’ve got skills when it comes to platforming. Play it here - requires Flash.