Archive for September, 2009

File Under: Software & Tools
Sep
23
2009

Goby Gets Local Search Right

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Goby is new search engine designed to help you find something to do. The site searches across hundreds of websites and pulls in thousands of results pointing to local music happenings, museums, activities, sports games, entertainment events and restaurants.

Goby searches through events databases from big sites like Upcoming, Eventful and Yahoo Local to smaller ones like museum sites, hiking guides and hundreds more, combining all the relevant results in one list of search results.

The results are impressive, whether applied to your hometown or a vacation destination. In fact, Goby’s local search engine is possibly the best we’ve ever used.

Part of what makes Goby smarter than a typical Google search also makes it slightly more complicated. Rather than simply searching for terms, Goby asks you a series of questions: what do you want to do, where do you want to do it and when? The minimalist home page invites you to start a query by filling in three blank boxes, but Goby quickly jumps in, suggesting search terms and asking you to point to an area of focus on a map or pick a date range from a pop-up calendar.

However, while the initial search process might be a tad more complex, the results are well worth it. Once it has your input, Goby trolls through a vast index of information, pulling out events and destinations in your area for the time period you selected.

It’s worth noting that the results aren’t necessarily ranked. As Goby CEO Mark Watkins tells Webmonkey, that’s by design.

“We’re not trying to take an editorial view that says result A is better than result B,” says Watkins. Rather, Goby’s goal is to “surface up the information so that you can make the most of your free time, based on your own criteria.”

Depending on your search, Goby’s results can be rather extensive, which means you could use up a good part of your free time just sifting though your options. Fortunately, while Goby may not rank, it does have plenty of time and distance filters that make it easy to narrow things down to a specific area or a start time to help you find something you like.

For example a search for “live music” in Athens, GA this weekend returned results from Jambase.com, Last.fm, Culture Mob, Upcoming, Eventful and a bunch of other sites. The aggregation of various outside resources created by far the single most complete list of live music in Athens that I’ve seen online (sadly, good local web search is something sorely lacking in Athens).

Goby isn’t just about music. There are plenty of other options — everything from outdoor activities to museums to ball games. And the results were very good for just about everything I tried. A search for hiking trails in the “North Georgia mountains” pulled in 250 trails from dozens of websites.

One great feature that isn’t immediately obvious is the “distance radius” filter on Goby’s map tool. It allows you to quickly narrow results to, for example, within a half mile of your house or within 25 miles of the hotel you’ll be staying in.

Of course, Goby isn’t perfect. Aggregating data from numerous sources as Goby does means that your results will have a number of duplicates — the same music event listed on both Upcoming and Eventful will show up twice in Goby’s list. It’s a little annoying. I’d like to see Goby filter and combine duplicates, but it’s not a deal breaker.

Watkins rightly points out that because each result leads back to a different source, there is different data to be found in each result. For example, in the screenshot above, clicking though to both the listings would get different sets of user perspective and comment. For the launch, Watkins says Goby wanted to “preserve those perspectives,” though he says that Goby is still working out how to handle duplicate results.

The most frustrating thing about Goby is that it lacks RSS feeds. Call us spoiled, but Everyblock has conditioned us to believe that every filterable chunk of data deserves a feed.

Of course, in some cases, RSS feeds on Goby wouldn’t make sense. But a recurring search like “live music in my town tomorrow night” would be the perfect thing to drop in your feed reader so you’ll always know about upcoming shows. For now, you’ll have to do without the RSS feeds, though Watkins says Goby is “certainly thinking about them, along with many other ideas.”

I should also note that, at the moment Goby is limited to the United States. But if you’re looking for something to do inside the U.S., Goby is one of the best places to find it.

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File Under: Software & Tools
Sep
22
2009

New Google Plug-in Embeds Chrome Inside Internet Explorer

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Want to start using all the websites that take advantage of the latest technologies in HTML5, but can’t move away from Internet Explorer? Google has your back.

The company has released an open-source plug-in for IE users called Google Chrome Frame. It can be used to automatically force IE to load a website using the same WebKit rendering engine as Google Chrome, complete with its enhanced JavaScript rendering and support for HTML5 technologies like Canvas and embedded audio and video.

To implement it, all the developer needs to do is add one line of code to a page’s header:

<meta equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">

If a user is running Google Chrome Frame within the IE browser, the plug-in will detect that line of code and fire up the Chrome engine. The website site gets served inside a Chrome wrapper running within IE. Site builders can load up their pages with the latest CSS and JavaScript enhancements, even those unsupported by Microsoft, and those IE users running the plug-in will be able to see them just fine.

The plug-in accomplishes this engine switching using the IE=EmulateIE7 tag Microsoft built in to Internet Explorer 8 to ensure compatibility with older, quirkier websites.

This is pretty much the height of awesomeness — or audacity. Google wants everyone to start using HTML5 as soon as possible, but IE doesn’t support HTML5 natively. So, the company hacks Microsoft’s browser to run Google’s browser inside of it.

Google is coyly releasing this now as a lead-up to this fall’s public launch of Google Wave, the company’s real-time communication tool which makes extensive use of WebKit’s JavaScript and HTML5 rendering abilities. The company wants to ensure that Wave works for everyone, including IE users.

But it’s an especially welcome development to those who want to start using the latest web technologies, but aren’t able to switch browsers due to corporate lockdowns on installing software or other, similar limitations on user privileges on their machines. Of course, use of the plug-in assumes the users can install their own plug-ins, but restrictions on app extensions are less common than restrictions on application installers, .exe files or mounting disk images.

From Google’s Chromium blog:

Recent JavaScript performance improvements and the emergence of HTML5 have enabled web applications to do things that could previously only be done by desktop software. One challenge developers face in using these new technologies is that they are not yet supported by Internet Explorer. Developers can’t afford to ignore IE — most people use some version of IE — so they end up spending lots of time implementing work-arounds or limiting the functionality of their apps.

Here’s a video:



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File Under: Software & Tools
Sep
22
2009

Picasa Photo App Gets Better at Recognizing Faces, Locations

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Google has released Picasa 3.5, a new version of its free desktop photo editing software. The latest version of Picasa adds the ability to group photos by faces — a feature already found in Picasa Web Albums — and much better geotagging support.

Picasa 3.5 is available for Mac, Windows and Linux as a free download from Google.

Picasa is a very popular way to manage photos on Windows, which lacks a robust consumer-level photo editor out of the box. On the Mac, iPhoto still has a stronger foothold among Mac OS X users. Apple’s desktop photo manager can do almost everything Picasa 3.5 can do, but lacks the simple, free, online gallery component you’ll find in Picasa Web Albums.

However, iPhoto ’09 has a few features Picasa was, until Tuesday’s update, missing, namely the facial recognition tools. Picasa Web Albums have had facial recognition for some time, but the desktop software, oddly, did not. Luckily, Picasa 3.5 brings the same tools to the desktop.

The new faces features works almost exactly like the similar feature in iPhoto, scanning through all your images and grouping photos by the people it finds. Once that’s done, you’ll find a new album called “Unnamed People” where you can add name tags to each group of faces. As you’d expect, if you’re signed into a Google account, Picasa will auto-complete names from your Google contacts.

Once you’ve gone through and added names to all your images with people, you’ll have an easy way to sort images and or create albums, collages, movies and more based on who is in your photos.


As with the Picasa Web Albums’ facial recognition tools, the desktop version isn’t perfect. In fact, it can be funny at times when people so obviously different are paired together. However, once you start labeling a few faces, Picasa’s ability to recognize your friends by name improves dramatically.

While the facial recognition component alone makes Picasa 3.5 a worthwhile upgrade for existing users, there are some other cool new features as well, including improved geotagging support for placing your photos on a map.

With Picasa 3.5, you no longer need Google Earth to geotag your images — everything happens directly within Picasa in the Places panel, which loads a Google Map for easy drag-and-drop geotagging. If you prefer, the old Google Earth method still works, as well.


To get started with the new geotagging, just select pictures the images you want to use and then, click the Places panel and drop a pin in the right place on the map. Once you’ve added geotags to your images, it’s easy to search and locate photos according to where they were taken.

Picasa 3.5 also features a revamped importing tool, with a new option to simultaneously import and upload images from your camera directly to Picasa Web Albums for sharing. There’s an option to upload all your photos, or you can simply star the photos you’d like to push into Picasa Web Albums.

While photo pros and serious hobbyists are generally willing to shell out some cash for more powerful options like Adobe Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture, for casual photographers looking for an easy way to organize, edit and share their image, Picasa is hard to beat.

We’d definitely recommend Picasa 3.5 to existing users, particular those on Windows. For Mac users already fans of iPhoto there isn’t too much in Picasa 3.5 that might tempt you to switch. But if you’re unhappy with iPhoto, Picasa does offer comparable capabilities without the price tag of an iPhoto upgrade.

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File Under: Software & Tools
Sep
21
2009

Firefox With WebGL Brings Powerful 3-D Graphics to the Web

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Mozilla is making progress in its effort to supply developers with open-source tools for creating better 3-D animations on the web. The company’s effort, dubbed WebGL, is now available for testing in the latest nightly builds of Firefox.

Mozilla’s WebGL project gives web developers a way to connect the HTML 5 Canvas tool, which can be used to display complex graphics in the browser without plug-ins like Flash, to the operating system’s native, hardware accelerated graphics engine — in this case, OpenGL.

OpenGL is an OS-native graphics engine that’s most often associated with video games, but is also often used in data visualizations and virtual reality apps. OpenGL itself is an open standard that defines a set of cross-platform APIs for working with 2-D and 3-D images. WebGL is an attempt to create a bridge between the browser and the OS-native OpenGL tools. While it’s a long way from its goal, it’s possible that one day WebGL will put VR worlds, flight simulators and much more complex video games online.

Of course, OpenGL isn’t the only graphics engine around. Microsoft has its own set of 3-D tools, Direct3D, and allowing developers to tap into those through WebGL is high on Mozilla’s to-do list. Mozilla is also working to turn WebGL into an open standard that other browsers can easily implement. There’s already a WebKit version of WebGL in the works, though so far neither Google Chrome nor Safari (both WebKit-based) have added WebGL support.

Even the new WebGL support in the Firefox nightly builds is very much in the alpha testing stage. In other words, don’t look for your favorite online games to rush to adopt WebGL tomorrow.

However, as developers start to experiment with the new tools we’ll likely get a sneak peek at how HTML 5 can push the boundaries of what’s possible on the web for 3-D animations interfaces without using Flash, Silverlight or any other plug-ins.

If you’d like to play around with the new API, grab the latest nightly build of Firefox (WebGL arrived on Friday, September 18, 2009, so anything after that should work). Then you’ll need to head to the about:config page and enable WebGL — just search for webgl and double-click the enableforall_sites option.

So far Mozilla doesn’t have any working demos or examples of what you can do with WebGL, but developer Vladimir Vukievi, who has been working on the project, promises that some demos will be released in the near future.

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File Under: Uncategorized
Sep
21
2009

Adobe Debuts New Flash Tools for Building and Tracking Social Apps

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Software maker Adobe has announced a new set of Flash Platform Services, a group of tools that give Flash developers an easier way to build, deploy and track their apps on the social web’s various application platforms.

Adrian Ludwig, group manager for the Flash Platform, tells Webmonkey the new Flash Platform Services will “help app developers building on Facebook and other social networks reach a larger audience.” Ludwig also promises that the new components will make it easier for developers to manage and track their apps — who’s installing them and using them, and how often, for example — thanks to a clean, simple stats-tracking package.

When social networks first started rolling out their application platforms, it seemed like anyone could release an app and the viral nature of the social network would take care of the rest. But those days are long gone. Now, releasing an app on Facebook, MySpace or other social platforms now is like tossing a needle into a haystack.

This is the conundrum Adobe is hoping to solve. Using Flash Platform Services, designers get tools to speed common development tasks and automatically create elements like “share this” buttons, e-mail links and mobile delivery options. All of the new Flash Platform Services are component-based tools, so adding them to your application is just a matter of drag-and-drop. The components themselves are ActionScript libraries, so it’s easy to customize them, though Ludwig tells Webmonkey that everything should “just work” right out of the box.

The components themselves are free, but Adobe has a few extra, enhanced capabilities available on a pay-per-use basis. See Adobe’s website for details.

Also part of the announcement is a new partnership with Gigya, the widget distribution service, which will give developers access to usage statistics pulled from Gigya and displayed in a nice looking AIR application that will available as a separate download.

While its not part of today’s announcement, in the future Adobe plans to release more Flash Platform Services including a package named “Social” which will give developers a way to build write-once, run anywhere apps that work on all the major social networks.

So far Adobe has not set a time line for the Social Service, but the distribution and statics services are available for download today. If you’d like more details on how the new components work head over to Adobe download center.

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File Under: Programming, Software & Tools
Sep
17
2009

Do Frameworks Have a Place in Web Development’s Future?

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Snakes on the Web from Sebastian Desimone on Vimeo.

Let’s face it: web development sucks.

Not all the time — in fact, there are an increasing number of great, dare we say fun, tools out there. Frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django take a lot of the pain out of web development, and JavaScript libraries like JQuery or Dojo make creating slick user interfaces easier.

But even with the fantastic tools we have, there are still plenty of mundane tasks that, well, suck. In fact, most advancements in web development have come from a very basic developer problem: how can I make this suck less?

That’s the question Django developer Jacob Kaplan-Moss recently set out to answer at a Python Conference in Argentina. As Kaplan-Moss says in his talk, embedded above, “we’ve already made a great transition from thinking about ‘web pages’ to thinking about ‘web applications’.” His key point, however, is that, “it’s time for a new transition, for us to start thinking about a holistic ‘web site,’ and all its associated related tech.”

For Kaplan-Moss “all its associated related tech” means everything from backend frameworks to HTML 5, which is going to change the way web developers work. If you don’t believe that claim yet, check out 280Slides.com, which looks and behaves like a desktop app — drag and drop things within the app, to desktop and from the desktop. Sadly, as Kaplan-Moss points out, the developers of 280Slides had to create not just a new framework (Cappuccino — which you can read our assessment of), but what amounts to whole new language (ObjectiveJ) to realize their goals.

Creating a custom framework sucks, so imagine how much it sucks to create a new language. Surely there’s a better way?

Maybe. But, according to Kaplan-Moss, we should look to rethink the frameworks themselves since they’re largely to blame whenever modern web developers paint themselves into a corner.

Frameworks have two problems — they don’t scale beyond a certain point and, much worse, they trap you inside the framework. Frameworks are optimized for the generic, which is why they work for so many sites. But as those sites grow, they need specific solutions, not generic ones. Django, Ruby on Rails and other frameworks are great ways to get up and running quickly. But over time, as your site grows, the “Twitter moment” eventually arrives when, as Kaplan Moss says, “all hell breaks loose.” You’ve outgrown your framework and you’re screwed.

If you were an outsider looking in, it would seem logical to assume that if Ruby on Rails were letting you down in some place — say the concurrency problems that plagued Twitter — you could simply swap out that chunk of code for another written in Haskell, Erlang or another language optimized to solve concurrency problems. Sadly, that idealized vision of web development bears no resemblance to reality. Where we web developers find ourselves right now, there’s simply no way to easily write a part of your site in Django, a part in Rails and part in Erlang.

What’s the solution? Well, there may not be one. But if one does exist, it most likely involves taking a major leap and leaving monotheistic frameworks behind.

Kaplan-Moss is at heart a Python fan, so he wants the solution to come from Python. And indeed, Python does have quite a history as a “glue” language. Desktop and game developers have long written the performance-critical parts of their applications in C++ or Java, then used Python to tie together the higher-level customization tasks.

Something similar might be possible on the web — using Python to tie together Haskell, Erlang, Ruby and other languages. The problem is that we’re a long way from any solution — Python-based or otherwise — and the web is continues to grow both in size and, with HTML 5, complexity.

It’s true that most sites are small enough that they’ll never have to face the sort of traffic and scale woes that Twitter, Facebook and Google have had to deal with. But it is precisely the edge cases of high-traffic sites that have created many of the tools we have to day — Twitter, Google and others are the crucible in which all our current tools are truly tested and from which — ideally — new solutions will emerge.

While the average web developer might not face the sort of challenges those sites do just yet, the potential solutions will affect all of us and, hopefully, make the web development suck just a little less.

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File Under: Humor, operating systems
Sep
17
2009

20 Questions for Fake Linus Torvalds

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There’s a particular badge of honor you earn in web culture when you gain a high-profile impostor — Fake Steve Jobs comes immediately to mind.

But Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel and a bona fide hero within the free software community, is so beloved, he’s gained four pretenders.

For the last month, four Fake Linuses have emerged, each one posting 140-character bursts of humor and insight to Twitter and Indenti.ca, a free software alternative to Twitter that’s gained some traction among open source devotees.

All four pranksters are voiced by high-profile individuals within the Linux community, but their real identities have been kept secret by the Linux Foundation. The nonprofit advocacy group is running a contest between the four Fake Linuses. The one who does the best (and funniest) impersonation of Linus will be unmasked publicly and given an award at LinuxCon, which begins Sept. 21 in Portland, Oregon.

Webmonkey scored an exclusive interview with one of the Fake Linuses (FLT#2, we’re told). We communicated over e-mail to ensure the poser’s identity would be kept under wraps.

The real Torvalds, who has remained suspiciously mum about the whole thing, has a reputation for being both genial and bristly in his internet communications — he once famously compared OpenBSD developers to “a bunch of masturbating monkeys.”

Thankfully, we found his doppelganger to be just as audacious.

Webmonkey: You’ve been active on the web since its inception, but you’re new to Twitter. What’s more fulfilling, tweeting or posting to Usenet?

Fake Linus Torvalds #2: That’s hard to say. Usenet attracts a very specific group of people, so my flames hit their targets more directly. On the other hand, Twitter is a larger and more varied group, which means I get more flames from all sorts of folks.

Webmonkey: Have you ever asked for help with the Linux kernel on Twitter? If so, what was the response like?

FLT: Me? Need help with the Linux kernel?? Pfftt…

Webmonkey: As a web service, Twitter is notoriously flaky. Any ideas for improving its stability?

FLT: You mean, besides making it open source? Seriously, with so many people depending on Twitter to get up-to-the-second updates on what their friends are eating and which games they’re playing on company time, we need to get an open source development community involved to make it stable and, um, even geekier.

Webmonkey: What other social networks are you on?

FLT: Identi.ca, of course, because that’s where The True Believers hang out. But, I’m not all that “social,” if you haven’t noticed. I prefer to hang out on the kernel mailing list.

Webmonkey: Do you also only have those accounts because the Linux Foundation makes you?

FLT: Nobody makes me do anything. That’s what so great about this job. I spend many days simply trying to learn Napoleon Dynamite’s dance moves. If [Linux Foundation director] Jim Zemlin weren’t always bragging about his moves, I wouldn’t spend so much time on it.

Webmonkey: Which feels more sacrilegious, Twitter on Android or Identi.ca on the iPhone?

FLT: Hands down: Identi.ca on the iPhone is more sacrilegious. Look at it like this: If you’re using Identi.ca, then you’re open-source-minded and tech-savvy enough to know better. The only reason you bought that iPhone was to look cool.

Webmonkey: How difficult is it to compress a complex insult into a 140-character tweet and still assure yourself OpenBSD developers will be able to understand it?

FLT: The BSD crowd generally has trouble reading anything longer than 140 characters, so tweets work quite well for the purpose of insulting them.

Webmonkey: How do you feel about Richard Stallman’s campaign to have Twitter renamed GNU/Twitter?

FLT: Well, is it any surprise, really? He failed to get Linux renamed as GNU, so now he’s trying for Twitter. If that fails, he’ll go after Apple next. Just keep working his way down the food chain. Maybe someday he’ll realize no sane person wants to name their product after a wildebeest.

Webmonkey: What’s up with that guy who has @linus?

FLT: It’s rather charming. It got a little creepy, though, when I caught him going through the garbage cans behind my house. Funny thing is: A lot of people actually thought he WAS me on Twitter. So now I’m trying to be less predictable: I’ve even thrown a few bugs into Linux, just to keep things fast and loose. The bizarre thing is that Microsoft copied them! Those guys…

Webmonkey: On average, how many direct messages does @jzemlin send you each day?

FLT: These days, I have no idea. I had to block him once I started receiving pointless messages every 10 minutes. “So, whatcha thinking about?” “Just heard this song and I thought of you.” “How come you haven’t responded to my messages?” Yeah, pretty weird.

Webmonkey: What was the message that drove you to finally block him?

FLT: I think the tipping point came when he sent me this DM: “Did you know that ‘Linus’ means ‘love’ in Swahili?” It was then that I realized: this bromance had come to an end. I considered a restraining order, but then I remembered that he cuts my paycheck.

Webmonkey: Why can’t the KDE people just give it up, already?

FLT: I can’t venture to guess. But, legend has it that Matthias Ettrich started KDE because his girlfriend could not use the desktop applications of the time. Who’s he kidding? Matthias knows he’s never had a girlfriend.

Webmonkey: As the story goes, you met your wife over e-mail. Do you think there’s any opportunity for people to find love on Identi.ca or Twitter?

FLT: Thanks to the internet, and services like Identi.ca and Twitter, people can search for love 24/7, without ever leaving their parents’ basement.

Webmonkey: About a month ago, Novafora, the company that acquired Transmeta, ceased operations. As a former Transmeta employee, how do you feel about this — in 140 characters or less?

FLT: Sad to see Novafora and Transmeta disappear, but in Silicon Valley, such is life. Companies come and companies go. Only Linux is forever.

Webmonkey: How do you say “tweet” in Finnish?

FLT: Tyhjiöfluoresenssinäyttö. OK, not really. But all Finnish looks the same, doesn’t it?

Webmonkey: Do Fins tweet much?

FLT: Fins love to tweet! How else can they tell their friends about the 20-pound perch they caught ice fishing, without having to set down their beer or turn down the volume on the heavy metal?

Webmonkey: Does Tux tweet?

FLT: It’s hard to tweet when you have flippers instead of fingers.

Webmonkey: You’ve been gravely injured, and you only have the energy for one status update with which to cry for help. Twitter or Indenti.ca?

FLT: I’d cry for help on my Identi.ca account, which automatically feeds to Facebook and Twitter. Triple my chances for help! Microsoft, don’t get any ideas. You come after me, you’ve got to take the whole Linux community down, too. Ain’t gonna happen, baby!

Webmonkey: Can we have your #followfriday list?

FLT: @linuxfoundation, @linuxdotcom, @patricknorton, @donttrythis, @snackfight, @darthvader.

Disclaimer: Fake Linus Torvalds #2 is not the real Linus Torvalds, and these statements do not reflect the opinions of Linus Torvalds or the Linux Foundation. The identities of all four Fake Linus Torvalds will be revealed on Sep. 21 at LinuxCon. You can vote for your favorite FLT — the one with the most votes will receive the coveted Silver Penguin cocktail shaker at LinuxCon.

File Under: Programming
Sep
16
2009

Tr.im Source Code Now Available

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Tr.im, the popular URL-shortening service for Twitter and other social networks has announced the initial release of its backend code as a new open source-project on Github.

After announcing it would shut down by the end of the year, the team behind Tr.im then decided to continue on as a community-supported open source project. The team said it would release all of its code under the MIT open-source license and offer developers unfettered, real-time access to all the link-map data associated with Tr.im URLs.

Until the code showed up on Github though, the Tr.im announcement was, well, just talk. But now you can grab a copy of the code and start exploring. At the moment, the Github page has the first two modules for tr.im. The final tr.im website module will be released in a few days.

The tr.im developers caution that the authentication and login system needs to be updated, and some bug fixes need to be applied as well. However, if you’re impatient and you’d like to start digging into how the tr.im code works, what’s available now should get you started.

The tr.im blog also says that final steps are in motion to donate the tr.im domain name to a third party that will hold it in trust for the sole use of the tr.im project.

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File Under: Mobile, Software & Tools
Sep
16
2009

Opera Mini Grows Up: New Beta Looks and Acts Like Desktop Browser

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Opera has a released a new beta version of its Mini web browser, arguably the best mobile browser for Java-capable phones, especially those with limited memory and processing power. This first beta release of Opera Mini 5 features an all new, much slicker interface and brings some very useful new features as well, including tabbed browsing and Speed Dial.

In fact, this release of Opera Mini is much closer to a desktop browser and even borrows a few features from Opera’s recently updated full-size browser, Opera 10. Mini 5 beta 1 includes a password manager system and Speed Dial, both borrowed from its desktop sibling, as well as new tabbed browsing features.

Perhaps the most useful feature in Mini 5 is the new Speed Dial support, which works just like the desktop version, offering a grid of nine thumbnail images so you can quickly launch your favorite sites. Given the awkwardly small keyboards on many phones, Speed Dial alone should spare you plenty of painful thumb typing, and the handy preview images are certainly a step up from the previous effort, which consisted solely of text links.

The tabbed browsing in Opera Mini 5 is also quite handy, making it much easier to jump between pages. A small row of thumbnails makes it easy to move between various open tabs without the jarring page load animations you’d find in Mobile Safari, for example.

Like its desktop sibling, Opera Mini’s overall look has been revamped as well. The primary navigation menu now resides at the top of the window and is simply a list of icons, which cuts down on screen real estate. There’s also a nice a new “Find in Page” search tool, which highlights keywords in the current web page.

Opera Mini is also considerably smarter when it comes to touchscreen versus keypad devices, automatically adjusting to the features of your phone.

Opera claims that Mini 5 beta is considerably faster than its predecessors, though the company didn’t offer any specific numbers. However, as always, Opera Mini compresses web pages before they’re sent to your phone. Serving pages via proxy, according the company, means as much as a 90 percent decrease in page size and generally serves to make Opera Mini leaps and bounds faster than most existing mobile browsers.

Opera takes this route because its Mini browser is built for the widest possible range of Java-powered phones, which means many of the installations may be on phones that are less powerful than smartphones like the iPhone, and also may be in areas where bandwidth is difficult to come by. Opera Mini is also popular among owners of older or cheaper phones — if you have a more capable phone, chances are you’d run the more robust Opera Mobile, which is closer to full mobile browsers like Mobile Safari or the Android browser.

But svelte software still has its appeal on any device. Blackberry fans will be happy to know that the latest version of Opera Mini supports several unique-to-Blackberry features, like opening links from other applications and Blackberry’s built in copy-and-paste functions.

As always, Opera Mini is free download, which you can grab by pointing your phone’s existing browser to http://m.opera.com/next. Keep in mind that this is a beta release and there may be a few glitches here and there.

If you’d like to see the new features in action, but aren’t keen to download beta software on your phone, check out Opera’s promo video, which shows Opera Mini 5 beta in action of various phones:

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File Under: Software & Tools
Sep
15
2009

Chrome Hits 3.0, Mac Version Due Later This Year

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Google released an updated version of its Chrome web browser Tuesday.

If you’re running Windows, you can download Chrome 3.0 from Google. Tuesday’s update includes a performance boost for JavaScript rendering, stability improvements and a new theming system for customizing the look of Chrome on your desktop.

Version 3.0 also includes updates to the New Tab page and the smart location bar, as well as expanded support for HTML5 audio and video tags.

Also, a fully-developed Mac version of Chrome — which is currently only available for testing — will see the light of day before the end of this year, the company tells Reuters.

It’s a bit stunning that Chrome is already at version 3.0 on Windows PCs considering it’s only been around for a year (the first version of Chrome was released at the beginning of September, 2008). The rapid development of Chrome is evidence that Google sees the browser as an essential part of its business going forward.

The company has set some lofty growth goals for Chrome. From Reuters:

“If at the two-year birthday we’re not at least 5 percent (market share), I will be exceptionally disappointed. And if at the three year birthday we’re not at 10 percent, I will be exceptionally disappointed,” Chrome Engineering Director Linus Upson said. He noted the internal goals are even more aggressive than doubling share every year.

Google also tells Reuters the first official, stable Mac version of Chrome “will be released by the year’s end.”

As we reported last week, Chrome will soon gain support for browser extensions, bringing its feature set closer to that of Mozilla Firefox, the most popular alternative to Microsoft’s IE browser. Extension support isn’t included in Tuesday’s update.

It makes sense for Google to put so much weight behind its own browser, seeing as how a large chunk of the company’s business either floats or sinks along with the growth of browser-based apps. Specifically, web apps which use emerging technologies like HTML5, CSS3, off-line data syncing and Web Workers, which offloads complex page rendering tasks to your local hardware. Of course, Chrome is at the forefront of those developments, and offers support for most of that bleeding-edge tech out of the box.

Chrome uses WebKit, the same open-source browser engine also used by Apple for Safari, its browser that runs on Windows, Mac OS X and iPhones and iPod Touches.

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