Just a couple days ago Google released its own version of a web browser, dubbed Google Chrome. This is exciting news, because it now increases the pressure on Firefox and Internet Explorer to be all that they can be. It’s even surprising, considering that Google and Firefox were business partners in advertising. Just a while ago Google Adsense was paying people for referring people to Firefox. Read the rest of this entry »
Live Search Maps/Virtual Earth has grown with the integration of content from Photosynth. Essentially, Microsoft is now integrating synths into its mapping, location and search platform. This means that Virtual Earth users will no longer be able to explore only aerial, Bird’s Eye and satellite imagery, but also 3D environments put together with 2D pictures with various locations around the world, namely synths. Microsoft has blended together two of its services making available Photosynth content from Live Search Maps.
“In order to find Photosynths in Live Search Maps you’ll search for a location. In the welcome pane, you’ll see a link for ‘Explore Collections’ which you click and begin seeing all kinds of collections. Read the rest of this entry »
Computer mice are pretty versatile these days but here’s a very neat little freeware program that adds even more functionality to your favourite rodent. It’s called AltMove and once it’s running you can quickly move, resize and hide windows with a simple keyboard and mousse key combination, and it even works on windows that do not normally support move and resize. If you have a centre mouse button, or clickwheel, pressing it opens a magnifier screen, and there are three simple ‘gestures’ with the right mouse button. Click and hold the right button and move the mouse down and the open window minimises, click right, hold and drag upward to maximise and click right, hold and drag right lets you change the windows transparency. Read the rest of this entry »
Speaking in my capacity as a regular (though not particularly energetic) cyclist, and survivor of more than my fair share of near-misses at the hands of stupid car drivers, I was pleased to see this recently patented device on the Core 77 Website. Basically it’s for all of us patient two-wheelers, who don’t run red lights (well, not very often, anyway…) who have to wait at ‘on-demand’ traffic lights for a car to turn up in order to trigger the buried sensor. This gadget fools the inductive sensor into thinking there’s half a ton of tin waiting for the lights to change, rather than just on your bike. It works by creating a brief but strong magnetic field, triggered by a button on the handlebars. Read the rest of this entry »
Microsoft already proved that on the same system configuration Windows 7 would boot a few seconds faster than Windows Vista. But fact is that the evolution from Vista to Windows 7 is not limited to the boosted startup times. In this context, at the Windows hardware Engineering Conference in Los Angeles, Mike Angiulo, General Manager, Windows Planning and PC Ecosystem Team for Microsoft, and Jon DeVaan, Senior Vice President of the Core Operating System Division, revealed Windows 7’s superiority compared to Vista also in terms of memory usage and graphics performance.
“Once we’re even booted we’ve done a lot to improve the memory usage, and the graphics performance. This graph that you see on the screen here shows how in Vista we scale linearly with the number of open windows, so that’s the amount of memory that’s consumed by the system as you open more Windows. Read the rest of this entry »
