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Posts Tagged ‘Plug Ins’

Latest Version of Google Chrome Adds Auto-Translation and New Privacy Features

Google just launched a new stable version of Google Chrome, the company’s increasingly popular browser, which introduces a number of new features and more advanced privacy controls. Chrome will now automatically detect the language of any site you surf to and offer you to translate the text for you. In addition, Google also added granular privacy controls to Chrome that allow you to turn off cookies and JavaScript on a site-by-site basis. For now, these new features are only available in the Windows version of Chrome.

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Read 52 Languages

Starting today, anybody who uses the stable release of Chrome on Windows will see a little bar appear at the top of the window whenever the browser loads a page that features a language that is not the default language of your browser install. Google Chrome uses the technology behind Google Translate to automatically detect and translate 52 languages. Chrome also gives you the ability to selectively turn this feature off for those languages you don’t need it for.

One interesting aspect of this technology is that the language detection happens in the browser, while the translation itself happens on Google’s servers. As with all automatic translation algorithms, Google Translate is prone to errors, but it more than good enough to easily get the basic gist of a new article or blog post.

Better Privacy Controls

In addition to the new translation feature, the new stable release of Chrome also includes a number of new privacy controls. Through the new “Content Settings” option, Chrome users on Windows can manage how they want Google to handle pop-ups, plug-ins, cookies, images and JavaScript code. These new settings, for example, allow you to easily block cookies from some sites. It remains to be seen, however, if mainstream users will be able to understand these relatively complicated controls.

What About the Mac and Linux?

With multiple release channels and different schedules for every platform, keeping track of Chrome isn’t easy. While these new features aren’t available for Mac and Linux users yet, it’s likely only a matter of time before we will see them on non-Windows platforms. For the time being, Mac users on the dev channel should make sure that they have updated to the latest version of Chrome, which finally brings a usable bookmarks manager to the OSX version of Google Chrome.

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Mozilla previews new feature to guard against Flash crashes

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch claims that the company’s ubiquitous Flash plug-in doesn’t ship with any known crash bugs. One can only assume that he has never used the software. As Adobe representatives exhibit an increasingly dismissive attitude about Flash’s technical deficiencies, the browser vendors have stepped up to address the problems and are finding ways to insulate their users from Flash’s poor security and lack of stability.

Several mainstream browsers isolate Flash and other plug-ins in separate processes in order to prevent an unstable plug-in from crashing the entire browser. Mozilla is preparing to introduce a similar feature in the next version of Firefox. A developer preview that was recently made available to users offers an early look at the new plugin crash protection.

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Liven up your presentations with SlideRocket’s live data

SlideRocket, which offers an online tool for creating and sharing presentations, is introducing a new feature on Friday that should help you avoid stale presentation — it’s opening the applications to plug-ins that incorporate real-time data.

Chief executive Chuck Dietrich told me that his goal is to make presentations less static and more responsive to the most up-to-date information. For example, of you’re giving a presentation about a company, you could bring up a slide that shows the current stock price, rather than the price whenever you made the presentation. Or if you want to interact with your audience, you could ask them to post comments and questions on Twitter using a particular hashtag, then include live results as a slide. Ditto the results of a poll that you conduct via text message.

Now, you may have attended presentations with features like this already, but the difference is that they’re not in the presentation itself — someone would have to leave their slides and jump to the website in question. Plus, Dietrich said, more and more people are sharing presentations online, to be viewed at the user’s convenience. In those cases the presenter has include everything in the slides themselves, and it’s probably not a great idea to make a slide that says, “Go to Twitter and search for X.”

SlideRocket is launching its new plug-in system with a polling plug-in, a Twitter plug-in, and a plug-in for checking the most up-to-date stock prices and other RSS feeds. There should be others soon, built by SlideShare and outside developers. (The polling plug-in was built by PollEverywhere.)

The new data plug-ins will be available to SlideRocket business and trial users. The company says it will be rolling out the features gradually, but they should be available to all users by mid-March.

SlideRocket has raised $7 million in funding and says it has 1,200 paying customers. It’s also the official presentation tool of the South by Southwest festival.

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AR App Development: Metaio Releases Unifeye Mobile SDK

At today’s Mobile World Congress, augmented reality company Metaio unveiled its Unifeye Mobile SDK and Android demo at Sony Ericcson’s Creation Day. The company is offering developers a chance to experiment with feature tracking, 3D animation rendering and real-time interaction. In other words, the world of augmented reality applications is about to heat up.

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We first spoke to Metaio in November when we looked at the company’s consumer application, Junaio. Since then Metaio has continued to work with clients like BMW, Siemens and Popular Science to produce augmented reality products on the Unifeye platform. Because of this established presence with major corporations, the release of the Unifeye mobile SDK should have marketers salivating at the thought of dictating the design of their own experiences.

The SDK will allow 3rd party developers to take advantage of the Unifeye platform applications including its configuration templates, 2D texture / image tracking, 3D object tracking, marker tracking, GPS tracking plug-ins, video support and web-based rendering engine. According to the company, ” You can choose from different programming layers by either using the comfortable high-level (black-box) API or having individual component access to rendering, capturing, tracking on a low-level basis.”

As more companies provide tools for the mobile AR development space, it will be interesting to see whether developers opt for their own proprietary applications or whether they choose to build their ideas within pre-existing applications via the Layar model. Regardless of how platform allegiances play out, there’s no denying that the release of new tools can only encourage further innovation in the types of experiences being developed. Perhaps we’ll see our user-generated AR experience in the near future. For more on the SDK visit metaio.com/products/sdk.

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Find a Bug in Google Chrome, Earn $500-$1337

Google has just launched a new program aimed at improving security for its new web browser, Google Chrome. Developers who find a bug in either Chrome or Chromium, the open source codebase used as the testing grounds for Chrome, will receive anywhere from $500 to $1337 for reporting the issue. The amount of the reward will vary depending on the severity of the security hole discovered, says Google. Those bugs deemed “particularly severe or particularly clever” will receive the higher amount.

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Plenty of researchers have contributed to the Chromium project thus far for free, and to them Google hopes this new program will serve as a token of appreciation for their ongoing efforts. However, the introduction of monetary rewards is meant to encourage more participation in the community from external sources who have not yet pitched in.

The concept for an incentive program is not new, as Google notes in their blog post. It’s based on a similar venture created by the folks at Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox web browser. Like Mozilla, Google’s rewards also start at $500 for most issues. The payment of $1337, the number a nod to the geeky internet slang called “leet speak,” will be reserved only for critical bugs that would have had a major impact if left unpatched.

Participating researchers are asked not to publicly disclose the bug prior to reporting to Google. According to the company, responsible disclosure is a two-way street and Google admits their job will be to fix the reported issues in a reasonable time frame.

Currently, the program only encompasses the work being done in Chromium and the Google Chrome web browser, but not in third-party plug-ins such as those found in any of the newly launched Chrome extensions. Bugs that take advantage of vulnerabilities in the base operating system of the computer running the web browser will also be ineligible.

Those interested in contributing to this new program can file their bugs using the Chromium bug tracker. Only the first researcher to report the issue will receive the reward. To kick off the program, the first developer or development team to earn the cash will receive a little notoriety for their actions – they’ll be featured on the company’s releases blog. Future contributions will be credited in the appropriate Google Chrome release notes section and some developers may even be featured in the Google Security “thank you” section of the corporate website itself.

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YouTube Begins to Support HTML5

YouTube just announced that it will begin supporting HTML5 video players this evening across many of the videos on the site. The feature isn’t live yet but is expected to be within the next hour or two. If this test goes live site-wide, it will be a good thing for the web.

An HTML5 video player will allow videos to be viewed without Adobe’s Flashplayer plug-in, videos will load faster and developers will be able to build all kinds of other intriguing features into a media delivery scheme based on the next version of HTML.
For now users will need to sign-up the HTML5 preview on Test Tube and they’ll need to be using either Chrome, Safari or the Chrome frame in IE.

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The biggest benefit of HTML5 support is that it frees users from the need to use proprietary plug-ins like Flash player or Microsoft’s Silverlight by using a simple bit of code to render video. (Note this caveat regarding the lack of codec consensus, however.) If you’ve used Google’s Chrome much, you’ve probably seen how often Flash player crashes in that browser. Firefox doesn’t deal with Flash well, either.

HTML5 is being edited by Ian Hickson of Google and David Hyatt of Apple. Expect to see Google and Apple support this new standard all the more in the future so that those companies and others can build a web that looks more like Gmail on an iPhone than it does like a Flash landing page from the last decade.

For more details, see these 3 great HTML5 demonstration videos we highlighted previously.

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Google’s Chrome for Mac has arrived

Google has now launched Google Chrome for Mac. Of course it’s still in beta testing, but at least it’s now out the door.

The delay in the Mac version of the Google Chrome web browser was a big disappointment for Google. Co-founder Sergey Brin stated this publicly at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco.

Luckily that wait ends today. Mac users can now surf the web using a faster and lighter browser, compared to Firefox. However, unlike Safari, Chrome doesn’t have a toolbar. So you would have to familiarize yourself with the complete lack of buttons at the top. The Mac version ships with themes right out of the box. So if customization is your thing, Chrome won’t disappoint you.

In addition to launching Chrome for Mac users, Google has also turned the switch on Google extensions for Windows and made them available for everyone. Previously, extensions were just available to developers. Extensions or plug-ins were one area where Chrome seriously lacked Firefox. I, for one, seriously missed the possibility to tweak Chrome and extend it to my liking, like the way I used to do with Firefox. Some of the popular extensions include Google Mail Checker, Bubble Translate, Xmarks for Chrome Beta, Google Reader, and Chromed Bird.

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What is The Memex? Xerox Presents Trailmeme

Last week Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt wrote a guest article for the Wall St Journal, discussing the need for new forms of newspaper publishing to replace the old print paradigm. Another not-so-new paradigm, but one more suited to the networked computer age we live in today, is Vannevar Bush’s 1945 pre-hypertext concept the Memex.

Trailmeme is a product by Xerox that models itself on The Memex. It’s a destination site for Xerox Trails, which is being promoted as "a new kind of Web-based publishing technology."

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We last saw a product attempting a Memex-like service over 3 years ago, when we reviewed Trailfire in 2006.

Trailmeme enables users to map a set of web pages or other digital objects. So what is the Memex? Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Memex is. You have to see it for yourself. Check out this example using a ReadWriteWeb post: ReadWriteWeb’s Top 5 Web Trends of 2009.

Trailmeme includes a "collaboratively filtered" destination site, a bookmarklet and a toolbar for consumers, and a set of plug-ins compatible with WordPress and Media Wiki.

Xerox has created Trailmeme in the hope that it will be one solution to the decline of paper use and print publishing. The problem is, the Memex as a concept has been around for over 50 years and it has yet to catch on.

Nevertheless, just as Google is looking for ways to rejuvenate the publishing industry (see the Google Labs project mentioned by Schmidt in the WSJ, Google Fast Flip), Xerox is searching too.

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