Following up from the last post about the new Google Desktop 3 beta, there have been many privacy concerns voiced on the Google desktop group and around the web about its new Search across computers feature. How it works is that data from your computer is sent to Google’s servers, so that when working a different computer with Google Desktop installed you can access the index of your first computer.

According to Google, it’s all encrypted and locked down, but people seem to be worried that the US government will try and access it. I use Google Desktop, but I don’t use this feature, partly because I don’t have another computer with Google Desktop installed on it and even though I do (fairly) trust Google, I wouldn’t want all my documents traversing the internet. And living in the UK, I don’t think the US government has an immediate right to access my data either.

BTW, this is my first post as a guest of this blog while Huw is away, so if you’re interested give my blog a look (it focuses more on what I’m developing and doing and thinking rather than the latest tech news, however). So despite the fact that this is credited as by Huw, it’s actually by me, Peter. Hi everyone.

Google has released a beta of the next version of their Google Desktop program.

The release is covered pretty well on the Google Desktop Blog. Features include:

• Improved APIs so that developers can produce more powerful extensions to enhance the functionality of the program.
• Search across computers - allows searching of several computers in a network from one computer.
• Updated preference page.
• Indexing of zip files.
• Advanced search form.
• Playing online games with contacts using the sidebar.

It looks like it’s quite a big upgrade, and it needs to be - with much improved searching in Windows Vista, Google Desktop will soon no longer be able to take advantage of the poor searching capabilities in XP. It needs a new unique selling point, which is also unlikely to be the sidebar as that looks set to be a standard feature in Vista as well, with all sorts of interesting widgets. I think they’re looking at at least another strong update to the program before the release of Windows Vista in the Autumn. It will certainly be a big challenge for Google.

Bill Gates vision of the future

10 years ago. This article compares Gates’ predictions for the future of technology in 1995 to the current situation. He got a remarkable amount right, which probably explains why he’s the world’s richest man!

For those of us without access to the Windows Vista (next version of Windows) betas, there are several ways to get some cool extra features for Windows XP right now, remarkably from Microsoft’s own website. Called PowerToys, they are are described as:

PowerToys add fun and functionality to the Windows experience. What are they? PowerToys are additional programs that developers work on after a product has been released.

Some of the interesting PowerToys include:

ClearType tuner
ClearType is a type of font that has come to promince through its use in IE7 releases. It is a way of rendering fonts developed by Microsoft after years of research into how to make fonts easier to read - and thats just what ClearType is - a way of displaying fonts that is easier on the eye. A comparison between ClearType and non-ClearType is on the IE7 developer’s blog.

As you can see, the outline of the font is softer. If you zoom in on ClearType, you can see that there is a very weird colour gradient around each character, making them much less stark, and I definitely think easier to read. However, many people disagree with me, and have been complaining about it’s default use in IE7. Apparently, it only works properly on LCD screens (flat screens). This PowerToy allows you to use ClearType throughout Windows, and tweak its settings to what is best for your eyes. Definitely highly recommended.

Power Calculator
Does what it says on the tin. It is an enhanced version of the rudimentary calculator included in Windows, and it has added graphics capabilities and other mathematical stuff, and a slightly better GUI (graphic user interface). It’s worth downloading, as its only small and adds some features which you will find useful from time to time.

Virtual desktop manager
One of the most noticable differences between the Windows desktop and KDE (I think it’s KDE, but it might be GNOME), a popular desktop for Linux distributions, is that KDE allows you to have multiple desktops open, and so you could, for example, have one for web browsing, one for listening to music and yet another for the work which you really should be getting on with. You switch between these desktops by clicking the buttons on a toolbar on the taskbar.

The green button is perhaps the coolest feature, as it brings up a screen with the four desktops tiled, and then you can go to one by clicking on it (yes, I know, that’s already available in Mac OS X, and I’m sure that looks a lot better, but it’s new for us Windows users). Another feature is the ability to have different backgrounds for each of the respective desktops. It is worth making sure that the ’shared taskbar’ option is set to off, as otherwise the windows from the other desktops appear in every desktop’s taskbar. I have found this PowerToy to be quite buggy, and so I think its greatest use is to make me feel like a power user.

WebCam Timershot
Not entirely sure of any practical use for this program, apart from possibly catching burglars, but this PowerToy makes it possible to set the webcam to take a still picture regularly after a set interval. Still interesting though.

Slide Show Wizard
Again, pretty much does as the name would suggest. It allows the easy creation of webpage photo albums from a folder of photos, which could then be uploaded to a webserver for sharing with friends. This might have been a useful feature even a year ago, but with the advent of services such as Flickr, Yahoo!’s recently aquired photo-sharing service, with free storage up to a limit, the usefulness of this wizard is much reduced.

There are other PowerToys available on the Microsoft website, and they do provide some interesting and in some cases very useful functionality.

Extend Firefox Contest Finalists

Mozilla has been running a contest for the best extension for firefox - not that there has ever been a shortage of good ones! It has some that I already use, such as MyStickies and IE Tab, as well as some interesting looking ones that I haven’t tried yet. Well worth a look.

A new feature for Gmail (or Google Mail) is being rolled out over the next 2-3 weeks.

It allows users to chat from within Gmail. Google describes the new feature here. From the page:

Gmail learned to Talk. Now Gmail accounts are automatically enabled with chat
features. You don’t have to do anything special, it just works. See when your
friends are online and decide for yourself how you want to get in touch with
them. Email and instant messaging don’t have to be so different. And why should
you always have to remember whether something important was said over email or
IM? We’ve made it easy for you to save chats, so
you can search for them, print them, even reply to one over email.

This is presumably to improve the poor response to their Google Talk service, which has lagged behind rivals such as MSN and Yahoo! messengers. The Gmail Chat will work, as Google Talk does, with Jabber clients as well as scattering other email providers. It’s a good idea, and will presumably be a master class in how to use AJAX (asynchrous javascript and XML, it is a way to update information on a page without needing a total reload).#

Update: There’s now an Official Google Blog post on Google Chat here. It doesn’t really have any new information, it just talks about some of the usual Google idealism (genuine or otherwise) behind the project.

Thoughts on IE7 from Firefox developer

Sounds as though it would be ridiculously biased, but it’s actually quite a measured look at the new IE7 beta 2 release, and a comparison of it and firefox. Obviously he comes out in favour of Firefox 1.5 though. What will be very interesting will be the release of Firefox 2.0 in five days time (10/02/06)

MyStickies is a new service which allows you to annotate pages with comments, which are then saved, along with the page address. It is designed to enhance bookmarks, with the ability to add descriptive tags to pages, and always know exactly why you bookmarked a page.

The service works by installing an extension in your browser, which adds a toolbar as well as the ability to add stickies by alt-clicking and dragging on a webpage.

I can see this being really useful, providing me with a searchable list of all the sites I liked, as well as why I liked them. It also has the ability to add friends. I’m not sure exactly what functionality that adds, but MyStickies might well be working towards a very Web 2.0 concept of ’social stickies’. A neat little idea, and one that might well catch on well.

coComment - clear conversation in the blogosphere

I’ve just discovered this beta of a new service called ‘coComment’ thanks to TechCrunch. It looks like it will be a really interesting service.

From their site:

When you comment on a blog, coComment keeps a copy of your message on a special page - called “your conversations” - that allows you to quickly see your comment and where it was posted, with a link to the original site.

You post your comment using a bookmarklet rather than the blog interface, and it is supposed to work with loads of different platforms. You can also share your comments with your own blog’s readers, by easily posting them to your blog. In addition, the system will alert you when other people reply to your comment, so you don’t have to keep going back to the blog.

This is completely irrelevant, but absolutely hilarious. It’s a circa 1950s black and white video (on Google Video) of British troops trying to complete an exercise after taking LSD.

[via Google Blogoscoped]