The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘feature’

A few days ago, we spotted Twitter’s initial roll out of a geolocation feature on its Website. It appeared that Twitter was testing the feature because it quickly turned it off. Last night, the feature went back on, and Twitter co-founder and CEO Biz Stone officially announced it.

While Twitter’s geolocation feature has been live through its API since last November, this is the first time Twitter has enabled geolocation on its site. To start Tweeting with your location attached, you need to enable the feature in your Twitter Account Settings. Once you’ve opted-in, you will be able to add your location information to all your Tweets or choose to add them to individual Tweets as you compose them. You can choose to share your exact location (your coordinates) or your neighborhood or town.

Currently, the feature only works with Firefox 3.5 and Chrome for Windows. If you decide you want to send a Tweet without your location, you can simply click the “x” next to your location to disable it. Interestingly, if you Tweet with your geolocation on Twitter, the location doesn’t seem to show up in TweetDeck, Seesmic or presumably other third-party clients. And It doesn’t work from Twitter’s mobile site, at least not on the iPhone, where it would make more sense.

As we wrote in our earlier coverage, the timing of this move by Twitter is purposeful. With the SXSW conference in Austin starting today, the location wars are heating up. Earlier in the week, the New York Times reported that Facebook would unveil its answer to location next month at its f8 conference. Google, meanwhile, is in the game with Latitude and to some extent Buzz (but could have been in it a lot more). And of course, Foursquare, Gowalla and a host of other location-based apps are rolling out additional functionality. As we previously noted, many of these apps use Twitter’s geolocation API to pass the data back to Twitter, so it makes sense that this would be a good time to turn the functionality on for the website.

As we noted earlier, Google announced an update today to its Android OS for Nexus One phones that would enable the pinch-to-zoom multi-touch feature for the first time in a few Google apps: Maps, Gallery, and the Web Browser. We’ve just received the update, which is technically firmware 2.1-update1, and have taken a video of the new functionality in action.

While some third-party apps have taken advantage of mutli-touch for some time on Android, Google has resisted the feature for its own apps — likely due to an agreement with Apple. But now, all bets appear to be off.

Google notes that most users shouldn’t receive the update until the end of the week as they gradually roll it out, so we were apparently lucky. Watch it in action below, and note how it compares to the iPhone’s multi-touch.

Yesterday, browser market share figures came out from Net Applications, and the big news is how Chrome is moving up the ranks at the expense of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and even Firefox, compared to December.  But you have to look further back to get a sense of what is really happening.

The various flavors of Internet Explorer (IE6, IE7, and IE8) together have 62.1 percent market share, down from 68.5 percent last March.  That is a 6.4 percent drop in about a year.  During the same period Chrome went from 1.6 percent share to 5.2 percent.  Firefox and Safari each gained about a percentage point each over the same period to 24.4 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively.  (Although Firefox is a tiny bit down since November, when it peaked at 24.7 percent).  If you add up the gains from those three—Chrome, Firefox, and Safari—that is where most of IE’s share went.

But even that doesn’t tell the whole story because if you look at share of individual versions of the different browsers, you can see another dynamic in play.  Namely, a big part of the share shift can also be explained by the uneven rate at which people abandon older browsers like IE6 for newer ones like IE8 or Chrome.  Let’s look at the share shifts just among IE6, IE7, and IE8.  The pitchforks are out for IE6, people hate it and Websites (especially those run by Google) think the sooner it dies, the better. Even Microsoft wants people to move away from IE6.

IE6’s individual market share has dropped by about 11 points since March, 2009, from 31.4 percent to 20 percent.  Meanwhile, IE8 took almost twice as much share as IE6 lost, it’s up  almost 21 points from almost nothing to 22.4 percent share.  So why did IE show an overall drop?  You can blame poor old IE7, which lost exactly as much as IE8 gained, going from 35.2 percent to 14.5 percent share.

But taken alone, IE8 actually gained more than any other browser during the period (up 20.6 percent), followed by Firefox 3.5 (up 17.1 percent).  Chrome’s 5.2 percent share gain was spread across its Windows and Mac versions.  So IE8 is making stronger gains than you might think from simply looking at the overall IE share numbers.  In fact, in January, it finally surpassed IE6 in market share and is now the largest single browser. As IE6 and IE7 continue to dwindle, IE8 needs to capture as much of those legacy users as it can.  With almost 35 percent share left between them, IE8 will no doubt continue to see rapid individual share growth simply by getting people using older versions of IE to upgrade. It helps that IE8 comes pre-installed with the Windows 7 operating system also.

But those users are also prime targets for Chrome and Firefox (which is still going through its own transition from 3.0 to 3.5).  Chrome, in particular, has the most to gain here.  It only needs another 5 percent to double its market share, whereas IE8 can win over another 20 percent and still see IE’s overall share go down.  It remains an open question where the overall shares will settle when all of this shakes out over the next year or so.

So Matt and I just got our hands on the Samsung E6, the company’s first electronic book reader.

Read more from the original source: 
First hands on: Samsung E6 e-book reader

Mad Catz isn’t actually known for being subtle, but this is a bit much even for them.

View post:
Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. is the ugliest mouse known to man

You’ve got a package coming in the mail. It left Cumberland, Maryland yesterday morning, and after fifteen refreshes, it finally got scanned into your local post office

Go here to see the original:
FedEx’s new SenseAware tech makes shipment tracking real-time. Almost.

Quick! Get your F5 button all greased up and ready to go.

Originally posted here:
It’s an all-out Woot-Off!

As we’ve noted, Chrome for Mac is getting very, very close to its official beta launch. The team is down to a mere 8 bugs to fix before it’s ready (and it looks like the list has been trimmed to 7 as of a few hours ago). This is great news for Mac users who want to try out the Chrome experience that PC users have had for well over a year now. But still, the product will be in beta, and it will be incomplete.

It’s been known for a while that Google would have to trim some features from the initial Chrome for Mac beta launch to get it out before self-imposed “end of the year” deadline. But what’s on the chopping block? A scan through the Chromium logs on Google Code seems to reveal what will and won’t be a go for Chrome for Mac beta.

So what’s out? The biggest feature that is currently not slated to be done in time for “milestone 4″ (aka Chrome version 4, which Chrome for Mac beta will be, at least initially) is the Bookmark Manager. Current Chromium (and dev Chrome) testers will know that this option has been grayed out forever on the latest builds of the browser, and as of September, it was moved from a M4 (milestone 4) to a M5 target. It would appear that Google will launch Chrome for Mac beta without it working.

Another feature moved to M5 is App Mode. This is the Chome mode that allows you to run web apps in their own basic browser window. Fans of Fluid, a free program for OS X that works with Safari, will appreciate this being built into the browser eventually, but it doesn’t appear that will be ready for the beta launch either.

Likewise, the Task Manager has been moved from M4 to M5, but recent chatter about it makes it seem like it’s possible that it could be done in time.

Gears, which allows for offline web app functionality, is completely off the table as a Chrome for Mac feature right now, according to project lead Mike Pinkerton (he actually noted this back in July). Apparently, Google plans to push ahead with full HTML5 support rather than rely on Gears, at least on the Mac.

Sync for Mac (bookmark syncing) is another feature that currently works on the PC version of Chrome, but is slated to be a M5 project for the Chrome for Mac team. Still, this thread shows that significant progress has been made on it, and it looks like you can even enable it to try it out, but it won’t be on by default yet.

Multi-touch gestures that are built into OS X and used by MacBook trackpads and the new Magic Mouse are another M5 project. The two listed gestures, “Three-finger-swipe up” and “Pinch in/out to zoom in/out” are still being debated as to what they should actually do.

While one of the highly touted features of Snow Leopard is that it’s 64-bit, Chrome for Mac beta will not be initially supporting it. In fact, this may not even be a M5 project, it all depends on how well Google’s V8 JavaScript engine is able to perform in a 64-bit environment, apparently.

Full extension support will also not be a part of Chrome for Mac beta, Pinkerton tweeted out tonight. While many extensions are working in the latest builds of Chromium for Mac, some are apparently not. Pinkerton promises that the team will get to this “soon,” but needed to “draw a line somewhere.”

Another feature currently disabled in the Mac builds of Chromium is Full Screen mode. It would seem this too has been pushed to M5.

So those appear to be the big features that will be missing with the launch of the Chrome for Mac beta. There’s a larger list of other M5 projects here. Again, Chrome for Mac beta will be a M4 (version 4) release, so all of these appear to be off the table for now.

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At least 2 million Xbox Live users have logged into Facebook this past week , which I guess means the feature is a bit of a success. (You’ll recall that Microsoft launched Facebook and Twitter to so much enthusiasm last week.) Mysteriously, Microsoft didn’t reveal the number of people who logged into Twitter.

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Were you one of the 2 million Xbox Live users who used Facebook this past week?