~TECH-BYTES~

Here’s a small funny video that desribes very well why Apple’s new revolutionary ipad isn’t that revolutionary afterall…

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The Windows version of Google Chrome 4 is out of beta and you can finally try the features that were previously available in Chrome’s beta and dev channels. Google will automatically update the browser to the latest version (4.0.249.78), but you can also click on the wrench button, select “About” and manually update the browser.

The most important feature released in Google Chrome 4 is the support for extensions. Chrome extensions are easier to create than Firefox extensions because they’re nothing more than web pages that use Chrome’s APIs. That’s why you can install or disable extensions without having to restart the browser, that’s why extensions use separate processes and this is one of the reasons why Chrome extensions are more limited and don’t have a consistent interface.

Google Chrome has built-in support for user scripts, so you don’t need to install an extension like Greasemonkey. Chrome can convert user scripts into extensions, so many Chrome extensions are just glorified Greasemonkey scripts.

To install an extension, visit Google Chrome’s extension gallery and pick one of the 1,861 extensions that are currently available. Here are some of the most useful extensions that add missing features to Google Chrome:

1. RSS Subscription Extension. Detecting and previewing feeds is a standard feature in most browser, but not in Google Chrome. This extension shows an orange icon in the Omnibox when it detects feeds and lets you subscribe to one of the feeds using your favorite feed reader. You can select one of the popular feed reader that are available by default (Google Reader, iGoogle, Bloglines and My Yahoo) or you can add another feed reader.

2. Email this page. Firefox’s contextual menu has an option called “send link” that lets you send a link to the current page using your favorite mail client. This extension has a similar functionality, but it only lets you pick the default mail client and Gmail.

3. Google Dictionary shows the definition of a word when you double-click on it. It only support monolingual dictionaries and a small number of languages, but it’s useful if you want to find the definition of a word without opening a new page.

4. Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer – a simple extension that detects the links to PDF, PPT and TIFF files and opens the files in Google Docs, so you can view them without installing additional software.

5. Slideshow – a great way to view the images from sites like Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Facebook, and Google Images in a slideshow.

6. Empty New Tab Page – a simple extension that replaces Chrome’s new tab page with a blank page.

7. FlashBlock disables Flash content for all web pages and replaces it with a placeholder. Click on the placeholder and you’ll enable the Flash element. This way, you’ll no longer see Flash ads, annoying Flash animations and other unnecessary objects that slow down your browser.

8. AdBlock hides ads using frequently-updated filter lists. You can whitelist domains and subdomains using Ctrl+Shift+L.

9. Secure Login Helper redirects you to the HTTPS login pages for sites like Twitter, Facebook and Twitter.

10. Smooth gestures – use mouse gesture to perform actions like going back one page, going to the top of a page or opening the last close tab. Mouse gestures are intuitive and you can customize them.

If you found other great Chrome extensions, mention them in a comment.

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After many years of waiting, Google’s online storage service will finally be available. It won’t be called GDrive, as it will only be an updated version of Google Docs.

“Instead of emailing files to yourself, which is particularly difficult with large files, you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You’ll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don’t convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year,” mentions Google Docs blog.

The update will be slowly rolled out in the coming days and it’s the next step in the evolution of Google’s online office suite. When Google added support for PDF files in 2008, it became clear that Google Docs will let you upload any kind of file.

Google says that the service will be able to open many common file formats. “You can search for document files you’ve uploaded or that have been shared with you just like you do with your Google documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs. And you’ll be able to view many common document file types with the Google Docs viewer.”

Google Docs has the potential to become a great service for online storage, but it won’t succeed if it only includes 1 GB of free storage. Microsoft’s SkyDrive offers 25 GB of free storage, while ADrive offers 50 GB of free storage. Even Gmail has more free storage than Google Docs and its main purpose is not storing files.

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Google updated the pricing for the additional storage you can buy in Gmail and Picasa Web Albums: $0.25 per GB per year.

Here’s some historical data:

Pricing (August 2007)

Pricing (January 2009)

Google says that the storage is shared between Gmail and Picasa Web Albums, but it’s obvious that the additional storage will mostly be used in Google Docs, when the service morphs into Google Drive.

“While storage costs have been dropping naturally, we’ve also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce costs even further. Today, we’re dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage more affordable. You can now buy 20 GB for only $5 a year, twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price, and enough space for more than 10,000 full resolution pictures taken with a five megapixel camera,”explains Google.

If you’ve already purchased Google storage, there’s a good news: “Your total storage will be increased according to this page at no extra cost. For example, if you had previously purchased 10 GB of Google storage, you now have 80 GB available.”

Wooo Hoooo i am definitely going for 20GB after all whats Rs. 250/-  if i can keep a back of all my valuable moments  on Picasa and that too in one single account…

Google has released a new programming language called Go. Google wants to offer a couple of benefits from their language: fast compilation, easy analyzing of dependencies, static types that nevertheless feel more lightweight compared to some other languages, and multi-core machine support.

Go is not (not yet anyway) an approved official Google-internal language, but apparently more of an experiment for “adventurous users”, started in September 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. The motivation for a new language is explained at the Go site:

Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language. It also aims to be modern, with support for networked and multicore computing. Finally, it is intended to be fast: it should take at most a few seconds to build a large executable on a single computer. To meet these goals required addressing a number of linguistic issues: an expressive but lightweight type system; concurrency and garbage collection; rigid dependency specification; and so on. These cannot be addressed well by libraries or tools; a new language was called for.

Why doesn’t Go offer generic types? Google explains that the language does not offer them yet, but that they may well be added at some point. The site says:

Generics are convenient but they come at a cost in complexity in the type system and run-time. We haven’t yet found a design that gives value proportionate to the complexity, although we continue to think about it. Meanwhile, Go’s built-in maps and slices, plus the ability to use the empty interface to construct containers (with explicit unboxing) mean in many cases it is possible to write code that does what generics would enable, if less smoothly.

This remains an open issue.

Here’s a bit of Go code to give you an idea, and much more is explained in Google’s tutorials. I’ve just copied some syntax samples into this bit of code, not to create a compilable valid program but for the sake of showing off some of the := declaration syntax, the “missing” if and for brackets, the use of semi-colons as separators but not terminators (the tutorial code seems to be inconsequential about this, or I’m missing something), the implicit break in the switch statement and more:

package main

import fmt "fmt"

const (
    Space = " ";
)

func main() {
    var s string = "";
    for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
        if i > 0 {
            s += Space
        }
        s += "foo"
    }

    var a int;
    b := 0;
    c := 0;
    switch {
        case a < b:
            c = -1
        case a == b:
            c = 0
        case a > b:
            c = 1
    }
}

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