Month: September 2011

Categories
Technology

The End Of Google Freebies

Image representing Google Desktop as depicted ...
Clear Your Desktop

If you use Windows XP, there’s a product you should get while you still can. Google Desktop is a useful way to search all the documents you have on your own computer, instantly. You may be familiar with the search built into XP, and how slow and basic it is. Google’s Desktop brings their Web-search speed to your own computer.

OK, it is getting to be a bit obsolete. More modern operating systems have similar fast searching built in. And there is an alternative from Microsoft called Windows Desktop Search. But I liked the Google product best, and in less than two weeks they’re not going to let us have it any more. Boo.

As the link shows they’ve in fact discontinued the whole Google Pack, of which this was just one part, along with a whole lot of other projects that were far less popular. That’s a shame I think. It was always a good place to point people to get some essential software from a source they could trust. (We still do trust Google, don’t we? Basically I mean.)

Sure the links are still there, but the package had a mechanism to keep them updated for you. It was all very beginner-friendly. (You can still get it from here, but there’s little point if the update system is going to stop.) It was an endearing little feature of Google’s corporate personality, I found it quite useful over the last few years, but now it’s gone.

And no, it never did get out of beta.

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Categories
Cosmography

Fox Vignette

Driving back through a storm, from dinner at a friends’ just a couple of villages away. Or an hour and a half’s drive, if you think you passed the house on your way there, drive almost all the way back home again, and be still so absolutely certain that you must have missed it twice that you do it all over again before finally consulting the GPS that has been running right in front of you all the time and realise that you are on the wrong road.

But that was the way there. Now it’s dark, and there are raindrops coming at the windscreen almost horizontally. You remember that “hyperspace jump” effect in Star Wars where the stars stretched out into lines? Looked just like that. I was driving into the storm, and the storm was driving into me.

Suddenly an animal dashed across the road in front of the car. A fox! A big one too. So hungry that it’s out hunting in torrential rain. And I in a nice waterproof tin box, heading home to a warm bed after a fabulous meal.

It’s great to be a human.

Categories
Technology

Folding Tablets

Sony Tablet P - Click for slide show

We have still to see any real Android challenge to the iPad. The simple fact is, they’re not as nice. Apple’s hermetic approach to design means that they can tweak the whole package until it’s really quite lovely. Almost every rival product so far feels like an inferior imitation.

It shouldn’t be this way. The advantage of the more open Android platform ought to be that, like Windows, it gets used on an interesting variety of hardware. That should allow creative manufacturers to experiment and innovate. Inexcusably though, most don’t. But just now and again someone lets loose, and the results justify the wait.

Sony simply call it the Tablet P, and though it looks like one of those concept devices that are demoed and then never seen again, it is actually coming to market – along with its more conventional sibling the Tablet S – any day now. I don’t even usually like Sony’s stuff; for my tastes it seems too shiny and insubstantial. But the idea of a folding tablet is just gorgeous.

Why? Well the iPad has been touted as somehow a replacement for print publications – even the potential saviour of the publishing industry. But it is not a device you can easily carry around with you to read in the places most people read casually: During journeys and commutes, sitting at a café table. Basically it’s too big; smartphones on the other hand are too small for comfortable reading. A device that has almost the same screen size as an iPad yet can be slipped into a jacket pocket or handbag makes sense in so many more situations.

Meanwhile, there are strong rumours that Amazon is about to enter the fray too, attempting to beat other tablets where so far there’s been a painful absence of competition – on price. So despite Apple’s courtroom tactics and the demise of HP’s Touchpad, it looks like competition is finally beginning to happen. The biggest upset though may be yet to come. So far, Microsoft has been noticeable in the consumer tablet market mostly by its absence. Are they having second thoughts? More soon…

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