We’re half way through the week gadget guzzlers, so pull up a chair and get your quick fix of Wednesday’s top tech titbits. We can see Friday from here.
Tagged ‘chrome’
Most people only think of Mozilla in the context of web browsers. Apparently the team is a little more ambitious than we previously suspected. Today, the first developer release of Mozilla’s new Web App Store was unveiled. As a direct competitor to Google’s Chrome Web App Store, the battle begins in 2011.
This week in Sites We Like, we’ve got a fistful of fun and its rushing towards your face. Watch as the sucker-punch of superb sites delivers you Chrome generative audio joy, free audio books delivered when you want them, a huge playground full of Flash games and a great free way to super-charge your snaps. Read on and take a look…
Listening Room is a project by developer Abe Fettig which lets you set up a room where you can play MP3s which everyone on the same web page can listen to. They in turn can play their own tracks. The site is still a little buggy but fire it up in an up-to-date version of Chrome, Safari or Firefox and it’s an impressive achievement. We particularly like the fact that album artwork shows up on the little record player that spins while a track is playing. The site is free to use and pretty brilliant so make sure to follow Abe on Twitter (@sleeperco) and check out his blog.
Out now | £free | Listening Room
With Google’s Chrome OS nearly upon us, next year looks like it will be the big one for web apps. But you don’t need a Chrome OS computer to get cracking.
Before you throw yourself into the abandon of the New Year celebrations, fish out your laptop, fire up the Mac, park yourself in front of the PC and take a gander at our list of 10 web services to try before 2011.
Google Body Browser is Google’s search smarts translared to the human body. The simulator lets you explore a virtual human body and is now in Google Labs. You’ll need a browser with WebGL so that’s Firefox 4 and Chrome 9 betas or Chrome 8 if you enable WebGL in the “about:flags” menu. The Google Body Browser visualisaton options are great and there’s lots of search tools to play with. You can see them in the Google Body Browser video after the break…
Chrome for a Cause is a Google Chrome extension that counts the number of tabs you open in one session and translates it into charity donations. It’s running from 15-19 December. You can choose one of five charities you want to donate to, and you get a reading of what your tabs have been converted into. It’s not a trick to invade your privacy either. Google says: “Chrome for a Cause tracks your tab count, but doesn’t store any of your browsing history.”
To give you an idea of how many tabs rack up a decent donation: it takes 10 tabs to rack up enough browsing to plant a tree or donate a book. The five charities are Doctors Without Borders, The Nature Conservancy, Room to Read, Charity:Water and Un Techo para mi PaÃs. For more info about Chrome for a Cause, head here.
News of the first Chrome OS netbooks has arrived this week, and if it delivers what it promises then we could be looking at a completely different OS experience in the future, counter to what we get from Windows now. What do you think, could Chrome OS catch on, forcing Windows to make a paradigm shift in its make up to save being killed outright? Or is Microsoft’s move into the cloud already pushing it in a similar direction to Chrome OS?
Click and tell, and drop us a line in the comments to tell us what you think…