Posts Tagged ‘Google’

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Google Update

Monday, December 6th, 2010

Here’s what happening with Google today:

Google eBookstore

Did you buy someone an internet-connected gadget for Christmas, such as an iPad, Android tablet, eReader, or netbook? Chances are it can take advantage of Google’s eBookstore that offers millions of free and pay-for ebooks. Google announced and opened the eBookstore today which combines the selections from some of the big ebook providers with Google’s own library of digitized books. One nice feature of Google eBookstore is that the ebooks that you add to your collection remain on the web, so you can read them on your smartphone and then switch to your netbook without having to download your book again. Your whole library is available to all your internet-capable devices. It also remembers where you left off, even when switching between devices.
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Turkey Day is Coming

Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

Well, it’s almost Thanksgiving, also known as the day before Black Friday, the day that stores lure you in to stand in freezing temperature for hours so you can fight for one of a few available units of Product X offered at a good deal, and then sell you overpriced alternatives when you refuse to leave empty handed. That’s how they go “into the black” and where the day gets its name. It’s that time of year when we thank a turkey and then go shopping. This year, many retailers are opening their doors early – really early – as in on Thanksgiving, forcing their employees (or giving their employees a valid excuse) to leave their families on this day of thanks to go in to work and deal with crazy customers.
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Google Font Previewer

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

Another free Google tool in beta?  Yep.  Seems like another one comes out every week.  This one in particular has been out for months, so if you haven’t given it a try yet, then you are overdue.

Do you need help configuring, testing and then easily embedding some free fonts into your web pages?  Great!  The Google Font Previewer lets you pick one of the open source fonts from Google’s Font Library, then tweak the size, spacing and decorations using simple sliders and buttons.

Perhaps even more exciting is the Chrome browser extension for the Google Font Previewer.  Click the icon in your Chrome toolbar, and select the web font you want the page you are currently viewing to become.  Zap!  New fonts to preview.  This can be great if you’re designing a site, but you’re just not sure which free web font to use.

These are both great tools for designers and web coders alike, so give them a shot.

Google Font Previewer (http://code.google.com/webfonts/preview)
Google Font Previewer Extension for Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/engndlnldodigdjamndkplafgmkkencc)

Also, don’t forget to go back and read Greg’s post about Google’s Library of free Web Fonts.

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Custom Icons with the Google Maps API V3

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

Putting a map on your website is pretty easy. The easiest way is to go to Google Maps and find the location you want, click embed, then copy and paste the code onto your site. This creates an iFrame on your site, which isn’t bad, but isn’t the most flexible either.

If you are feeling brave, you can put a map on your website with the API that Google provides. It’s all javascript code that works on every modern browser. The API is extremely well documented, so I won’t get down to the complete process of setting up a map, because this blog post is about using custom icons for your markers.

Click through to read how.
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Who wants PI?

Friday, September 17th, 2010

PIRecently, a team of nerds were able to find the 2 quadrillionth digit in PI. Let’s put some perspective on this.

2 Quadrillion looks like this: 2,000,000,000,000,000. But if I were to write out that may digits, it would take a long time to load this page and your computer (and the web server) would crash. If it takes 4 bits to store a number from 0 to 9, then we could store two digits in a byte. That means it would take one quadrillion bytes to store two quadrillion digits. If you’re still with me, lets simplify this. There are 1024 bytes in a kilobyte, so you need 976,562,500,000 KBs to store this number. That’s 953,674,316 Megabytes, or 931,322 Gigabytes, or 909 Terabytes. If your computer has a 500 GB harddrive, you’ll need about 2000 more harddrives. At about $60 per drive, that’ll be $120,000.00. That’s an expensive number. I’m sure there must be a more efficient way to store it.

Actually, the team did not find every digit of PI up to 2×1015 decimal places. It skipped most of the digits and jumped right to calculating a digit far to the right of the decimal place. It took 23 days and a cluster of 1000 computers to find it. The article says that the digit, expressed in binary, is 0. It doesn’t say what it is in decimal format. Read the source article to geek out on all the fascinating details.

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Download The New Google Image Search

Friday, September 10th, 2010

Just kidding. That’s an inside joke here at Zoom. You really don’t have to download anything to see the Google Image Search makeover. It is already in effect on the Google.

Here is what the old Image Search looked like:

old search

Here’s what’s new in the refreshed design of Google Images:

  • Dense tiled layout designed to make it easy to look at lots of images at once. We want to get the app out of the way so you can find what you’re really looking for.

new search

  • Instant scrolling between pages, without letting you get lost in the images. You can now get up to 1,000 images, all in one scrolling page. And we’ll show small, unobtrusive page numbers so you don’t lose track of where you are.
  • Larger thumbnail previews on the results page, designed for modern browsers and high-res screens.
  • A hover pane that appears when you mouse over a given thumbnail image, giving you a larger preview, more info about the image and other image-specific features such as “Similar images.”

hover pane

  • Once you click on an image, you’re taken to a new landing page that displays a large image in context, with the website it’s hosted on visible right behind it. Click anywhere outside the image, and you’re right in the original page where you can learn more about the source and context.
  • Optimized keyboard navigation for faster scrolling through many pages, taking advantage of standard web keyboard shortcuts such as Page Up / Page Down. It’s all about getting you to the info you need quickly, so you can get on with actually building that treehouse or buying those flowers.

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Good News For Galaxy-S Users

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

With September right around the corner, Samsung is (reportedly) getting close to rolling out the Android 2.2 update. This version is called FroYo and supports many speed enhancements and updates. One big one is including Flash 10.1, so now you can visit all those sites that won’t work on the iPhone or iPad.

There are no official dates that have been announced, but Samsung has had a few releases of FroYo available for the international Galaxy-S on their website. These were mostly beta tests and bug fix releases, and wouldn’t work on any of the branded phones (T-Mobile’s Vibrant, AT&T’s Captivate, etc.) but once the platform is solid, you can be sure that each of these vendors will be hard pushed to release their update over the network.

I for one, am very stoked. Check out this site or this site for more information.

Speaking of the iPad, Samsung is getting very close to releasing their own pad based on the Galaxy-S hardware. It’s a 7 inch tablet that will roll out with Android 2.2, and it looks very nice.

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Hands on Review: Samsung Vibrant

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Please take a moment and look back through a few posts from the Dev team here at Zoom Creates. I think that you will come to find that we seem to love Google. It’s quite true. This also includes Google’s mobile operating system, Android.

Justin has had an Android powered phone for a while (he picked up T-Mobile’s G-1 when it first came out) but has been stuck with version 1.6 of Android for quite some time. Kris and I also have T-Mobile, but neither of us had taken the plunge into the smart phone world for various reasons, but the time has come.

Last week T-Mobile bumped up the release date for their newest Android Powered handset, the Samsung Vibrant. To avoid any confusion, the Vibrant is T-Mobile’s release of Samsung’s Galaxy-S line of phones. All Galaxy-S phones have similar specs, but each carrier is allowed to modify the basics of them to suit their needs. Both Justin and I have been using our Vibrant phones for almost a week, and here’s what we think:
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Posted in Code Logic, Etc. | 1 Comment »


Kayak Explore

Monday, June 14th, 2010

Kayak Explore Ready to plan your next vacation? This clever tool from Kayak is just the tool to assist with seeing how far your travel dollars can take you.  Open up http://www.kayak.com/explore/ to take a look.  The web site will pick up your current location, and pinpoint a local airport (based on IP address).  You can, of course, enter a different starting location in the top toolbar.  Then, use the slider at the top to choose how much is in your budget to spend on a round-trip flight.  As you move the slider upwards, you’ll see more locations opening up around the world; listing the current bottom-out round-trip airline ticket price (per seat) you would have to pay for travel.  Click on any of the price tags to see details on the flight, including total flight time and number of stops.  Some locations will even tie in hotel deals and ratings.  To further trim down results, you can select the time of year you plan to travel, as the default is “any time”.

The map is powered using Google Maps, and takes advantage of all the wonderful features built-in to their interface.  Kayak partners with dozens of airlines, hotels, rental cars, and other online travel companies to bring this information to you.  Their model is no-pay advertising, so the use of their site remains free to the consumer via ad space and affiliates.

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Cufon vs CSS3 vs Google Font API

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Dynamic
Fonts are fun!

(this box built with CSS)

As Greg has mentioned in a previous post, using Google’s Font API you’re are no longer limited to “web-safe” fonts! We all love Arial and Times, but there are thousands of other really cool fonts to play with too. Here I’ll compare some options for using custom fonts on the web.
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