Archive for the ‘Google’ Category
Monday, July 14th, 2008
Well something had to wake me from my blogging slumber, and this certainly is it.
Radiohead are a band I have a lot of respect for. They try something new. First they did it by releasing their latest album ‘In Rainbows’ for download at whatever price you wanted to pay for it, before eventually releasing it on CD. A great marketing ploy, but still a risky one.
That was interesting, but the release of their new music video for the song ‘House of Cards’ takes that very much to the next level. They chose to film their video entirely without cameras, instead using lasers to collect 3D data of them singing and other clips, the results of which formed their new video. There’s even a youtube clip of how it was made.
Okay, so that’s quite interesting. It’s different. But, enter Google, and it becomes more so. Google have taken that very data that makes up the music video, and they’ve shoved it into a 3D viewer, so that if you’ve got the patience to let it load, you can actually spin around and zoom in on the music video playing out in front of you. The above screenshot is of me doing just that. It’s strangely cool, and quite satisfying to play with, take a look at it here, and you too can be creeped out by Thom Yorke singing to you as you zoom in on his face.
And keeping with the ‘free’ theme of their album, Google has also put up the actual raw 3D data so that you can take it and manipulate and display it in anyway you should see fit, provided you know what you’re doing, which is another great touch. There’s a youtube group for those who do have a play to put their videos up for everyone to see, which I’ll be keeping an eye on.
Take a look at everything there is to know, including the video itself over on Google Code, you won’t be sorry.
Oh, and I suppose I should also mention that I saw Radiohead play live in Glasgow Green at the end of last month, for the first time. They were great, they played plenty of the classics, and some recent stuff, making for quite an evening. Even the constant rain didn’t dampen the crowd’s spirits, although the occasional rogue umbrella in the way tried to.
Posted in Computer Graphics, Google, Music | No Comments »
Thursday, February 1st, 2007
I just read over on Google’s blog that they’ve released today a version of Google Maps just for Windows Mobile devices. As my phone is currently a Windows Mobile 5-based Orange SPV C600, and I also have an iPaq hx2750 again with Windows Mobile 5, I obviously had to give this a go.
First it went on my phone - one of the cool parts of Apple’s demonstration l
ast month of the iPhone was how well integrated Google Maps was. Google Maps on my Windows phone seemed pretty fantastic too, but with the advantage that I don’t have to wait until the end of the year to get it 
It’s really simple to use, and over my GPRS connection it could pull up all the map data very fast. I could pan around and zoom in and out with only a couple of seconds wait inbetween, and flicking to showing the satellite view didn’t seem any slower either. Zooming in and out is just a case of pushing up or down on the volume button on the side of my phone, and hitting the menu key throws up the option to find your position either by typing it in, or by tracking your location via a GPS device. On my phone I don’t have such a GPS option, but on my PDA that’s another matter - more on that shortly.
You also have access to similar features of the Google Maps website such as finding nearby businesses or getting directions from one point to another, although I haven’t been able to get it find me any businesses in the couple of (admittedly Scottish) locations I tried - perhaps that side is still more US-focused for now. Google Maps will also let you quickly jump to the address of any of the contacts on your phone just by clicking on their name from a menu.
There isn’t however the kind of hybrid view you can get on the full Google Maps of both map and satellite imagery, but you can flick between one or the other which is still useful.
Having wrestled with so many supposedly simple and quick map sites on my phone over the last few years that have resulted in me giving up (either from lack of detail, lack of patience, or unwillingness to pay Orange for the privelege), and ending up lost, Google Maps is really a breath of fresh air. It’s now got a permanent home on my phone, and really mobile providers should consider bundling it on Windows phones as standard.
With all that success, I also tried it on my iPaq. 
The experience is pretty similar, same options but obviously on a PDA you can see a bigger portion of the map, and as it has a touch screen the zoom options are presented on transparent buttons near the bottom of the screen, freeing up the left hand menu option for carrying out searches. You can also far easily set start and end points for getting directions, just by holding down the stylus on the location you want to mark, and choosing the appropriate menu option that pops up. Aside from that, it’s essentially the same - except that I tried it out via a wireless WiFi connection instead of via GPRS, so the speed was near instant.
As I had access to a GPS device that fits into the CompactFlash slot of my iPaq, I thought I’d give it a go and see how well Google Maps can find my location. My experience with other GPS applications for Windows Mobiles hasn’t been good, with there often being too many confusing options and ultimately it taking an age to pinpoint my location. With Google Maps though, there’s one option - if you select ‘Track Location (GPS)’ and your GPS device is enabled in the Windows Mobile OS, it just detects it and gets on with finding the nearest satellites. In my case it found my exact position and loaded up the map data instantly with out making any fuss. Perfect.
Things that could be better? Not a lot, really just the ‘Find Nearby Business’ option having more for UK users, and it would be fantastic if it could also track my route across the map as I move, logging as it went via GPS. That way I could see a quick visual representation of where I’ve been, and maybe even export it out for use elsewhere.
I really can’t say enough good things about Google Maps for Windows Mobile - I’m really pleased Google took the time to develop this, it’s going to come in so much use when travelling, and is definitely far more reliable than anything else I’d used thus far. Nice.
Posted in Google, Software | 12 Comments »
Friday, January 5th, 2007
Since I started using Google Reader back in early October, it’s become a regular port of call whenever I’ve got time to browse the Internet each day. As Google Reader has improved over the months, with the odd new feature and stability improvements, so too have I added subscriptions to various web pages I want to keep an eye on. But in turn, the number of posts I’m faced with every time I pull up Google Reader have risen to epic proportions - every morning I discover that bloggers and not-so-bloggers have been updating their sites with new postings all night, ready for me to spend the rest of the day trying desperately to flick through them all and get the number of new posts down to zero.
It never happens. Quicker than I can flick through and decide that the hundreds of new items that have appeared are largely not that interesting, more new posts appear. And then more, and more. Obviously the only true way to cut all this down is to remove some of your subscriptions altogether, but then every subscription I have will from time to time throw up something that actually I DO want to read.
Google doesn’t really have an answer for this eternal problem, but as of yesterday morning when I logged in as usual - what they HAVE done is come up with a rather nice new feature that actually just shows that the problem was even larger than I thought, and also kind of hints at where the future may lie in at least reducing the problem - Google Reader Trends. Google Reader can tell me all about my reading habits: when I mostly read items, which sites are updated most frequently, how many of the posts I actually read (not so useful, as I flick through them all eventually), and which of my subscriptions to sites have sat there largely inactive for extended periods of time. There’s even a nice little tag cloud showing what the most common post tags are in all my subscriptions, and how many of these sort of items I actually read.
So what did it tell me? Well apparently for starters, “From your 219 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 10,565 items, starred 1 items, and shared 1 items”. Turns out I have way more subscriptions than I thought I did, and they generated ten and a half thousand items - yikes. Now, obviously if I really had read all 10,565 items I wouldn’t really have had much time for anything else in my life. But even if you suppose that I only briefly flicked my eyes over most items as I tried to fly through them finding something of interesting, that’s still a heck of a lot of time spent just trying to keep on top of what’s going on in the 219 little worlds I decided to keep track of.
The new Trends area also shows me the odd spikes in days where I ‘read’ more items than usual over the last 30 days - I can pretty quickly spot the days when I returned from being away for a weekend, or when I wasn’t near an Internet connection for awhile. It takes me days to catch up, as more items pile up.
Finally, apparently Thursday is the most popular day of the week for me to read lots of items, and I’m most likely to try and read my subscriptions at lunchtime, or between 5 and 6pm - presumably when I’m waiting for a lift home from work, and need to kill time. I’ve apparently never read an item on Google Reader from midnight through to about 6am, and also very rarely have looked at anything between 8am and 9am (either asleep, still waking up, or going to work I guess).
So how does this all really help me? Well, as it currently stands - not a lot. I mean, it can show me exactly what the biggest offenders are for sheer number of posts should I choose to nuke some of them, and it can show me lots of things I didn’t know about my habits, but I’m probably wasting even more time now on Google Reader, because I’m also looking at my Trends now too.
What I’m more interested in is what this potentially could become. Many people are predicting Google Reader could morph into a digg like site where people can view the most read items by everyone on Google Reader, which while nice, I’d rather see it go in another direction. Down the line in fact, I’d far sooner see Google Reader try and predict what kind of stuff I’m actually most likely to want to read based on my habits so far. Did I just flick past a given type of item with barely a glance, did I click a link to certain types of sites from within an item, and what sort of posts do I spend the most time reading? If it knows that, perhaps Google Reader can also help me find the good stuff in amongst the crap, and perhaps I can stop wasting so much time trying to find it myself.
Still, for now it could be worse - Robert Scoble of Podtech has 483 feeds, and read 25,185 items in the last 30 days - clearly I don’t know I’m born.
Posted in Google, Ramblings, Software | 2 Comments »
Monday, October 2nd, 2006
For quite some time now, I’ve been keeping track of the many websites I visit via Mozilla Firefox’s ‘Live Bookmarks’ feature. This was fine for awhile, but as I’ve added more and more sites, and as I had no way to know what I’d read already other than relying on my memory, I’ve been considering trying out some of the seperate RSS reader applications.
The final straw was returning from London to find that in three days, just about everywhere I visit had gone ‘post crazy’ - it took far too long to catch up.
As luck would have it though, Google went and launched a new version of their Google Reader site, which on closer look seemed as though it would suit me just fine - if I give it all my sites it will list off any updates for me to look at and keep track of what I’ve read.
Moving all my live bookmarks was relatively easy once I’d worked out there’s an extension for Firefox to allow you to export them in OPML format, ready for importing into Google Reader. After some initial mopping up, rearranging some of them into different folders, and marking recent posts at each site as already read, I was good to go…
Sort of. While Google Reader has certainly sped up my internet browsing, and I do quite like it - it’s still a little buggy (remember it’s still a Google Labs product) as the above screen shows. I’ve added 115 subscriptions, and it can be a little slow at times. There are also sometimes phantom entries telling me a feed has a new post when there aren’t any, but it’s simple and useful enough that I’ll stick with it for now.
Posted in Google, Ramblings | 3 Comments »
