As of my last Chromium update I got a chance to select whether I want or not to use the Form Filling feature. It includes address details and credit card details as can be seen in the image below:
More addresses and cards can be added as well.
I'm still using the LastPass plugin as autofill service but will sure try out Chromium's soon. Currently it is saved locally and not in the cloud so won't have it handy at different locations you're using the browser.
Google’s breaking news left and right today. Of course the big news is that real-time search is live, but the release of Google Goggles can’t be overlooked. The brand-new addition to Google Labs is an experimental application for Android devices that supports visual search.
How does it work? Just open the app, snap a photo and voilà: Google will process the image and return search results. The photo search functionality eliminates the need to type or say anything on your mobile device, and it adds context to your real-world surroundings.
While the technology is pretty remarkable, Google admits that it is still in its infancy. So while some image searches work brilliantly — think photos of books, business cards, artwork, places, logos and landmarks — don’t be too disappointed if your image searches for food, animals, plants and cars are less than stellar.
Still, the application should prove useful, and we hope to see versions of it made available for other smartphone users as well. For now, though, iPhone users can turn to a number of different augmented reality applications for camera-enabled search functionality.
Watch the video below for a demonstration of Google Goggles.
Moving from Windows XP to Windows 7 will be a whole lot easier if you use Ninite. The free online site lets you pick those extra apps you always need to hunt around the web for when you do a clean install.
Once you've checked off your choices among the 59 possibilities, you download an installer (sorry, Windows only) , double-click it and you can just walk away while it loads up all those apps on your fresh operating system. It's even smart enough to avoid installing crapware such as unnecessary toolbars.
We've been testing this routine in its beta phase, and we can tell you it works beautifully. We test a lot of operating systems here, and it's a pain to individually install apps such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader (or better yet, Foxit Reader), iTunes, Firefox, Winrar, and many others. Now, with our custom installer, everything is ready to go in minutes.
The company aims to please, asking you to suggest more apps that aren't yet included. It's hard to believe this is free.
Today, Mozilla announced a new open source project called Raindrop, a service that pulls your social content from multiple sources and organizes it in one place to create a centralized messaging experience that matters to you.
The goal of Raindrop is to make email and messaging personal again, and allow complete customizability in how you manage that information. It brings in content from multiple, sources such as Twitter, RSS feeds, and email, and presents it in one central, web-based front end. Thus, instead of having to watch multiple sources just to keep up on your personal conversations, you can focus on one single bucket.
Raindrop can also decide which conversations are important to you and your life, and "bubble up" that information to the top—while keeping the less important messages out of the way. In addition, like all Mozilla projects, Raindrop will be extensible—whether through HTML, Java, CSS, or APIs—in order for you to further personalize your experience.
Mozilla says that the goal is not to invent a new protocol or system, but better handle ones that already exist. The video demo (above) explains some of the basic principles behind Raindrop.
Raindrop is still in very early stages, and isn't something the basic user can try out just yet, but it's certainly something we'll be keeping an eye on.
I really hope someone at Apple sees these concept interfaces from Ocean Observations. They've taken the best elements of the Pre's card system, combined them with Cover Flow, and created an awesome vision of multitasking on the iPhone.
The designers also have an idea for managing the mess of home screens that comes along with app hoarding. Tapping the home button would bring up a paneled Exposé page. From there, you could easily jump to a specific page, rather than swiping a hundred times to find Peggle.
Hopefully someone at Apple is keeping up with this page to see what else these guys come up with.
[Gizmodo via MobileCrunch]
Android: 'Augmented Reality' is a buzz phrase gaining a lot of notice lately. Free Android app Layar, one of the first full-featured AR apps for Android, layers helpful, location-specific data on top of whatever you're looking at through your device's camera.
In a true-to-form augmented reality app, a phone's camera would be used to provide a live video stream, and the application would analyze objects in that stream and interact with them in some way. This video demonstrates what the future will likely hold for motion-sensitive, GPS-enabled, decent-camera-toting phones—with zombies:
Until phones catch up to developers' ambitions, we have half-breed apps like Layar that pull in geographic data from your phone's GPS location, check it against web databases, and then show the locations of nearby subway stations, restaurants, and more overlaid on the image of your surroundings from your phone's camera. Android phones allow apps to access the video stream for overlays, while the iPhone 3GS picked up that ability with the 3.1 firmware update, as ReadWriteWeb details. Here's how Layar's developers demonstrate the app in their native Amsterdam:
For a real-world, smaller-city test, I grabbed a T-Mobile G1 and headed to Buffalo's Elmwood Avenue commercial strip, with a side venture to Main Street, to see what Layar could show me. The app has a single view and function that pulls in your camera's video stream, but you can switch up what 'layer' you see over it on the fly. The layers, listed at Layar's web site, come from web services with big geographic data piles, like Wikipedia, review site Yelp, real estate finder Trulia, and sites that mash up social apps like Flickr and Twitter. Yelp and Flickr (pulled in as 'FlickAR' in this app) are, as you might imagine, the most densely packed of the apps I tried. You normally turn your camera, or yourself, to get thumbnail data on any 'blips' that come up in Layar. When you come up with clusters of results in layers like Yelp, though, you'll end up switching to the less impressive list view, because trying to pinpoint individual finds will have passersby wondering why it looks like you're trying to rotate the world with your phone.
I didn't get any results for local tweets or Trulia real estate findings, but an architectural society layer and Wikipedia yielded a few fun surprises. If you were new in a city and looking for something to check out, Layar might well be worth the time (and battery drain) to check out. Who wouldn't want to check out the spot where President William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, or the seriously creepy spires of the H.R. Richardson 'State Lunatic Asylum'? Layar is neat stuff, and will probably get better as more developers buy into it.
Layar is a free download for Android phones only. If you've used the app for something useful, fun, or something in-between, tell us about it, and post pictures, in the comments.
Android Market alternative/assistant Androidlib estimates the number of apps in the market to be a shade over 10,000. While it’s nowhere near Apple figures yet, the number is worth shouting about. Google just put the total number of apps near 5,000 back in May. If these figures are right, that’s 100% growth in less than 4 month. With the number of handsets and carriers getting in on Android, the number of apps is likely to skyrocket near 20,000 by the end of the year.
Other figures worth sharing:
Approximately 64% of the apps receive a satisfactory rating and another 12% or so are getting moderate levels.
Roughly 64% of the apps in the Android Market are free
Less than 1% of the titles in the market have seen more than 250,000 downloads
About 24% of Android Market apps have been downloaded over 5,000 times
Remember that these figures are not official, nor are they even from Google. Having said that, it’s good to see the Market growing this quickly. Now, if we could just keep the quality trend going…
More than a year after launch, there are 74,031 apps in the iPhone App store. Most of them are crap. Some of them aren't. Here are the 50 iPhone apps you actually need, all in one place.
Well, OK, if you count the overlapping apps—paid and free Twitter clients, neck-and-neck navigation apps, the jailbreakers—it's more like 56, but that's not the point, people: The point is, since the last time we corralled all the best of the best (barring our weekly roundups, of course), the iPhone and App Store have changed immeasurably. In the last nine months we saw the release of the 3GS and iPhone OS 3.0, Apple loosening its grip on what kinds of apps people are allowed to create, and hundreds of fresh developers making genuinely new, genuinely impressive stuff. It was time for an update, and a big one.
So, hit the 'iPhone Apps' link on the left sidebar, just above Bestmodo, or just click here. We've got the best games, messaging apps, eBook readers, dictionaries, productivity software and timewasters. We've got apps to keep you up on current events, to keep your daily music intake interesting, to keep you entertained on the train, and to keep you on the right interstate. These are the essential iPhone apps—a list that'll transform that shiny, boring brick you just bought into the device that everyone's always raving about. (Note: It's split into two pages, so make sure to click through)
What counts as an essential iPhone app changes all the time, and so should our guide: If we've missed anything huge, or you've got a much better suggestion for a particular type of app, let us know, or say so in the comments. We'll be updating this thing pretty frequently, and a million Gizmodo readers can do a better job at sorting through the app mess than a single Gizmodo editor. Enjoy! [Gizmodo's Essential iPhone Apps]
For a real-world, smaller-city test, I grabbed a T-Mobile G1 and headed to Buffalo's Elmwood Avenue commercial strip, with a side venture to Main Street, to see what Layar could show me. The app has a single view and function that pulls in your camera's video stream, but you can switch up what 'layer' you see over it on the fly. The layers, listed at Layar's web site, come from web services with big geographic data piles, like Wikipedia, review site Yelp, real estate finder Trulia, and sites that mash up social apps like Flickr and Twitter. Yelp and Flickr (pulled in as 'FlickAR' in this app) are, as you might imagine, the most densely packed of the apps I tried. You normally turn your camera, or yourself, to get thumbnail data on any 'blips' that come up in Layar. When you come up with clusters of results in layers like Yelp, though, you'll end up switching to the less impressive list view, because trying to pinpoint individual finds will have passersby wondering why it looks like you're trying to rotate the world with your phone.
I didn't get any results for local tweets or Trulia real estate findings, but an architectural society layer and Wikipedia yielded a few fun surprises. If you were new in a city and looking for something to check out, Layar might well be worth the time (and battery drain) to check out. Who wouldn't want to check out the spot where President William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, or the seriously creepy spires of the H.R. Richardson 'State Lunatic Asylum'? Layar is neat stuff, and will probably get better as more developers buy into it.
