Nothing is worse than buying a new piece of technology for it to be obsolete the next week. If you stay up on your gadget-gossip then normally you know what is and what isn’t going to becoming out soon, but sometimes its hard to track it all. With Apple it is easy, they normally release their products on one of their big days each year so predicting when new stuff will come out isn’t impossible… but mac rumors makes it even easier.

Their buyer’s guide analyzes each product line, when the last update was, the life cycle for a normal product and then tells you a recommendation on if you should buy or not . So if you are going after a new mac pro or sexy 30 inch cinema why don’t you sit back a little bit and wait it out. (Personal tip : as soon as these new products come out the old stuff doesn’t disappear, its either in clearance or the refurb section at what could be a heavily marked down price… if you are ok with slightly-less-than-cutting-edge technology.)

http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/

I don’t really use an online photo organizer but every once in a while I mess around with Google’s Picasa and throw a couple images up. Today I logged in and got a notice that there was a new tool there. It’s one of those add-ons google just gives you non-chalantly but then you look at it and wonder what kind of magic fairy dust the Google Team has access to.

It was a little thing called ‘name tags.’ I went to it, clicked it, and it told me to wait a few minutes while my images were scanned. What it proposed to do was automatically build a list of all the people in the photo. Much like Facebook’s tag tool (or Flickr’s) that lets you tag a person to a spot on the photo. However, after the scanning was done I was presented with this page : 

 

Google has built a tool that will automatically recognize faces and group them for you. Then you simply go through and add names to the applicable faces (e-mails as well to build a contact list if you so desire). As you can see there are a couple different photos on this screenshot, 2 different people it had trouble differentiating so you can do the heavy lifting there, but these instances were few and far between. I loaded up all of my images, from different events, with different lighting effects, and even showing different ages… and it was able from the start to group 90% of my images correctly. Pretty astounding.

The guys at Google are just smart. Really, really smart.

Just an update . Some of you guys are using PlayOn on my recommendation that lets you stream movies from hulu and other sources to your xbox / playstation. Well now they have the netflix part running also. So, if you don’t want to wait for the Xbox 360 dashboard update sometime before the end of the year, download and install this in 5 minutes and then your netflix queue is ready and waiting to be watched on your tv.

It is nice it uses your already set-up queue instead of everything since the 360 navigation of a bunch of files gets clunky. I’m watching mad max right now in all of its glory without having to go through Internet Explorer. Fancy.

Download http://www.themediamall.com/playonbeta2008?sid=23671

If you still visit a blue box store every Friday night in order to pick up and watch a movie then you, my friend, are behind the times.

As I have said before Netflix is where it at for a number of reasons, but most importantly for me is their online distribution service. While it still only works in IE (soooo… 1997) it is one of the best movie players out there, the quality is great, it is quick and it doesn’t cost you an extra sent. I actually use the online player more than I do the movies at home. Those are a nice addition to the service, not the other way around. Soon the xbox will release an update allowing you to watch all those same movies via the xbox (so on your TV) which really will push it to a new level. I’ve seen screenshots and it looks very sick.

BUT. After a certain time you use up the good movies on Netflix. They add some , but for the most part, its not the A-list talent you could be receiving via the mail. New releases are non-existent so you are stuck to TV series and older movies. This works for a while as you go through the older content but you get to the point where you want some newer, fresher, material.

Today Netflix released 2 major things. The first of which is that they signed up with Starz to have their catalog online. I got this pic from Engadget and it shows some of the movies right now Netflix is adding in conjungtion with Starz. All A movies, solid watchable flicks, not second hand-ers anymore. Awesome. I just won’t be doing any homework for the next month or two.

Also today (it was a big day) Netflix opened up their API to anyone and everyone. Black, white, red, whatever you can sign up on your own and start developing for whatever you want. So expect a plethora of new apps for your favorite device, or website to only expand the use of Netflix’s services.

If anyone has an idea for a Netflix App let me know and we can get going on one, I’m sure they will be rolling out in hours for those truly dedicated freaks of nature.

Good Day Netflix. Good Day Indeed.

Erik turned me onto this site about a year ago since he knows the creator, and I guess and I just wanted to let you guys in on the secret.

For all the sports nuts : this website will let you know what you should be watching on TV. For example, I just got an alert to turn on the UConn vs. Baylor game because it was coming down to the last possession. The system takes into account ‘points’ which users can add to a game and you can participate in yourself, or you can be even lazier like me and just sit back and let the system work for you. There also is a bot that goes around somehow ‘watching’ all the games going on at a certain time and applying its own algorithm of points to a game. If a game picks up enough ‘points’ then the website sends you a text message telling you there is an event you need to watch along with the status of the game (score & time left).

Therefore, if it comes down to the last few minutes and a game is tied or close then your gonna get a message. Same with if there is an ongoing upset in progress or something like that. Any event that a true sports fan would want to watch live, it will let you know. You can configure the channels you get on your tv, so that when you get the messages it will tell you what channel to turn on to see the action in progress. Also, I don’t let it send me baseball updates, only football, which cuts doown on the messages but really also lets me specialize on what I care about. When I get an Are You Watching This message I know its something I want to click to.

Worth a look at , and if you want the site has alot more activities you can be a part of, but so far I stick with just the updates.

AreYouWatchingThis.com

Personally, I have always thought IM bots are annoying, but in the past few weeks google has opened up to them and there are one or two useful ones out there, so without leaving your im window you can find out a bunch of good information. A website launched, and was later dugg, called imified.com that is going to be the basis for this post. 

Sign up here. Request an invite and then sign up with that (it only takes a few minutes for the invite to come, I don’t think they are screening them or anything right now)

After you do that you can start building your bot. Its super simple php, you just grab the msg from the user via the  line :

 $u = $_REQUEST['msg'];

and then you can do whatever you want with that msg. Right now I have a simple one running for bucketofawesome.com (add awesome@bot.im to your friends list to talk to ‘him’).

He really is just a test, but say hi, hello or howdy to get him started. If you follow the imified documentation you can get a few other details from the im, such as what visit # is this to your piece of code by this user. So you can step the user up the ladder depending on their visit. Then you can obviously reset that #, call back old messages from the user, etc…

If you really wanted to (though documentation is only for their side of the project) you could integrate this into a current cms to make it interact different ways for different users, and verify a user account etc…

Mine right now is just a series of if statements… if one thing is said do this… and if the user types the word ‘new’ it pulls the newest 3 articles from BoA, sends the list to the user, and if the user sees a title he hasn’t seen before, he can click the accompanying link to take him/her to the homepage.

Honestly, I can imagine my code getting really advanced and doing some cool things, checking to see if there are new updates since their last visit, OR you can even push messages to your im followers via HTTP Post if you wanted to update like a tweet when you post something new.

There are limitations though…. and most of those are on the side of the instant messenging program. HTML doesn’t really work beyond <br> (at least in gmail) so links are a pain … having to type out the whole thing obscures the rest of the text and makes it ugly. However, i think it has some cool potential if you have some good ideas for it.

If someone can help me with some stuff, I want to make a dreamincode one, I just need some help with particular sections. Comment below.

**Note : imified.com was recently dugg and had about 24 hours of downtown because they got hit at a perilous time between site chnages and a couple other worst case scenarios. getting your registration approved may take more time than normal right now.

To preface this review I want to do a quick rundown : 

Google Chrome sort of came out of nowhere in the last week when they (Google) accidentally released a little promo a little early. It was released (in beta) today to the world and will surely get torn apart over the next couple of days to see what is going on behind the scenes but my review is a broader review covering my first interaction with it.

Google : As you know the leader in search but also massively expanding in online apps with an online office-like suite of products, gmail, maps and all those other products you are used to. However, I have said before on this site I think google gears is where the future is going to take the web. Integration with google gears allows a site to work both online and offline, to work alot more like a standalone desktop solution which negates the main negatives of an internet solution by removing the NEED for internet connectivity.

 

Ok, to the browser. It is open source and based off other open-source materials, namely some of Mozilla’s codebase. The wonderful thing about this for the internet community is that Google has to give code back to the community just as it takes it, spawning more inventiveness and collaboration. Also its using a proven technology, the beta has so far been stable for me.

I love google products, I really do and I use most of their suite in my daily life. However their design aestethics, the minimalistic, blue, gmail-like scheme sometimes rides on me. I have a couple plugins to mess with that cause its a little annoying, child-like in my opinion. So I was worried when I saw the first screenshots of Chrome. However, it is pulled off nicely. I wouldn’t say it is as crisp as Firefox’s theme which I have really gotten used to, but it goes in a different direction with smaller icons, less menus, and focusing on a few things well instead of trying to incorporate everything. 

The main thing you are going to notice at first is the tabs are above your address bar. Instead of the file, options menu that you would normally see, its a string of tabs running the top of your window. At first this sounded stupid to me because I use those tabs all the time, why put them farther away? i have seen no difference in my browsing since moving them, it didn’t even take time to get used to. Problem one bypassed.

The other thing you see is there is no google search bar in the top right. What? How does that work? You would think google would do everything in their power to integrate search in here. Well, they do, the address bar is now an ‘everything-bar’ allowing you to type a url , a search term or whatever else floats your boat. Unlike Internet Explorer’s annoying attempt at something like this, this works. Plus, it rides on Firefox 3’s new address bar tech of searching for whatever term you are typing throughout urls, titles etc… so you get good results when you use it. 

The UI is your basic UI, nothing special , the basic buttons you are used to, and that makes the switch simple. The FF3 back / forward button while intuitive sometimes throws off new users just because it looks different. This will be an easy switch for everybody.

My only complaint so far is that I right click to open in a new tab quite often and it seems the open in new tab / open in new window / open in incognito window are right on top of eachother. I have 2 or 3 windows open right now because I clicked the wrong one.

May just take time getting used to that set-up.

Quick rundown of other things I like : history / downloads organization (looks like a webpage as opposed to sidebar etc…) , imported all FF data with no problems, developer console added in by default , its SUPER FAST, should have commented on this above but it seems to be flying. Most importantly, I’m not missing anything yet. It seems to have cut away the fat which runs the risk of leaving me short on something I use since I am outside the realm of a normal internet user, but I’m not missing anything yet.

I’m not going to talk alot about the real programming changes becasue I am not versed as well in that area but do want to hit upon a couple experience changes.

1) Incognito mode - Turns off the saving of any date (urls, cache, ip addresses etc) to your computer while you browse, also limits cookie interaction and only uses ones necessary to continue browsing, which it deletes when you leave this mode. This can be accomplished via FF add-ons, and I don’t really use it on my personal computer, but some people find this useful.

2) Gears integration - Of course google integrated Gears into this release. It will make running online apps that much easier and you won’t have to install any add ons anymore. Along with this they made linking to apps via desktop icons very easy, so you can just load up gmail via a shortcut made by Chrome. This has always been possible but if Google pushes it then more people may get used to it, and it will again push their online services.

3) Tab Manager - I don’t know too much about how the tabs work in Chrome. Apparently they run completely seperate from each other with their own processes, memory etc… which should result in better performance. Google also has a nice tab view / history view when you load up a new blank tab or as a start page.

– Note there are also other coding advances such as better javascript for increased speed and functionality and other things I will not get into in this post.

I have not been able to test interaction with every website out there such as netflix but since the codebase is familiar with FF I assume its going to be similar in what I can and can’t do online. (Remember most things you can’t do aren’t a result of the browser not being able to it but is a byass against those browsers…. Netflix and IE integration is stupid.)

Result. I am loving Chrome right now. Its slick, the fastest browser on my desktop, it surprised me with how good it looks, all the changes seem to be for the better, and it makes browsing both easier and more attractive. Way to go Google you really have hit a very good shot with this beta. I know your version of beta is practically a stable release so I don’t expect many changes and we might have just gotten another valid competitor in the field of browser wars .

Download Chrome Beta Now

I’m back as a Netflix user. I took a hiatus to focus that entertainment money on more important things like food and shelter, but as school is back in session my extra curriculars dwindle so I watch some more cinematic pieces.

I joined up again for a couple of reasons but none more important than the xbox’s coming integration. In the past few weeks I have been using play-on to watch hulu on my tv and it does drastically change the experience from watching on a computer. Thats why in my opinion when some of those podcasts we all watch (such as diggnation or the totally rad show) get into a platform where they are easier to stream to the TV, then they really will take off. Huge numbers of people online, and I watch it via my xbox, but even still when Internet enabled TV’s (or similar systems accomplishing the same thing) become more commonplace then those shows become more than just a web-geek world.

So, before that tangent what I was trying to say is that my xbox + netflix will become my first direct to box content service and its going to be interesting to see how it works.

One bone to pick with Netflix and it is a major annoyance on my part. How on God’s green earth do you still not support FF. I’m assuming it has nothing to do with tech specs and that there is some microsoft tie-in because honestly I have not opened Internet Explorer in months before yesterday so that I could watch my show via the netflix player. (Those 30 seconds from loading IE to getting to my movie start make me hate myself).

Someone please fix that. Or know a work around? maybe I just need an IE Tab extension for FF. See, writing these posts makes my brain work better.

I will be posting a couple technical (not so much) posts later , 1 on animated favicons and the other on building your own im-bot. Also hopefully a review of google chrome. If you don’t know what that is, please plug in the internet. Thanks.

If you have a 360 or PS3 you need to grab this program. PlayOn Beta is out and lets you stream hulu, youtube (soon netflix) and a host of other media options to your device. Very cool for hulu, and a great out for the PS3 fans out there who are upset that Microsoft was first to integrate with Netflix.

I set it up on my computer, nothing to set-up it ran out of the box, and my 360 and Ps3 picked it up . Then I started browsing all the tv shows on hulu in seconds, quick with no loading times that I have experienced.

This is a 60 day trial, after that it costs 30 bucks, but for now, use it for free. After that make your pick between this and the new 360 dashboard (if you have those options).

Pretty cool site if you are stumped on some color combos. I think they are all web-related, but I use them in print design also.

COLOURlovers™ is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. COLOURlovers gives the people who use color - whether for ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification - a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.

CSSTux, one of many CSS gallery websites I keep on hand in case I am running out of ideas or need some inspiration.