The new Chrome Web Store includes several apps designed especially for Pinoys, created by local developers, including Pinoytuner and Terno Recordings apps for listening to and discovering local music, My ABS-CBN app that supplements the popular TV station, and the new PBA app for basketball news.

Unlike apps, extensions like Pinoy Exchange — which allows users to check out the top discussions on the forum any time they’re online — are always available no matter what website one is on. Themes change the appearance of the background for a personal touch.

SAN FRANCISCO – Google has just released the source code for the latest build of Android, deliciously titled “Ice Cream Sandwich.” In a Google Groups post, Google engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru says “this is actually the source code for version 4.0.1 of Android, which is the specific version that will ship on the Galaxy Nexus.”
The source code is available for download right now from the Android Open-Source Project git servers, though Queru warns that it is a rather hefty file and can take some time to download. If you plan on checking out the source code yourself, I recommend waiting a bit for the servers to calm down.
Clicking on the link from the original post sent me straight to a 404 page so it might be a while before people can actually get their hands on the full file.
Interestingly, the code includes the previously unreleased source for Android 3.0 (Honeycomb). Queru admits that Honeycomb was unfinished and urges all developers to ignore it in favor of Ice Cream Sandwich.

With another Google event happening on November 16th of this week, we can only hope that this source code release signals the imminent arrival of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. We still have no official release date or price for the Galaxy Nexus, but with the source code out in the wild it’s only a matter of time before the phone arrives as well.

By Christina DesMarais
October 11, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO – Google isn’t reinventing the wheel with a new feature it is testing that allows any two computers using its Chrome browser to connect with each other.

But integrating remote desktop functionality into a Google product may be welcome to some users who may not trust third-party vendors that already offer the service.

Called Chrome Remote Desktop, the new feature is in beta testing and lets you connect any two computers that have a Chrome browser, including Windows, Linux, Mac and Chromebooks. The app can access all data on a remote computer and requires the person sharing access to their computer to give a code to the person who will tap into it remotely. That authentication must be done every time access is granted.
The company released the new cross-platform extension for its Chrome browser on Friday.

The feature comes in handy for people who need technical assistance from IT technicians in far-flung locations. Businesses also use similar services when training employees on new software or systems. Other products on the market that give people access to another computer include TeamViewer, which is free for non-commercial use, and a website called join.me, which also is free.

Google’s free app currently lets IT administrators — or anyone — have remote access to users’ computers to solve technical issues. In the release notes, Google stated that “Additional use cases such as being able to access your own computer remotely are coming soon.”

Google says the goal of the beta release is to demonstrate the core “Chrome Remoting technology” and get feedback from users.

By Eden Zoller
September 23, 2011

FRAMINGHAM – Adobe Systems announced Flash Player 11 and Adobe Air 3 software Wednesday to help developers build more sophisticated applications with dozens of new features across smartphones and tablets as well as desktop computers.

The releases are Adobe’s biggest in two years, and will be available free of charge in early October, said Anup Murarka, Adobe’s director of product marketing. The related tools, Flash Builder and Flex, will support new features in Flash Player 11 and Adobe Air 3 by the end of the year.

The releases will enable delivery of 2D and 3D games over the Internet to various devices, Murarka said. Developers of enterprise applications will also find the 3D capabilities popular for data-centric apps. Enterprises, for example, will be able to build application dashboards to “visualize complex data sets” with 3D images, he said.

Developers will also be able to use the tools to more deeply integrate business software like Excel and Outlook in devices and to accesshardware programming interfaces for functions such as Near-Field Communication being used more widely in smartphones, Murarka said.

The new versions will also help developers build more secure applications with the ability to leverage cryptographically secure random number generation, he said.

For 3D support, Abode said faster video rendering on desktops is provided through hardware acceleration. A pre-release version of those same 2D and 3D features for mobile platforms, such as Android , Apple iOS, and BlackBerry Tablet OS, is also now available, with a full production release coming “in the near future,” Adobe said in a statement.

Other features give developers the ability to package Air 3 within an application to simplify installation of apps on Android, Windows and Mac OS, much the same as Adobe has done for Apple iOS recently.

Adobe also said developers will be able to extend capabilities already built in to the device, such as the accelerometer or near-field communications technology, through HTML5 as well as Flash.

Even so, Adobe notes that 130 different models of smartphones and 85 tablets will run Flash-based apps by the end of the year, totaling about 200 million units. That number is expected to reach more than 1 billion units by the end of 2015.

SAN FRANCISCO – Google made the best search engine on the Web and then went on to create (arguably) the best email and mapping apps, too. But as you might expect, these services are filled with cool features that don’t stick out on the surface–including some of the most useful features offered by the apps.

We hit up Google for some insider tips for searching, gmailing, and mapping that are commonly used by the nice people who work at Google. We’ll start with search, and progress to Gmail and Maps.

The Searchers

You may know how to use Google to search for a flight, look up a definition, or solve a simple math problem, but here’s Google’s “Top 10″ list of search tips and tricks for searching like a Google pro.

Searching for a comparison chart about a certain topic? Sign in to your Google account and try searching Google Squared for collections of information. For example, search Google Squared for “roller coasters” to see a chart of the top 20 tallest roller coasters; or check out this chart of hurricanes for images, descriptions, and damage estimates of recent hurricanes. (Note that Google will be shutting down Google Squared on September 5, 2011, as part of its decommissioning of Google Labs, so run your Google Squared searches ASAP.) Not quite sure what you’re looking for? Google’s Wonder Wheel gives you another way of looking at the related searches near what you’re looking for. “Wonder Wheel” is listed in the left-hand sidebar and produces a circular chart with searches that other people have done recently that are related to yours. Your original search (example: space shuttle Endeavor) provides the starting node, with paths pointing off in all directions. Click one of these and you begin moving from node to node, getting farther away from the original search, but hopefully in the right direction. Need to find something you’ve found on Google before? Try searching your own Google search history. Sign into your Google account and enable Web history. Run your searches, and then visit www.google.com/history to see your search history and to revisit previous searches. Bonus: Search history also syncs to your mobile device. Speak your search queries into your mobile device when you’re on the go. Google Voice Search is a feature of Google Search app for iPhone, BlackBerry, and Nokia S60 V3 phones. If you have an Android phone, download the “Voice Search” app from PCWorld’s AppGuide; if you have an iPhone, download “Google Search” from the same place. Looking for information from a particular time period? The Timeline option (also in the left-hand toolbar) lets you zoom in on any time range and see news pulled from assorted sources, including books, news, and Web pages. Searching for the Anglo-French Wars, for instance, brings up a timeline that runs from 1600 to 2010, stepping down into individual years and then individual months. Filter your results in Google Images. Try searching for a word that could yield a wide range of images–a name like heather or raven or cliff, for example. Toward the bottom of the left-hand sidebar in Google Images, you’ll see a dedicated option to view only clip art, photos, or line drawings. Trying to find a particular type of file? Google doesn’t look exclusively for HTML content. Type what you’re looking for and then add filetype:tag on the end. For instance, “filetype:doc” will return only results from .doc files. This search capability supports PDF, Microsoft Office formats, Shockwave Flash, and many more. In fact, it will discover matches for ANY three letters that you designate as a filetype. Compare different Google Suggest results side-by-side. Visit Web Seer to get a visual comparison of two search prefixes. Though not a Google product, Web Seer was built by two Googlers and provides interesting insight into Google results. Search in the URL. If you know a specific string of letters or words contained in the URLs of pages you’re looking for, you can use “inurl” to find them. For example, many websites with public webcams have URLs that contain ‘view/view.shtml’. So a search for inurl:view/view.shtml will return the URLs for various webcams around the world. Search certain types of sites or just certain sites. You can search a wide variety of sites by inserting a close angle bracket (>) symbol before the type of site you want to search. For example, [penguins site:>.edu] searches for penguins across all .edu sites; and [crater image site:>nasa.gov] searches for crater images across NASA.gov.

Be a Gmail Ninja

Gmail is a very deep program, with too many tips and tricks to list in this article. In fact, Google categorizes its Gmail user tips into four stages–white belt, green belt, black belt, and master. The tips for each belt can be found at Google’s “Become a Gmail ninja” site. There’s even a printible guide; after all, even ninjas forget their moves once in a while. This cool blog gives you “Ten Tips for Using Gmail at Work.” What if you want to use Gmail when you don’t have a Web connection? There’s an app for that. Gmail Offline is a Chrome Web Store app designed for situations when you need to read, respond to, organize, and archive email without an Internet connection. This HTML5-powered app is based on the Gmail Web app for tablets, which was built to function with or without Web access. After you install the Gmail Offline app from the Chrome Web Store, you can continue using Gmail when you lose your connection by clicking the Gmail Offline icon on Chrome’s “new tab” page.

Mad Skills for Mappers

Check the weather for your upcoming trip directly on Google Maps. Whether you’re organizing a trip overseas or a picnic at a local park, make travel and activity planning easier by knowing the weather forecast. See temperatures and conditions for the next few days for places around the globe by selecting the weather layer from the widget in the upper right corner of the map. Zoom in for conditions in specific cities, and zoom out for cloud coverage over an area. Try it now: See icons denoting sun, clouds, rain, and so on via the weather layer on Google Maps. Fly around the world…and dive under the ocean. Google Earth enable you to navigate the world in 3D–you can zoom in from space to the streets of cities from Hong Kong to San Francisco to Johannesburg, watch the changing rain forests over time, and dive underwater to explore the Mariana Trench, tropical reefs, or shipwrecks. Endless hours of exploration can be found in Ocean in Google Earth. Find hotel prices directly on Google Maps. No more copying and pasting the address from one site into a map to see its location–for several major cities in the United States, you can easily see nightly rates when you search for hotels in Google Maps. Try it now: Search for a “hotel in Los Angeles” on Google Maps Preview your destination using Google Street View. Check out the attractions near your hotel by viewing our 360-degree ground-level photos in 30 countries around the world. Try it now: View the surroundings of the Plaza Hotel in New York View local search results on a map (on mobile). When you’re somewhere unfamiliar and want to find someplace to eat, enter the type of food plus the town or postal code, and Google will display the results on a useful map and give you directions for getting there. Try it now: Search for “barbecue in Memphis” on Google Maps Plot your trip by adding your own icons to Google Maps. Make travel planning a snap with custom maps, a feature of Google Maps that lets you personalize a map by adding your own icons. Before your trip, you can use this tool to mark all of the hotels you’re considering staying at and all of the sights you want to be sure to see. Then decide which one is in the most convenient location. You can also share customer maps with friends and family so that they can participate in mapping out your trip. When the trip is over, use your custom map as a virtual scrapbook: Add icons on the map for the great picnic spot you found in the park or for the great little gelato stand you kept revisiting. You can even add text, photos, and videos within the custom map to help keep the memories alive.

By Christina DesMarais
August 23, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO – Google+ users can now have a video-watching party on YouTube.

That means if you want to participate in making the latest viral video even more infectious, you can do it by combining the power of Google+’s Hangout and YouTube’s video-sharing functions.

Since the beginning of Google+, early adopters of the new social network have been raving about its Hangout feature, some even calling it G+’s “most interesting and useful feature.” Hangouts have been so well appreciated that soon after Google+ went live, Facebook made a counter move and announced its Skype-powered in-browser video chat service.
For Google+ users, taking advantage of the new YouTube feature is simple.

While watching a YouTube video hit “Share” under the video pane, then “Watch with your friends: Start a Google+ Hangout.” From there, you’ll be asked to install the Google Voice and Video Plugin if you don’t already have it. Then it’s just a matter of choosing the Circles you’d like to include in your video-watching party.

If you haven’t been invited to Google+ yet, you’ll have to wait to use the new YouTube function. Google’s social network is still in “field trial” and its floodgates haven’t yet been opened to the masses.

Imagine sharing a video of one of your kids performing in a school play with your parents who live in another state and watching their reactions via web cam. Or, see your skateboarding teenager showing off video of the latest trick he mastered to young cohorts across town and getting to hear and see their appraisals without having to wait for comments to post on Facebook.

Considering nearly everybody uses YouTube to some degree, the new share option just might propel more people to accept some of those unused invitations and get on Google+.
What’s your take? Can you see yourself watching YouTube videos collaboratively with others in a Hangout?

By Kevin Fogarty
August 22, 2011

SOUTHBOROUGH, MASSACHUSETTS – HTC, which just announced it would stick with Google and keep running Android on its best phones even though Google just bought one of HTC’s main competitors, continues the trend started by Samsung this week of needling Google by doing things that make it easier for people to mess with Android.

Samsung hired the founder and chief developer of the most popular developer of Android-modification firmware to work on its smartphone OS development team with the goal, he said in a Facebook update, of “making Android more awesome.”

Google has been trying to lock Android down more, lately, in addition to buying Motorola for reasons that are cloudy but might include the need to stave off potential patent-trolling from Motorola if Google didn’t come through with some love.

The acquisition is expected to produce a huge shift in the smartphone market, though no one is quite sure what that effect will be.

Nokia put out an announcement yesterday predicting the Google/Motorola connection would drive customers to Windows Phone 7. That seems like a chancy prediction, however, considering the Windows Phone 7 experience is currently driving customers to other operating systems.

While Samsung’s gesture was a grand one, HTC is sticking with smaller ones that follow through on promises it made earlier in the year to deliver bootloader unlock tools for many of its most popular Android phones.

The software allows owners to get access to the operating system and system software protected as firmware on the phones and allow them to modify both to their hearts’ content.

Most carriers lock down the operating system to keep customers from messing around with the OS, partly to reduce support costs and keep the phones’ links to the cell network from being corrupted, but also to keep customers from adding software or services from third-party developers that the carriers would prefer to supply themselves — at a premium price.

Unlocked phones and user-installed software pose much higher risk of infection by malware or corruption of system software. Most bootloader unlock apps include either a method or reminder to users to back up system images of the phones to restore them more easily if necessary.

HTC views unlocked OSes as a way to encourage both ISVs and owners to get more involved developing apps and mods for the phones, according to an interview in the WSJ with HTC CEO Peter Chou.

HTC did investigate whether it should build its own operating system to compete with Android, as Samsung has done.

It decided to stick with Android for the size and activity level of developers and owners already in the market.

“I think there’s a lot we can do…it’s not the operating system, it’s the ecosystem…so we think we can find a way to differentiate to add value, but at the same time leverage our partners, Google and Microsoft, since we have such a great relationship with them,” Chou told Dow Jones Newsires during an interview.

The first U.S. device that can use the bootloader is the EVO 3D. It only works on software version 2.08.651.2 and above, so some users may have to go through the carriers’ process of firmware update before using it. EU version s of the HTC Sensation got the update earlier.

The bootloader and HTC’s detailed instructions for using it are posted at the HTC developer’s site HTCDEV.

By Katherine Noyes
August 18, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO – If there’s any lesson to be learned from Google’s news-making activities these past few days, it’s that software patents are a problem.

The most recent illustration, of course, is Google’s $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility, clearly a strategy for gaining the latter’s considerable catalog of patents.

Also continuing to make news lately is the whole Lodsys debacle, in which both Apple and now Google are having to fight off–at great expense–the attacks this patent troll is making against developers for both Android and iOS.

Then, of course, there’s the recent $4.5 billion collective purchase of Nortel’s old patents by Apple, Microsoft, RIM and others, deliberately leaving Google in the dust.

Elsewhere in the mobile arena, meanwhile, we’ve learned that HTC is paying Microsoft $5 for every Android handset it sells, creating the crazy situation in which Linux-based Android has become a significant money-maker for Redmond.
The list goes on and on, but the bottom line is this: The mobile arena is becoming increasingly patent-focused, and that’s a big problem. Now, more than ever, it’s clear that software patents need to be abolished. Here are just a few reasons why.

1. Software Is Just Math

It is not possible to patent a mathematical concept, and for the very same reasons it should not be possible to patent software. Why? Because all software is fundamentally just a series of mathematical operations that are performed on inputs to generate results, whether a numerical value, text on a page or music from your speakers.

Just as it would be ridiculous to grant a patent on the algorithm for calculating “pi,” for example, so it is equally ridiculous to allow patents on software, all of which can be reduced to a set of comparable mathematical algorithms. The fact that such patents are routinely granted is a huge signal that those in charge of granting patents don’t really understand what it is being patented.
2. Vast Sums Are Being Wasted

As Google’s Motorola Mobility purchase vividly illustrates, patents are wildly expensive. They also take up an insane amount of time to apply for and win. Imagine if all those resources could be spent on innovation instead.

3. Only Lawyers and Megacorporations Benefit

The only beneficiaries of software patents are lawyers and giant companies like Microsoft and Oracle, which are the only ones with pockets deep enough to acquire, protect and assert them. Not coincidentally, it is often the same types of companies that are motivated to gather up patents in the first place. Since such megacorporations have often become less innovative themselves over the years, they can pursue a strategy of sitting back and collecting licensing fees on their patents instead.
4. Monopolies Are Being Expanded

Along similar lines, because it tends to be the giant corporations that can afford and are motivated to buy up patents, those very same patents tend to expand their monopolies, as they begin to claim ownership of more and more of the intellectual assets in their industry. Can that possibly be a good thing? No way.

5. Innovation Is Being Squelched

Software innovation depends heavily on the exchange and iterative development of new ideas, but such exchange is precisely what software patents are designed to prevent. Numerous patents have been granted that are excessively broad, too, making it virtually impossible to develop original software without fear of infringing.

6. Small Companies Are Being Shut Out

For all of the above reasons, you could be the most brilliant and creative software developer ever, but if you don’t have pockets deep enough to pay hefty licensing fees and start a patent war chest of your own the way Google is being forced to do, you are simply out of luck. End of story.

7. Consumers Pay the Price

Small businesses suffer as a result, but ultimately the even bigger loser–as always–is the consumer. Under this system, control of ideas is falling into the hands of the companies that are big, fat and unable to innovate, simply because they have the money and no other easy way to earn more. That, in turn, means the little guys–the innovative ones–can’t bring to market the next big thing that could change consumers’ lives, at least not without a heavily inflated price.

It’s important to note that the patent problem is not contained to the mobile world. Back in 2005 a group of companies including IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips and Sony created the Open Invention Network to prevent patent aggression against the Linux ecosystem, for example, and just recently the likes of Cisco and Twitter have joined in.

Patents are causing harm throughout the software industry, in other words. What’s especially crazy about it all is that we simply don’t need software patents. We have copyright, and that provides innovators with more than enough protection at a fraction of the expense.

It’s time to call off this insane patent arms race, or we will all pay a steep price.