Posts tagged with "google"

On Rules and Android “Openness”

Short version: every ecosystem needs rules. Otherwise, it’s a mess.

Long version: I wanted to briefly inform you about my take on Android’s purported “openness” and the need of rules and control on a mobile platform. Openness is good: everyone wants to be able to have a choice, choices make us feel in control of almost every situation. With computers, choices mean we can decide how to operate a machine. With mobile devices, choices have (sadly) come down to choosing whether or not you want to browse with Flash or find any kind of application in a marketplace. Read more

Google Goggles Now Available in Google iPhone App

Finally, I’ve been waiting for this: with a post on the official company blog Google has just announced that the Google Mobile iPhone app has been updated to include support for Google Goggles, the free service that allows you to search by taking pictures. An iPhone version of the popular Android-only service was first announced in June.

The app isn’t available yet in the US Store (I guess it’s still propagating). Check out the video below.

Update: the app is now live in the App Store. Update #2: I took a quick test, the app works great. Check out my screenshots below.

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Eric Schmidt Weighs In On Apple’s “Closed System”

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt was invited on stage to TechCrunch Disrupt, where he gave a quite interesting 39-minutes speech about what Google is really all about, openness, user happiness and yes, Apple.

When asked about “openness” (around the 31:00 minute mark), Schmidt simply said that in order to define something that’s open, you have to take the opposite in consideration. The opposite is Apple, which relies on a closed system based on its own development tools, hardware, marketplace. Google’s Android is about “adding choices”, giving users the possibility to choose what to use on their devices and what not. Interesting enough, apps that come pre-installed by carriers are mentioned as “more choices”, too.

Check out the full video below.
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Chrome OS Installed On The iPad

Chrome OS is Google’s upcoming operating system based on the solid foundation of the Chrome web browser and is open source version, Chromium OS. Much has been said about Chrome OS being the OS “of the future”, as it’s entirely based on Chrome’s UI and easy to understand principles. Much has also been said about tablets getting Chrome OS by this fall.

It turns out that the first tablet to get Chrome OS is Apple’s iPad. Read more

iPad Users Getting Full Google Docs Mobile Editing

Together with the announcement that more than 3 million business have gone Google, the search giant has also confirmed that iPad users will get full mobile Google Docs editing soon. No release date for the new feature has been announced yet.

Right now, if you try to log in Docs from your iPad you only get a viewing interface - so this is great news for anyone who uses Google Docs (like us) every day. Read more

Cyberduck 3.6 Released with Google Storage Support

Cyberduck is a great FTP client I use every day to upload files to Rackspace Cloud Files (actually, it’s one of the few OS X apps that support Cloud Files) and access my iPhone and iPad file system (jailbreak is required). It’s a full-featured application to upload files to the internet, which just got a lot of better and is about to be used by a lot more users.

There’s a Windows version in the works, that’s true, and a beta is launching later this month. You can read the details here and also take a look at the first screenshots; for what it’s worth, the Windows UI looks pretty clean. Down to our Mac business, the new version introduces support for Google Storage (go sign up here), a refined dashboard interface with awesome new icons, support for S3 Bucket versioning and new Google Docs features.

Check out the full press after the break. Read more