Collaborative Photo Albums Comes to Picasa Web

I use Picasa for most of my photo managing/editing, and as mentioned in a earlier post, I use picasa web albums to backup my photos to the cloud. Besides acting as a backup location, web albums offers other great features such as the ability to share whole photo albums, order prints, and view other photos from around the world. The latest feature added last week is quite impressive: multiple users can collaborate on a single photo album. Imagine taking a trip to LA with a friend, instead of creating two separate albums by two separate users stored in two separate locations (on the web), a single album stored in a single location (on the web) can be created and both users can add photos to it. This could work very well in the classroom. For example, a group of students that completed a field trip could create a single photo album with captions and geotagging. Each one could add their favorite photos to the album. This is truly a great feature and expect the social networks to adopt it soon. 

Visit here for details of this feature. 

Two Great Taskbar Apps for XP

    For the past two weeks I have been on vacation (hence the lack of blog posts). During this time I helped my brother purchase a new Windows Vista laptop. My experience with Vista had been limited, and I had a very negative attitude towards it which partially came from the abundant negative news on tech websites. This changed when I helped my brother with his new laptop. I liked the sleekness of the Vista OS, the security, and the taskbar thumbnail preview which gives a thumbnail preview of a taskbar item when the mouse is hovered over it. This led to me thinking very hard (smoke came out of my ears) about whether I should install Vista on my work computer. After hours of thought, I decided against the installation since Windows 7 is coming out soon and I didn't see the point of learning two OS's in less than 6 months. So, I decided to do a search for  "Windows XP Taskbar preview", and I came across a simple program called Visual Task Tips. After about two minutes for the download/install, I had thumbnail previews, which is the feature I wanted most from Vista!! 

    The other taskbar feature that I wanted and wasn't sure if it existed is the ability to change the location of taskbar buttons, for some reason I love having my important programs such as the browser or photo editor located to the far right. It would be neat if I could rearrange programs instead of having them appear in the order that they were opened. This lead to another Google Search, and I came across Taskbar Shuffle. This is again a simple, easy to install program. Within 2 minutes I could rearrange my taskbar buttons. Life is good.

  Thumbnail Preview

When Life is Busy, I'm a facebooker and Not a Twitterer

For the past week, life has been very busy. What I have realized during this

hectic time is that I can always find time for facebook, but not for twitter. As the day progresses and I'm in need of a break, I flip through some facebook photos, respond to some wall posts, and glance at a few videos. I rarely log into twitter, and I may get at least 1 tweet out per day, but that's about it. I'm not sure what is behind this behavior, maybe the reasoning is that I physically know my facebook friends whereas I haven't even spoken to most of my twitter followers. Maybe I use facebook more for social networking, whereas I use twitter for getting real-time news. Or maybe I just enjoy the brainless photo flipping and video watching of facebook. Finally the busy life is slowing down a bit, maybe I'll have time for both.

Explore The Moon With Google Earth

Marking the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the Moon can now be explored in Google Earth. To see this, plus much more, check out the video below, it looks amazing (especially the tours). You can also explore the moon in maps (screenshot below video, this may have been released before today's announcement). This is going to be such an excellent teaching tool, my brain is currently on overload thinking about teaching/assessment strategies.

Quotes From Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer....Why Isn't He Fired Yet?

Here are some quotes from Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, that I pulled from from an excellent article on TechCrunch:

“The last time I checked you don’t need two client operating systems. We tried it before. Windows 95 and Windows NT. It’s good to have one. So I can’t — I don’t really know what’s up at Google.” (July, 2009)

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance,” (June, 2007)

“I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people,” (October, 2007)

“Google’s not a real company. It’s a house of cards,” (March, 2004)

The one regarding social networks is my favorite. It really shows that he's not clued in; the web itself is becoming a social network, people depend on social networks, and they have changed the way that we socialize!! Now I'm sure that he has done some wonderful things for Microsoft, but he should definitely get out of his Microsoft shell and see what the rest of the world is doing.

Will My Next Computer Be Running Google Chrome OS?

    Since this is old news in the technology world (it was announced last Tuesday), I won't go into all of the details of Google's operating system, but here are a few highlights: it's called Chrome, it's web based, it's going to be lightweight ( = fast), it's free, it will be available during the second half of 2010, it's targeted toward netbooks but will be available on desktops, it's going to be running the Linux kernel, and it is separate from Android. How well will this work? I think it will be work fine, but my concern is for areas with limited internet. I gave my analytics account a quick glance and 10% of my viewers are surfing with dial-up, how will Google deal with this group and what happens when we loose our internet connection? This doesn't happen often, but it still happens. Google Gears is obviously part of the solution. This technology allows Google Docs users to edit documents, and view spreadsheets and presentations without an internet connection (also allows Gmail users to check email without an internet connection); it performs well but has limitations. 

    It's going to be very interesting to see what Google has been working on (Chrome OS was detected back in March by CNET). They've  released (or bought) some amazing products that have pushed the technological boundaries, and they will probably do the same with Chrome OS. Will we, all 90% of computer users, switch from Windows? Maybe.....

I Want an iPod Touch!!

To begin with, my source of portable media is a LG Dare dumbphone (check out my review). The phone is OK, but the internet browsing is dated, games and apps are very limited, I've been waiting 7 months for Telus to fix the My Email app, and the music player is horrible. I was thinking about purchasing a netbook as a means of portable media, but then I sat down and thought about my portable computing needs; web surfing, twitter, games, Google Earth, and occasional Google Docs editing. Then a light bulb went off somewhere in my brain, "an iPod touch can do all of that.*" So now, I am seriously considering buying an iPod touch. I am going to wait until September because rumors have it that a 3rd gen of touch is coming this fall which may have a camera and GPS. I'm kind of expecting it to happen since Microsoft is releasing a new version of it's Zune player and Apple again has a back to school deal that offers a free iPod touch when you buy a Mac, some people see this as getting rid of inventory. So, I think I definitely getting an iPod touch, even if a new one is not released. 

*I forgot to mention that I could get a smarter phone, but the monthly bills up here in Canada are just too high.