Friday, June 11, 2010
Cool new online gadgets
6/11/2010 09:20:00 AM | 
Posted by
Ronny Gabriels
This week has seen some great new gadgets online from both Google and Microsoft. One more interesting and useful than the other, but both cool nonetheless.
The coolest thing Google did was to enable people to put a photo background on the Google search page. OK, Bing already has this, but what Google did was let you upload your own photo besides giving you the options of choosing from their own galleries and stock photos. The upload is done to a Picasa Webalbum and from that moment on, the photo appears on the Google search page. A little criticism is that the photos are not scaled very well and therefore displayed at 100% when the browser is full screen. For some reason it does scale if the browser is not at fullscreen albeit not for all formats. That means that for a big 10 megapixel photo the bottom of the photo drops of the page (unless you have a huge monitor of course). Take that into account when choosing your background photo. So my searchpage now looks like this.
Microsoft
Besides some great updates to Hotmail, like for instance let you send 10GB of documents with one mail (the docs are uploaded to SkyDrive and then linked to the mail), the coolest news is that they finally listened to me and made some major updates to SkyDrive. If you are going ... "Sky..what?", maybe a little explanation is in order. SkyDrive is the online storage Microsoft gives it's subscribers (so anyone with a Hotmail address has a SkyDrive). Now why is this a cool feature? Well, because it allows up to 25GB of online storage. That's right 25GB!
Up to now however, it was a little hard to use, mainly because you couldn't download everything in a folder at once. So if you shared a folder with 200 photos, you either had to download each one individually, or the person sharing them had to put them there in zip files. Since the limit for one file is 50MB (to prevent SkyDrive from being used to share illegal movie files etc.) that wasn't always too handy either. I think I made about 20 suggestions to the SkyDrive team (as probably did many other people with me) to get a "one-shot" download for all files in a folder and now ... it's there!! You have the option of downloading all files in a .zip file or via Photo Gallery (a free program not unlike Picasa from Google). So now, SkyDrive has become a very handy and very easy to control online sharing platform that I will use much much more because of this update.
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