Windows 8 D9 demo

Think Google is content to simply make public domain books freely available for e-book readers? Not quite — the company has just confirmed that its previously announced Google Editions e-book service will finally be launching in late June or July. That service will apparently let folks buy digital copies of books they find through Google’s existing book search service, and let book retailers sell Google Editions on their own site and retain the “bulk of the revenue.” Details are otherwise still pretty light, including any word of pricing or publishers involved, but Google has previously said that it planned to make between 400,000 and 600,000 books available with prices set by the publishers.

Firefox: If you love the screen coverage full screen mode provides, but you rely on the toolbar too much to have it constantly popping in and out of existence, this simple tweak will keep it in sight.

It seems counter productive to willingly give up some of that screen space you gained by switching to full screen mode, but if you rely on the toolbar or you just like having the address and search boxes visible, all it takes is a single right-click tweak. When you’re in full screen mode, move the mouse up to the top of the screen to bring the address bar and toolbar down, right-click and uncheck “Hide Toolbars”. From then on, you’ll still get the expanded view in full screen mode but you’ll also enjoy a compacted address and toolbar interface.

The guys and girls at engadget got their hands on the lates firmware upgrade from Barnes & Noble on their Nook. Read on their first impressions from the upgraded device:

Playing some Sudoku and reading Engadget on our Nook? Yeah, we are! Obviously, after hearing about the Nook 1.3 firmware update this morning, us bookworms nabbed the latest software to check out the added features. The over-the-air update took about a total of ten minutes from start to finish, and when the e-reader had restarted the new Games, Wi-Fi, Audio, and Web shortcuts were more than obvious on the main menu.

The browsing experience, which is clearly marked beta, is very similar to that on the Spring Design Alex — you input the address on the touchscreen and an expanded view of whatever site you’re visiting appears on the E-Ink display. You can use the LCD to navigate the page, though the physical page turn buttons work as well, which is actually a nice trick. It isn’t the fastest browsing experience, but it’ll definitely be useful for quickly reading some news or checking the weather when you are near a WiFi network – we got a page not found message over 3G.

Visit engadget’s photo gallery of the all new device Nook 1.3 browser and games hands-on

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJBw9kHVJKo

iTag is a FREE service to locate and protect your lost or stolen phone. View your cell phone’s location, make it ring from the website, lock the keys, back up your data, delete the information on the phone.

itag.com

Microsoft releases Windows 7 Touch Pack to the general public –  free for download.

The Touch Pack includes:
Microsoft Blackboard, an intricate game of physics in which you solve a puzzle by creating a fanciful machine on a blackboard.

Microsoft Garden Pond, a tranquil game that takes place in serene Japanese water gardens.

Microsoft Rebound, a game in which you use your fingertips to control Tesla spheres with an electrical field between them to catapult a metal game ball into your opponent’s goal.

Microsoft Surface Globe, a program that you can use to explore the earth as a flat 2-D map or as an immersive 3-D experience.

Microsoft Surface Collage, a program that you can use to explore and interact with your photos and arrange them as a desktop background.

Microsoft Surface Lagoon, a screen saver and interactive water simulation, complete with a meditative rock arrangement and playful, shy fish.

If anything from the above sounds interesting and right for you touch enabled PC, follow the download link to Microsoft’s Windows 7 Touch Pack (size 239MB).

New document and spreadsheet features
We’ve responded to many of your requests for features you’re used to in desktop software. In documents, we’ve added a margin ruler, better numbering and bullets and easier image placement options. And in spreadsheets, you’ll now find a formula editing bar, cell auto-complete, drag-and-drop columns and other features not possible with older browser technologies.

Higher fidelity document import
We’ve made big improvements to our document upload feature so moving files from your computer to the cloud is easier now. Imported documents retain their original structure more accurately, so you can hit the ground running editing in the browser without having to fix formatting like bullets and text alignment.

Speed and responsiveness
New browser technologies like faster JavaScript processing have made it possible for us to speed up Google Docs significantly. Even very large spreadsheets are fast to work with in your browser now. Applications that run this fast feel like desktop applications but have the unique advantages of being in the cloud.

Faster collaboration
We’ve extended Google Docs’ collaboration capabilities too, with support for up to 50 people working together at once, and in documents, you can now see other people’s edits as they happen character-by-character. And now you can also collaborate on flow charts, diagrams and other schematics in real time with a new editor for drawings on Google Docs.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_hJ3R8jEZM

While iPhone 3G owners and would-be Windows Phone 7 buyers sit in the corner, quietly weeping over their lack of true multitasking, webOS and Symbian continue to point and laugh. In mid-January, a Palm Pre Plus was seen cackling with joy over its rivals’ misfortune even as the device staggered under the weight of 50 simultaneous applications, and less than a week later, a Samsung Omnia HD performed the very same feat, despite having only half the Pre Plus’ RAM (i.e. 256MB) to work with. Now, in what we can only interpret as a large middle finger and “come here” gesture to all who aspire to the cell phone multitasking heavyweight title, we have a video of the i8910 running no less than sixty-two applications thanks to a custom ROM by HyperX. Watch in stunned silence as a finger scrolls through them, right after the break.

Steve Jobs is never one to mince words when taking questions from the press, and he just made it very clear how he feels about other platforms during the iPhone OS 4 event when asked about task management:

Q: How do you close applications when multitasking?
A: (Scott Forstall) You don’t have to. The user just uses things and doesn’t ever have to worry about it.
A: (Steve Jobs) It’s like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it. In multitasking, if you see a task manager… they blew it. Users shouldn’t ever have to think about it.

Yeah, that pretty much sums up the Apple Way, but hey — tell us how you really feel, Steve.

You heard that right, people — iPhone OS 4 just brought multitasking to the platform! Apple says they’ve figured out how to implement third party multitasking without hurting performance or battery life, and they’re demoing it now — you just double click the home button and see a list of your apps, and you can just tap to switch between apps. The system actually runs the services apps need in the background — the apps don’t need to do them individually, so it’s not a “true” multitasking system, but it seems plenty effective. There are seven services: background audio, which allows you to use the standard pop-over iPod controls, Voice over IP, which can receive calls in the background, location services for GPS and social networking (there’s an indicator if any service is tracking you), updated push notifications with local notifications, task completion so you can finish things like uploads in the background, and fast app switching, which lets apps sleep and resume instantly. Notably missing? Anything for managing a conversation, like IM or Twitter, which is a big omission. Win some, lose some, we suppose.

Update: Here’s a big “lose some” — only the iPhone 3GS and 3rd generation (late 2009) iPod touch will support multitasking. The iPhone 3G and below won’t — Steve says the hardware doesn’t support it. Sad face.

Multitasking comes to iPhone OS 4.0!

Developing…
Make sure to check out the ongoing iPhone OS 4.0 liveblog!

Windows 7 has been well received both critically and on the street. And while Lifehacker readers love Windows 7, a well-built OS isn’t a perfect OS. Check out these five applications that tweak Windows 7 and customize it to your heart’s content.

A stock Windows 7 installation a fairly pleasant place to work, judging from our readers’ reports. Even so, a little tweaking of its behavior, looks, and other features lets you optimize and personalize that desktop. Check out these five great tools for doing so.

God Mode (Windows, Free)

The “God Mode” in Windows 7 isn’t quite like a video game God Mode—alas, no infinite laptop battery life or unlimited bandwidth—but it is a pretty nifty hack, and doesn’t require any new installations. Create a new folder on your Windows desktop, save it with the name God-Mode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}, though you can substitute whatever name you want for “God-Mode.” The folder will change icons, and when you click on it, you’ll see every configuration option available in the control panel. That’s the real power of the Windows 7 God Mode—it takes all the toggles you have to dig through the control panel menus and sub-menus to get to, and puts them right in one master list. It’s worth trying out God Mode just to see settings you may not have even been aware of.

Regedit (Windows, Free)

The Windows registry is a treasure trove of tweak-friendly variables and values. You shouldn’t muck around in it blindly, but by reading up on specific variables, you can tweak all manner of things that slightly irk you. Stroll through #registry here at Lifehacker to read up on all sorts of neat tricks, like how to speed up the Windows 7 taskbar, customize the login buttons, and tweak Aero peek . While you’re learning about the registry, you’ll want to check out our guide to the registry and registry cleaning. If you’re not comfortable directly editing your Windows registry, we’d advise you to check out some of the other Windows tweaking applications in the Hive Five. Many of the settings they provide are just a neat graphic interface for the variables hidden in the bowels of the registry.

Windows 7 Manager (Windows, $40)

Windows 7 Manager doesn’t do anything that you can’t do with various pieces of freeware or registry tweaks, but it does roll together dozens of functions into a unified, simplified interface. Not only can you tweak the GUI of Windows 7 but you can also tweak your boot routines, find duplicate files, securely erase files, retrieve and backup software keys, and more. Windows 7 Manager comes with a 15 day trial, so you can pit it against the free options in today’s Hive before shelling out your hard-earned cash.

Rainmeter (Windows, Free)

Rainmeter is a skinning application for Windows, but that doesn’t quite do it justice. You can do nearly anything with data using Rainmeter, from embedding the weather into your desktop to massaging the entire way you interact with your OS into something new. The best testament to the versatility and outright coolness of Rainmeter is wandering through the#rainmeter tag here at Lifehacker, and checking out all the unique desktops and tweaks readers have shared with us—also worth a peek is the best desktops of 2009, many of them featuring Rainmeter. If you look at your Windows desktop and go beyond thinking, “I wish the taskbar had different spacing,” and more toward, “I wish my Windows interface looked like something totally new and Star Trek-flavored,” then Rainmeter is for you.

Ultimate Windows Tweaker (Windows, Free)

For those of you that remember and loved the TweakUI utility from Microsoft, Ultimate Windows Tweaker is a freeware tool that takes the concept of the old TweakUI and supercharges it for Windows Vista and 7. You can tweak hundreds of settings and variables—system tray icons, the menu pop-up speed, security settings for the control panel, and a lot of other things you can’t normally get to. It’s a 380 KB, stand-alone portable application, so if you’re curious to see just how many things you can tweak, it’s no hassle at all to take it for a spin.

It’s still not a true Gmail app (sigh), but it’s a step in the right direction, we suppose. Google has today announced that it has released an experimental user interface for the iPad built on the Gmail for mobile HTML5 web app, but unlike the iPhone and Android versions, this one has been retooled a bit to best take advantage of those extra pixels. iPad Gmailers will find a two-pane view with their conversations on the left and messages on the right, and while it’s not exactly revolutionary, it’s certainly better than what we’re being forced to use on existing smartphones (and their comparatively minuscule displays). The company’s openly asking for feedback once your iPad lands, and we couldn’t help but notice that it pointed to the fact that Google is still the default search engine embedded into Safari. Who knows — maybe Steve and Eric really were talking about butterflies and buttercups the other day.

It’s a fantasy come true for the avid nerd / traveler, but unfortunately for us, it’s but a concept in its current form. Syracuse’s own Rahul Mahtani and Yofred Moik have dreamed up Google Envelopes, and if brought to production, this might just make the USPS as relevant as it was during the heyday known as 1985. Put simply, the solution would involve a new ‘Send Envelope’ method of passing along a note penned in Gmail; when pressed, you’d get a printout of the message along with a specially crafted envelope, the latter of which really makes this idea shine. The envelope itself would be a Google Maps representation of the quickest route to transfer said message from you to the recipient if roadways and kayaks were used in place of fiber and coax, giving the receiver a crucially awesome keepsake each time you dropped him or her a line. Oh, and having an ‘Avoid Tolls’ option would just totally put it over the top — even if were relegated to beta.

[Thanks, Yofred]

Although we were a little more focused on Windows Phone 7 Series when we went to MIX 10, Microsoft’s other big announcement at the conference was Internet Explorer 9, which offers HTML5 support and support for GPU acceleration throughout the browsing experience. We saw a few demos of the system in action at MIX, but this video from NVIDIA does a little better job showing how helpful that extra GPU boost can be — IE9 running on the Ion 2-based Eee PC 1201PN smokes a regular Atom-based netbook across a suite of tests. What that’s going to mean for battery life is up in the air, especially since the GPU on an Optimus system like the 1201PN kicks in automatically, but it’s pretty cool to see a netbook browsing the web at almost desktop-like speeds. Check the video after the break.

Literally laughed out loud. We’ve all seen our share of amusing CAPTCHA’s – if you haven’t, you simply haven’t seen enough of them in your life – but this one takes the cake. Way to depress people, Facebook.

Unless you can point us to funnier ones?

Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on the Earth to view satellite images, maps, terrain, 3D buildings, from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean. You can explore rich geographical content, save your toured places and share with others. This amazing software allows you to search the whole planet right from your comfortable rooms. Fans of Google Earth have been on a virtual searching chase looking for anything interesting and amazing. Here we have collected some of the mind blowing and spectacular sights to mesmerize you. Enjoy and feel free to share it with others.

Terrain Face in Google Maps

The terrain in Alberta, Canada accidentally forms what looks like a human face when viewed from the air or when viewing the satellite pic in Google Maps.

Osmington White Horse

The Osmington White Horse, outside Sutton Poyntz, UK. This prehistoric figure is carved into the white chalk of the hillside – such horse carved shapes are called “Leucippotomy”.

Google Escher Effect pic from Houston

Here’s another weird satellite pic from Google Maps of some downtown Houston skyscrapers. This effect has become known as the “Escher Effect”, or the “Google Escher Effect”.

Heart-shaped island highlighted by Google Earth becomes hit with lovers

The 130,000 square yard islet of Galesnjak came to prominence after its unusual shape was highlighted on Google Earth.

Land Art near Munich Airport

Land Art or “Earth Art” appearing in a field near the airport in Munich, Germany.

KFC space logo

Yum! Brands Inc created the logo near Rachel, Nevada, and claimed it’s the first ad that can be seen from space. If you recall, the same company had previously wanted to beam a laser ad up onto the moon for Pizza Hut, but had later scaled back to buying ad placement on the side of a Russian rocket.

Firefox Logo

Crop circle art made in the shape of the iconic Firefox Logo near Portland, Oregon,

Where’s Waldo in Google Maps?

Canadian artist Melanie Coles built a large image of the iconic “Waldo” onto a rooftop at an undisclosed location in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Will U Marry Me

Marriage proposal seen on a rooftop via Google Maps.

Lips

Bunny in Google Maps

Giant Pink Bunny created by a group of artists near Artesina, Italy as seen in Google Maps.

Coca Cola Logo in Google Maps

This Coca-Cola logo in Google Maps was apparently created out of coke bottles just outside of Arica in Chile.

Portrait of Ghenghis Khan in Google Maps

Out of some sort of fear that they might forget who he was, the people of Mongolia have carved the likeness of Ghenghis Khan onto a hillside outside of Ulaanbaatar. (See it in Google Maps.)

The Vitruvian Man by Da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man – one of the world’s most recognizable illustrations – is rendered here in crop art in Germany.

Man-Shaped Lake in Brazil

The Palm Islands of Dubai

The Palm Islands are artificial islands in Dubai, United Arab Emirates on which major commercial and residential infrastructure will be constructed. They are being constructed by Nakheel Properties, a property developer in the United Arab Emirates, who hired Belgian and Dutch dredging and marine contractor Jan De Nul and Van Oord, some of the world’s specialists in land reclamation. The islands are the Palm Jumeirah, the Palm Jebel Ali and the Palm Deira.

Oprah Maze

She’s got a massive syndicated show and a magazine called O, and she was dubbed the most powerful celebrity in the world by Forbes. Why shouldn’t Oprah get her own corn maze? An Arizona farmer created this 2004 tribute to the TV talk-show host.

Iraq’s Bloody Lake

This blood-red lake outside Iraq’s Sadr City garnered a fair share of macabre speculation when it was noticed in 2007. One tipster told the tech blog Boing Boing that he was “told by a friend” that slaughterhouses in Iraq sometimes dump blood into canals. No one has offered an official explanation, but it’s more likely that the color comes from sewage, pollution or a water-treatment process.

World’s Largest Fingerprint

Mystery Stone Arrow

Guitar-Shaped Mansion

I lOVE u

Billed as an iPad competitor, the WePad is not vaporware, but is in fact, The Chosen One. At least, that’s the view of some , who are hailing the WePad as the saviour of the German print publishing industry.

While Apple is still racing to the wire to secure enough media content partnerships for the iPad before its launch this week, the WePad has already bagged Europe’s biggest publisher , Gruner + Jahr.

Read the rest of this entry »

iPad pre-orders are just starting to ship out and Best Buy is getting prepped, but Apple’s just posted up a whole slew of its Guided Tours to hold you over until April 3. Sadly, we’re not seeing any entries for “How Do You Type While Standing Up” or “Why Do I Need A $30 Dongle To Get A USB Port On This Thing,” but the entries for Mail, Safari, iBooks, and the rest do include some revealing new information — and it certainly seems that tap-and-hold will be a big part of the UI paradigm. We’re still watching them all — let us know if you see anything interesting in comments.

Update: Okay, here’s the new stuff we’ve seen so far:

• iBooks has an integrated search feature, a built-in brightness control, and a dictionary that can pull up any word just by tapping on it. The same dictionary is in Pages, too — we’re assuming it’s a system-wide feature available to any app, just like on Mac OS X. We’ve been told in the past that it supports user dictionaries and spellcheck, but we’ll see what actually ends up shipping.
• There’s a quick mention of connecting the iPad to your home stereo in the iPod video, but no mention of streaming to the Airport Express or an Apple TV. There’s a big missed opportunity.
• Typing with one hand on the portrait keyboard in Pages looks just as silly as you’d expect.
• Numbers has a special formula keyboard.
• Tap and hold is everywhere, and unlike the iPhone, the UI has “windows,” which are detailed info panes that float above the main app interface. The iWork apps also all have a “menu bar” area in the upper right that contain several options. You can see how interacting with an iPad will be familiar but still quite different than using an iPhone — depending on the apps, of course.

[Thanks, John]