Google I/O 2013 Day 1 – Hangouts, Maps, Music Streaming, and More
Google I/O 2013 kicked off today with a 3.5+ hour keynote, which didn’t feature any new version of Android like it usually does, but still featured numerous exciting announcements, from a new Maps experience to a unified messaging experience.
This is a review of the top announcements from today’s keynote.
Preview of Windows 8.1 “Blue” Available June 26
Have you upgraded to Windows 8 yet? Launched last fall, Windows 8 received some positive reviews, but also received its fair share of criticism.
Microsoft is hoping to change that and just confirmed rumors of Windows Blue, which will now simply be called Windows 8.1.
Gmail Tests New Chat History Interface
Do you use Google Chat? Google stores the logs of all your chats in Gmail, allowing you to easily refer to an old conversation.
Gmail has begun testing a new interface for viewing chat history.
Hide Watched Videos, Disable Autoplay, and More with YouTweak
Want YouTube videos to automatically play in HD? Don’t like autoplay? Is your subscriptions feed getting too cluttered?
YouTube’s site accepts a limited number of parameters, such as playing a video in 720p HD, but if you want to take it one step further, the Chrome extension YouTweak for YouTube can help.
Useful YouTube Player Parameters
A guide to every parameter available for the YouTube video player (both the website and embedded players) as well a URL/code generator.
What It Would Take To Bring Me Back to BlackBerry
When you run a BlackBerry blog, switching away from BlackBerry is a weighty decision. Yet that’s exactly what happened this fall. A few elements fell into place around the same time, and it seemed like an opportunity to leave a platform I’d mostly stopped using in the last year — even with the prospect of BlackBerry 10 phones just around the corner.
It certainly did hurt to make a relatively long-term switch without giving BlackBerry 10 a real chance. After all, for more than a year I spent significant time at BBGeeks.com speculating about how BlackBerry 10 would fare in the marketplace. Now I was going to leave without realizing the payoff? Again, the decision was not made lightly.
The Best of April Fools 2013
It is April 1st, a day when you truly can’t believe everything you see or read on the internet. As usual, many companies like to create all sorts of shenanigans on this very special day.
Here is a compilation of some of this year’s best April Fools pranks around the internet.
Help Conserve Energy by Opting to Remove Letters
Yesterday, Twitter announced two tiers of service: the free Twttr, which does not allow vowels, and the premium Twitter, which functions normally. They decided to do this in an effort to generate more revenue. However, TechAirlines realized that this was a genius idea, not for making money, but for saving energy instead.
Every page request takes energy to transmit. The larger the page, the more energy it takes to transmit it over the internet and render it in your browser. Makes sense right?
Every English word contains at least one vowel. So what if we took out all the vowels? It would make the size of each page significantly smaller. And a smaller page, means less energy is needed to transmit and load that page.
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