For years, my favorite presentation software has been Keynote on the Mac, which I use extensively in my Journalism classes. Between that and MS PowerPoint, I thought, you wouldn’t need much else. So I was surprised when some of my students began presenting information in a way I had never seen before. These presentations felt like movies—with the camera zooming in and out and panning smoothly to and from various elements scattered over a huge canvas. It was free-form presentation that still maintained some order and structure. The tool they used was Prezi, which bills itself as “The Zooming Presentation Editor.”
I RECENTLY received two hilarious videos that my nephew Thomas created using Photo Booth on the Mac. Unfortunately, the files were in Apple’s .mov format, and I wanted to burn them onto a CD as .avi files that my DVD player could play.
WHAT’S the fastest browser? If you guessed Google Chrome 6 or Safari 5.0, you’re in for a surprise. The current speed demon is Opera 10.6, the alpha test version from the Norwegian company, Opera Software (http://www.opera.com). The Download Squad Web site reports that Opera 10.6 scored 25 percent better than Google Chrome 6 (development build), using the Peacekeeper browser benchmark. In fact, Opera’s developers say 10.6 users can expect a 50 percent improvement in JavaScript performance and page loading.
AN ongoing poll confirms what many Microsoft competitors have been saying for years: given a choice, Windows users would use a browser other than Internet Explorer.
ARE you getting the most out of your Gmail account? Google, which has been offering the free Web mail service since April 2004, has compiled a list of tips to turn you into a Gmail ninja. I’ve chosen a few of the best tips and added a few that Google has left out.
THERE’S a lot of talk about cloud storage these days, which is just a fancy term for online storage. The idea of saving files on a remote server and accessing them from any machine with an Internet connection isn’t new. That’s been around since file hosting services from the early days of the Web. What’s new is that online storage is becoming more ubiquitous and more convenient, with services that automatically synchronize content on your local drive with a virtual drive on the Internet and a variety of devices.
WHEN Barack Obama used Twitter as a potent campaign tool last year, Filipino politicians took notice. Now, with national elections just a few months away, a number of them, too, have their own accounts with the popular micro-blogging service. “What’s a 52 yr old guy to do the night before his wedding?” posts Senator Mar Roxas, one of the first politicians in the country to sign on to Twitter, on the eve of his marriage to broadcaster Korina Sanchez. “Tying the knot in the age of Twitter is certainly something, haha.”
ON the Internet, longer isn’t always better. When it comes to addresses, a shorter URL is much easier to remember, to jot down and to pass on to friends. In contrast, a long address is more prone to being mistyped or, on some online forums, unceremoniously cut. And, as anyone who works in a newspaper or magazine knows, a kilometer-long URL is a pain to set in print.
DO we need a Filipino-language version of Firefox? Mozilla, maker of the world’s most downloaded browser, wants to know. The question was put to me last week by Gen Kanai, director for Asia business development at Mozilla. He and his colleague, Seth Bindernagel, were in town to touch base with users, bloggers and Web developers to find out what Mozilla can or should do in the Philippines.
WHEN you process 65 percent to 70 percent of the world’s search queries, you can gain a lot of insight about what people are interested in at any given moment. This is what Google realized some time ago, when it began keeping track of what people were trying to find on its search engine and presenting the information in Google Zeitgeist. Google reveals the zeitgeist – the spirit of a given time or period – by aggregating the millions of search queries it receives every day. Aside from presenting the top searches, Google also offers a number of tools that can give users insights into global regional, past and present search trends.
WHICH blogging software or service is best? This question from a reader caught me by surprise because I didn’t have a ready answer. But for most users who simply want to get their feet wet, a free public blog site is probably the best way to go.
WITHOUT much fanfare, Google, the king of online search, has introduced its successor. Google Caffeine, as the new search engine is called, hasn’t taken up residence at the official domain just yet. For the moment, you can find it here: www2.sandbox.google.com. Be forewarned. You won’t even know it’s the new Google because it looks and behaves much like the old one. All the work has been done under the hood.
Digital Life is a blog that features a technology column by the same name that appears every Tuesday in Manila Standard Today, a national daily from the Philippines. This blog gives readers easy access to the column, which started in November 2002. Copyright 2009 Chin Wong.
ARE you getting the most out of your Gmail account? Google, which has been offering the free Web mail service since April 2004, has compiled a list of tips to turn you into a Gmail ninja. I’ve chosen a few of the best tips and added a few that Google has left out.
DO we need a Filipino-language version of Firefox? Mozilla, maker of the world’s most downloaded browser, wants to know. The question was put to me last week by Gen Kanai, director for Asia business development at Mozilla. He and his colleague, Seth Bindernagel, were in town to touch base with users, bloggers and Web developers to find out what Mozilla can or should do in the Philippines.
