Showing posts with label Chrome. Show all posts

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Voice Search for Google Chrome

Voice Search for Google Chrome: "Voice Search is a Google Chrome extension that lets you search using your voice. It's not developed by Google, but it uses an experimental Chrome feature called form speech input. The feature is enabled by default in the dev channel builds, but it can be manually enabled by adding a command-line flag.

'Voice Search comes pre-loaded with the following default services: Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Wolfram|Alpha. You can also add your own user-defined search engines. It also integrates a speech input button for all websites using HTML5 search boxes. This extension requires a microphone. Speech input is very experimental, so don't be surprised if it doesn't work. Also, try to speak clearly for best speech recognition results,' suggests the author.

Speech recognition is limited to English and it doesn't work very well, but this extension is a good way to test a feature that will be enabled in the future Chrome releases. If you have a website, it's quite easy to add support for speech input, but it may take a while until Google's Speech Input API specification becomes a standard and all browsers implement it.

{ Thanks, Silviu. }

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Google Chrome Drops H.264 Support, Even Though It Still Loves Flash

Oh wow. Google's dropping support for h.264 video in Chrome, because, they say, they're only going to support "open codec technologies":

To that end, we are changing Chrome's HTML5 support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

Instead, Google's going to push its own WebM video, based on the VP8 standard and Theora. The problem is that there's not a ton of support for WebM yet, in particular when it comes to hardware decoders and when it comes to mobile. H.264 also already has a ton of momentum, largely thanks to the mobile space. But this will definitely help WebM get some pick up.

In other words, the video standards battle is back on. And expect to still see lots of Adobe Flash outside of Google's YouTube to play video if you're using Chrome. Speaking of! How come Adobe Flash—a very closed technology—will still be baked into Chrome? [Google]

Send an email to matt buchanan, the author of this post, at matt@gizmodo.com.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Desktop Fun: Google Themed Icon Packs

Are you an avid user of Google’s online services, but the icons for your desktop and app launcher shortcuts leave something to be desired? Now you can make those shortcuts shine with style using our Google Themed Icon Packs collection.

Note: To customize the icon setup on your Windows 7 & Vista systems see our article here. Using Windows XP? We have you covered here.

Sneak Preview

For this week’s sneak preview we set up a Google Chrome themed desktop using the Simply Google Icon Collection shown below.

Note: Original full-size wallpaper can be found here.

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We used Chromium to create a set of app shortcuts for various Google services on our desktop. Anyone who has done the same knows that the original icons do not look very good, so these icon packs can make those shortcuts look spectacular.

google-chrome-desktop-02

Once the new icons were arranged for our desktop app shortcuts, we then pinned them to ourTaskbar. Those are definitely looking nice!

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The Icon Packs

Simply Google Icon Collection

*.ico and .png format

google-themed-icon-packs-01