An Open Letter to Google

April 22, 2024 | Comment

Dear Google,

In 2014, around about the same time that you Nest Labs, I bought and had installed a Nest Learning Thermostat to control our central heating and give us remote access. I think that it has been a great success, so much so that I have recently upgraded to the latest version that also allows our hot water to be controlled.

I then had an idea! What if I could see temperatures around the house and use that data to get better control over resources there? So I wrote a simple dashboard which I called The Weather Station. I’ve … Read the rest

Will Chromium give Microsoft the Edge?

September 6, 2019 | Comment

Having dominated the browser world and making developers lives a misery with Internet Explorer Microsoft are now adapting to a new world order by adopting a competitors browser.

IE, A Short History

There was a time when Internet Explorer (from now on referred to as IE) ruled the world when it came to browsing the web. Then along came Chrome (and to a lesser extent Firefox) and there was a mass exodus from IE. IE now only accounts for just over 6% of traffic while Chrome has 47%.

With Windows 10 Microsoft introduced Edge as it’s browser going forward but … Read the rest

Google’s Motion Stills

July 26, 2016 | Comment

Google have a good track record of bringing to iOS unique apps that aren’t available on Android. They recently released a simple little app called Motion Stills which takes Apple live photos and turns them into forever looping gifs. And it works really well.

On opening the app you are shown your photostream with a looping preview of each image. Tapping on the image allows you to make some very small changes such as turning on/off the sound and, crucially, the image stabilisation. It is the latter option that is most impressive. Live Photos actually last longer than you might … Read the rest

Google Cardboard. VR – the Future or Passing Novelty?

June 7, 2016 | Comment

A friend of mine turned up recently with a Google Cardboard a, well, cardboard phone holder that allows you to watch virtual reality content. I was interested to have a go but skeptical as to the longer term possibilities of the technology.

As you can see from the picture above the box has a place to put your phone which is held a few inches in front of a couple of lenses. You need specific apps in order to see the content which create a sort of stereoscopic effect. Although this is made of cardboard it is pretty robust although … Read the rest

Is Google Keep a Keeper?

March 22, 2013 | Comment

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So Google have released a new product roughly one week after axing a raft of others including Google Reader, much to the angst of the general tech public.

Google Keep is a note taking application allowing you to keep important information in your drive for searching and reviewing at a later date.

It is similar in thought to Evernote but without any of the usefulness of it. As it says in the image above Google Keep is just a bit too simplistic right now. All you can do is create a note with a title and some text content and … Read the rest

A Google Sized Problem

August 6, 2012 | Comment

As of June 2012 Gmail has 425 million active users. That’s seven times the population of the UK and one and a half times the population of the US, so it’s a pretty sizeable number of people. I am an active user, the rest of my household are users, as is my mother-in-law. This gives a good idea of the cross section of people using Gmail: young, old, male, female, tech-savvy and not so.

About a month ago my mother-in-law’s Gmail account was hacked but not only was the password changed but also all the reset data. This is … Read the rest

Google Chrome on iOS

June 29, 2012 | 3 comments

So my favourite browser has finally made it on to my favourite mobile operating system as last night Google Chrome for iOS was released.

I have downloaded it onto both my iPad and iPhone and I’ve been immediately impressed with just how much it looks like its desktop siblings, which shouldn’t be a great surprise, especially on the iPad.

There are a number of great things that have been brought over from the dekstop versions including the omnibar that allows you to enter either a web address or a search term and Chrome is intelligent enough to work out what … Read the rest

Why I’ll Not be Using Google Drive (and it’s got Nothing to do With Terms & Conditions)

April 27, 2012 | Comment

So this week Google finally got round to releasing its cloud storage option, Google Drive. Within hours of them doing so the internet was ablaze with outrage over the terms and conditions and just exactly what they could or could not do with your files once they are uploaded. Many used this as the primary reason for not using the service and instead sticking with Dropbox, Box, SkyDrive etc. I have, for me, a much more compelling reason not to use Google Drive – app support.

I have just over 20gb of storage with Dropbox, all of which I have … Read the rest

April Fools

April 1, 2012 | Comment

Google has really pulled out all the stops for April 1st this year – you can see all of them here but my personal favourite is Chrome Multitask Mode – it looks so useful!

However, the best of the lot today has got to be a reworking of the family favourite Hungry Hippos for iPad. I would definitely get this if it came out!

… Read the rest

Top tech of 2010

January 16, 2011 | Comment

Last year, for the first time, I produced a list of my top tech for 2009. I thought that it would be interesting to do the same in 2010 to see how things have changed, if at all. So this is the technology that I used day-in, day-out in 2010 and could not do without.

Google Chrome

No change here and, in fact, I am more wedded to Chrome this year than I was last having used it for a full 12 months I still much prefer it to both Internet Explorer and Firefox. The addition of extensions has just … Read the rest