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Google acquired Flutter, a startup that built a software that lets you control music and movies with gestures. The desktop software uses your computer's webcam to detect your gestures. "Just put your hand up to stop the media playback, point your thumb right for 'next' and left for 'previous'," reports ArsTechnica.


You can still download the apps for Windows and Mac OS X. The software supports media players like iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, Spotify, VLC, but also sites like YouTube, Netflix and Pandora using a Chrome extension.


Gestures are intuitive, but detection didn't work that well for me.


Flutter's comic-style site asks users to join "the fight against unnatural user interfaces".


"When we started three years ago, our dream to build a ubiquitous and power-efficient gesture recognition technology was considered by many as just 'a dream', not a real possibility. Since then, we have strived to build the best machine vision algorithms and a delightful user experience. Today, we are thrilled to announce that we will be continuing our research at Google. We share Google's passion for 10x thinking, and we're excited to add their rocket fuel to our journey," wrote Navneet Dalal, Flutter's CEO.

From touch interfaces, voice-driven user interfaces to gesture recognition, object recognition, facial recognition and biometric scanning, it looks like computers will change dramatically and natural user interfaces will make computers disappear into the background. Xbox Kinect, Google Glass, smartwatches and other wearable computers, flexible screens are probably just the beginning.

{ via ArsTechnica }

What to do if you only want to see web search suggestions in Chrome's omnibox, not suggestions from Google's top results, your bookmarks, your browsing history or previously typed URLs. Type ? in the omnibox and then start typing your query. You can also use these keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+K or Ctrl+E for Windows and Linux, ⌘-Option-F for Mac.



Chrome will still show suggestions from your previous searches. If you use this trick in the incognito mode, Chrome will only show suggestions from your search history.

I'm not sure why Chrome's app launcher doesn't have a keyboard shortcut, but it's pretty easy to add one. For Windows XP, right-click the desktop shortcut for Chrome App Launcher and select "Properties", go to the "Shortcut key" field and enter a keyboard shortcut. If you use Windows 7 or 8, press Shift while right-clicking the colorful grid icon from the taskbar, select "Properties", go to the "Shortcut key" field and enter a keyboard shortcut. I picked Ctrl+Shift+A.


Now I can just press Ctrl+Shift+A and the launcher will show up. I can type a Google query, the first letters from a Chrome app or just use the arrow keys to pick an app.


Google now even shows suggestions from the Chrome Web Store, so you can quickly install apps without visiting the store. I wouldn't recommend doing that, unless you really trust the app. For example, you can search for "gmail" and quickly install Gmail Offline.

Who knew that Google can create successful hardware? Who knew that Chromebooks could become the best selling computers at Amazon.com? Who knew that Nexus devices could become popular?

Electronics best seller - Chromecast


Laptops best seller - Samsung Chromebook


Most popular laptops under $500 - #1: Samsung Chromebook, #3: Acer Chromebook


Most wished for electronics - #1: Chromecast, #6: Samsung Chromebook


Tablets best sellers - #3: Nexus 7


So what are the reasons why Google's hardware projects are suddenly successful? OEM partners like Samsung, Acer and Asus, low prices, high-quality hardware, the focus on user experience, Google Play and the popularity of Chrome and Android.

When you search Google for [brandy] or [brandy drinks], you'll get a Knowledge Graph card with information from Wikipedia: "Brandy is a spirit produced by distilling wine. Brandy generally contains 35–60% alcohol by volume and is typically taken as an after-dinner drink." Unfortunately, the photo that illustrates the card is not appropriate: it shows the popular singer Brandy, not the alcoholic beverage.


The photo is from an article about drinks and the caption says: "If this is the first brandy you think of, you need to get out more". Well, this shows that Google's algorithms are far from perfect.

{ Thanks, Sébastien Izouaouen, Sushubh Mittal and Max Kemman. }

When Chrome was released 5 years ago, many people were surprised to see that the browser didn't install in the Program Files folder. Chrome was Windows-only back then and Google wanted to make sure that users can install Chrome, even if they don't use admin accounts. Per-user installs worked well, but Google had to create a separate system-level MSI installer for enterprise.

Now it looks like Chrome has a smart Windows installer that combines both approaches. The setup file tries to install Chrome in the Program Files folder and switches to the AppData folder if it fails.


"We did change the download page to install system-level by default (and fall back to user level if that fails or the user says "no" to the UAC prompt). Installing in AppData was never a security measure, it was for convenience to make sure people could install Chrome even without admin rights. Our data shows that *preferring* a system level (Program Files) install with a fallback to user level improves the install success rate," said Mark Larson from Google.

Apparently, this is a feature launched last year, but I haven't noticed it until today, when I had to reinstall Chrome because of this error: "Update failed (error: 7) An error occurred while checking for updates: This computer already has a more recent version of Google Chrome. If the software is not working, please uninstall Google Chrome and try again."


Chrome's help center still recommends to use an alternate installer "to install Google Chrome for all user accounts on a Windows computer. By doing so, you'll replace all other versions of Chrome that may already be installed on your computer for other user accounts." For Mac, "you can install Chrome for all user accounts on your computer if you're signed in as an administrator."

Google's reverse image search feature is about to become more popular, now that you can easily use it in Chrome 30+. You no longer have to install an extension, just right-click an image and click "search Google for this image".

"Search by image allows you to do a reverse image search and discover all sorts of content that's related to a specific image. For example, search using a picture of your favorite band and see search results that might include similar images, webpages about the band, and even sites that include the same picture," explains Google.



It's interesting to notice that Google uploads the image, instead of using the URL. Maybe Google wanted to make sure that you'll always get some results: not all the URLs are publicly accessible (for example: Gmail's image attachments).

Reverse image search also works for modified versions of an image, so you can use it to find more information about an image, other sites that include the image, the original source of an image. You can also use TinEye, a similar reverse image search engine.