Every now and then I find myself working on slides in Keynote and writing Download Squad posts - and struggling to find a suitable image. Of course, Flickr is the best way to find images - their clear licencing and Creative Commons support makes finding images fairly straight forward. However, getting the image into Keynote isn't entirely painless. The workflow of browsing search results, viewing the image and then finding it at a suitable size (if it exists) takes time - however that's where Viewfinder steps in.

A native Mac OS X application (requiring Mac OS X Snow Leopard), Viewfinder allows you to search Flickr from the desktop apply filters to show only Creative Commons images, and specify a particular image size. Then, once you select an image you can download the image, set it as your desktop background - and most importantly - send images straight to Keynote for your slides.

If you're a heavy keynote user (or blogger) who frequently needs to find Flickr images for your work Viewfinder is indispensible. I've been testing it since early September and found it an incredibly convenient tool to have at hand. A licence costs £15 (roughly $25) and a free demo is available for you try from the Viewfinder webpage.

Media center application Boxee has grabbed a lot of headlines over the past year or two, and for good reason: Boxee provides Mac, Linux, and Windows users with an excellent solution for watching internet video on a TV. While web browsers were generally designed for viewing text and images with video thrown in as an afterthought, Boxee was designed to look and feel more like a consumer electronics application that you can navigate from the couch with a remote control.

Boxee can access online video from services including Hulu, Joost, and BBC's iPlayer. You can use it to enjoy audio and video podcasts. And you can access local media stored on your hard drive.

But despite all of its features, Boxee is still alpha software. That's going to change next month. Boxee is set to launch the first beta version of its software at an event in New York on December 7th. I suppose the day will continue to live in Infamy, although I doubt that decades from now we'll still be talking about it as the date that Boxee went beta.

The new version will have a new user interface, improved navigation, a user-controlled queue, and a new TV and movie search function among other changes.

Google sure knows how to time its innovations. Just in time for the holiday rush, Google have a new search tool -- but not for shoppers like you or I, at least not directly. No, this one's for businesses themselves; it's an enterprise product that straps onto existing online shops! (Sorry, I like anything that sounds vaguely Star Trekkie.)

Citing the ol' chestnut that most visitors spend on average just eight seconds before deciding if it's the right site for them or not, Google's Commerce Search replaces any kind of built-in search engine that an e-commerce shop might already have installed. Rather than hosted locally, it's hosted up in the big Google cloud, so as business gradually increases in the weeks up until Christmas, the Commerce Search will remain quick and snappy, not buckling under the increased load!

And as you all know, Google prides itself on the accuracy of its results -- so being able to search a shop quickly and reliably for the gift you want can only be a good thing for us this Christmas.

There's a lot more info over on the Google Blog itself, so go take a look.

Over the past few years, Microsoft has had to contend with increasing competition from free, web-based office suites such as Google Docs and Zoho Office. And when I say contend, I mean, maybe start taking notice of. There's no doubt that MS Office is still the 800 pound gorilla in the word processing, spreadsheet, and database field. But free competitors including those online applications and desktop solutions including IBM's Lotus Symphony and and the open source OpenOffice.org can't make the folks in Redmond very happy.

So it probably shouldn't be that surprising that Microsoft Online VP Ron Markezich referred to Zoho, Google Docs, and Zimbra as services that offer "fake Office capabilities."

What was a bit surprising is how well the Zoho team took that idea and ran with it. Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu wrote a blog post about the topic yesterday. And today the company launched FakeOffice.org, a site that compares Zoho's application suite with Microsoft's.

Not surprisingly, Zoho points out a number of features that it's products offer that Microsoft's doesn't. Clearly, MS Office has a few features up its sleeve that you won't find in Zoho Office, including 100% compatibility with all those Office documents your friends and colleagues keep sending you. But it's worth checking out the site for the Fake Office "work online" music video, and the little comments such as the Twitter gadget, which is powered by "Fake MS Access."

Zoho has actually been an innovator in the online office space for a while, and most of the company's web apps offer far more features than competing Google Docs. But it's tough for a company with an unusual name like Zoho to take on the big guys like Microsoft and Google. Maybe Vembu should think about permanently changing Zoho's name to FakeOffice? It does have a nice ring to it.

Unfortunately FakeOffice.com has already been registered, which is why Zoho had to grab a .org address for their site.

[via Instant Fundas]

It was pretty exciting news at Download Squad to hear Orb, the "sort of software version of Slingbox," was available for Mac. Orb allows you to broadcast your media to any device that has a web browser. After downloading Orb to your "always on" Mac with a high speed internet connection, you can access all your photos, songs, TV shows, and videos from any device with a browser and media player.

After downloading the app, Orb indexes your media and then prompts you to either log in to mycast.orb.com, or create a log in if you don't have an account. After you log in you can see your dashboard and all your media goodies.


Though my songs appeared immediately, my photos did not. There are various feed settings you can play with and channels to explore. Also, with a simple drag drop interface you can share your media with your friends via email, SMS, widget on your blog, or a public URL.


Checking it out from my home computer is one thing, but would it work on other devices? Success! I was able to access my media from my Dell PC.

A note for iPhone owners: The esteemed and indefatigable Jay Hathaway noted that he received errors when he tried to download the free version of OrbLive for the iPhone, which he tried from both his iPhone and his iTunes account on his Mac. There are 3 flavors of Orb available for the iPhone: OrbLive free, OrbMedia ($4.99) and OrbLive ($9.99)

Note to Orb: Please update your landing page to include PC and Mac, ok?

Web designers and standards advocates have tried everything to kill Internet Explorer 6, but it just refuses to die. In fact, Microsoft has extended support for the aging browser until at least mid-2010, and longer for some versions of Windows. However, there is strong evidence that people are coming around to browsers that support standards, don't make web designers cry, and have frickin' TABS, for crying out loud ...

Firefox is now more popular than IE6.

That's right: according to October browser usage stats reported by Ars Technica, the old, incontinent granddad of the browsing world has finally been overtaken by the cool kid with all the rad accessories. Although IE6 still has 23% of the market - sadly, more than any other version of IE - when you add up the usage on every version of Firefox, you get 24.07%, enough to top that single old edition of Internet Explorer.

I assume the shift is accounted for by home web users shifting to newer browsers with the release of Windows 7, because corporate IT departments are still the last bastion of widespread IE6 use. As Ars speculates, high Windows 7 adoption rates could be the stake through IE6's cold, tab-less heart.

Meanwhile, in the Webkit browser wars, Chrome and Safari both made gains this month. Chrome is still growing faster -- right now it's closing in rapidly with 3.58% to Safari's 4.42%.

Did you know that four million Chinese play World of Warcraft?

You probably knew that a lot played it -- and that WoW has 13 million subscribers or so -- but four million? That's almost the population of Denmark or Scotland. And they're all having to go without their Warcraft fix... again!

After a relaunch in September, the operators NetEase have been forced to shut down the realm of Azeroth yet again. Now, this isn't Blizzard being indecisive or something: no, it's two wings of the Chinese government getting their panties in a knot. Y'see, there's a department that deals with PR -- the General Administration of Press and Publication... comrade!! -- and the more-sensibly named Ministry of Culture. Neither of them seem to be able to decide whose jurisdiction WoW actually falls under -- and until they stop swaggering around and one actually backs down, we may not see WoW return to China.

Meanwhile, Activision Blizzard are losing the subscription fees provided by one third of its player base. But not to worry... Modern Warfare 2 is out this week! A lot of people point to the 13 million subscribers and marvel at the amount of money that WoW must make for Activision Blizzard -- but their MMO revenues only account for 35% of their total takings. The rest come from their huge COD and Guitar Hero brands.

Thanks to the magnificent, circumventable behemoth of the Internet, WoW players in China are just logging into the servers over in Taiwan anyway. Hooray!

[via VentureBeat]

MSN.com, Microsoft's search, news and services portal page, hasn't weathered the years well. Tweaking the same basic design for a decade left it far behind the times in terms of design and usability. With today's clean, whitespace-friendly, reimagining of MSN.com, Microsoft ditches the spectre of MSN search and delivers a site that's a little more worthy of showcasing the company's new search hotness, Bing.

A prettier, less cluttered layout and a prominent Bing search bar aren't the only upgrades to the homepage. In a touch that says Microsoft actually knows what year it is after all, you can add your Facebook newsfeed and your Twitter stream to an area on the right side of the page. The news is still there, but it's more customizable, and the layout presents fewer stories at a time than the cluttered old MSN.com did. There's also a local focus, with local weather and a Bing-powered local news widget at the bottom left.

I have to say that, compared to the MSN of old, this new design looks attractive and functional. Speaking of comparisons, though, have a look at our gallery of MSN.com designs since 2001. Looking at how slowly the site changed over the years only underlines how much it just changed overnight.

... but, in true Google fashion, it's less annoying and invasive! Hooray!

Google keeps rolling out the big guns to their search service -- which is good, as people might've been beginning to think that Google has their attention on other things. But no, Google has their attention on everything. Fingers in every pie.

Today, if you're in a subset of Google's users, you can now choose even more ways to display your search results. You've probably noticed that 'More Options' button in the top left corner -- well now, at the bottom of that list, there are now the following options:

• More text -- you can get a good 50-100 words from each page now, without having to click through!
• Images from the page -- this option shows you a couple of images from each search result. I'm sure there's a good use for this, I just haven't worked it out yet.
• Page previews -- the big one! Now you get a little thumbnail showing you what the target page looks like.

And that's about it. Some of you will have none of the above options -- and if you're like me, I have all of the options on my laptop, but only two of them on my desktop. I have no idea why -- I guess they are all being gradually unfurled.

US electronics retailer Best Buy is preparing to enter the digital video distribution business in a big way. The company is partnering with CinemaNow, an online video download service that lets users rent and purchase movies and TV shows.

Best Buy will load up CinemaNow software on internet-connected consumer electronics sold at the company's retail stores. That includes computers, portable media players, Blu-Ray players, set-top boxes, mobile phones, and internet-connected television sets.

Customers that purchase one of these items will be able to rent or buy videos from a catalog with about 22,000 titles. Movie purchases typically run between $10 and $20, while TV shows are $1.99 per episode. Movie rentals typically go for $2.99 to $3.99.

The move should give Best Buy and CinemaNow a much stronger foothold in the digital media space. CinemaNow already offers a pretty compelling user experience, allowing you to download a video and watch it on up to three devices. But the fact that virtually every consumer electronics device that Best Buy sells that can run the software soon will, means that CinemaNow is about to become a much bigger name in digital media, and that could help the companies take on Apple's iTunes and Amazon's video on demand services.

Best Buy is expected to roll out the new service early next year.

We've covered Invisible Hand, the discreet shopping comparison add on for Firefox, which displays prices on items you are searching on the web. Just in time for Black Friday, the hand has trotted out a new add on which along with other improvements, incorporates Google search results.

Now, you can get your price results in real time so you know you're getting the best deal. My test drive of the hand went smooth, the results loaded up within a second or two and updates were very discreet. This is a real time saver for getting price results.

The add on will be officially released to the Mozilla site within a few weeks, but the first 200 Download Squad readers can download the beta version. Just click on the link below and key in invisibleDLS for the access code.

http://preview.getinvisiblehand.com/

I'm not quite ready to reveal just how geeky I am, so I'll spare you the massive deluge of Star Trek jokes. My apologies in advance if one or two slip past your shields.

Anyway... Over on the Google Wave Developer Blog they've just announced that they're ready to start implementing the federation of Wave servers. This doesn't mean a whole lot to most of us, only that it means the Borg Collectiv-- er, The Google Wave Team, is plodding ever onwards, driven by its impulse engines towards some kind of epic singularity where all email servers will be wiped out and replaced with Wave servers.

And what a glorious day that will be. But yeah, if you're a developer -- or ISP? -- now's the time to get in there and integrate your experimental Wave server with Google's sandbox! With the open specification and open source nature of Wave it will be interesting to see what other developers are hiding up their sleeves

[On a side note, our great Google Wave invite giveaway was a great success. There should be more news about that later today -- and the lucky winners should start to receive their invites in the next few days!]

The results of a survey, announced yesterday, show that the biggest buyers of music are in fact those that pirate the most. The conclusions come from a poll of 1,000 people between the ages of 16 and 50, with 10% of those admitting they download music illegally -- so it's not a huge slice of the population, and it's by no means conclusive, but I think it just confirms what we already know: it's the music fans that download all the music.

It's the music fans that watch live performances and go the extra mile to get the t-shirts and the posters and track down out-of-print B-sides. The survey shows that the average music downloader spends £77 ($126) a year on music -- while the non-downloader only spends £44.

This probably isn't very big news for you in America -- we all know the RIAA are draconian bitches, nothing new, move along now -- but here in the UK we're about to have a law passed that will allow people to be banned from the Internet if they continue to download music illegally after a written warning. It just stinks of poorly-informed lobbying by the BPI -- the British equivalent of the RIAA.

[via The Independent]

You probably all know what BitTorrent is: it's the technology that powers almost every peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing tool currently in existence. Whether for nefarious, dubious downloads, or for grabbing the latest distribution of Ubuntu, BitTorrent comes to our swift rescue on its mighty steed of share-and-share-alike virtuosity.

What you probably didn't know is that BitTorrent Inc., the company created by the technology's inventor Bram Cohen, spends most of its time extolling the virtues of its tech and campaigning all over the world for the relaxing of P2P restrictions by ISPs. The thing is, while BitTorrent really, really rocks for its users, it tends to clog up networks really quickly. It also costs the ISP -- such as Verizon or Comcast -- a lot more than 'normal' Internet usage.

But it's this disparity between what the ISPs consider to be 'normal' Internet usage and what we the users consider 'normal' that has driven the development of 'BitTorrent 2.0' or uTP. (uTorrent Protocol? I'm not sure.) BitTorrent Inc. firmly believes that P2P is part of our every-day Internet lives. It is our right to download and distribute files via BitTorrent.

And if ISPs won't let us, insisting on limitations and traffic-shaping the bandwidth that we use, then they're going to develop a new protocol that meets them at least half way. uTP now automatically limits its own bandwidth use when it detects congestion on the network -- uTP limits itself so that the ISP doesn't have to.

Genius, pure, simple genius -- if it works. It's already being tested by thousands of users of the new version of uTorrent 2.0 -- which you should probably go and download! (Direct download link is available on that page.)

[via TorrentFreak]

As I mentioned yesterday, internet movie channel Epix launched this weekend. The TV channel is available to Verizon FiOS customers, who can also login to the EpixHD web site to watch dozens of movies including new releases such as Iron Man and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as well as older, more obscure titles including Bubba Ho Tep and Son of Rambow.

If you don't have Verizon FiOS you can request a 3-day weekend trial of the service, but I'm not entirely sure what the point is, since Epix doesn't plan to launch a web-only version anytime soon. Perhaps they're hoping you'll contact your local cable, satellite, or other TV provider and request they add Epix to the lineup.

If your invitation hasn't come through yet, you can take solace in the fact that I did score an invite. OK, that may not be much comfort, but I did manage to grab a bunch of screenshots of the user interface. It's kind of a mixed bag right now. The search function works quite nicely and you can click the watch button from the drop-down menu that appears when you're searching for a movie -- if the movie is available. Unfortunately, there are a ton of listings for movies that you can't actually watch yet, including Star Trek, GI Joe, and The Godfather I, II, and III.

You can also browser for movies by most watched, newest, genre, or other collections. You can also see all the movies from A to Z.

Browsing is sort of a cumbersome task though, since you have to scroll through thumbnails of movie posters. If it's not clear what movie you're looking at, you can mouse over the cover to see the title, but it may take a moment for the title to show up. And in the genre section, many movies are listed more than once (for example, the same title might show up in comedy, award winners, and action). And it's clear the web site wasn't really designed for geeks, because the sci fi category is dead last, which means you have to do a lot of scrolling before you get to it.

On the bright side, video quality was pretty good and you can even click a button to check your bitrate and other settings, which are automatically adjusted based on your internet connection settings.