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I got quite a shock this morning when browsing Google as I found a very positive article about my free iPhone website on Google News – in position 3.
Hopefully this will help my site gain some credibility with all the sceptics out there, and it should drive some traffic my way too.
As I don’t imagine it will stay there for very long, here’s a screenshot I took. Mine is the 3rd link down.
I got quite a shock this morning when browsing Google as I found a very positive article about my free iPhone website on Google News – in position 3.
Hopefully this will help my site gain some credibility with all the sceptics out there, and it should drive some traffic my way too.
As I don’t imagine it will stay there for very long, here’s a screenshot I took. Mine is the 3rd link down.
Google have released a mobile version of their Google books service, enabling free iPhone users to have access to 1.5M (in the US, 0.5M everywhere else) public domain books.
While these books were already available on Google Book Search, these new mobile editions are optimized to be read on a small screen. To try it out and start reading, open up your web browser in your free iPhone or Android phone and go to http://books.google.com/m.
To make the books readable on the iPhone, Google extract the text from the page images so it can flow on your mobile browser just like any other web page. This extraction process is known as Optical Character Recognition (or OCR for short). The following example demonstrates the difference between page images and the extracted text:
=> “Because I made a blunder, my dear Watson— which is, I am afraid, a more common occurrence than anyone would think who only knew me through your memoirs. …”
The extraction of text from page images is a difficult engineering task. Smudges on the physical books’ pages, fancy fonts, old fonts, torn pages, etc. can all lead to errors in the extracted text. The example below shows the page image from the original manuscript for Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. In this extreme case, the extracted text is riddled with errors:
=> “lV~e.il!” .ÍAoHyU- AUte. U brstty/affc. su.it a. f o.tl as ~tk¿* , I s&O.IL .éfiiíjz tiotkun-) of-ttmlr1¿*y ¿i^n. sta¿rs ! Jfo» ura.ve …
Imperfect OCR is only the first challenge in the ultimate goal of moving from collections of page images to extracted-text based books. Google’s computer algorithms also have to automatically determine the structure of the book (what are the headers and footers, where images are placed, whether text is verse or prose, and so forth). Getting this right allows Google books to render the book in a way that follows the format of the original book.
To try it out, point your mobile browser to http://books.google.com/m and begin reading. If you come across patches where the text seems wrong you can just tap on the text to see the original page image for that section of text.
Google’s free iPhone app, Google Mobile, was already extremely handy with the addition of the much-vaunted voice search, but it turns out that it’s got more features than anybody first realized.
The Google Mobile team just blogged about an easter egg, a hidden menu in the free iPhone app that enables some extra goodies and options. To find it, go to the Settings tab in Google Mobile, and keep trying to scroll down below the “About” option at the bottom. Eventually, a menu called Bells and Whistles will appear. This is pretty low class to “hide” something like this, but hey, developers have to have a little fun too, right?
So what are these options?
Some of them are actually sounds: you can replace the default sounds with chicken or monkey noises, if for some odd reason you wish to. You can also change the colour of the Google Mobile Theme and see a live waveform when you talk. This is all kind of fun, but not that super-useful. But that isn’t the whole story…
The reason you really want to find this easter egg is the “open links in app” option. Some commentators argue that it should have been there in the first place and not hidden, and I agree with them. To “hide” a feature like this is much less charming than your free iPhone making chicken sounds.
This is very cool, google earth finally comes to the iPhone – and it’s great.
Hold the world in the palm of your hand. With Google Earth for iPhone and iPod touch, you can fly to far corners of the planet with just the swipe of a finger. Explore the same global satellite and aerial imagery available in the desktop version of Google Earth, including high-resolution imagery for over half of the world’s population and a third of the world’s land mass.
With Google Earth for iPhone, you can:
• Tilt your iPhone to adjust your view to see mountainous terrain
• Show the Panoramio layer and browse the millions of geo-located photos from around the world
• View geo-located Wikipedia articles
• Use the Location feature to fly to your current location
• Search for cities, places, and business around the globe with Google Local Search
