Kicking off Chrome’s second birthday, Google announces the third stable release of the infamous web browser. The new release features lots, and I mean LOTS, of bug fixes and the long anticipated Themes support! All the new improvements, means speed, and speed is everywhere from the start up, to the web applications.

• A more personalized “New Tab” redesigned to fit user’s needs.
• Improved Omnibox by adding little icons to help you distinguish between sites, bookmarks, history, searches.
• Getting ready for HTML 5 (supporting video, audio, canvas)
• Theme support, to give your browser a photo finish ;) You can browse for themes in the Theme Gallery

Not so good news for Mac users as Google announced that the current beta version will be released by year-end. Extensions won’t be available until version 4.0.

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Excellent news for Android users and developers. Android 1.6 SDK is available for download. Android 1.6 introduces new features for users and developers like New User Features, Android Market Updates and New Platform Technologies. Some of the most notable new features include Expanded support for screen densities and resolutions, Quick Search Box, Text-to-speech engine, Gestures and of course a new Linux kernel upgrading from 2.6.27 to 2.6.29.

Android 1.6 includes a redesigned search framework that provides a quick, effective, and consistent way for users to search across multiple sources—such as browser bookmarks & history, contacts, and the web—directly from the home screen.

Another experiment made it through Google labs named Fast Flip. This experiment provides blindingly fast overviews of headline pages of top newspapers. It is very useful if you need a quick look in today’s news/newspapers. In other words:

Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to “flip” through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches.

It has four main navigation menus including Popular, Sections, Topics and Sources. Under each navigation menu you will be able to switch between:

• Recent { Recent, Most Viewed, Recommended and Headlines }
• Sections { Politics, Business, U.S., World, Sports, Sci/Tech, Entertainment, Health, Opinion and Travel }
  
• Topics { Japan, England, Finance, Los Angeles, Taylor Swift, Yale student and Tennis }
  
• Sources { Newsweek, Salon, Smithsonian, Popular Mechanics, The Atlantic, New York Times and All sources » }

Apart from that there is also a mobile version of this Google product.

Twitter downtime is here once again. This time we got an 403 Error. HTTP Error 403 – Forbidden, states that the web server thinks that the data stream sent by the client was correct but the access to resource identified by the url is forbidden for some reason. Fortunately, everything came back online very soon.

After a summer project of the Digital Technology Group,  Android users can now surf the net anonymously using the The Onion Router (or Tor). Software required for anonymous browsing consists of two andoid applications, TorProxy and Shadow. Project’s web site as well as more information and FAQs can be found here.

Twitter keeps evolving, trying to serve and manage more information and getting more serious this time. Today there is update in Twitter’s Terms of Services saying more or less something like “Hey, you know what? It’s time to get serious.” Some of the new highlights from the new “Terms” include Advertising (we live in an Ad-world after all), Twitter APIs, which means more and better applications, Spam rules, and last but not least Ownership. According to Twitter, the Ownership part can be summarized to this:

Twitter means ditter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.

In addition, Twitter added four new themes and in case you haven’t noticed it, the typography of the number of the followers and following links changed.

UPDATE: after some conversation with some friends, typography looks the same (according to them :P)

Last night Google decided to change some UI elements in its homepage. This time buttons changed, getting bigger and more squared. They also got a new style class -correct me if I am wrong but I don’t recall that class- for their buttons named “lsb” (i wonder if lsb means something). Moreover the text field above the search buttons got bigger. However these changes take place only with Firefox under Mac OS. Safari and Chrome don’t seem to be affected by these changes.

There comes a day when you say “I will build my own file server!” and a few hours later all that happens is you get lost in the numerous online tutorials on how to build, configure and run a server, still wondering if samba sharing means you have to dance to get the server up and running. Not to mention what someone could think about ssh, vnc and other technical terms that he or she may have never seen before. Well, it is true that there a numerous online tutorials on how to build your own server (file server, web server, etc). Last night i found this one explaining in a quite simple steps how to build your own file server from scratch at home. So, what are you waiting for? :)

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