ForcaTech Blog

Those of us who use the internet now-a-days have grown accustomed to the fact that when we go to google.com we may not see the standard ‘Google’ logo above the search field. Google from time to time–whether for advertising purposes or to pay recognize recent events, anniversaries, holidays, etc–has changed up their logo with a Jack-o-lantern, snowman, etc. When the Google logo is non-standard like this they call them “doodles”.

These Google doodles have all been pretty static–until now. Today those of you who pulled up Google to type in a quick search probably said “Oh, a new Google logo I wonder what this one is for.” It wasn’t until I went to mouse over the logo to see exactly what the occasion was when I was surprised to see the logo begin to move like the classic Pac Man that we all know and love.

Initially I sat and watched assuming it was some kind of flash image. It wasn’t until Pac Man got eaten by one of the ghosts that I realized that I might actually be in control. For the next life I realized that it was in fact a playable game! Using the arrow keys on the keyboard I was actually able to play the game just like any other Pac Man game.

The interactive doodle is in fact a full 255 level game with the 256 level kill screen(I got close – level 3)–just like the original. Today’s doodle the first interactive doodle for Google. Marcin Wichary, a senior user experience designer for Google, worked with a member of the “Google Doodler Team”(this is what I want to be when I grow up) to create this unique doodle. [Google]

Despite my feeble attempts to summarize what Google Wave is and what it is capable of I have still been asked by several people, “so what IS google wave exactly?”

Instead of attempting to explain it again I will let this guy–who does an excellent job!

After months of rumors it looks like ATT has finally decided to roll out their femtocells in a soft launch to a few markets. Those markets include Atlanta, San Antonio, Seattle and a city or two in North Carolina.

What is a femtocell? It is a device used to extend your wireless/3G range. If you live in an area where the reception is bad then you can pick up one of these devices, hook it up to your home internet connection and get a beautifully strong 3G connection.

While this is great and all, you are having to plug this into your router, which is most likely a wireless router…. which will give you a better connection over WiFi than you will get over the femtocell 3G. Now all phones don’t have WiFi capabilities and so this is a big perk for the 3 nation wide customers few ATT customers who have a data plan with a phone that doesn’t have WiFi built in.

This should help alleviate some of the 3G load and make it a little more reliable and snappy but since the majority of 3G is eaten by iPhone users and the femtocell doesn’t really help to get iPhone users off 3G I foresee the improvements being minimal. [BGR]

AT&T has announced that they will be rolling out their 7.2Mbps HSPA 3G this year to a few markets. T-Mobile is now claiming that they will do the same–maybe they will start by rolling standard 3G out to more markets, we are still without 3G for T-Mobile where I live.

So, where do we go from here? Most carriers will soon be talking about their 4G networks however, T-Mobile is boasting their super-boosted 3G rocking out at 21Mbps.

While most carriers are doing the smart thing and dropping 3G at the 7.2Mbps barrier and moving up to 4G, T-Mobile is going to use and abuse the 3G network for as long as they can. They claim that they will be able to reach near 4G speeds in 2010. [mocoNews]

Well, the bad news is that the majority of you are going to have to continue to deal with what you have got. But, if you live in the Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, or Miami area then you are in luck.  AT&T has announced that  by the end of this year the HSPA 7.2 network will be up and running in those areas. They claim that by the end of 2010, 19 other major markets will have HSPA available and by the end of 2011 the remaining 3G footprint will be upgraded.

Some of you have probably already noticed the 3G+ symbol on your compatible device–such as the iPhone 3GS–meaning that you are already experiencing from the “7.2Mbps” network.

There is still good news for the rest of you. Because these 3G traffic areas are moving off the old 3G network many of you will probably notice improvements in your 3G network.

“It’s the future of gaming.” –  or at least that is what OnLive is hoping for. After seven years in “stealth development” they have now announced their new product. OnLive hopes to bring a new world of  streaming video games to TVs, entry level PCs, and MACs, through the internet.

Interested? OnLive is currently looking for beta testers to stay at home wearing the same raunchy clothes for days without sleeping give their streaming game service a try, and provide them with feedback about the experience. To be apply as a beta tester visit the OnLive site and fill out the form. If you are lucky and are chosen to sit at home and play OnLive while gorging on microwaveable meals and delivery pizza as a beta tester you will get to use their service for free, in exchange for your feedback.

Not much more to say. The Gmail servers have been down for almost 10 minutes now. The internet giant who has an endless supply of microwave corn dogs money, servers, satellites, and ideas has had a server error.

What this really means we are unsure but there are very few possibilities.

[UPDATE]: Well after over an hour of being down it looks like things are back up and running. Looks like we are all going to be ok this time.

Those of you who are avid Pandora users have no doubt had all of your hopes and dreams crushed recently. Pandora is now forcing Pandora One down your throat heavily advertising for their paid subscription service Pandora One. While I agree it is a little more than annoying that we Pandora members, who have been listening to the site since it first started up, are now limited to 40 hours a month; however, I can understand that they have their own costs to cover.

In the past you were also able to just go to pandora and listen without an account. Now you have to register and login to listen to music so that they can track your every move limit everyone to 40 hours.

I thought I would beat the system and create another account when I initially ran out of my 40 hours, but no dice. Pandora not only limits your account but also limits each computer.

You will notice a new drop down when you first sign up for Pandora One. One of the cool features of upgrading is the slim “Pandora Mini”. Its basically just takes everything off the web page except for the center area where the music is.

As soon as you get to 30-35 hours you will begin to notice a bar at the top of the screen warning you that you are about to run out of sweet, free listening time. Once you hit 40 hours BOOM. You’re done.

If you want to continue listening you have to pay $0.99 for the next month or $36/year to upgrade to Pandora One.

With Pandora One you also get a slim yet spiffy Pandora desktop application that allows you to listen to Pandora without a need to use your browser at all. This, in and of itself, is really cool. If you have a firefox update, accidentally close your whole browser instead of that one tab or have no reason to have a browser window open you can still listen to your  music uninterrupted. Whenever the next song comes on there is a little overlay that pops up in the top right corner of your screen to let you see the Artist, Song, Album, and Album cover.

You also get high quality streaming audio. Instead of the 128Kbps default you have the option of listening to 192Kbps instead. We tested this feature out on some $10 cheap desktop speakers and also on a higher end setup and on both we could tell a quality difference when switching between the two. It obviously wasn’t as noticeable with the cheaper speakers so if you don’t have a nice audio set up this wouldn’t be a selling point for Pandora One.

When you upgrade you also have the option to apply custom skins to your in-browser Pandora. Which is cool, but again, not a selling point.

Some other perks that are worth the money–if you listen to 40hrs+ of Pandora each month–is that you have unlimited listening and no audio or visual ads. Your idle time out before it asks “are you still there?” is bumped up from 2 hours to 5 hours. As long as you skip a song, rate a song or click on anything else on the Pandora site you won’t timeout and will have uninterrupted music.

Honestly, there aren’t a ton of features available for Pandora One but if you are someone who listens to Pandora often then I say it is worth it. The desktop application is pretty slim but allows you to add new stations, select the one you want to listen to, rate, skip and adjust volume. The real selling point with Pandora One is if you run our of your 40 free hours. All of the other features are nice, but just perks to having the unlimited music and no ads.

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[UPDATE]: Users have been reporting that when using any build of Windows Mobile 6.5 they experience a time out after a few songs. No word as to what exactly is causing this–and we don’t have any other details and haven’t verified–but we have contacted Pandora support to see if they are aware and have started doing any kind of troubleshooting. This is definitely something wrong with WinMo 6.5 specifically since users who experience this problem can move back to 6.1 and the issue is resolved. It would be a smart move by Pandora to look into this and set a goal to get a work around  for their App finished around or before the unknown 6.5 release date. We will update you with any additional info.

Not much info out about this currently but BPL(Broadband Over Power Lines) is now one step closer to being available in our neighborhoods. An IEEE working group has released the first test specs of a BPL standard and are working on developing it now.

It is probably still a ways off but it will be exciting when we begin to see 100MB plans from a BPL provider that will compete with our cable and DSL company plans.

The Google Voice iPhone app gave users the ability to use some advanced features of Google Voice right from their phone as well as call out using their Google Voice number. Earlier this week Apple/ATT disabled the App claiming that it imitated some of the functions of the iPhone.

Now the FCC is trying to find out why things happened the way they did. The FCC has sent letters to Apple, ATT and Google asking for details.

You can see those letters here at TechCruch.

ATT has been the first to respond saying that they have nothing to do with the App store and will “of course” respond to the FCC letter anyway.

This morning we got our invites to the Google Wave Developer Preview so that we could begin to work on some apps for Joomla and WP. Nearly boiling over with excitement I got to my computer where I could get to my email and login. I pulled up firefox and boom. There I was in the Google Wave Developer Preview. After staring at it for a minute I moved my mouse and clicked on one of the open developer waves(threads). BAM. Error, Error, Error.

What can you expect right? It is the developer preview and this early in developement. This is more than acceptable right now. I spoke with some of the other developers and was told I would have better luck in Chrome. After pulling up Wave in Chrome the experience was much more enjoyable.

Currently Wave only supports the following browsers:

You have the option of using IE if you want but our experience with Wave and IE was terrible. Personally I wouldn’t mind if it stayed that way. I have never been a fan of IE and now that Microsoft is openly trying to make advances over google with Bing and now partnering with Yahoo to “create the future of search” I think it would be just fine if Google decided to say “hey, Wave works great in our browser! If you want our users to be able to use your browser then make it work with our program.”

Now on to Wave itself. The default layout when you open Wave has your Navigation menu on the left with Inbox, Trash, By Me, Spam, etc. Below that are your contacts. In the middle area you have a list of any Google waves that you have started or have been invited to by order of most recently commented on in real time. From here you can see which ones have been commented on since you left, how many responses there have been that you haven’t looked at yet, other people that are part of the wave and even see what text people are typing in as they type.

When you clikc on a wave it will open to the right and you can scroll through all of the text that has been entered. You can even see text from everyone else that is commenting at the moment in real time.

One cool part of the interface that makes it very intuitive is the ability to minimize any and all of the windows or move them around. You can even click on the minimize button on the navigation and contact menus. Everything that you minimize will appear at the top of the window. While they are there you can click on one to see a mini view of the wave to check on the updates or you can move it back down to the main window.

Here is something else that caught our attention when we first began using our Wave mail:

With standard gMail accounts you are currently given 7352 MB–and counting! With our Google Wave email account we had 25,600 MB. This could just be a perk to being in the developer preview so don’t get too excited just yet however there probably will be a need for more space when using Wave and so I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if all Wave accounts started with 25 GB of space.

We will update when we begin to develop apps.

This morning just a few minutes ago I just received an email confirming that I was still interesetd in participating in the Google Wave sandbox. The email said that if I was to fill out a form and I would receive my account details within the next few days.

Whoo hoo! For those of you behind and not familiar with Google Wave watch this hour and 20 minute long video.

Go ahead that to do list can wait.

The Google Wave beta–which is sure to be in beta for 15+ years since gmail took 5–will be released to 100,000 individuals on September 30th. If you are interested in getting access to the beta you need to “let Google know where to contact you”–as if they don’t already know!

Rumors have been bouncing all around for several months about Amazon potentially acquiring Netflix. While I am sure there are some good things that would come from this I think that good would also come from them remaining separate. Competition is good.

We will update when we hear word one way or another.

Gmail now has quick and easy to use tasks integrated into the Gmail interface much like your chat client. Usable? Yes. Functional? Mostly yes.

This obviously being inspired by another large company who has been accused of taking over the world market seems like it would have come sooner. Still, better late than never and it comes with features we would want like in email ‘add to tasks’ options, print options, etc. Give them a try if you are a gmail user and let us know what you think.

Like I mentioned in an earlier post about the features of Firefox 3.5 some browsers–Chrome 2.0+ and Firefox 3.5+ to be exact–now have location based services available using the W3C Geolocation API.  If you are using one of these browsers and go to Google Maps you will notice a new little box with a circle inside.

This–theoretically–allows Google Maps to locate your position. Location based services like this have been more or less a fad in the past and none have really caught on save location based cell phone applications.  Only time will tell for this one.

My experience with location based Google Maps has been less than ok. When I clicked the button, told Firefox  to allow Google Maps to access my location–and remember my settings–I was told I was about 60 miles off of where I really was.

Come on location based services! You can do better than that. Its not like I am in the sticks on a poor connection either. I am in a decent sized city on a fiber internet connection and that was the best they could do.

I’m not complaining really. The less “they” can find out about us the longer we can postpone the apocalypse–which is fine by me…