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Advanced file grabber

Aaron's WebVacuum promises to help users capture all of the pictures and other files they can handle from their favorite Web sites. This unique program could be a huge help to many, but runs the risk of being overly complicated.

The compact interface is densely packed with tabs, buttons, and check boxes, and may overwhelm novice users. Fortunately, a brief tutorial pops up to explain the program's purpose and how to get quickly started, which is very helpful. Like a browser, there's a field for the URL of the page you want to pull from. Below that … Read more

Lacks browser integration

We liked the premise of this bookmarking tool, which offers a thumbnail view of the pages in your bookmarks list to make it easier to find the one you want. In practice, CORB Bookmark Thumbnail doesn't completely integrate with your browser, or allow you access to any user settings.

The program doesn't ask you whether or not you want the additional desktop shortcut it adds, or if you want to keep its default setting of launching automatically at startup. CORB Bookmark Thumbnail also doesn't allow the user to change these settings through an options menu, so you'… Read more

Google, Microsoft, Apple sued over preview icons

This post was updated on January 5 and January 7 with corrected and updated information about the plaintiff company, an updated link to an amended filing, and a comment from Google. See bottom of post for correction.

An Arizona-based networking company on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Google, Microsoft, and Apple, alleging that all three tech giants violated a patent it owns on the use of document-preview icons--or thumbnails--in operating systems.

In the suit, Cygnus Systems targets Google's Chrome, Microsoft's Vista and Internet Explorer 8, and Apple's iPhone, Safari, and Mac OS X as patent infringers. Apple … Read more

Google to appeal German copyright decisions

Google lost two copyright cases in Germany on Monday but the search company reportedly plans to appeal.

A German court ruled that Google violated the copyright of Michael Bernhard by displaying one of his photographs as a preview thumbnail, according to the Bloomberg news service.

Separately, a German court ruled in favor of Thomas Horn, who owns the copyright to some German comics that appeared in Google's search results.

In Bernhard's case, the court ruled "that it doesn't matter that thumbnails are much smaller than the original pictures and are displayed in a lower resolution," … Read more

Power Downloader converts images to thumbs quickly

Recently Power Downloader was sifting through his daily e-mails when he came across a message from Francois Foto, his photographer friend from France. In the e-mail, Francois asked about Thanksgiving and what else Power had planned for the holidays, but at the end of his message he had a special request for PD. Francois was attempting to build a Web site of his photos so people could see his work, but wondered if there was a way to convert all of his larger images into uniform thumbnails. His initial searches for thumbnail products turned up so many results that Francois … Read more

Listpic returns with classifieds from Oodle.com

Listpic, the controversial visual front-end for Craigslist, has made the switch to classifieds service Oodle.com. The change comes after last week's cease and desist order from Craigslist, which forced Listpic to discontinue scraping data from the popular classifieds service. Listpic was apparently sucking up so much of Craigslist's bandwidth that the site's performance had suffered. Craigslist then fired back with legal action.

Oodle.com is a service that aggregates classifieds listings from a number of local and national sites. It claims to let users search over 20 million listings that have been pulled from more than … Read more

Flickr upgrades slide shows, commence eye candy

Flickr quietly launched a new version of its slide show feature today. The new design forgoes the once small black box and takes over your entire browser window with full-sized photos that fade into one another. Also tweaked is the speed control, which has gone from a slow to fast slider to one-click options for slow, medium, and fast. Flickr decided to retool the slide show feature based on user feedback, as the previous version would restrict photos down to small size, even on large monitors or browsers set to full screen. The new version will simply resize itself to … Read more

Microsoft Labs' Deepfish: iPhone for everyone

Microsoft announced Deepfish , a new mobile browsing technology from itslabs group. Deepfish is a small, downloadable application for Windows Smartphone users. The app presents Web content the same way you'd see it on your computer's Web browser. If you've seen the mobile version of Apple's Safari on the upcoming iPhone, then you have an idea of how Deepfish works.

Deepfish is designed like an array of photo thumbnails. To zoom into a section you want to see in more detail, you just select it with a "magnify box" controlled by your phone's directional pad or pointer. If you want to zoom back out, the original version of the page will still be loaded in your phone's memory cache--which should save a considerable amount of time (and data usage).

In our brief hands-on with it today, we noticed a few quirks.… Read more

Blinkx makes video previews awesome

Embeddable video is getting pretty cool. Static preview images seem to be a thing of the past. Blinkx, which is showcasing its service today at Demo 2007, is announcing a new widget called 'Blinkx It' that crawls your blog or Web site to deliver contextual video content. Think of it as Google Ad Sense with videos and no advertising. For example, clicking the 'Blinkx It' widget below will bring up videos related to News.com stories:

This is nice and unobtrusive, but the results aren't necessarily pertinent. In most cases, I was unable to get a smattering of relevant … Read more