photos

As we wait for Steve Jobs to take the wraps off what many expect to be a new Apple MacBook Pro, Engadget has posted a blurry photo of what appears to be that rumored laptop.

While the site does not go so far as to pronounce it the real deal, it does note that the photo shares similarities with other photos of laptop cases that leaked on to the Web over the weekend. Engadget also reports that the MacBook Pro will sport two Nvidia GPUs in possible a "hybrid SLI setup" it called "pretty wild."

Meanwhile, … Read more

On Thursday, Photobucket introduced two new features: a way to skin albums and an overhauled organizational tool that lets users drag and drop photos into various folders.

Of the two, the organizer is the biggest enhancement. Users are taken to a dark gray editing environment that lets them make changes without the entire page having to refresh. Everything is drag and drop, which is useful for ferrying photos and videos between albums, and reordering album arrangement. There's also support for batch operations, so you can quickly move, reorder, and rename multiple photos at once.

Compared with Adobe Photoshop Express … Read more

Sharing photos is what we all want to do, but the number of ways to get it done can be overwhelming. For users who want to keep their photos in a small, private circle, don't always want to access a Web site to get their sharing on, or for those who want or need to keep their Web use to a minimum, Memeo Share might be your solution.

Driven by a user-friendly setup wizard, Memeo Share lets you sync files from a designated folder on your computer to the computer of one or more contacts. File-sharing becomes a breeze, … Read more

Google has brought to Linux the beta version of its new Picasa 3 software for image editing, cataloging, and uploading.

The new release catches the open-source operating system up with Windows, which got the Picasa 3 beta one month earlier. There's still no word about a Mac OS X version, although Mike Horowitz, Google's Picasa product manager, told me earlier that "Macs are important to us...We're always looking for new ways of making sure our users are happy, so it's something we're looking at."

The new version adds a retouching tool, automatic … Read more

We've all experienced it. You've taken a bunch of photos or a home video at a family gathering and now you're trying to figure out how to share your work with everyone in your family. It's possible to use online photo sites like Flickr, Shutterfly, or Photobucket, but what if you had a localized program that could share photos and videos immediately? Not all your relatives are as computer savvy as you, so you want a program that works quickly and with the fewest steps. You want a program that anyone in your family will be … Read more

For years, Amy Jo Kim has been a well-known and respected member of the video game design community, as well as the author of perhaps the best book ever written on building online community.

But for the most part, through years of working on other peoples' projects--Ultima Online, The Sims, the virtual world There.com, Rock Band, and many others, as well as consulting for countless companies--Kim has played a supporting role.

That's all set to change. Kim, along with her husband and consulting partner, Scott Kim, are in the midst of what might be their most ambitious project ever: Building their own game company from the ground up.

Their start-up, known as ShuffleBrain, plans to announce the public beta of its first effort, a Facebook game called PhotoGrab, in a matter of weeks. On the one hand, PhotoGrab is a puzzle game, tasking players with matching small snippets of photographs with the full pictures they're taken from--and doing so against a clock that's quickly counting down. The more accurate the placement and the more snippets you can match, the higher the score.

But PhotoGrab is also a social platform that is built around the idea of encouraging photographers to upload groups of their own pictures and make their own games from them.

So, for example, after playing for a little while with a few of the games already in the system, I uploaded five pictures I took last summer while visiting the Corvette factory in Bowling Green, Ky., on my CNET Road Trip 2008 project, and then spent a few minutes selecting small circular pieces of the photos for players of my game to identify. … Read more

By now you've probably heard of Eye-Fi, the Wi-Fi-enabled SD memory card that wirelessly beams photos from your camera to your PC. When it first came out last year, I thought it was overpriced at $99--but now you can scoop up an Eye-Fi Home card for just $59 shipped.

(Note: The above link takes you to CNET's product page for the Eye-Fi Home. On the right-hand side, you'll see that several vendors are offering the card for $59. To get free shipping, choose either BuyDig or Beach Camera.)

I've been testing an Eye-Fi for the last … Read more

A few hours ahead of the official launch event in New York, T-Mobile has begun showing views of its G1 phone, the HTC Dream model that will be the first to sport Google's Android operating system.

For a peek at some of the photos, we recommend a look at Boy Genius Report, which got its shots from T-Mobile's G1 site.

Also worth a peek are some shots at TmoNews and Gizmodo, which shows some comparatively rare white-case models of the handset.

The views reveal few surprises for those who've seen Google's earlier Android demonstrations, earlier leaked shots, … Read more

Microsoft has decided that Windows 7 won't include built-in programs for e-mail, photo editing, and movie making, as was done with Windows Vista, CNET News.com has learned.

The software maker included Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Mail, and Windows Movie Maker as part of Vista, but later chose to offer separate downloadable Windows Live programs that essentially replaced those components with versions that could connect to online services from Microsoft and others.

Microsoft told CNET News late Monday that it has decided to remove those features entirely from Windows 7 and instead offer only the service-connected Windows Live versions … Read more