Gmail has long had keyboard shortcuts, though learning them can be difficult. Enter the Gboard, a specialized mini-keyboard for Google's e-mail service. It debuts this Friday at an asking price of $19.99.
The Gboard consists of 19 colored keys set in a standard size numpad-only keyboard. Clicking on any one of these performs that particular keyboard shortcut. Included are Gmail-specific features such as starring messages, starting a search, and jumping between message threads. Outside of Gmail they simply act as normal keyboard buttons, and will type in whatever letter or number corresponds with that shortcut.
The device is powered by USB and requires no special software or drivers, however users need to first enable keyboard shortcuts within Gmail's settings before using it. Also worth noting is that it was created not by Google, but by Charlie Mason, a film producer from Venice, Calif. This is his first foray into the computer hardware business.
The Gboard consists of 19 keys, all of which act as shortcuts within Google's Gmail Web mail service.
(Credit: James Martin / CNET)This really is a product that users will either love or hate. Those who have mastered Gmail's shortcuts will see little need to buy special hardware and find a spare USB port to plug it into. Meanwhile, newbie users may be unwilling to take the plunge on such a specific peripheral for a program that works only within another program (the browser). The Gboard runs the risk of being an unappealing prospect to both parties.
It's also not the first attempt at easing the process of learning and remembering shortcuts. This time last year Google offered users a free pack of color-coded shortcut stickers that could be tacked onto any keyboard. There have also long been specialized keyboards for video and audio editing as well as graphical design--all of which provide similar, color-coded keys. Users who don't want to commit, or tack stickers on their keyboard, also have the option of buying a silicone keyboard mat, though no such thing has been created for Gmail.
Considering there are a total of 69 Gmail shortcuts (with more on the way if Google graduates some of its experimental features from its labs section) the Gboard could just be the first step toward creating a full-size (100 plus key) version. In the meantime, its early December release and low price tag make for a good stocking stuffer if you've got a Gmail lover in your family.
The good:
• No setup required
• Color coding is logical and makes it easy to learn the keys
• Good build quality and feel; keys are flat like on a laptop
• At $19.99 it's not that expensive. Most numeric-only keyboards cost about the same.
The bad:
• Does not come close to including all of Gmail's shortcuts
• Could be rendered less useful if Gmail's shortcuts change
• Only comes in one color (black)
SAN FRANCISCO--Most of the new ventures launching at the TechCrunch50 conference are standalone Web sites, but not all. In years past there have been the few hardware launches, and this year is no different. Here are two new bits of hardware, and a new hardware platform that are gunning to make their way into your living room and office in the coming months.
The iTwin splits up into two USB sticks that are paired to talk only to each other
(Credit: iTwin )iTwin is a two-piece bit of USB hardware that acts as a "cableless cable" allowing two computers to connect and share files as long as they have an Internet connection. There's nothing to set up, since both halves of the device are paired together and stay constantly connected. Users just plug it in, and can begin dropping files large and small into a shared folder.
The product will be available beginning early next year for $99, and comes with two paired sides that interlock when not in use. If users lose one of the two sides, they can lock down their account with an SMS message, or by disconnecting the other piece. They can also purchase an additional side, which can be re-paired.
ToyBots is a new gaming platform that lets toy manufacturers plug in their toys to an online network. Much like the Pleo, the personality of the toy can be altered by firmware upgrades, which are directly connected to the Web. Users can then play games and get feedback from their toy, as well as purchase and download new personalities and applications.
The company is hoping to get toy manufacturers on board as partners, and get them to start using the standard firmware profile across their entire line of toys. This would do two big things: let users re-use firmware or applications they've purchased for one toy, onto another, as well as keep money coming in even after a consumer has purchased a toy.
ToyBots' founder demos a toy running the prototype firmware.
(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)
The Fail Whale ate your Twitter user icon for lunch and now it's too heavy to lift.
(Credit: Twitter)Twitter has been hiccuping all day, it seems. Earlier, some users (myself included) noticed occurrences of the service's notorious "fail whale"--the cartoon that pops up when Twitter's servers are overloaded--and later, some members began to report that their profile pictures had disappeared and were replaced by Twitter's default icon.
As they say at Fark, everybody panic!
Well, not really. Twitter CEO Evan Williams acknowledged the issue, saying "if you're missing your icon/avatar, please excuse -- will be back shortly!" in a Twitter post. As of Monday afternoon, some of them are still MIA, and Twitter hasn't said what the exact issue is. But, from what it sounds like, the avatars are not gone forever.
The irony? I navigated to Williams' profile page shortly after 4 p.m. PT, and his own avatar was down. Maybe it was just for solidarity.
Twitter's outage problems were notorious in its early days, regularly downing its servers and spawning rumors that hardware issues had led to the ouster of one of its top engineers. Major outages are now rare at Twitter.
Update: We wanted to note that the "fail whale" art was created by Yiying Lu.
Considering all the horror stories we hear about photos hosted on Facebook and people, you know, losing their jobs over them, maybe this isn't such a bad thing: The social network acknowledged in a blog post on Sunday evening that 10 percent to 15 percent of the billions of photos it hosts were affected by a storage problem, replaced by a question mark.
But they aren't permanently gone, the post by engineer Evan Priestley insisted. "We've already repaired about one-third of affected photos and expect to complete repairs on another third tonight," he explained. "We still have all your photos because we store them in a way that maintains multiple copies of the data in case of hardware failures like this."
The company still isn't quite sure how the outage happened.
"During an otherwise routine software upgrade on Friday night, we ran into some problems with our photo storage and a few of the hard drives where we store photos apparently failed all at once," Priestley wrote. "We're trying to fully understand what happened, since simultaneous hardware failures like this are rare."
Facebook is no stranger to uptime issues, with minor but noticeable outages hitting the social network as recently as two months ago. This one, however, is different in that it specifically affected the photos hosted on the site, leading some members to grow concerned about mass deletions.
If your photos disappeared over the weekend, they are probably back already. But just to be safe--you really should keep a backup on your hard drive. Really.
Facebook might not be a photo-sharing site, per se, but there are a heck of a lot of pictures uploaded to it.
On Tuesday night, engineer Doug Beaver wrote a blog post announcing that the total count of photos on the site now stands at about 10 billion. The social network announced informally in August that it has hit 100 million active users worldwide.
To compare, the News Corp.-owned Photobucket, which has a real-time ticker of photos uploaded, stood at slightly less than 6.2 billion photos on Wednesday morning. Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, hit 2 billion photos just less than a year ago.
"To celebrate (the photo-hosting milestone), we got a bunch of cupcakes and handed them out to our engineering and operations groups," the post read. "One of our engineers calculated that if we had gotten one cupcake for each of our photos, and lined them up side by side, the line could reach halfway to the moon."
Facebook's popularity may indeed reach the moon, but the news is a bit troubling too. Beaver noted that Facebook stores four sizes of each image, meaning that it has more than 40 billion images stored on its servers. That's a lot of storage space required, and though it's much cheaper than it used to be, hardware simply isn't free.
Facebook reportedly borrowed $100 million in May to cover server costs, and while the company is still pretty much swimming in venture capital, it's not clear that revenues will be up to par with server demands any time soon. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that the company hopes to be profitable in three years.
Recent rumors of Intel employees signing up for Facebook accounts en masse might not have been totally unfounded: Facebook has chosen to use Intel's Xeon 5400 processor-based servers to deal with its hardware and software demands. Additionally, the two companies have signed an agreement so that Intel can continue to assess how Facebook can stay stable and improve performance.
Facebook will have "thousands" of Xeon servers, a release said.
It's not an earth-shattering announcement by any means, but Intel's pretty psyched. "Intel is excited to engage with Facebook as they are a dynamic force in the evolution of the Internet," Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's Server Platforms Group, said in Thursday's release. "Facebook's selection of Intel Xeon processors for their next round of infrastructure growth is a testament to the performance, energy efficiency and technology benefits Intel can provide." Translation: it's a big deal for Intel to be able to say it makes the hardware of choice for Silicon Valley's cool kids.
Facebook's not growing quite as fast as it once was, but it's still been expanding steadily and now has over 90 million active users across the globe. With photo- and video-sharing now an essential part of social networks, their server demands can skyrocket--and it was technical difficulties that likely doomed the initial frenzy of growth at social-networking pioneer Friendster, as early execs willingly attest.
The CradlePoint WiPipe, attached to a Verizon EVDO USB Modem
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)An odd little device made me a hero tonight. We were in the middle of a what turned out to be a 13-hour blackout in my San Francisco neighborhood, and my wife was getting antsy since she couldn't get her laptop online to work. She had some battery power left, but no connection. (My computer has cellular, but I'd rather let my wife drive my car than use my laptop.)
But I had brought home a demo unit of the Cradlepoint PHS300, a battery-powered cellular-to-WiiFi router. With a Verizon USB EVDO modem plugged into it, it turned my house into a battery-powered hot spot even though we had no power to our cable modem.
Setting it up took no time at all. Other cool features, which we didn't use, include a built-in chat function for people sharing the connection, and flexible security and administration utilities.
The use cases for this device are limited. It's an expensive networking backup, for example. While the device itself is $179, you'll also need a cellular data plan and modem to use it, and that usually costs about $60 a month. Individuals who need to guarantee themselves that they'll always have Internet access should get a laptop or modem that connects directly to a cellular data network; there's no need to use Wi-Fi as an intermediary. But if you need to quickly pop up a hot spot for several people to use, it's worth looking at.
Today it is possible to mash together Web services into a passable site with only a hobbyist's knowledge of programming. Tools like Yahoo Pipes get you started with the concepts, and then the APIs for products like Google Maps make things like the Chicago Crime Map buildable without requiring a large investment in original technology.
The same has not been true for hardware, but Peter Semmelhack at Bug Labs wants to change that. The company is releasing a hardware development system made of sensing and input modules that snap into a low-cost central Linux-based core, allowing you to mash up your own gadget. The main core, the BugBase, is bit larger than an iPhone. The modules that snap into it are half that size and a standard BugBase has four ports for modules.
Special-purpose modules snap into the BugBase.
(Credit: Bug Labs)Say you want to make some sort of gizmo for your car that records location and acceleration and displays stats on a screen. You could try to write a program for an existing GPS gadget, or you could snap together the necessary Bug Labs modules, write your own code in the Bug Labs system for your device, and go from there.
Bug Labs' system is meant for prototyping, and all the pieces of it are open-source. This means that once you've got your gadget working, you can use the Bug Labs hardware schematics as the basis for your own mass-produced version of the gadget in question. (You can also use the actual Bug circuit boards in your products, since they screw together nicely even when liberated from their plastic snap cases. However, this would be an expensive way to produce hardware.) The development environment is Eclipse. I'm not familiar with it, but it's open-source and looks to be philosophically similar to the Bug hardware--that is, highly modular.
All input/output to the modules is done via Internet protocols, and each hardware component has its own URL. This will make building mesh or networked devices that aren't physically connected to each other relatively easy, and it also means that all Bug-based gizmos are, by default, Web appliances.
The first four modules, and the base.
(Credit: Bug Labs)Bug Labs may get into the business of helping developers make Bug-based prototypes into actual mass consumer products, by embedding Bug-standard hardware with developers' code in more permanent cases.
But you can also just get a bunch of modules and hack around in them for fun (the first modules are: GPS, camera, touch-sensitive LCD, and accelerometer; the company plans to release four new modules each quarter). Bug Labs is very much like Lego Mindstorms: A collection of hardware modules you can snap together and then program. You don't need to sell your work to have a whole lot of fun with this system.
Bug Labs hardware should be available by the end of the year.
See also HeathKit (historical) and CompuLab. Also, Engadget has more Bug specs.
The $198 Google-approved Web 2.0 gPC.
(Credit: Everex)On Thursday, WalMart begins selling the Everex Green gPC TC2502, a $198, low-power, Linux-based PC designed primarily for running Web 2.0 applications.
When users first fire up their gPC, they'll get a Mac-like desktop with a series of program icons "docked" across the bottom. The icons are bookmarks to popular and useful Web 2.0 services from Google and other vendors. There are icons for Google Docs, Gmail, Google Maps, and YouTube, for example, as well as Meebo, Facebook, and Wikipedia. Sprinkled into the lineup are some non-Web-based apps, like Skype and Gimp, but the novice user won't know, initially, which are local applications and which are Web services.
Isn't that as it should be? An app is an app, so why should users know or care if it's running on their local PC or in the cloud?
The gPC icon dock
(Credit: CNET)Unfortunately, using the gPC's Web apps isn't as transparent as we'd like, although that's not Everex's fault. Web apps still run in a browser (and the gPC won't ship with Adobe AIR or another runtime platform that runs online apps in their own windows), so each time a user clicks on one of the icons that's pointing to a URL, it will fire up Firefox or a new tab in it. Also, Web apps require their own online logins (though if you're logged into Google, you have to worry about that only once per session). And, of course, there's the question of where one's data is stored. The gPC has a hard disk, but users of the Web apps won't be putting files on it. (It also has OpenOffice installed on it, but users will have to dig to find the suite.)
My criticisms are aimed mostly at Web apps in general, and this is nonetheless a great product. It costs less than $200 and you don't have to buy one for a child you've never met to get it (not that that's a bad thing, but it would drive up your cost). It will do what most of us need, thanks to all the Web 2.0 sites and services that are available now and that don't require the equivalent of a Cray supercomputer to run acceptably fast. The gPC, which Everex is selling with Google's blessing, gives us a look at what a Web PC should be: A much cheaper but almost-as-capable alternative to a regular PC or Mac. This is the closest thing I've seen to a Web appliance that might actually sell.
The gPC runs a 1.5GHz VIA C7-D processor and ships with 512MB of RAM and a 80GB hard drive. The operating system is gOS, from a new company of the same name. It's a version of Ubuntu 7.10 with the Enlightenment window manager. The $198 price tag does not include a monitor. But it does include 24/7 800-number tech support.
The gPC will be available at Walmart.com and at these Wal-Mart retail stores.
See also these interesting Linux-powered products from Everex competitor Asus: The P5E3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP motherboard with embedded Firefox, and the Eee PC 4G, and low-cost Linux laptop
The gPC runs all the Web apps you'll need as well as several useful Linux-based desktop apps.
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