We've covered a number of Web history tracking and organizing tools in the past, but Wikipedia Diver may be one of the most interesting, albeit niche. This Firefox add-on gives you a visual history of everywhere you've been on Wikipedia, and organizes it down to the day, order, and session in which you visited the sites, making it easy to revisit old entries.
Each visited page is presented as a small red globe that you can click on to advance the timeline. There's also a source list of every site you visited, that will take you right to the page.
Tiny red balls tell you how you got from looking at video game descriptions to the molecular makeup of precious metals.
(Credit: CNET)Like some other Web history trackers, Wikipedia Diver intelligently tracks when you hit the back button on your browser. Each time you leave whatever Wikipedia entry you're on to visit a link that's on that page, it simply attaches it to your history. In one entry I was looking at, I had clicked on seven different links that were on that page, and the extension kept track of how I had arrived at each of those pages. That in itself can be fun to look at--e.g. how I got from the Zoopraxiscope to the assassination of Alfred Herrhausen.
One thing it does not track are the reference links you click when exiting the site to view a source. I'd like to see this added as an option, but understandably that takes it into the realm of watching everything you do.
Also worth a mention is that all of this data is kept safe and secure on your local machine, and never sent to the cloud. Like any other extension that does this, this means that your information isn't being beamed elsewhere, although you can only access your history on that particular machine, and in that particular browser.
When Opera released its widget software development kit last year, there was little doubt that some cool applications would make their way to the company's browser. More than a year later, they indeed have.
I've been sifting through hundreds of Opera widgets that all work with the Opera browser for your Mac, Linux box, or PC. I've found 10 that stand out from the others. Opera users should definitely try these out.
10 Opera widgets
Brainkrieg Brainkrieg is a fun game that does its best to "exercise your brain." The tool gives you a variety of games to play that test your memory and help you think. The point of the game is to decrease your brain age. It's somewhat similar to Brain Age on the Nintendo DS, but the latter is a bit more sophisticated.
Brainkrieg helps you improve your memory.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Dotoo Dotoo is a to-do list widget in your Opera browser. You can create a host of to-do lists and access them all from within the widget. Adding tasks is as simple as pressing the "+" button under your list and inputting your task. It's not a sophisticated widget, so you won't be able to track your progress. But if you want to quickly add a few tasks, you should be happy with what you find.
Dotoo lets you create a quick to-do list.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Facebook Notifier Facebook Notifier gives you a listing of all your friends' recent status updates. You can't update your profile in the application, but you can easily access your profile with the links in the widget. It might not be the most useful app, but if you want to see what your friends are up to while you're browsing outside Facebook, it's a fine choice.
Facebook Notifier keeps you up-to-date.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Microsoft has quietly confirmed that it is getting out of the encyclopedia business, ending its long-standing Encarta product.
As noted by Ars Technica, the software maker says it will discontinue all its online Encarta products by October, with the exception of Encarta Japan, which will run through the end of the year. It will also stop selling Microsoft Student and Encarta Premium, paid software products that included the online encyclopedia.
In a posting on its Web site, Microsoft said that the move reflected the change in the way people use reference material. It didn't mention Wikipedia by name, but I think we all know the biggest change to encyclopedias to come around in recent memory.
"Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years," Microsoft said. "However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past. As part of Microsoft's goal to deliver the most effective and engaging resources for today's consumer, it has made the decision to exit the Encarta business."
The move is one of a relative handful of products that Microsoft has discontinued in the wake of expense cuts implemented in January, cuts that included the company's first across-the-board layoffs.
Last week, Microsoft said it was scrapping a Web analytics product that was in beta. In November, the company announced plans to stop selling its Windows Live OneCare antivirus product.
Microsoft has been publishing Encarta, in various forms, for more than a decade. It has also scooped up various print encyclopedias along the way, according to Wikipedia (I love irony). While the original Encarta was based on Funk and Wagnalls, Microsoft later bought Collier's Encyclopedia and New Merit Scholar's Encyclopedia and incorporated those two products into Encarta, again according to Wikipedia.
(Credit:
CNET)
If you're one whose search results lead you to a Wikipedia page nine times out of ten, you would do well to install the Googlepedia extension for Firefox.
This free, terrifically easy add-on pulls the Wikipedia article most closely associated with your search term into the right half of a Google search results page. Modest controls let you expand, shrink, or hide the article.
Here's the best part: clicking a link within the article feeds the term back into Google's search engine, and therefore back into Googlepedia's cycle of serving up Wikipedia articles.
Googlepedia will undoubtedly save you time if a quick search is all you need. If you're one to submit to Wikipedia's siren call of never-ending knowledge, download at your own risk.
Quickpedia isn't the only Wikipedia-scouring app for Google Android, but it's the best we've seen so far.
The free application makes it easy to search and browse Wikipedia for articles, throwing in a few tiny twists along the way to make navigating, reading, and learning interesting tidbits a breeze.
You can see it all unfold in this First Look video.
Correction made on October 27 at 9:40 a.m. PDT: See details below.
Google Earth for the iPhone can show satellite views of the world in 3D, in this case the Matterhorn, and dots the display with blue squares showing geotagged Panoramio photos.
(Credit: Google)SAN FRANCISCO--Google already has customized some of its Web sites for display on the iPhone, but now the company also dived headlong onto Apple's highly regarded mobile phone with a full-fledge application, a handheld version of its Google Earth geographical software (download for Windows and Mac).
Google Earth lets people virtually fly around a 3D view of the world made from satellite and aerial imagery mapped onto the planet's mountains and valleys. The iPhone version reproduces this core experience, downloading imagery from Google's servers as the perspective shifts and dotting the map with landmarks, photos, and other information.
"The idea of having Earth on a mobile device is something people dreamed of back to the Keyhole days and before," said Peter Birch, Google Earth's product manager, referring to the satellite imagery company Google acquired in 2004. "This is the first opportunity we've had to be able to deliver a great experience."
Keyhole began its first version of what later became Google Earth in 2001, when computer horsepower and network capacity had not risen to their current levels. "A lot of that core engine can run on a device like this," Birch said.
The free software started becoming available through Apple's App store on Sunday (download here). (Update 7:50 p.m. PDT: Apparently Australian App Store users get the first crack at this software, but it should be spreading to other regions "soon," Google said.) It's a free download in 20 countries, running in all 18 languages the iPhone supports.
Surprising performance, good interface
I tried the application late last week and was impressed how well the iPhone version kept up with the performance, features, and usability of Google Earth for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux--at least, while using a Wi-Fi network connection. For example, your view of the world starts looking straight down, but you can tilt the view so terrain contours are visible, and generating that variable perspective takes some significant processing.
Search results, such as cafes in Trento, Italy, show as pushpins on the Google Earth view.
(Credit: Google)What's most interesting to me, though, is that the iPhone's multitouch screen actually made using the application easier than the PC versions. Dragging a fingertip across the screen slides the view appropriately, of course. Two-finger pinch gestures not only zoom in and out, but also, by adding a little twirling rotary motion, steer the view's orientation in one direction or another.
Another nice feature: When the iPhone is tilted a certain angle out of horizontal, Google Earth reads data from the phone's accelerometer and adjusts your view accordingly, so you can look up into the sky. And it's integrated with the iPhone's ability to locate itself through GPS, Wi-Fi networks, and mobile phone towers.
The only things I didn't figure out on my own within a minute of use is that you can use a two-finger drag to tilt the perspective back--flight-simulator gamers might think of pulling the stick back to lift the nose of a virtual airplane--and that you also can zoom in and out with single-finger and two-finger double-tapping, respectively.
"One of the challenges we face with Google Earth is people aren't used to moving around in 3D, especially if you're moving around with a mouse," Birch said.
Touching the circular icon on the lower left of the screen moves the view to your current location, shown with a blue ring. The W icons indicate geotagged Wikipedia entries.
(Credit: Google)It's a very intuitive interface, a notch more so than the mouse controls of the PC version--though I've heard Google Earth is much easier to grasp with a 3D controller such as Logitech's 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator. One intriguing possibility is that Google could bring this interface to multitouch-aware computers such as Apple's newer MacBook models.
"Macs have multitouch on them," Birch said. "That's something we could consider."
Just a curiosity?
So what exactly do you use Google Earth for?
Though you can search for specific addresses, Google Earth in general is more for exploring than for practical tasks such as navigation. There's no turn-by-turn directions and no map view showing street names, as on Google Maps, for example.
But there is some practical utility. The computer version of Google Earth can show many layers of information, including user-supplied ones on the Internet. The iPhone is more limited for now, with small blue squares indicating where you can see geotagged photos of a particular area that are stored on Google's Panoramio site and "W" icons indicating links to geotagged Wikipedia articles.
Also handy for folks whizzing around foreign cities in buses, taxies, rental cars, or trains, the iPhone app can show your changing location on a map.
Using the search tool gives a scrollable list of search results.
(Credit: Google) Search + mapping = revenue
And where would a Google application be without search? The Google Earth iPhone application will show search results such as pizza restaurants as small red pushpins. Touching the pushpin will pop up a window with information such as a business's Web site and phone number.
And happily, like Safari but unlike most iPhone applications, Google Earth can use a horizontally oriented touch-screen keyboard, too.
Google Earth for iPhone has a small Webkit-based browser to show the specific information users click on, and the bare-bones browsing experience includes a link to the more fully featured Safari browser Apple builds into the iPhone. One handy trick: when you click the address of a business, the iPhone will intercept the command and show it on the Google Maps application so you can get directions. Personally, I'd prefer a more direct link to Google Maps, though.
And where would Google search be without Google advertising? There are now ads in Google Maps for desktop computers, and Google Earth for PCs shows "very limited" ads right now, Birch said, but currently there are no ads on the iPhone version of Google Earth, but Birch said Google is "definitely not" ruling it out.
Touching a blue square on the Google Earth interface brings up people's geographically tagged photos stored at Google's Panoramio site.
(Credit: Google)"Within (Google's geographic products group) as a whole, we see advertising as a huge opportunity. Geographic mapping as a business for Google is a great opportunity. We wouln't be in it if we didn't see it as a major bottom-line contributor," Birch said. "We're absolutely looking at and experimenting with ads in Earth as well."
Google Earth is a little different from many Google products, though, because the company also sells premium versions of the software, so Google has alternate revenue sources.
Google Earth for Android?
Birch was cagey about what else will come of the software, but Google's Android operating system for mobile phones appears to be high on the list.
"We're huge fans of the iPhone. It's a fantastic platform and a great opportunity to show Google technology. We're equally excited about Android," Birch said. However, he added, "We have nothing to announce right now."
Adding other features available on the desktop version of Google Earth also is a possibility. There's no support for the 3D buildings Google Earth can show, for example, nor the ability to view KML (Keyhole Markup Language) data such as a guided city tour.
"There are a lot of things on the wish list," Birch said.
Even in its 1.0 incarnation, though, Google Earth for the iPhone should prove entertaining and useful for geography buffs or virtual tourists.
Correction: This story incorrectly described the current iPhone's navigational abilities. The phone can provide step-by-step driving directions.
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Google)
WikiMobile Encyclopedia has been around for awhile for the BlackBerry and Windows Mobile Pocket PC, so it's no surprise to see it formatted for the Google Android G1 phone.
Just as advertised, WikiMobile Encyclopedia crawls Wikipedia.com for articles, offering up predictive search queries as you type your term. You can also search Wikipedia for a random article or browse what's popular, especially if you have a few minutes to kill or are looking for a factoid to impress people at a dinner party.
Interestingly, instead of scrolling or flicking the results page vertically, the app slices the text into pages. You click "next" or flick the screen to the left to advance. It's too bad there isn't an option for those who prefer consuming their articles in one gulp instead of being force-fed bites.
Much of the program's functionality hides out in the center menu button where you can view just the article's pictures, a table of contents, and, where available, a bunch of quick facts. It's useful being able to bookmark pages for reference; e-mailing them to a friend is the next natural progression. It's a good app for playing information fetch, but we'd like to see it take advantage of more of the G1's features.
Get more of CNET's news and reviews on the T-Mobile G1 and Google Android apps.
The idea behind WikiTaxi is so simple that the utility of it should be obvious: take Wikipedia offline. How cool is that? The real question is, though, does it work? Is it even possible to take the massive online encyclopedia offline in a usable format?
Surprisingly, the answer is yes. WikiTaxi compresses all of Wikipedia into a database that's searchable, fully usable, and small enough to fit on an 8GB USB drive. It grabs the Wikipedia database dump every few weeks, keeping your offline entries up-to-date with the latest changes. There's also an option in the program to update it yourself, if you happen to venture near enough to an Internet connection.
As a single-file app, WikiTaxi is easy to manage--hence the portability. To install it, you extract the file to any folder. When you open it, it opens to a randomly selected page, and you can browse from there. WikiTaxi does leave Wikipedia's images behind to keep the file size down, so if you need graphics this might not be for you. Also, given the nature of WikiTaxi, don't forget that external links are not supported for obvious reasons. Internal links should still work, though. So as a growing number of people try to take advantage of the Internet's resources without getting all the online distractions, WikiTaxi is a smart way to bus around one of the best tools on the Web.
As you might have noticed, Power Downloader hasn't been around for the past few weeks. Even on vacation and out of range of a Wi-Fi signal, Power D's been able to look up any question he has on Wikipedia. He managed that little superheroic feat with a sharp program called WikiTaxi.
WikiTaxi compresses Wikipedia down to offline size.
(Credit: WikiTaxi)WikiTaxi compresses all of Wikipedia into a database that's searchable, fully usable, and small enough to fit on an 8 GB USB drive. Power D knew not to be skeptical about the entries getting old because WikiTaxi grabs the Wikipedia database dump every few weeks. There's also an option in the program to update it yourself, if you do happen to find yourself near a fleeting connection to the Internet.
As a single-file app, WikiTaxi is easy to manage--hence the portability. To install it, you extract the file to any folder. When you open it, it opens to a randomly selected page, and you can browse from there. Power D cautions users who want the images from Wikipedia, though, that WikiTaxi abandons those to keep the file size down. Also, internal links are supported, but external ones are not for obvious reasons.
For those who want to learn more, the WikiTaxi site explains in further detail how the database, compression, and installation works.
This excellent freeware program will stop you from ever fretting over a definition or antonym again. WordWeb offers hot-key lookup and offline resources in a smart package.
In addition to displaying definitions, synonyms, and antonyms, WordWeb can find sets of related words. The database has more than 150,000 root words and 120,000 synonym sets, and plenty of proper nouns, pronunciations, and usage tags. It can't tell you when you've split your infinitives or garbled your gerunds, but it gives great word accuracy on the fly.
