.::REALITYRECALL::.

Horses, Wales

Photograph by Marian Ubrankovic

This Month in Photo of the Day: Animal Pictures

This photograph was taken near Pitt’s Head in Snowdonia National Park. The sun was setting and the backlighting created this dramatic picture.

(This photo and caption were submitted to the 2011 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest).

The deadline for entering the photo contest is July 11. Send in your best shots today!

See more pictures of U.K. national parksLearn more about horses &raquo

Been lusting after the Galaxy S II, but aren’t willing to break the bank? We hear you, and apparently Samsung does too. Up for pre-order today, on the Swedish arm of Three, is the Galaxy Z — billed as a more affordable spawn from its Korean progenitor. The Gingerbread-toting handset will sport a 4.2-inch Super Clear LCD, 1GHz dual core processor (rumored to be Tegra 2), and 8GB of onboard storage, extensible with microSD. Fret not camera junkies, also present is a 5 megapixel sensor plus flash and “HD” video recording. All that stands between you and this little Galaxy, are 4,000 kronor (about $630) and your undying love of Swedish meatballs.

Samsung Galaxy Z: Galaxy S II’s ‘affordable little brother’ now ready for pre-order originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 05:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Posted by Jason Cornwell, User Experience Designer

We get a lot of great feedback about how Gmail helps you be more efficient, keep in touch with family and friends, and get work done. We’ve saved you from forgetting attachments and made sure that you got the right Bob. Over the years, adding countless features to Gmail has made it an increasingly powerful communication hub, but along the way the interface has also become more cluttered and complex.

That’s one of the reasons we’re embarking on a series of interface updates to help strip out unnecessary clutter and make Gmail as beautiful as it is powerful. This is part of a Google-wide effort to bring you an experience that’s more focused, elastic, and effortless across all of our products. The changes are not going to happen all at once. We know that you love and care about Gmail as much as we do, and we’ll be working on these upgrades gradually over the next few months to allow plenty of time to understand and incorporate your feedback into the evolving design.

We’re kicking things off with two new themes for you to try out as a sort of sneak peek at what we’re up to. Starting today, you’ll see the “Preview” and “Preview (Dense)” themes in the Themes tab in Gmail Settings. Why two themes? Our new interface will eventually expand dynamically to accommodate different screen sizes and user preferences, but until then you can pick the information density that you prefer.

Here’s what one of the new themes currently looks like:

And in conversation view:

Click the images above to see larger versions.

If you poke around you’ll hopefully find a lot to like and a much cleaner, modern look but also few rough edges. In particular, some Labs features may look a little strange in the new themes. We plan to fix these issues as we roll out changes in the coming months. You can also expect some updated themes that embody the same design principles but are better suited to working in a dark environment, use a different color palette, or include the illustrations that we know many of you love to see around your inbox.

Look out for these and other new features over the next few months. In the meantime, try out the new themes as a preview of the future of Gmail and let us know what you think.

P.S. Like Gmail, Google Calendar is also getting a new look. You’ll see it automatically within the next few days so there’s no need to turn it on, and we’ll also continue to make improvements there in the coming months. Details about the current changes to Calendar can be found in the Calendar help center.

It looks like Facebook isn’t the only one planning a secret Instagram rival. Pool Party is Google’s Android-based answer to Instagram and it’s already in beta testing (accessible by invite only). More »

Rumor has it that ASUS wont be the only company with a sliding Android tablet this holiday season — DigiTimes claims to have it on good authority that Acer will be launching its own 10.1-inch slate with a peekaboo QWERTY stashed behind the screen. The ARM-powered device is reportedly being manufactured by Compal, but beyond that your guess is as good as ours. By the time it lands we should be getting our first taste of Ice Cream Sandwich, but it’s a pretty safe bet if this unnamed device does ship later this year, it’ll do so with Honeycomb on board.

Acer planning a sliding Android tab for the holidays, won’t fit in your stocking originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Jun 2011 19:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPhones. iPads. Android. Windows Phone 7. And even Jailbroken phones. We’ve updated all of our essential apps lists to include a few forgotten favorites, some long awaited arrivals and, as always, even more amazing apps. Check them out! More »

““I no longer believed in the idea of soul mates, or love at first sight. But I was beginning to believe that a very few times in your life, if you were lucky, you might meet someone who was exactly right for you. Not because he was perfect, or because you were, but because your combined flaws were arranged in a way that allowed two separate beings to hinge together.””

– Lisa Kleypas (via tror)

“Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies”

– Aristotle | goodbyerachel (via quote-book)

Today we’ve updated the Google search experience for BlackBerry 6.0 WebKit enabled devices. We’ve added a number of enhanced search features integrated throughout the homepage and search result pages, making searching faster and easier on www.google.com, especially on touch-enabled Blackberry devices.

Left: Improved homepage with autocomplete and search history as you type.

Right: See more information with search options and enhanced results.

• Enter searches faster: Save time by using autocomplete and search history queries that appear beneath the search box as you type.
• Web search: Find what you're searching for fast. Comprehensive results pages let you see relevant websites, images, videos, news, real-time results and more. Simply click on the arrow button ‘>>’ to the left of the top search box for more refinement options.
• Image search: Swipe through image results quickly and easily on touch enabled devices. Start by selecting ‘Images’ at the top of www.google.com, then enter a search. From there, click on any image to view a larger size.
• Local search: Find restaurants, shops and other popular business categories with a single tap. Start by selecting ‘Places’ at the top of www.google.com, then click on an icon from the Places homepage.

These features and more are available on most RIM OS 6.0+ devices with WebKit browsers like the BlackBerry Torch and BlackBerry Bold 9780, and can be accessed in 20 languages across 70 countries.

To try out the new features, go to www.google.com in your mobile browser. We recommend that you bookmark Google Search to your phone’s home screen, so that Google search is just one click away.

Posted by Ryan Doherty, Software Engineer

While tech pundits are widely praising Google’s new Plus product, I’ve found the one feature that could take away from Facebook where it’s most dominant: Time on the site.

Facebook users are known for staying on the site for over half an hour a day, something no other site could compete with… until now.

To be honest, my gut reaction after using Google Plus was initially, “Why on earth would anybody switch to this from Facebook?”

However, when I loaded up Google Finance as I do every morning, I suddenly realized that I was asking the wrong question. The reality is that users won’t have the option of not using Google Plus.

Google already has more users than Facebook, over one billion. They aren’t going to suddenly leave Facebook in droves, they’re just going to spend more time on all the sites in Google’s network. That big notifications box in the top right of all Google sites is the reason why.

As I’m browsing around Google-powered sites there’s occasionally a red notification alert that pops up and immediately grabs my attention. Soon enough I’m clicking through the various notifications and seeing what my friends have shared and who has recently begun sharing with me.

It’s a not-so-subtle tactic by Google to quickly increase the amount of time you end up spending on Google properties. It’s also an easy way to immediately add social discovery to all of Google’s products.

The notifications box is also something that Google could leverage to steal one of Facebook’s most valuable assets: developers.

Something like 30 percent or more of all Facebook users’ time on the site is from applications. While Zynga, which is reportedly filing to go public this week, has built a multi-billion dollar business on top of the platform, it has little loyalty to the company.

The primary reason is that Facebook is now taking a 30 percent cut of every game developer’s business. By contrast, Google, which brings in over $30 billion in revenue each year, could easily afford to let developers keep all the money they generate.

Add in the fact that Google also has the fastest growing mobile distribution channel of any company (Android) and you suddenly realize the power that the search giant has to woo developers.

No, Google Plus is not a “Facebook killer,” but despite the company’s numerous failed attempts at getting into social media, the new Plus product gives users no other option but to accept the fact that Google is becoming exactly that: social.

This is clearly just the start, though. Once Google Plus becomes stable and more widely used, the company will attempt to compete with Facebook where it matters most by building an entire social platform. The notifications are just one indicator of what lays ahead.

Readers, have you tried Google Plus yet — do you think it has the potential to cut into your use of Facebook?

Disclosure: I own shares of Google.

Update
Looks like I was dead on with the platform prediction … there’s now code already showing their interest in launching games within the system.

It may be too soon to tell quite how you feel about Google+, but let me tell you right now: the new Google Calendar look is love at first sight. Clean, smooth, sparse—it's everything we've ever loved about Google's UI, coming out just at a time when the rest of its properties get more cluttered by the day. More »

Canadian Stanton Friedman is a superstar in the UFO world, a man who can walk into a conference about aliens and be recognized the way that golf fans recognize Tiger Woods prowling the fairways of the Masters.

GoDropBox (no relation to DropBox) is an add-on for Google Apps that allows public uploads to your Google Docs account. The add-on provides a link you can send to anyone who has a file to upload, and will email you when they’ve uploaded a file. More »

You’ve got to hand it to IBM’s engineers. They drag themselves into work after their company’s 100th birthday party, pop a few Alka-Seltzers and then promptly announce yet another seismic invention. This time it’s a new kind of phase change memory (PCM) that reads and writes 100 times faster than flash, stays reliable for millions of write-cycles (as opposed to just thousands with flash), and is cheap enough to be used in anything from enterprise-level servers all the way down to mobile phones. PCM is based on a special alloy that can be nudged into different physical states, or phases, by controlled bursts of electricity. In the past, the technology suffered from the tendency of one of the states to relax and increase its electrical resistance over time, leading to read errors. Another limitation was that each alloy cell could only store a single bit of data. But IBM employees burn through problems like these on their cigarette breaks: not only is their latest variant more reliable, it can also store four data bits per cell, which means we can expect a data storage “paradigm shift” within the next five years. Combine this with Intel’s promised 50Gbps interconnect, which has a similar ETA, and data will start flowing faster than booze from an open bar on the boss’s tab. There’s more detailed science in the PR after the break, if you have a clear head.

Continue reading IBM develops ‘instantaneous’ memory, 100x faster than flash

IBM develops ‘instantaneous’ memory, 100x faster than flash originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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