When Google unveiled Project Glass, the tech world instantly fell into two camps. Camp one was excited: we’re living in the sci-fi future! Camp two, though, wasn’t so happy. It’s vapourware! some said, while others worried that Google just wanted to plaster ads on the entire world. Is either camp correct? Let’s find out.

What is Google’s Project Glass?

Google Glass is the attempt to make wearable computing mainstream, and it’s effectively a smart pair of glasses with an integrated heads-up display and a battery hidden inside the frame.

Wearable computing is not a new idea, but Google’s enormous bank account and can-do attitude means that Project Glass could well be the first product to do significant numbers.

When will Google Glass be released?

It looks as though Project Glass will see a public release in 2014 at the earliest. Latest news is that developers will be able to get hold of ‘explorer edition’ units at some point in 2013 with a “broad consumer offering” arriving a year later.

What’s the difference between Google Glasses and Google Goggles?

Google Goggles is software, an app that can search the web based on photos and scans. Google Glass is hardware.

How does Project Glass work?

According to well-informed Google blogger Seth Weintraub, Google’s Project Glass glasses will probably use a transparent LCD or AMOLED display to put information in front of your eyeballs. It’s location-aware thanks to a camera and GPS, and you can scroll and click on information by tilting your head, something that is apparently quite easy to master. Google Glasses will also use voice input and output.

An FCC filing in the US also revealed more potential details, suggesting that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth would be used to send pictures to the screen, whilst bone-induction may be used for sound, vibrating your skull to communicate the sound into your inner ear. It’s not a new technology, but certainly does have critics who suggest that it falls short of traditional headphones.

What are the Google Glass specifications?

The New York Times says that the glasses will run Android, will include a small screen in front of your eye and will have motion sensors, GPS and either 3G or 4G data connections. Weintraub says that the device is designed to be a stand-alone device rather than an Android phone peripheral: while Project Glass can connect to a smartphone via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth 4.0, “it communicates directly with the cloud”. There is also a front-facing camera and a flash, although it’s not a multi-megapixel monster, and the most recent prototype’s screen isn’t transparent.

What will I be able to do with Google Glasses?

According to Google’s own video, you’ll be a super-being with the ability to have tiny people talking to you in the corner of your eye, to find your way around using sat-nav, to know when the subway’s closed, to take and share photographs and to learn the ukelele in a day.

YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c6W4CCU9M4&hd=1

GLASS ACT: Google’s video is fun, but it’s not this-year fun: expect more modest systems at first

OK, what will I really be able to do with Google Glass? Is Google Glass a vision of the future?

Nobody knows. The idea is to deliver augmented reality, with information that’s directly relevant to your surroundings appearing in front of you whenever you need it. For example, your glasses might tell you where the nearest decent restaurant is, book your table, invite your friends and show you how to get there, or they might provide work-related information when you’re at your desk.

What information we’ll use it for, if we use it at all, remains to be seen: like Apple’s Siri, it’s a technology with enormous potential. It could even end up in contact lenses: one of the Project Glass team, Babak Parviz of the University of Washington, recently built a contact lens with embedded electronics.

I already wear glasses. Will Google Glasses work for me?

Yes. Google is experimenting with designs that will fit over existing glasses so you don’t have to wear two lots of specs.

Is Google Glass vapourware?

The New York Times says no: Google’s got some of its very best people working on the project, and experts such as wearable computing specialist Michael Liebhold say that “In addition to having a superstar team of scientists who specialize in wearable, they also have the needed data elements, including Google Maps.”

Not everyone is convinced. Wired spoke to Blair MacIntyre, director of the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech, who said “you could not do [augmented reality] with a display like this.” MIT Media Lab researcher Pranav Mistry agreed, saying that “the small screen seen in the photos cannot give the experience the video is showing.”

There are several engineering issues – making a screen that works in darkness and in bright sunlight is tough – and mobile display technology doesn’t offer dynamic focusing, which reads your eye to deliver perfectly clear visuals. Current wearable displays have to be two feet away from your face.

There’s clearly a big gap between Google’s demo video and the actual product: Google says its photos “show what this technology could look like” and its video demonstrates “what it might enable you to do” [emphasis added by us].

On a separate note, Google is going to great lengths to keep its Glass development at least partly private. Developers attending its first event had to sign strict non-disclosure agreements that forbade them from spilling the beans. Isn’t glass supposed to be transparent?

What is the Project Glass price?

The NYT again: according to “several Google employees familiar with the project who asked not to be named,” the glasses are expected “to cost around the price of current smartphones.” So that’s around $750/£500, then, possibly with the help of a hefty Google subsidy.

The developer versions – traditionally more expensive that the final consumer units – were made available for pre-order for $1500 (c£966).

Is Project Glass evil?

It could be. Google’s business is about making money from advertising, and some people worry that Google Glass is its attempt to monetise your eyeballs by blasting you with ads whenever you look at something.

If you think pop-ups are annoying in a web browser, imagine them in front of your face. The ADmented Reality spoof is one of very many parodies that made us laugh.

Some of the parodies actually make a good point by showing people bumping into stuff: heads-up displays can be distracting, and there may be safety issues too. Until Google ships its self-driving car, the thought of drivers being distracted by their glasses is fairly terrifying.

There are privacy implications too. Never mind your web history: Google Glass might record everything you see and do.

Google Glass pre-order customers will get regular updates

Those people who paid Google $1,500 for the privilege of pre-ordering some Project Glass specs will be receiving “private updates” through Google+.

Will Google Glasses make me look like a dork?

Er… yes.

I have a lot of love for Firefox, and for the good people of Mozilla: the web might be nice now, but if they hadn’t come along and fought Microsoft, today’s internet would be marginally less fun than getting punched repeatedly in the face.

The problem at the turn of the century was that developers were coding and for and testing on just one platform, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and ignoring everything else. “To the codemobile!” Mozilla shouted. “We must save the web!”

Save it they did, but as every superhero knows, when you knock down one bad guy another one always comes to take his place.

Today, developers are either coding for a single browser platform – WebKit – or they’re bypassing the web altogether, lured into the warm embrace of walled-off app stores selling platform-specific wrappers for web services. To the codemobile!

Everyone’s a winner, baby

Firefox OS isn’t for you, Mr iPhone user, and it isn’t for you either, Miss Galaxy S3. At least, it isn’t at the moment. We live in countries where the markets for smartphones are so saturated that we’ll throw a big strop if the iPhone 6 doesn’t make us levitate.

Most of the world isn’t that jaded, and doesn’t have our spending power – and it’s those markets where Firefox OS could make a big impact. It’s designed to run on what to us looks like hopeless hardware (single core processors? How 2008 of you), and it doesn’t do native apps. They might look like native apps, and they might work like native apps, but they’re just website bookmarks. It’s all HTML5.

Mozilla reckons that we’re doing apps wrong, and that if we’re not careful we’re going to lose the open web we take for granted today. By making Firefox OS hugely popular in emerging markets, Mozilla hopes to stop that process in its tracks.

Will it work?

Optimistic-me hopes so, but grumpy-me isn’t so sure. Firefox isn’t the only OS targeting developing markets – there’s Tizen and Ubuntu too, and while RIM hasn’t even relaunched the BlackBerry OS yet, it’s already talking about a possible future where they don’t do hardware and licence the OS out instead – and we’ve already tried the web app thing.

Remember the original iPhone? It launched without web apps – and the entire world blew raspberries at Steve Jobs until he changed his mind.

Mozilla is betting that it can make the web as good as native apps, not just on smartphones, but on low-powered featurephones too. It’s a big bet – but then again, so was going up against a web browser with near-99 per cent market share. You might not end up running Firefox OS, but you might enjoy the web apps it spawns.

When you buy the latest Samsung Galaxy S3, Apple iPhone, HTC One X or a Google Nexus 7 it’s reassuring to know that it’s as fast as you’d hoped for.

But beyond whizzing a few web pages up and down, and “testing” that Angry Birds runs nice and smoothly, just how do you check the speed of a device?

For an age the process has been dubbed benchmarking after the standard bench mark symbol used by surveyors.

On computer systems it’s a standard test that can be rerun many times to assess performance across a range of devices in a comparable way. Generally a benchmark will involve testing a single aspect of performance, while an overall system score can be found using a suite. Though it can be somewhat meaningless.

Tests cover raw processor speed or how fast it performs functions, storage access speeds, 3D performance with how many polygons it can draw a second and how detailed effects it can handle, and finally task-specific tests such as browser speed. Because of the range and complexity of these tests, it’s rare that a single one covers all bases. A

nother issue is that cross-platform test for Android Vs Apple Vs Blackberry Vs Windows RT are even more complicated, and somewhat rare. But to get you started here are our recommendations.

1. Vellamo

The latest benchmark app for Android is called Vellamo and you can install it for free from the Google Play Store.

Developed by Qualcomm, this is the company that designs and manufacturers some of the most widely used phone and tablet processors, so it should know what it’s doing. This latest version of Vellamo has been updated to fully test browser speeds running HTML5 tests, plus a suite of dedicated processor speed-tests that are called Metal. An Extras section also includes streaming video tests. The tests can take a while to run but once complete you can compare your results with a host of other Android devices.

2. AnTuTu

One of the most widely used benchmarks for Android devices is called AnTuTu and it’s free on the Google Play Store. Everyone loves a big number and AnTuTu provides just that, from its comprehensive range of tests – that drive everything from the 3D graphics to the processor as hard as possible – it manages to derive an overall score for your device. You’re then ranked against a raft of other popular devices or you can upload it to the online rankings. While this is great for a quick off-the-cuff compraison it’s doesn’t exactly provide insight into performance differences between devices.

3. Geekbench 2

How do you boast that your Apple iPad 3 is faster than your friends Samsung Galaxy Note? It’s not easy but one of the few good choices is the 69p Geekbench 2 available on the Google Play Store and from the Apple iTunes App Store.

As the name might suggest it’s somewhat more complex to understand but can provide a simple number that you can argue about down the pub. Being available on both Android and Apple iOS it does help fuel the argumentative fires. It’s more of a limited test only really pushing the processor and memory aspects.

4. SunSpider

Another cross-platform benchmark that runs on Apple, Android and anything that has a web browser is SunSpider found at webkit.org. his tests something called JavaScript, which is a core aspect of web site and browser performance. It runs a suite of browser-based tests multiple times and will generate a time in milliseconds, the lower this is the faster the browser and processor is.

This test is an interesting one as it tests both the speed of the web browser and indirectly the processor as well. It enables you to test different web browsers on a device and see which is the fastest for web browsing. Or if you use the same browser on different devices enables you to compare processor speeds.

5. GLBenchmark

Finally we have the current lead for 3D benchmarking the imaginatively named GLBenchmark from Kishonti. Pure 3D benchmarks often come under fire – usually from the party that has the poorer score – that they’re unrealistc or don’t represent real gaming performance. There is a point about lack of optimisation within these that a game could leverage, but the point is these are benchmarks that provide a level playing field and a guide to overall performance. Not potential performance gained via tweaks.

When running GLBenchmark it’s important to keep in mind that different devices have widely different resolutions. So you’ll see the Apple New iPad 3 getting lower or similar scores to the supposidly slower Apple iPad 2, that’s entirely down to the far higher resolution and so number of pixels the New iPad GPU has to push around.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD isn’t the only upgrade the company is making to their proprietary products.

Along with their new tablet, Amazon is introducing an updated version of their Silk browser.

Not only will Silk receive faster page load speeds, better HTML5 support, and an improved start-up page, but the browser will also gain a new, potentially revolutionary feature.

Dubbed “Trending Now,” the behind-the-scenes feature will analyze user trends from anyone using the browser to discover web pages and content that is currently seeing high volumes of traffic.

With this, Amazon hopes to deliver breaking or newsworthy content to you before you even know you want it.

Trending now, privacy issues?

Both the new Kindle Fire and the Kindle Fire HD will get the new version of the Silk browser.

In addition to searching the most-visited content across the entire browser network, Trending Now will also be able to pre-cache your favorite pages.

Silk is a cloud-based web browser, so knowing where you’re going and where you’ve been will allow Silk to find and prepare the most current version of the pages you like visiting ahead of time.

In a 2011 video, Amazon described what they hoped to accomplish with Silk.

“You can think of Amazon Silk as a small store for files you access. What we have done is create a limitless cache used to render the web pages you view every day. It does not take a single byte of storage on the device itself.”

Though some may view this as a bit of an invasion to their privacy, Silk doesn’t appear to track personal information outside of your web surfing habits.

There’s no word as to whether or not the Trending Now feature can be turned off, but we’ve reached out to Amazon, and will update this article accordingly when we hear back.

How to create an Android app with Andromo

Think you need to be fluent in Java to write apps for Google’s Android mobile OS? What if you could write an app simply by navigating through a bunch of menus, without installing any piece of software and, more importantly, without writing a single line of code? Thanks to Andromo, it isn’t a question of what if’ but what is.

Andromo’s app-creation process is totally idiot-proof. If you have a mouse, a web browser and an imagination, the world’s your oyster. Anyone, including someone who doesn’t even have a whiff of programming knowledge, can whip up an Android app in a matter of minutes. Best of all, it costs nothing.

But don’t let that fool you into thinking of Andromo as a tool only for newbies. It’s also got lots for the seasoned app developer who likes to spend time customising their apps to the hilt. For a fee, pro app developers can resell Andromo-created apps and even list them on Google’s Android Store, Google Play.

If you still aren’t convinced to try Andromo, here’s another gem: Andromo can help you generate revenue. That’s right. To cover its costs while making the tool available for free, all Andromo apps display small non-intrusive strips of ads, 50 per cent of the revenue from which it’ll share with you!

Click, click, done

Andromo runs completely inside a web browser, so you don’t need to install any additional software, unless you want to test your Android app inside an emulator.

The Andromo interface is divided into tabs with each representing a step in the app-creation process. After making changes inside a step, remember to click the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom of the page, before moving on to another tab. You can also exit the process at any step and return to it later.

The first step is to describe the app. An important part of this step is to select an icon. You could go with Andromo’s default icon, but it’s best if you choose your own. If you’re not familiar with creating icons, there’s no dearth of royalty-free icons available on the web.

Dress it up

Then there are different steps for customising the various aspects of your app. For example, in the Styles tab you can select from one of the two predefined Android themes, depending on whether you want a light or a dark background colour.

From under the Action Bar tab you can customise the appearance of the bar that appears at the top of your app. Besides displaying your app’s name, users will use the bar to navigate between the various components in your app.

The most important screen, which you need to spend time decorating, is the home screen. Head to the Dashboard tab to alter its look. Here you can choose to apply a variety of backgrounds. You can upload images, as well as fine tune their alignment.

Bring in content

The meat of the app-creation process lies in the Activities tab. This is where you select and define the capabilities of your app.

Andromo currently supports a total of 13 activities with 11 free activities, and a couple of Gold-only activities available to paying members. The tool supports two kinds of activities: one that pulls in data from external services, and others that display data bundled with your app.

The external services that Andromo can bring in data from include Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and Google Maps. Additionally you can pull in a website, or an RSS/ Atom news feed, or stream audio over the internet using HTTP progressive and live streaming.

While all activities have similar configuration elements, such as a name and a custom icon, each has its own additional configuration options and nuances. So if you want to display a Facebook page with the social network’s activity you only need to enter the name of the page as it appears in the URL.

Similarly, using the Flickr activity you can display images of a particular user by mentioning their Flickr User ID. Or you can display images from various sections of the website, such as the most popular photos on Flickr, or a user’s favourite photos, by pointing to the relevant Flickr feed URL.

Bundle content

Then there are activities that let you bundle content along with the app. One you definitely need to use is the About activity. It’s designed to include information that describes your app as well as yourself, thanks to optional URLs to your Facebook page, or your Twitter feed, or profiles on LinkedIn or Google+, or even your website.

If you need more flexibility you can use the Custom Page activity to create the About Us page or a Contact Us page. It includes a full-featured HTML editor to help you design the page.

With the Audio activity you can bundle normal audio tracks with the app that users can play with Andromo’s customisable music player, which has visible media controls. Or you can include short sounds that are played back with the soundboard that lacks any media controls.

But be cautious while using this activity or else your app will become very bulky. Currently Andromo limits the size of each audio track to 6MB. Furthermore, if you wish to put your app on the Android Market, remember that only apps up to 50MB in size are permitted.

Testing the app

The only real shortcoming with the process is that you can’t test your app before first building it. So double-check those colours! When you’re done creating your app, Andromo will build it on its servers and email you a download link when it’s ready.

After downloading your app, you can test it on an emulator or run it on your Android device. Read these instructions for setting up the Android emulator along with the Android Software Development Kit (SDK) and the Android Debug Bridge.

You can also download the app directly onto your Android handset and install it, after setting up the phone to install apps from other sources in addition to Google Play.

Step by step: create an Andromo app

1. Register with Andromo

Before you can create an app you need to register with Andromo.com by picking a username and password, and providing an email address. After you’ve registered, log in and edit your public profile. You should also get a gravatar if you don’t already have one. You can also change your password and email address from here.

2. Create new project

Once registered, you can start building your app. Begin by entering a name for your app, which you can change later. This lands you at Andromo’s tabbed app creation control panel. The first step is to describe your app by editing its name, entering a description and a version number, and categorising it under one of the Google-approved categories.

3. Upload an icon

To help people find your app and to distinguish it from other apps, you can (and should) also upload a custom icon for your app in this tab, replacing Andromo’s default icon. You can find lots of free icons on the web or you can create your own. Just make sure the icons are in the dimensions and file format mentioned on the website.

Customise the app

1. Pick a theme

Andromo lets you customise various aspects of your app. Head to the Styles tab where you can choose the background colour of the app as well as the colour of the headings, date and various other pieces of text. You can either enter the hex colour code or pick it up from the colour picker. Make sure you click the ‘Save Changes’ button before moving on.

2. Action Bar

This is the bar at the top of your app. It requires four colour schemes for the four elements it displays. The first is the single colour or a two-colour gradient background. Then there’s the font colour for the foreground text. Pressing the action bar will display a drop-down list of activities in your apps, and your can alter their colour schemes as well.

3. Dashboard

This is the main interface of your app and therefore has lots of customisable elements. You can select a single colour or a two-colour gradient for the background, or a textured image that will fill the screen irrespective of the phone’s orientation. Additionally, you can upload images for the background – one for the portrait mode and one for landscape.

Add content to your app

1. My Projects

Log into your account and create an app if you haven’t already done so. To continue working on an existing project, go to the My Projects section, which lists all your apps. Navigate to the app you want to edit and click on the ‘Edit’ button underneath it. This will bring you to the app-creation control panel where you can review your app’s description.

2. Select an activity

Next, define the functionality of your app by adding various activities from the Activities tab. So, if you’re a Star Trek fan, your app can have the Facebook activity to point to your Star Trek fan page, and the website activity to point to the official website, as well as the Audio Player activity to play the theme music and different sounds from all the Star Trek series.

3. Customise the activity

After you’ve picked up an activity, say Audio Player, customise it. That includes naming it, uploading an icon for it and selecting a background image. Since you need both an audio player (to play themes) and a music board (to play Klingon pronunciations), add multiple audio player activities, then upload the relevant audio files for each.

4. Arrange activities

By default the activities appear in your app in the order in which you added them. To rearrange the order of the activities, modify their Order column value in the Activities tab. Activity with the lowest number is displayed first. Click on the ‘Edit’ button next to the activity you want to move and specify the new number in the Position field.

5. Advertising

After you’ve added and arranged all the activities, head to the Ads and Analytics tab to customise the advertising options. You can choose from three ad modes. The first will show Andromo ads. The second option will split the ad space with ads served by your AdMob account. Or, you can turn off ads altogether by switching to the Gold Upgrade Package.

6. Build and showcase your app

That’s all there is to it. Now head to the Build tab and ask the service to turn your app into an Android app. When your app is built, you can download it from the emailed URL, then share it with others. You can also share the app with other Andromo users by adding it to the Andromo Showcase, from under the Showcase tab.

Share your app

After you’ve created your app, you need to ask the Andromo service to process it and generate an .apk file for you. Once it’s done, it’ll email you a link to download your app. The link is valid only for an hour, so if you need to distribute your app to other people, you need to download it from Andromo and host it elsewhere.

If you want to restrict the app to a small group of people, you can email the .apk file to your group, or host it on your own website. To install the app, others will have to tweak the settings in their phones to allow installation of apps from sources besides Google Play.

The other option is to upload the app to Google Play. But before you can upload your .apk file to Google Market, you need to register by paying a registration fee of $25 (about £16), even if you’re going to distribute your app for free. After you’ve registered, you can upload your app along with a couple of screenshots, an application icon and app details.

Gold upgrade

For the most part the Andromo service doesn’t cost you anything. But to keep it that way, the service displays ads in your apps. In fact, they’d even share half the ad revenue with you if you want (or you can let them have all of it).

You can also turn off the adverts altogether by subscribing to Andromo’s Gold Upgrade Package. It costs $99 (about £63) per year per app. Besides giving you the ability to turn off in-app adverts, you get several other features with the upgrade.

For one, you can remove the Andromo branding from the About section of the app, which would be of use if you want to sell the app via Google Play or customise it for a client who wouldn’t want third-party branding or advertising.

The upgraded apps are also placed higher in the build queue and get priority over non-Gold apps. Usage of Gold apps can also be tracked via Google Analytics. Finally, the Gold Upgrade enables business users to add activities so users of their apps can contact them straight from within the app itself, either via phone or email.