Software : In Depth: 12 best Google Chrome extensions

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In Depth: 12 best Google Chrome extensions Posted: 07 Aug 2011 04:00 AM PDT Google Chrome's speed and stability have made it many people's browser of choice. It has also supported browser extensions for some time, and there are hundreds now available that add to its features and help to make your browsing safer, faster and more productive. However, it's not always easy to separate the wheat from the chaff, and there are some shockingly poor extensions out there. We've helped show the way by picking out 12 of the best Chrome extensions. 1. Send from Gmail Clicking 'mail to' links online can be annoying if you're a Gmail user, because they generally launch the default mail program and don't work well if you prefer to use web mail. Send from Gmail changes that behaviour to open a Gmail 'Compose mail' window in Chrome whenever you click an email link. It also gives you a Gmail button next to the address bar, which you can click to open a new mail message wherever you are. You can configure the extension to support Google App for your domain. 2. Scroll to Top Button Savvy web designers generally break long sections of text into manageable page-sized chunks to avoid scrolling, and good web writers stay succinct and to the point, because most visitors are averse to scrolling and only really look at the first screen full of information. However, lots of sites still include pages that are many times the length of the average screen. Scroll Top to Bottom adds a handy 'scroll to top' button to particularly long pages, which appears when you hover the mouse over the top right of the page and makes navigating lengthy pages much easier. You can configure the button to scroll to the bottom of the page as well, and there are lots of options to customise the button and its position to suit your reading style. 3. Dropbox for Chrome Dropbox is a free service that lets you store up to 2GB of data on a remote server. It synchronises your stored files with local copies on as many PCs as you like. Dropbox for Chrome lets you access your Dropbox files directly in Chrome, so you can quickly download or upload a modified file without installing Dropbox locally. This is ideal for portable computing and laptops, where you don't want to sync continually. Once you've installed the Dropbox extension, you'll be prompted to enter your username and password. You can also specify the size of the popup window used to display your files. 4. Docs PDF PowerPoint Viewer Docs PDF PowerPoint Viewer is a very handy extension which practically does away with your need to run a local PDF viewer application. Once the plugin is installed, Chrome will automatically open any PDF files you come across when browsing as Google Documents. There's no need to download the file to your PC before you can open it, and you can store it in your Google Document space if you have a Google account. The PDF viewer is quite basic, but you can still perform a simple text search within it. The latest version of Chrome includes a PDF viewer, but this is still handy if you want to move PDFs to Google Docs and share them with others. 5. Things to Do Things to Do is a simple addition to Chrome that lets you maintain a to do list that opens whenever you start a new tab. If you're browsing the web and suddenly remember a task, open a new tab, click the 'Add' button and enter the details. You can return to this tab or open a new one at any time to maintain your list. You can use the options to customise the colours and size of the list. You can reorder items on the list page by simply clicking and dragging the bullet buttons to the left of each entry. Edit any item by clicking its text and making the necessary changes. 6. New Tab Favourites New Tab Favourites gives you a list of common destinations to choose from whenever you open a new tab in Chrome. The idea is that you can browse more quickly with convenient links to places like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook at your fingertips. There's already a list available when you install the extension, but you can customise it by clicking 'Edit mode'. Enter the names of any new sites you want to use along with their URLS, and remove any unwanted ones. 7. TweetRight Twitter is great for sharing things you've found online, but copying a URL, shortening it correctly and then pasting it into a tweet can be a tedious and clumsy affair. Even if you have a URL-shortening tool built into your preferred Twitter client, you still have to copy and paste the full address of anything that you want to share. TweetRight is a Chrome extension that makes posting something to Twitter a two-click process. Right-click the item you want to share, choose 'TweetRight' and then 'Post link to Twitter'. It's simple and easy. 8. Google Scribe Google Scribe uses Google's predictive technology to guess what you're typing as you type it, and will suggest the likely next word in a sentence. This Chrome extension makes the predictive power of Scribe available on any website. There are privacy issues, because predicting what you're writing involves remembering what you've typed before, but this is still very useful for anyone who finds typing a chore. You can enable Scribe in all text boxes by default or select 'On demand', which lets you can toggle it on and off by pressing [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[J]. 9. AdBlock Adblock removes adverts from web pages. Once it's installed select the ad filter lists that you want to use. You can add new lists if you know the URL of the list server. One of the general options lets you choose to keep text ads on Google searches, which can be useful. An option to remove YouTube ads is currently in beta. You can enable ads on certain sites in the 'Customize' tab, which can be useful if you want to see ads on a site. You can also block specific ads by URL. 10. Google Translate If you come across a foreign language web page and you can't translate it yourself, Google Translate is the next best thing. It uses Google Translate to fetch a literal translation of the page from Google's servers. It automatically detects the language used and provides a link to the translated version if it isn't your default language. You can set your default language and opt to translate pages automatically if you prefer. 11. Chrome IE Tab Multi For sites that insist you can only browse them using Internet Explorer, there are various extensions that can help. Chrome IE Tab Multi is the most useful of the options on offer, because it does the best job of mimicking Internet Explorer and supports multiple tabs. It also supports ActiveX controls, and can remember which sites you prefer to use in IE mode. In the options you can bookmark sites to open with IE Tab Multi and add options to open links in IE Tab Multi to the Chrome context menu. 12. FlashBlock Flash can add useful and attractive multimedia elements like animation to web pages, but it can also be used to hide malicious code. Flash modules can also be frustratingly slow to load, especially if they aren't relevant to what you want to do. FlashBlock is a port of the Firefox extension that blocks all Flash content until you permit it. Flash elements are presented as placeholders, which you can click and then decide whether to run the script or not. You can set up a whitelist of trusted sites, which will allow commonly used and trusted Flash content to run without interruption. Consider installing the FlashBlock plugin if you want to improve your browsing security at the expense of some bells and whistles.

In Depth: How to explore space from your desktop Posted: 07 Aug 2011 02:00 AM PDT Half a century has passed since Yuri Gagarin ventured into orbit, and over 40 years since we landed on the moon, but since then, we've retreated. Space is too expensive to explore. The space shuttle fleet is being retired to museums, and our only permanent orbital presence is limited to a handful of scientists. But while manned space exploration appears to have faltered, astronomy has exploded beyond all recognition. We now know of nearly 600 planets orbiting alien suns, and have a small army of space telescopes at our command. It's not just professional scientists making breakthroughs, either. Amateur astronomers and armchair enthusiasts also provide vital discoveries. Do we really need expensive manned space flight any more, or can we now discover the secrets of the universe from our PCs and back gardens? "I actually had to classify the galaxy next to it - next to the strange thing I found," says Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel of the discovery that made her famous. Hanny's Voorwerp (the Dutch word for 'object') is an unusual patch of superheated gas close to a spiral galaxy in the constellation Leo Minor. It contains no stars, so where is the heat coming from? It seems to be a complete mystery, but it's one that could have been undiscovered for many more years if it weren't for the emerging field of citizen science. "It's very light, very warm, and it doesn't have any stars, which apparently is exceptional," says van Arkel. "I thought, 'Wait, what was that?' So I clicked the back button and saw this strange, blue sort of cloud. It caught my eye because it was very blue and it had a strange form. It was nothing like the irregular galaxies I'd seen." Van Arkel found the Voorwerp while classifying galaxies from her home in Holland as part of the Galaxy Zoo project. She contacted one of the astronomers on the project (known as Zookeepers), but neither he nor his colleagues knew what the Voorwerp was either. In a demonstration of just how much private individuals can help science, time was booked on the Hubble Space Telescope to examine the Voorwerp in more detail. The team controlling Hubble receive around 10,000 requests for time each year, but van Arkel's discovery was so intriguing and important, it became one of only 3,500 requests to be granted. Van Arkel's involvement in the Galaxy Zoo project was as unexpected as her discovery. "I have a passion for music," she says. "I play guitar, and Queen is one of the bands I like. Brian May is interested in astronomy and put an announcement on his website about a project called Galaxy Zoo. It looked very interesting and I thought: 'Well, I'll have a look.'" Crowdsourced science Galaxy Zoo is much more than a simple project to get people interested in astronomy and science in general. It's also part of an attempt to help working scientists overcome a growing problem shared by many different areas of science, as physicist Chris Lintott explains. "It's something strange that's been caused by an explosion in technology, in computing power, in the availability of cheap cameras and in bandwidth," he says. "I think for the first time in a long while, we almost have too much data. And I think that a lot of the science that happens in astronomy, in ecology [and] in climate science over the next decade will be driven by how creatively we can solve that problem." Galaxy Zoo helps solve the problem of the mountain of data streaming down to Earth from dozens of space telescopes collecting data at various wavelengths. When it comes to pattern-matching, the average human brain is still far more accurate, faster and cheaper than even the best artificial neural network software. It was therefore logical to ask members of the public to log in and set to work classifying galaxies into groups to help create a full survey of captured galaxies. Galaxy Zoo launched in 2007, with an initial one million images for people to classify. The team behind the site believed it would take two years for visitors to work through them all, but were very excited by the enthusiasm shown by armchair astronomers the world over. Within 27 hours, pictures of galaxies were being classified and re-classified at a rate of 70,000 an hour. The original million galaxies were classified 50 million times by 150,000 regular users in the first year alone. Multiple classifications increase the confidence that a galaxy has been correctly categorised. Galaxy Zoo is part of a larger initiative called the Zooniverse. Its subtitle is 'Real science online', and that's exactly what it is. After all, experimentation is only a small part of science - the bulk of the work revolves around classifying and analysing the collected data to discover what it reveals. There's no reason that anyone with an interest in science and a little training can't don a virtual lab coat, pitch in and help out. The full Zooniverse contains projects as diverse as watching for massive solar storms to help provide a much needed early warning system for Earth, hunting for planets orbiting other suns, and helping to show how Earth's climate is changing by entering naval observations stretching back to the 18th century. Getting involved The training involved in Galaxy Zoo is straightforward, making the project open to just about anyone who's interested in taking part. When classifying galaxies, you are asked several questions about their appearance. To answer the questions, you simply need to know what they mean, which is explained on the project's website. The first question is whether the galaxy is smooth (simply a cloud of material that gets brighter towards a central point), has visible features, or is a definite disk shape. There are several examples you can click to see if your classifications are correct. This idea of teaching by example is remarkably efficient, and by the third classification question, it's difficult to get the answers wrong. It's very easy to see if a galaxy is 'cigar-shaped', for example. Counting the number of arms on a spiral galaxy is just as simple. This classification system is exactly the same as the one used by working scientists like Meghan Gray, a research fellow in the Faculty of Science at Nottingham University. "Even though we have automated routines to gather some of this information," she says, "those automated routines are still not perfect and there's still a lot to be gained by using [the] eye-brain system, which is really good at picking out particular patterns or particular features." There's a real need for volunteers in these projects. "Together with a team of maybe about seven or eight other people, we could cover about six or seven thousand galaxies, with each one being done a couple of times to make sure that we agree on the classification," says Gray. Some databases contain millions of galaxies, though. "That's far too many galaxies for any sane individual to look through, one by one," she says. Amateur discoveries There's always the possibility that you might uncover something that nobody else has seen or can explain, and that's exactly what happened in the case of Hanny's Voorwerp. It became an object of interest; something out of the ordinary, and that's always something that excites scientific minds, trained or otherwise. The word 'amateur' comes from French, meaning 'lover of'. While the term has negative connotations in some fields, astronomy has a long tradition of amateurs making important discoveries, and this looks set to continue into the internet age. One inspiring example is German-born composer and musician William Herschel. His music led him to study mathematics, and eventually astronomy. After emigrating to England and settling in Bath, where he became organist at the Octagon Chapel in 1766, Herschel designed and built his own reflecting telescope - sometimes spending up to 16 hours a day carefully grinding and polishing the mirrors. In 1781, during a painstaking search for double stars, Herschel and his sister Caroline discovered Uranus. This led to his election to the Royal Society in 1782, and his appointment as the King's Astronomer. Since then, many other amateur astronomers have found fame and even fortune. Sir Patrick Moore, despite having written over 70 books and been president of the British Astronomical Association, is a proud amateur. His maps of the moon were even used by NASA to help select possible landing sites for the Apollo missions. Canadian David H Levy is an amateur astronomer who holds the record for the most comets discovered by a single person (22), including the famous Shoemaker-Levy 9, which broke up in 1994 and smashed into Jupiter's upper atmosphere in 1995. If you'd rather simply understand what you can see on clear nights, or fly a virtual spaceship between the planets, there's no shortage of excellent free software that can help you, much of which is also open source. Stellarium is a fully featured virtual planetarium that will tell you exactly what you can see in the night sky. Turn off the atmosphere to get a better view of space by pressing [A]. You might also want to turn on the equatorial grid by pressing [E] so you can judge where you are in the sky more easily. The best thing about Stellarium is that you're not limited to observing from Earth. Press [F6] select 'Moon' and you'll find yourself on the lunar surface. You can even speed up time by hovering the cursor over the location bar at the bottom of the screen. Celestia is an application that lets you climb into a virtual spaceship and travel between planets to see some far-out sights. It's more than a simple virtual planetarium; it's a real time space simulation that uses real data to plot the location of objects in our solar system and well beyond. It's best to start with a demo, which you can enter by pressing [D], but Celestia also lets you fly around under your own control. Point your virtual spaceship in the direction you want to travel by dragging your cursor, then press [A] to accelerate. Your speed is displayed at the bottom left of the screen. To decelerate, press [Z]. To jump to a specific location, click 'Navigation | Go to Object' and enter its name. For example, to go to the Cassini probe, type Cassini and press [Enter]. Be aware, though, that Celestia can cause you to waste several hours doing things like flying through Saturn's rings, or making contact with space probes. Worldwide Telescope Microsoft Research's Worldwide Telescope is an even more impressive piece of software. It gives you access to the images from a collection of telescopes and sky studies, combined to provide a seamless view of the known universe - but there's a lot more to it than just amazing visuals. "Worldwide Telescope brings to life a dream that many of us in Microsoft Research have pursued for years, and we are proud to release this as a free service to anyone who wants to explore the universe," says Curtis Wong, Manager of Microsoft's Next Media Research Group. "There's really nothing else that allows you to so fluidly put together your own view of the night sky and different objects and then share it in a seamless way," adds Jonathan Fay, a developer with the group. The Worldwide Telescope has also been described as a space for storytelling, but what does it let you to do? For starters, you can add your own imagery to the default database. If you're already a keen amateur astronomer, this means you can create your own views of the sky, rather than relying on others to do it for you. The Communities feature lets you make a global group of like-minded individuals to help you in your research. The hope is that teachers will also use Worldwide Telescope to make lesson plans that pupils can add to. The default installation contains a catalogue of guided tours, and because the Worldwide Telescope is a collaborative venture, there are plenty to download too. When mission controllers are driving a robot on another planet, like the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars, they don't only have to use simple 2D television pictures and other readings to find their way around. It makes sense to also see depth, and Worldwide Telescope gives you a sense of how that must feel if you have a pair of 3D glasses to hand. After downloading and installing the software, click 'Explore', then 'Solar System (sky)'. Click 'Mars', then select 'Panorama' from the menu at the bottom of the screen. The default image is a picture of the Apollo 12 landing site. Select an entry labelled 'stereo' from the Imagery menu and put on your 3D glasses. The Spirit and Opportunity rovers have stereo vision, and the difference it makes to their images is breathtaking. No satellite needed If astronomy isn't your thing, there are other projects out there, including the Old Weather project. Climatologists are trying to predict future weather trends by looking at records going back to the 18th century. Are current fluctuations in climate unique, or have similar changes happened before? Luckily, log books are available from ships belonging to the English East India Company. These stretch back to the 1780s and contain measurements of tides and weather, but they aren't the only resources we have. When Darwin made his historic voyage on HMS Beagle between 1831 and 1836, the voyage was part of the South American Survey. Darwin was essentially a passenger, on board partly because Captain Fitzroy feared madness if he had no one of his intellectual status to talk to. Data from this and similar voyages is also available, but the scientists trying to map historical weather have a serious problem. There are 250,000 ships' logbooks in the UK alone, and more exist in the USA, South America and Asia. Clive Wilkinson of the Old Weather Project estimates that they contain billions of observations. The problem is, computers can't read the copperplate handwriting used to log them. This is where the public comes in - the text needs to be read and entered into a database. Once this is done, the climatologists plan to publish the data so people can make their own analyses. This is very exciting; there's every chance that a non-scientist might make an important discovery about our climate. We live in an unprecedented time of technological progress, but it's also a time of data overload. Because of this, scientific discovery is no longer the preserve of professionals. They need our help, which means that anyone could discover something amazing. In that sense, we're all potential explorers, boldly going where no one has gone before. The universe is vast and mostly unmapped. There are still plenty of Voorwerps left to discover on Earth and out in space, each potentially stranger than the last. All we need is access to a PC.

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