Software : Chrome overtakes Firefox in global browser stats |
- Chrome overtakes Firefox in global browser stats
- Buying Guide: Best iPhone sat nav: 5 apps on test
- Microsoft Office coming to iPad, says report
- In Depth: Why deblur won't make the next version of Photoshop
- Buying Guide: Best image editing apps from the Mac App Store
- Google iOS app gets Google Instant and site previews
| Chrome overtakes Firefox in global browser stats Posted:  Chrome has overtaken Firefox globally for the first time, with analytics company StatsCounter's figures suggesting that Google browser is now leading the IE chasing pack. Chrome's growth this year has been astounding, and it breezed past Mozilla's Firefox in the UK in the summer. However, the latest global figures show that this trend has been repeated across the planet – with Chrome now the official number two with a 25.69 per cent market share. That's all the more remarkable considering that Chrome held just 4.66 per cent share of the browser market in November 2009. Fascinating"We can look forward to a fascinating battle between Microsoft and Google as the pace of growth of Chrome suggests that it will become a real rival to Internet Explorer globally," said StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen. "Our stats measure actual browser usage, not downloads, so while Chrome has been highly effective in ensuring downloads our stats show that people are actually using it to access the web also." StatCounter suggests that IE remains hugely dominant in the US with a 50.24 per cent market share – that's up slightly on last year – with Firefox in second on 20 per cent and Chrome on 17.3 per cent. The UK is a market that seems to be ahead of the curve in browser trends, and it has IE on 42.8 per cent, Chrome on 24.8 per cent and Firefox on 20.6 per cent In the US Internet Explorer continues to perform strongly and is maintaining market share at 50.66 per cent, up slightly from 50.24 per cent year on year. Firefox retains second place on 20.09 per cent, down from 26.75 per cent. Chrome is up to 17.3 per cent from 10.89 per cent. Safari is on 10.76 per cent from 10.71 per cent. TechRadar figuresTechRadar reported on Chrome overtaking IE among its users in October, but IE has inched back ahead in our latest statistics – with a shade under a quarter of the traffic (24.98 per cent) compared to Chrome's 24.16 per cent. Firefox holds a 21.79 per cent share of TechRadar browser traffic, Safari on 19.04 per cent and the Android browser on 5.67 per cent. |
| Buying Guide: Best iPhone sat nav: 5 apps on test Posted:  Best iPhone sat nav app: 5 testedThe iPhone is a perfect sat-nav device. Small enough to sit discreetly on your dashboard, but big enough that you can glance – rather than squint – at it, all you need now is the perfect app to use with it. A quick search of the App Store will show you there's lots of choice, from free ones to apps costing over £50. So we've picked four of the big players: TomTom, Garmin, CoPilot and Sygic, as well as one cheap alternative: Navmii GPS Live UK. When you're choosing an app, think about where in the world you're likely to use it, and buy the correct version. And remember that while you don't need an internet connection to use these, since the maps are stored on your phone, you will need it for live traffic information. If you've ever had a car with a built-in sat-nav, the experience of using the iPhone is somewhat different. The main change is that with a built-in sat-nav you've got physical buttons and dials to control it. This means you can, for example, zoom in or out of the map while you're driving, without taking your eyes off the road. There's no doing that with the iPhone, however, because your screen's a single flat surface. You really need to set it up while you're stopped, then put it in the mount and leave it to do its thing as you drive. With the iPhone, you're pretty safe to save your 'Home' location, since you're not going to be leaving your iPhone in the car, and because you can pop a passcode on your phone to keep its contents safe. One thing to make sure of is that when you reach your destination and exit the satnav app, it stops using Location Services. If the compass arrow remains in the top bar, it's still accessing your location and will run the battery down. Go into the app and tell it to stop navigating, or, from the Home screen, double-tap Home, tap and hold the icons to make them wiggle, then tap the minus sign on the sat-nav. How we testedYou need a sat-nav to be there to help you in the most confusing and tricky places to find your way around, so what better place to test them than our home town, Bath? Full of one-way streets and bus-only roads, as well as some streets that were redesigned in the last few years as part of a major building project, it presents a real acid test for any sat-nav app. We started our test at home, up on the northern slopes of the city, and asked each app to take us to a local point of interest – in this case, a petrol station on the edge of the city centre. From there, we wanted to visit a friend whose address (but not the postcode) was saved in our iPhone's Contacts list. After that, we tried a straight postcode lookup to take us to a local National Trust property, Prior Park Landscape Garden. Once we'd looked around there, we made our way towards the main railway station, and then back home. This route was specifically designed to test the different ways of setting your destination, as well as the app's knowledge of prohibited roads. There were two such roads in the test, one of which, the Ambury, allows cars for loading only. While there's no active enforcement of this rule, as good law-abiding citizens we wanted the sat-nav to steer us away from it anyway. The second forbidden road was the bus gate at the top of the High Street, which has an enforcement camera on it. Despite this, several of the apps still tried to send us through it, which would have resulted in a hefty fine had we followed the routing. In both cases, we followed the suggested route as far as possible (shown as dotted lines in our maps) and then turned off, to test the apps' ability to reroute us. Obviously, the apps' routing accuracy will vary in different places throughout the country; this is just an example. 1. CoPilot Live Premium UK & Ireland - £29.99A premium offering, but not a premium price point
Despite its Premium name, this is one of the more affordable apps on test here. Though its interface, doesn't look particularly iOS-like, it's simple enough to find your way around. But as you make your way through the menus, it lacks some of the polish and smoothness of the TomTom or Garmin apps. Scrolling's a little jerky and there's sometimes a delay before menus appear. These are minor gripes, but it's things like this that set the great apps apart from the ones that are merely good. The display when you're driving looks pretty, though the fonts used are a tad on the slim side for glancing at when you're driving. Some braver, chunkier bolding wouldn't have gone amiss. Similarly, the so-called Driving Menu, which gives you access to various on-route options, has nice, big, easy-to-press buttons, marked with big, clear symbols, but the font on the labels is too small to read without peering in closely. Having got all that off our chest, there's a lot here we do like. When you're stationary, for example, it adds local points of interest to the map. But, knowing this adds clutter, these vanish again as soon as you pull away. The spoken instructions during our test were a mixed bag. The ones it gave us in advance of a junction or lane change were inferior to both TomTom and Sygic, but we found the 'now' directions ('turn left now') were given at the perfect time. The voice giving the instructions, like on all the apps except Sygic's, was a little mechanical, especially when pronouncing road names. And this was the only app other than TomTom that, as far as we could tell, made use of the GPS in the TomTom Car Kit, meaning that it should work on an iPod touch as well, but check this before you buy. The live traffic updates cost a bargain £8.99 for a year's subscription, and show up at the side of the screen. Verdict: 3/5 2. Garmin UK & Ireland - £39.99Can the new kid in town give the rest a run for their money?
Garmin is no stranger to the world of satnavs, but it's the new kid on the block when it comes to the iPhone, the app having been out for a matter of weeks when we tested it, and still at version 1.0. We love the simplicity of the main menu: two big buttons, with some smaller ones down the side. It's easy to find your way around the app and to navigate to different types of waypoint. The interface looks very similar to what you get with Garmin's own brand sat-nav units, so if you've used one of them, this'll be second nature to you. But even if you haven't, it's quick to learn and feels remarkably slick considering it's the first version of the app. Though the map itself can be cluttered, the main interface is, happily, nice and simple. A big instruction, your estimated time of arrival, a prominently displayed speed limit, your own speed (which turns red if you're going too fast), and a traffic button are all you get, and it's absolutely great. The route you need to follow is marked in bright pink, so it's easy to tell apart from the surrounding roads, and there's a quick-access button to the live traffic information, if you've subscribed. This'll cost you £2.99 a month or £21.99 for an annual pass, and the app automatically routes you away from traffic it detects. It also zooms in and out of the route when it feels this is useful. We commend Garmin for including lane guidance in towns and cities, rather than just on motorway junctions. It wasn't always perfect, and was a little bit small, but it's a useful addition. The same could be said for the speed camera warning, which plays a sound and pops up on the screen, though the writing is too small to read from a distance. In time, we learned what this combination of sound and a grey blob on the screen meant, but a simpler and larger camera symbol would work better, we feel. The guidance voice could also do with some work, but this is an excellent offering nonetheless. Verdict: 4/5 3. Sygic UK & Ireland - £17.49Not keen on spending too much? Then try this for size…
At less than half the cost of some of the others here, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Sygic's app might be found wanting in comparison to those with heftier prices. But it impressed us on multiple fronts, starting with the menus you use to tell it where you'd like to go. The buttons are big, making them easy to press, and they feel polished. This wasn't the only area where Sygic impressed us, though. The default voice that reads out instructions is by far the most natural-sounding of all the apps. Using it was more like having a friend in the passenger seat telling you where to go, rather than a mechanical-sounding robot. The instructions that the voice gave us were impressive too, especially the 'keep left/keep right' lane guidance. Our test route contained lots of two- and three-lane roads, and sometimes knowing which to be in is baffling, even for those of us who have been driving in Bath for some years. Yet the lane guidance, with one or two small exceptions, pointed us to the lanes that our experience would have led us to choose. The on-screen map that you see when you're driving is kept minimalist, which we also liked: it's easy to find the particular bit of information you're after, and the speed limit is always prominently visible. If you subscribe to the live traffic information from INRIX (€9.99 per year for the UK), you get a little symbol in the other corner of the screen, telling you if there are any delays on your route. We'd have liked this to be bigger, but it's simple to get at. It wasn't all good news, though. Our biggest complaint was that the colouring of the map at times made it tricky to pick out your route from all the surrounding roads. We'd have liked to see more contrasting colours used here. The on-screen lane guidance is too small as well. And when we were trying to navigate to a contact's address, it listed our entire address book, rather than just those with addresses available. It also threw a strop when we put in a postcode with a space in the middle. Hmph. Verdict: 3/5 4. TomTom UK & Ireland - £49.99How does the sat-nav veteran stand up to the competition?
TomTom's been doing the sat-nav thing for so long that it's almost become the de facto choice for navigation: you want a sat-nav, you get a TomTom. And as you use its iPhone app, you can tell it's a carefully refined piece of work. Feeling very at home on iOS, it uses big chunky fonts that are easy to read, even when you can only glance at the screen quickly. These permeate throughout the menus as well as the driving screen. The menus you use to tell it where to go are logically arranged and extremely smooth to use. The driving display is easy to read and uncluttered, with a good contrast between the directed route and surrounding roads. One thing we were less keen on was the way the name of the road you're currently on is displayed directly above the instruction arrow at the bottom, while the road you're looking for next is on its own at the top. It would make more sense to swap them round, so that a single glance would tell you you're looking for, say, a left turn onto Lower Mortlake Road, rather than needing to look at the bottom of the screen for the first part, then the top for the second. The voice is one of the better ones among the apps we tried. Though it's not as natural-sounding as Sygic's, it does a reasonably good job with road names and giving instructions. Live traffic information comes from TomTom's sophisticated system that anonymously tracks the speed of vehicles with TomTom devices on board, and combines this with information from other sources. It also incorporates historical traffic data, so if a particular road is always slow at rush hour, it takes this into account, too. If there's traffic ahead, it looks for a quicker alternative and informs you if it's found one. A month of use costs £3.99, while a year is £26.99. There are similarly priced options for speed cameras. And provided you use a TomTom Car Kit for the iPod touch, the app will work with this device, too. Verdict: 4/5 5. Navmii GPS Live UK - £2.99Just how good a sat-nav can you get for a few quid?
One of the main reasons sat-nav apps aren't cheap is because of the map data that's required to power them. Companies spend a lot of money developing their maps, and you as the consumer pay for this. Navmii is different, because it uses OpenStreetMap, a free map of the world that's been made by people like you – the Wikipedia of maps, if you will. So although it's not perfect, if you do find a mistake, you can correct it yourself. And because it's so cheap, we can cut it some slack for its shortcomings as an app. It's missing a lot of the features that are standard in the others, such as contact lookup and some point of interest searches. We like the way its main menu is made up of big, chunky buttons, but the ease of use is spoiled somewhat by the tiny font beneath them. If you're going to be relying on a sat-nav a lot, we'd recommend one of the others, but if you only need it now and again, you could do a lot worse than to try Navmii's app. Verdict: 3/5 And the winner is…TomTom UK & Ireland - £49.99 For navigation panache, you can't get better than this
Having spent considerable time testing each of these, our conclusion is that if we were to jack in the day job and devote ourselves to crafting the perfect sat-nav app, we'd take elements from each one of these. From Sygic UK & Ireland, we'd want that incredibly natural-sounding voice and quality lane guidance, while CoPilot Live Premium chose the best route in our test. Navmii, given it's so cheap in comparison to the big boys, does a remarkably good job, too. And Garmin's first attempt at an iOS app is impressive; in a few updates' time, we can see it giving TomTom a real run for its money, particularly given its lower price point. But at the moment, TomTom's is the best iOS satnav app there is, because it's just so easy to use on an iPhone. The style and organisation of its menus make it simple to get to grips with. Options are where you'd expect them to be, while the buttons and fonts are large and bold enough to make them easy to read at a glance, without needing to peer in too closely – something that can't be said for all the apps here, by any means. It isn't perfect – the routing around Bath wasn't ideal – and it's the most expensive one we tested. But having said that, we feel it's a price definitely worth paying for a slickness and polish that we've come to expect from good iOS apps, and its currently unrivalled among its peers. If you're going to be using a sat-nav a lot, go with TomTom, and get a traffic subscription. You won't regret it. |
| Microsoft Office coming to iPad, says report Posted:  Microsoft is 'actively working' on bringing its Office suite of apps to Apple's iPad, according to a report from The Daily. The iPad-only newspaper says a string of updates are on the way, which include Office for iPad, a new version for Mac OS X Lion and Office 2012 for Windows 8, which is currently in Beta form. However, it's an adaptation for Apple's tablet that'll really make the headlines, with the Daily predicting the cost of Word, Excel and Powerpoint will be 'significantly lower' than the full version of Office. Apple's iWork suite, which includes apps like Pages, Keynote and Numbers, have proved popular and Microsoft's offering is set to be around the same £6.99 standalone pricepoint. Office 365 compatibleThe Daily's report claims that the iPad suite will also be compitable with the Office 365 cloud solution. According to the article, Office for Windows 8 and Office for OS X Lion will arrive near the end of 2012, but Office for iPad will be on the scene a little sooner. |
| In Depth: Why deblur won't make the next version of Photoshop Posted:  Photoshop Hidden Gems: Bryan O'Neil HughesPhotoshop is one of the world's most complex and flexible applications. Now that the Creative Suite line has reached version 5.5, Adobe invited TechRadar along to meet Senior Product Manager Bryan O'Neil Hughes and hear about some 'hidden gems' of the software. Bryan is the Photoshop team's primary worldwide spokesman. Before joining Adobe in 1999, he was a professional photographer and retoucher. "People always end up doing things that we never imagined that they would do," he says of the software. "CS5 is a more stable release than CS4, which considering how much was rewritten is really impressive – there are over 140 fixes in this version. It's always interesting to go our and see what people are doing with the product." There was a free update to CS5.5 for users that enables Photoshop to communicate with any device that has a wireless connection. How close is deblur?So what about the deblur demonstration shown at Adobe Max? "The reason that [demo] captured the imagination was that it's a problem that everybody has," says O'Neil Hughes in a tone that demonstrates he's clearly had to trot out this line numerous times before. "Correcting [motion blur] has been the holy grail for some time. It was a sneak peek that we explicitly asked not be reported. But someone reported it and what's missing from that video is that is just internal technology we're working on. Taken out of context, 'surely it's coming to Photoshop any day now'. It's a wonderful technology demonstration and in that example that they showed, it works very well. "But I'll tell you very candidly, we are very early in that technology. There are a lot of people working on it, but it's a tough nut to crack, especially with the expectations that people have. When you show people a magic trick, people expect you to come through." Camera RAW and Wide angle correctionThe latest version of the software includes updates to Camera RAW – providing automated lens correction with 600 camera lens profiles built into the software. The correction also works with jpegs and TIFFs. "So whether it's [a DSLR] or the lens on the iPhone – which we know is the most common camera on Flickr – obviously we know that a tiny lens like this has a lot of distortion, colour fringing and vignetting or an SLR [there are profiles for it]. We're also seeing 1 to 2 user-generated profiles every day." O'Neil Hughes also takes us through Wide angle correction, which you can also see in action here: "We know what camera [is being used] and we know what lens. We know the physical characteristics of the lens. I'm able to tell it which areas I want to be straight. "For architectural photography, for anybody that's ever taken images of people with a wideangle lens where you have noses bending into the frame or arms contorting – this is the ability to correct all those things quickly and easily; very magical." Taking Content aware fill forward"A lot of people have heard of content aware fill, a lot of people don't know you can use content aware fill within the spot healing brush. It's an amazing tool but it has its shortcomings – high contrast, edge of image. "The trick here is to use a path. People ask all the time, 'if you're adding new tools, why don't you take away some of the old ones' – it's something I'm very interested in but this is a great example of how some of the legacy ways of doing things are very powerful. So I'm going to draw a couple of points with the pen tool. I want to use a hard edged brush and much smaller brush I'm going to stroke that path the brush. "The idea here is you're going to save a lot of time doing something you weren't able to do before. The path enables you to really constrain your brush and be specific about where you're applying it." O'Neil Hughes then showed us Content aware fill working in tandem with Puppet Warp, something you can see here: As O'Neil Hughes says, Content aware fill has saved people hours and hours of painstaking work by simply giving an approximation of accuracy. "The thing with content aware fill is that even when it doesn't work, it gets me much further than the tools I didn't have before. It gives me a huge step forward. [Before] I would never try to remove an area that crosses a shadow, not a problem now. Dust, dirt, moisture, a finger over the lens – it's great for just selecting that and deleting it." On Photoshop performanceO'Neil Hughes is also keen to talk about the performance of Photoshop – he's running a two year-old MacBook Pro. "Yes it has 8GB of RAM, but we integrate deeply with the hardware – multi-core, GPU…. We do everything we can to accelerate Photoshop. "All of our GPU features baseline on the original MacBook Air…we want to make sure that as many people can use these features as possible. "64 bit gives you the opportunity to address larger amounts of memory. CS5 with 16GB of memory [can be] up to 15 per cent faster. To the best of my knowledge, Photoshop is the most significant cross-platform application that's 64-bit native. "We had to rewrite over a million lines of code to make it 64-bit native on the Mac. If you see a lot of magic in CS 5 it's because we had a lot of help from people beyond the team." O'Neil Hughes is also candid when talking about Adobe's Headlights feature, an opt-in method of tracking how people use Photoshop. "After 21 years this is incredibly important to our development: we have an intern who just sorts through these records. Photoshop, like a lot of other applications, is used for so many different things." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| Buying Guide: Best image editing apps from the Mac App Store Posted:  Best App Store image editing appsManage, share and edit your photos with ease with the help of these helpful apps from the Mac App Store... 01. ImageConvert This is an app with no frills. No, really, there are NO frills. But then, if all you want to do is convert your photos from one format to another, you probably don't want an interface getting in the way. To convert files you select the Preferences tab, and select the format you'd like to save in (JPG, PSD, TIF, PNG and so on). Then you just drop one image, a number of selected images, or an entire folder on the ImageConvert dialog box. Done!
02. Flare
Many apps are available that quickly enable you to apply pre-set filters to photos. On first inspection, it's easy to assume that Flare is one such tool, but it offers much more. Using an interface that makes editing photos a pleasure, you can stack multiple filters, add and remove them easily, and also save them as presets. Adjust exposure, contrast, blur, midtones, colour gradient, sharpness, texture, grain, and much more. We love Flare! 03. Sketcher
Creating painterly masterpieces from your photographs has never been easier, thanks to Sketcher. After dragging the photo you'd like to transform into the interface, you're presented with a series of sliders and drop-down menus. First, choose whether you want pencil, watercolour, pastel, oil, paint blend, or watermix. You can then edit the properties of your image, such as brush size and stroke. Finally, choose your media (crumpled paper, canvas and so on) and you're done. It's simple to use, and the results can be mightily impressive. 04. Colorize
Despite what you might think, the extremely popular practice of selectively adding colour to a monochrome photo is a technique that existed long before digital technology. Unfortunately, it was the devil's own job to achieve. But not any more. Photo manipulators have been using layer masks to achieve this technique for a good few years, but Colorize makes things even easier. Add an image, have it automatically converted to black and white, and then paint over the part of the image you want in colour. 05. CameraBag Desktop
CameraBag is presented as a 'one-click photo lab', and it's a great way to add an extra level of creativity to even your most uninspiring images. You can apply preset filters, such as mono and colour-cross, combine any two filters together, pick from a selection of borders, save presets, and even batch-process entire folders of images. And thanks to the unpredictable nature of film processing, the Reprocess button can make subtle/extreme changes with one click. 06. Aperture 3
If you feel that iPhoto doesn't give you enough oomph, there's another photography tool from Apple that caters to those people looking for a more professional solution: Aperture. Aperture doesn't come cheap, but compared to the likes of Adobe's Photoshop it's a veritable bargain. Building on the ease of use and functionality of iPhoto, Aperture offers enhanced editing controls (such as selective retouching and filters); enables you to create powerful slideshows; stores multiple versions of a photo in the same file (saving space); has masses of library options; and comes with the added bonus of being able to split your library across multiple external drives (for serious snappers!). 07. Flickery
It's impossible to cover photography apps for the Mac without mentioning this top tool for managing photos on the web's leading online image app, Flickr. Using Flickery, you can easily upload, manage and move your Flickr photos. It's actually worth the cost just to be able to navigate your Flickr images in such an intuitive way, but the added functionality makes it a necessary purchase for any serious Flickr users out there. 08. Light Master
The HDR (high dynamic range) photo technique enables you to get images that really pop, providing more control over the lightest and darkest areas. The purist's approach to HDR is to take multiple images at different exposures and combine them, but the effect can be achieved in-app with just one photo. Suited to landscapes, Light Master takes an image of your choosing, and enables you to use a slider to adjust HDR intensity. 09. iPhoto
Apple's entry-level organiser for photos is must-have software for anyone starting out with digital photography on the Mac and looking for a way to easily organise and edit files. There's great Facebook and Flickr integration, a number of slideshow tools, and a new full-screen mode in iPhoto '11, all of which make it well worth a look. 10. PhotoSync
At the time of writing, we're not entirely sure how iCloud is going to affect PhotoSync, but as things stand it's currently the best way to transfer photos from your iPhone or iPad to your Mac, without the need for cables. The PhotoSync Mac app is free, but the companion app on iOS has a small charge. But if the ability to quickly move photos around is important to you, this is a fantastic syncing solution. |
| Google iOS app gets Google Instant and site previews Posted:  Google has updated its iOS search app, adding Google Instant and website previews into the mix. The more image-orientated app is squarely aimed at improving the search experience for iPad users; one example is how it lets you flick through a coverflow style carousel of image results. As with Google web search, iPad users will start to see results pop up as they type their search query in, and the site previews will give a thumbnail snapshot of the resulting sites. Socially networkedIt also includes an on-page search function, making it easy to search for a word on the page you're viewing as well as adding the Google +1 button for sharing pages on Google+ and other social networks. You can also see search results and websites side-by-side so you can quickly and easily decide which is better for your needs. The Google Search app update is free and available from the Apple App Store now. |
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