Future Smackdown

I am not pretty sure behind the motive of the launch however. It might have got something to do with the browser wars in particular. You see, when the giants are busy fighting a dwarf can easily run away with the bounty. If the saying is anywhere close to truth then Google Chrome just might be the next big thing we have to wait and watch. What makes me say this you might wonder. Well, Internet Explorer is busy getting decked up for its version 8 release which Microsoft must be really pushing in with its best efforts. On the other hand Firefox has had a majestic release of its version 3.0. So where does Google Chrome fit in here? Remember, they say its in beta! Gmail was too!

Google Chrome has already been stated to possess best features of Firefox and other browsers. Bloggers have been ranting about this, the most. That is true since Google Chrome may not support plugins and themes feature as of now, on which Firefox has found its enormous success. But the first question to put up front is, is Google Chrome really just another browser or a desktop application which connects to the internet. Well both say the same thing but the mention of a different memory processing model for Chrome is something which you have to consider. Google won’t be silly to reinvent the wheel. It just might be a futuristic vision of Google which we are currently witnessing on a miniature scale. Google Suggest, Maps or GMail must ring the bells as I mention this.

People may crib and rant about Google Chrome but it hasn’t hampered the success of launch down even by a pint. In fact Google has made a smart move to get as many feedbacks as possible since it has made Chrome right from scratch. Now its motive would definitely be to do a write up once again and make a surprise launch with power packed features in the next version. I can see people waiting with baited breath keeping a hawks eye on every single move Google does.

In For a Tough Competition?

Google Chrome has been launched amidst Adobe Flex going mainstream with its enterprise presence and while Silverlight is being pushed into your face. You must have some or the other time come across Flex and Silverlight applications which left your mouth wide open to see the magic they do. Can a browser reduce these giant’s market share? Why do I ask?

If you carefully notice Chrome has heavily emphasized that it is going to support the standards of web technologies like CSS, Javascript, HTML5. This means that Google Chrome would be a perfect foundation for web developers who always have been frustrated with browser dependencies when working with these web technologies. By using Chrome you might really enjoy developing a web application. This translates to more web developers being happy, more usage of standard features of Javascript, CSS and HTML, more usage of open technologies viz. Ajax, XML, JSON, leading to more usage of free tools & less use of propreitary products.

All this means, more market share for open source and Google already has set its base up front with a plethora of tools. You name it, Google Gears, GWT, Google App Engine, Google Analytics, Google Maps etc for the web developers. More standards attribute to better web applications and all which is supported by Chrome inherently. The survival of Flex or Silverlight will be a debatable issue henceforth if Google Chrome manages to captilize on its intentions.

This sounds a huge success to Google Chrome. If this falls in line, then Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera will be competing with Chrome rather than with themselves. Google will rise to the top and rule the universe. All of this is a distant dream for me and I don’t want to sound preachy now. You do the analysis as I will wait for a surprise in the next version of Google Chrome. It might just be the next big thing, you may never know!

The things I admire in the current release of Google Chrome :

1. Full screen interface
2. Draggable tabs to windows and back into tabs
3. Neater display of history links and thumbnails of recent visits

Testing Google Chrome

The thing you might be wondering at the moment is how to distinguish Chrome from the rest of the browsers. As Google mentions, Chrome sports a different memory management model which implements each tab as a whole new process instead of a thread. On opening a tab you would notice that the task manager would have a new process listed. In order to try out Chrome’s ability with this regards you should try opening a Javascript heavy page first in browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Heavy Javascript attributes to browser hanging which is considered often as a painful process since all the tabs hang and the browser itself has to be killed to stop the loading. As far as Chrome goes, this nature would be handled in a completely different manner since you can now directly kill a tab process from the task manager without affecting the other open tabs.

While the above concept is not much useful for the casual surfer, it will be a must for web application users in times to come, since the advent of Web 2.0 has in fact spruced up the usage of Ajax which in turn has made the web application heavy for processing. Such a model would have been required any time in near future, but with Chrome stepping the right foot at the right time you can relax down a bit now. If you are a staunch Ajax developer then Chrome surely would come to your rescue.

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I am thoroughly satisfied with Google Reader for reading my RSS feeds but I felt its been a long time I have spent on it and it has now started to bore me a bit. So I started some search for good desktop applications which would give some eye candy and also improve my productivity while learning from the feeds.

I have found one nice solution which has relieved me to some extent and which is certainly an impressive effort in the direction of web desktop integration. Its called ReadAir. It is a really nice application for feed reading and I am impressed by its potential.  The reason I liked it was because it is built on Adobe AIR. I had become a fan of Adobe AIR when I had read about it for the first time.

Seeing a live usable application built on it was something I had waited for and ReadAir has confirmed my belief that sometime later in the future we are going to see amazing applications built for the desktops but running on the web. Mozilla Prism is a yet another effort in this field.

Okay, coming back to the ReadAir. ReadAir is a desktop feed reader for reading your Google Reader feeds. The features that I can place my votes on are:

• Easy setup and login straight into Google Reader
• Direct synchronization of read posts with Google Reader
• You can star any post directly inside it which is also visible later in your Google Reader
• Add/Remove tags or feeds from within it
• It has got a very minimalistic Interface yet its pretty neat looking
• The feed post colors and fonts are soothing to the eye
• It is quick in loading.
• Clicking on the post title marks the post as read (This is better than scrolling the entire length of the post as in Google Reader)

I was satisfied by the above basic features and also expect them to improve them in the future. Since the application is in its early days, some features can be cranky at times. For example, I found the auto update feature somewhat unnecessary. It updated the application with some new features which later started to show some errors. Also, the search is not fully functional and currently ReadAir does not support keyboard shortcuts.

Leaving apart the shortcomings, the synchronization was the best part of ReadAir. At least I have got a different reader for my taste and also due to the synchronization with Google Reader, I do not have to worry about re-reading the same posts if I happen to access Google Reader from a different location. I appreciate the commendable effort put up by Adam Mcgrath for bringing this idea to life and am looking forward for addition of more features.

Try it, its nice to have a change sometimes and I would always root for web desktop applications like these. For installing ReadAir you need to have Adobe Air installed on your system. Download Adobe Air from here.

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Whatever the reason may be, editing a photograph is no layman’s job. Sometime people give up half way through when they do not find the required results. I recently found a something which might make your spirit rise higher when you will notice the results you get out of it. The name of the tool is Picasa. Its a tool from Google. I am sure you must have used it many time to upload your photos to the online Picasaweb. But did you ever try making collages from it. Picasa can generate some really amazing collages out of your precious photos and make them really gift worthy or send it amongst friends as a memoir.

So here’s how you can make collages out of your photos:

• Download and install Picasa if you don’t have it already from here
• When you open it Picasa will start indexing all your image folders
• Choose a folder of which you want to make a collage from
• Now carefully select the photos which are your favorite and which you want inside the collage
• Click the Collage button in the bottom bar
• Your collage will be loaded in the dialog mode
• You might not be satisfied with the collage at first so you can try one of the 2 tricks
• Press Shift and drag your mouse pointer on the collage window. You will see a change in the layout
• Keep trying till you are satisfied with a layout
• Sometimes, you might like a layout but not how the pictures are placed
• In this case press Ctrl and drag the mouse pointer. The layout will be same but the pictures will start to randomize in their placement.
• Once you are done, hit the Create Button and specify location as the “current folder”
• The collage gets created and gives you a chance to edit the collage
• Here you can try out interesting presets which include making the collage black and white or giving it a sepia tone or soft focusing it. You can have real fun over here.
• After finishing with the effect choose file > save. A backup of the original will automatically be made
• So here you are with a amazing memorabilia of your treasured photos. Sounds simple isn’t it?
  

You can do different types of collages in Picassa. The one above is called the “Picture Pile“. The other types include:

Picture Grid

Contact Sheet

You can always edit the collage features after saving it. But however there is no provision to change the photos of it later. You would have to again do the above steps for making a new collage.

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The theme for this article is “Definitive Search“. It means that, instead of beating around the bush for carrying out permutations and combinations of your search queries, why not carry out the search for exactly what we are looking for. By doing this, you would become more sure of getting the most relevant articles to your queries. Notice the ‘more’ here too!

Most of the Definitive Search tricks are obtained by using the Google Advanced Operators. I would like to specify in this article as to where the operators can be utilized ‘more’ efficiently. I was myself thrilled when I tried using these operators which lead me into writing this article.

For this article I am taking a particular case study for search query optimization. So here we go…

Let us take the current situation of the Oracle BEA acquisition. One would be interested in which stories are doing rounds of it on the web. Even if you put the phrase Oracle BEA acquisition in Google you would obviously get a lot of links. Try it:

• Oracle BEA acquisition

But can you tell for sure which of the links are actually speaking specifically about this story? The answer is NO. This is because Google only searches for those articles which have these 3 words viz Oracle or BEA or acquisition.

1. Most common trick – Using Quotes

To circumvent the above analogy lets try one of the most common trick, using “” (quotes) around this phrase, since using them restricts the results to include all the above 3 words and match the articles which have them. Try it:

• “Oracle BEA acquisition”

This time the results look good since all the returned results have the 3 words either in content or their titles. But you still cannot say that the links would have some content surrounding the story. The reason is, if you consider this article itself, the 3 words are mentioned right here above. This means that even this article might get displayed in the results simply because I have used all the 3 words with the exact sequence. But there is no story about the acquisition. Get it?

2. Power of All – Using the operator allintitle

The time has come for using the powerful Google operator allintitle: This operator is used in a situation as above. Now considering the above situation, one would be urged to click on any article which has the 3 words in the title, the reason being articles with such titles are bound to be related exactly to what the title mentions. This is meaning of being definitive. The operator makes it a point to help you search the articles on the web which have the 3 words in their title. Try it:

• allintitle:Oracle BEA acquisition

3. Power of One – Using the operator intitle

Similar to the allintitle you also can use just intitle which searches for articles which have either “Oracle” or “BEA” or “Acquisition” in their content and not all the three in the title. It is good for single word searches which come in title. Let’s say that you just wanted to find some articles which mentioned all the acquisitions made by Oracle but you are not sure of them. The trick would be to use:

• intitle:Oracle acquisition

3. Digging deeper – Using the operator inURL

This one is my favorite trick. I am always looking out for current topics. The web on the other hand has got overloaded with redundant information. The problem lies here. If I search for something I won’t be so sure whether the links in the results are recent or old. Blogs help me the most is using this trick to my advantage. If you are frequent visitor of blogs then you might have noticed that they have the date of publishing right there in the URL. If you notice this blog too then the URL will have the date. Are you thinking what I am thinking?

If you have not understood then lets take the same above example. If you take the 1st example then you would notice that the search results also include old articles. In this case it also lists out BEA’s denial of Oracle merger in 2007. What we are interested is not this, but the news of the acquisition in 2008! So to try out a simple hack to this is to use the inURL operator. Try this:

• “Oracle BEA acquisition” inurl:2008

The usage of inurl:2008 lists out only those links which have been published in 2008, thus furthering making your search definitive.

4. The Perfect Match – Using the operator allinurl

This is the most definitive of all the combinations which I have mentioned above and the most efficient too. But it may not always work because having multiple words all together in an URL is rare. But still if we try this in our example:

• allinurl:Oracle BEA acquisition 2008

This is a huge filtering operator. You can judge it by the results themselves. It gives only a handful of results! Isn’t that brilliant? However, with this operator you cannot judge the quality of the returned results since it all depends on the URL is framed and not on the content! But many a times, I find it exact and helpful. Remember, you don’t have to put slashes (/) in here, just the words which you think might appear in the URL.

5. Look who is spying – Using the operator site

I use this operator sometimes for my amusement. With this operator you can search for keywords only from particular sites. For example:

• Oracle BEA acquisition site:techtracer.com

will search for the articles in this site only! It isn’t helpful much since many sites have inbuilt search feature, including Techtracer. But you can use it for finding comments which you might have made in some site! Sounds like fun!

I remember I had made a comment in DailySeoBlog a few days ago. But hey, I don’t remember which article I had made the comment on. So here is my hack for using the site operator. Just type which name you had entered while commenting. I had used my first name “nitin”. So check this out:

• nitin site:dailyseoblog.com

Amazing isn’t it? Now I know which all articles I had commented upon in the blog. So now I can easily see what people or the author has responded to my comments.

Gimme ‘more’

Using definitive tricks you can now be sure fire way of finding out exactly what you are looking for. But in the end knowing all the tricks will just won’t be helpful if you don’t apply the right tricks at the right time. It comes with habit of constantly searching for ‘more’ information. I will be continuing writing about how to improve your search queries. Many ‘more’ interesting tricks are about to come. So keep yourself subscribed to Techtracer.

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The fact is that, people miss out on these tricks since they are busy finding the keywords! In order to make them aware I will be trying to put up different tricks and their usage as per the requirement so that it becomes easier for you to get the required information in an instant.

This article is specially for the movie lovers since I am one of them. I am not “crazy” about movies but when I am keen to watch a movie I make it sure that the money is well worth spent. This is the place where Google helps me to make most of the decisions quickly. Some of these decisions include finding:

• Release date
• Cast of the movie
• Reviews of the movie
• Theatres where the movie is being aired
• Checking the schedule
• Trailers

So let me reveal the 5 most fantastic Google Movie Search tricks that I frequently use:

1. Movie Reviews

Google provides a meta parameter “movie” for finding details of movies. For example, if you want to search for the details of the movie “The Matrix” then you would have to use,

• movie: The Matrix

This would give you the information on the release year of the movie and also would show you the ratings which the movie has got from well knowns critic web sites. The interesting part of these reviews is that it even shows the number of positive reviews, neutral reviews and negative reviews, sorting by relevance, date and rating.

If you want to stop your friend from pestering you to watch a movie then make sure to check out those negative reviews! If you want to find out the details of a certain character from the view, check out links of the characters in “Frequently mentioned terms”.

2. Discover Movies

If you are left pale from you routine and want to catch up with the new releases then instead of reaching out for the different movie sites just go to,

• http://www.google.com/movies

This will of course give out the American movies. But what if you like to watch movies from your country. Of course, Google must have done something about it! And it does this, in the form of a simple domain change in the URL. For example if you want to find out Indian movies then change the domain in the URL to .co.in Here you go,

• http://www.google.co.in/movies

If this page appears blank to you then it is because of the requirement of the city name you want to see the movie in. If you are from US, just enter the zip code. This is the fantastic feature of the Google Movie search. Enter the city name in the box and watch the results. The results will show you all the theaters of the city with the list of movies which are currently being aired.

Some links worth checking out of this page are the schedules and the consolidated display of movies and theatres.

3. Movie Details

Let’s say that at this instance, you are feeling about watching any romantic movie. The first thing you would do is either ask your friend about a recommendation or walk into a shop to ask which movies are worth watching. You would not need to do this with Google Movie Search in place. All you need is to know what you are looking for. So your keywords in this case would be “romantic movies” . If you want recent ones just sort them by date.

• romantic movies

As with our earlier trick of changing domain, for searching movie by country, you would be short of luck over here. Because the results always would display english movies regardless of the domain of search. But hey, I have a trick for that too. Just a little change in the query,

• romantic hindi movies
• romantic indian movies
• action hindi movies

4. Movie Anatomy

Sometimes it happens so, that you remember a movie but fail to remember the cast of it, even who was the director of it. Google can help you quick fix these thoughts without much waste of time. You don’t have to open any website nor find the specific keywords if you don’t know whom you are searching for. For instance try this,

• director: The Incredibles
• director: Gladiator

The first line highlighted in bold spells out the directly the required answer. Fantastic, isn’t it? Similarly you can find about the entire cast of the film by just doing something similar to this,

• cast: The Incredibles
• cast: Gladiator

Remember that this might not work out in any movie. But for most of the popular movies you would be able to do the above tricks.

5. Trailers

Finally after you have done a hard work of finding the movie details, you would not want to suppress your excitement to go and actually watch the movie. If you cannot wait for long then why not add something more to it. And that is, watching the trailers!

For finding a trailer, you don’t have to visit the official movie website nor search the video sites. Just use the keywords “youtube” and “trailer” with the movie title in between. For example,

• youtube “The Matrix” trailer
• youtube “Gladiator” trailer
• youtube “The Incredibles” trailer

These searches would display two videos from youtube which have been named as trailers. These won’t necessarily be official trailers but they just the right videos which you would like to watch. Even if you don’t get the video playing option in the search results page, click the first link which would open up in youtube.

Bonus Tip: Apart from the fantastic five searches just one more bonus tip to get to the official site of any movie. Just use the keyword site besides the movie name. Examples are:

• “Resident Evil” site
• “Finding Nemo” site
• “The Matrix” site

You might ask, why I have chosen the same movie names in the examples. This is because these are some of my all time favorite movies . Similarly search for your favorite movie information with Google and enjoy it even more. Have fun!

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But by the time I had written about the API, I noticed that people were coming up with great new ideas in order to reduce the burden of making the chart. And the ideas are practically impressive and have great scope for improvement.

A JavaScript Library
Chris Heilmann has created a script which converts simple HTML tables to charts and vice versa. He has implemented a Javascript library which generates the chart for you. So the example I had mentioned in the tutorial can be simply put in the form of the following HTML table,

<table class=”tochart size300×100 color990000” summary=”Browsers for this site, March 2007“>
<caption>Browsers</caption>
<thead>
<tr><th scope=”col”>Browser</th><th scope=”col”>Percent</th></tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr><td>Firefox</td><td>60</td></tr>
<tr><td>MSIE</td><td>25</td></tr>
<tr><td>Opera</td><td>10</td></tr>
<tr><td>Safari</td><td>5</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>

The script pulls up all the tables present in the page which have the class set to “tochart” and puts up Google API generated charts in their place. Smart, isn’t it?

An Online Utility
The above script would definitely save your time in making the charts, but it is only created for a single type of chart, namely, the 3D pie chart. But if you require other comprehensive charts then you would have to make use of an chart generator developed by Jon Winstanley. It is a put-values-get-chart utility which makes the chart making process even more simpler. The utility takes care of all the factors required for a chart and also allows to create all types of charts.

But one element which goes as a negative aspect of this utility is that it is not flexible. You put in the value, get the encoded URL and then use it in your web page. Eventually, if you want to modify the chart later you would have to undergo the same process of putting in values again.

What I would like to see is, an implementation of both the above aspects. That is, have the put-values-get-chart utility but at the same time it should generate some XML format like the HTML table which should then used to generate the chart. In this fashion we would be able to modify the chart as and when required. Does it sound like the need of Google Chart Framework?

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• 10 Most Amazing Google Search Tricks

In this article I will list down the search tricks which I use quite frequently. Be it finding time, meanings or watching the cricket score, searching PDF’s, with Google as the search engine life cannot be more simpler. Here are the 10 most amazing Google Search tricks:

1. Different Types of Files at your will
How many times would you have asked for materials (PDF, PPT, DOC) for a particular topic from a friend? Its almost everyday that we might have the necessity to ask them either for knowledge, preparing a presentation, white-paper or for case studies. Such times it mostly difficult to look out what to exactly search for because most of the times you don’t know about the topic at hand. But this petty keyword unleashes its lethal power at such occasions.

Let’s say I want to implement a case study on SOA which means I have to read a lot of information for SOA. So I just have to find materials which might have already been uploaded on the web in the form of PDF’s, DOC’s or PPT’s. These materials can be easily obtained by doing a search for:

• PDF – service oriented architecture filetype:pdf
• PPT – service oriented architecture filetype:ppt
• DOC – service oriented architecture filetype:doc

2. Scholarly Search
If you want some authenticity of the materials then it would be better to find the materials from educational institutes or universities. For this use the Google scholar search. But suppose you don’t like to switch to Google scholar search you can add the same query with an additional parameter to the normal Google search box,

• service oriented architecture filetype:pdf site:edu

3. Meanings of any word in an instant
Now you do not have to carry a dictionary or install a dictionary software just for the purpose of finding out a meaning of a word. With the wealth of information in Google’s hands, its a piece of cake to find out the meaning of the word. Just use the define: keyword. The meaning would of course be displayed but also a set of other links which might have an alternative definition are also given out with the link to read more about it.

• define:beureaucracy

You would argue here that, a dicitionary gives out more information than this. But what about words that don’t actually fall within the vocabulary. Suppose you want to know what SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is then you would have no choice. Google Search comes to your rescue in this case,

• Abbreviations – define: SOA
• Jargons – define: Web 2.0
• SMS language – define: LOL

4. Find the time of any location
Many of us might be probably working for client which are based at different locations. And communication has to be carried out frequently carried out in such cases. But before a communication you have to know which time zone the location is falling into otherwise you would be causing a disturbance.

I have seen people installing time zone software for showing the time of the location they would be calling to. But with Google at your hands you don’t have to install any software. It would be just simple to use a query for finding the current time such as,

• time new york

psst….look closely the time on the little clock graphic. It also shows the perfect time!

5. Weather at your fingertips
I had been to GOA for a Christmas vacation in the last week of December. But I made a mistake of not finding out the temperature of GOA before leaving. Had I known that it is hot even in the winter I would not have made the mistake of carrying additional luggage consisting of blankets and jackets.

If you are thinking to visit a place it is useful to know what the temperature of the place is before hand, it can make efficient packing. Google helps you here too. Just use this query without asking anybody or waiting for the news to make a weather report. I wish I had thought of this!

• goa weather

6. Google does live commentary too!
Indians are cricket fanatics. But its amusing to see the organizations here trying to put together tactics to devoid cricket lovers from wasting time to watch the cricket scores instead of doing their work. What I think they fail to understand is that by blocking the live cricket scoring sites they are actually making the employees more curios and provoking them to hunt for proxy networks or listen to the radio or chat with their friends elsewhere.

Jokes apart, you actually don’t need proxy networks to view the live cricket scores if you at least have access to Google. If you want to find the latest info about all the cricket matches then just type,

• cricket

But if you want to find out only about a particular match then use only the names of the two playing nations,

• India Australia

Remember that the scorecard will come only when the play is going on.

7. Calculate with your browser
Every OS has a calculator inbuilt but when the browser is the thing which is constantly open whey bother to open up a calculator. Open Google and straight away type your mathematical expression. You can go all the way from basic arithmetic to trigonometrical expressions. This is simply amazing stuff accomplished by Google.

• 26 * 9000
• sin(90) / cos (90)

8. Compare your currency with others
Now that the dollar is declining, the rest of the world must be busy trying to check the impact of the dollar on their currencies. But first of all one must know how much a particular currency amounts to when cashed in another currency. Google’s inbuilt currency converter just does this.

• 1 USD in INR
• 1 EUR in INR

9. Keep track of the stocks
With the booming stock market it is very important to track the stocks on a day to day basis. Putting a stock ticker in the search box is the most obvious thing you would think of. But it is not always you would remember the stock ticker, you should add the keyword “stocks:” to the company name.

The best part of the obtained result is that it provides a chart which shows the trend in the company’s stock along with important statistics.

• stocks: INFY

Note: Currently the results are restricted to the companies listed in the US stock markets.

10. Wanna find some faces?
This is most interesting trick. You might be needing images for various occasions and searching for images is the most difficult thing because what we expect might not be possibly mapped to a query. But Google has a parameter in place for images in situations we need an image which describes a face.

Suppose I search for the term “happy” then the Google results page displays smileys. But I would like to use images of happy people. Even if I choose the term as “happy face” the results don’t show images which contain people. For this there is a parameter “imgtype” which you can use with the URL. For this put in the URL as follows:

• http://images.google.co.in/images?q=happy&imgtype=face

There are many more variations which can be bought about with the above tricks thus making your search experience not only enriching but also exciting. If I have missed any tricks of common usage, feel free to mention it.

Update 1: Google keeps on experimenting new ways of searching. If you liked the above tricks then don’t miss out my article which mentions how to use the new search experiments introduced by Google. Believe me, they are brilliant!

Update 2 : Search for your favorite movie information with Google and enjoy it even more. Have fun with the 5 Most Fantastic Movie Search Tricks With Google.

Update 3 : Why not carry out the search for exactly what we are looking for? Get excited for trying out 5 Most Exciting Search Tricks with Google Operators

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• Use a server side framework to code in the chart
• Use a database to collect the report data and then code for the framework integration
• Insert chart image after generating a chart in a software
• Use some heavy JavaScript libraries which add to the loading time of the page

But if you had only a few outcomes and wished to show a simple chart in your web page to the readers of your website or blog then probably you would be fixed in a situation like this. The main reasons being:

• Use of an HTML only website or blog which does not allow server side scripting
• Lack of knowledge of using a chart framework even if you had server side scripting
• Burden of the process in creating a simple chart.
• Wastage of your precious time.

But with the power of Google Chart API in your hands all you need to know is to insert an image in your web page and watch your chart come to life. But if you are thinking that what could be the use of using a static image for showing a chart then you are wrong. The Google Chart API is so simple yet so powerful that can give you some amazing features:

• Create charts simply by using URL with some parameters
• Inserting the chart is as simple as you would be inserting an image
• The chart is created on the fly dynamically
• No need of server side coding
• No need of JavaScript to code or view your chart
• Any resolution of the chart with only a change in URL parameters
• Manipulating the parameters of the URL would change the chart
• A variety of styles to choose as per your tastes.

Doesn’t this sound pretty much magical. If the above features excite you then probably the process of showing you how to create a simple chart right in this article itself will be enchanting. So lets proceed ahead.

Creating a chart with the Google Chart API

Lets take a simple case study for our chart. Suppose you are writing an article on the trends in the usage of browser’s and instead of showing the data in tabular format you could show present the data with some visual cues. Charts are the perfect way to do it. You must have already been at a site which shows amazing chart representations for some reports. Google however does not have anything sleek yet in their chart varieties but hey they surely have simple and sweet ones.

I am taking the browser usage trends of my blog readers. According to the statistics the trends show that 60% of my blog readers use Firefox, 25% use MSIE, 10% Safari and 5% the rest.

So if I have to represent this data in the form of a chart then first of all I simply need to choose the chart type according to my liking from the various Google Chart Types. From all, I will choose the 3D pie chart. So for drawing the chart we will have to build a URL with in this fashion:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?<parameter 1>&<parameter 2>&<parameter n>

Select the particular chart name, In my case it is p3. So the first parameter of the URL will be:

cht=p3

Now for the data, I will use the Simple Encoding technique which is indeed, simple. According to the technique my data representation would be done as follows:

chd=s:8ZKF (Four characters for the value indicate the four divisons in the chart)

We have to specify the resolution for the chart. According to my blog layout I would choose a height of 200px and the width of 400px. So the parameter would be,

chs=400x200

Titles have to be given to the data representation. So, for each of the four characters above in the data we would have to give its equivalent number of pipe delimited titles as follows,

chl=FireFox|MSIE|Safari|Others

Finally we come to the coloring part. You can specify any color you require. The API automatically shades the other chart divisions if the appropriate number of colors are not provided. I want my chart to have shades of 2 colors, blue and green so I would give the last parameter as follows:

chco=1B75DF,92BF23 (Colors have to be in hexadecimal format)

Our chart is complete! Don’t believe it?. You just have to combine the URL with the parameters and put in your browser’s address bar or click here. Google will do the rest of the stuff for you.

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:8ZKF&chs=400×200
&chl=FireFox|MSIE|Safari|Others&chco=1B75DF,92BF23

Inserting the chart into your web site or blog

It is very simple to insert the chart into your blog or website. Since the resulting output of the URL is an image (.png) you just have to copy the entire URL and encapsulate it into an image tag as follows:

<img src=”http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:8ZKF&chs=400×200
&chl=FireFox|MSIE|Safari|Others&chco=1B75DF,92BF23” title=”Browser Stats” alt=”Browser Stats”/>

You are seeing the live representation of the chart above. Isn’t this concept just fantastic? Now go ahead and start creating some visual presentations in your article and let me know about your creations.

Related posts:

• Impressive Google Chart Generator Scripts
• Search Results
• Unleash the Power in Your Blog with Google Custom Search
• 10 Most Amazing Google Search Tricks
• 5 Most Exciting Search Tricks with Google Operators

Timeline Search

If you want to search the chronology of certain events then you can add the attribute “view:timeline” to your query following a space. For example, you can find the timeline invention of television which dates back to the 20’s when John Logie Baird had invented it. I found out that the first laptop came about in the 80’s which was GRiD Compass. It’s strange that I could not find computer.

You can click on the timeline to find out the details of the searched query pertaining to that period. Its a nice useful feature which helps you learn more.

Search Navigation

This feature makes your search even more easier by providing you combinations of the input query that you would be likely to search in the next instant. This includes finding maps, videos, images etc. I tried searching for my Canon S5 IS which I had purchased recently.

Google makes the combinations based on the most likely keywords which were searched in the past and displays them in a sidebar. This eliminates the need of switching your views or typing in more keywords. In short, a good way to make you more lazy.

Digg Style Voting

TechCrunch reported the start of new Google Experiment which enables a user to vote the best search result pertaining to his query. This helps the user to retrieve the same result at the top when he searches for the same query again. This voting applies on to the user when he logs into this Google account and not to everybody.

I have been addicted to refine searches in Google ever since I started to use it. I believe such experiments helps us to retrieve the most minute information from the hoards of websites that lie on the web today. Which technique do you like?

Related posts:

• 5 Most Exciting Search Tricks with Google Operators
• 10 Most Amazing Google Search Tricks
• Search Results
• Unleash the Power in Your Blog with Google Custom Search
• Minesweeper – Back with a Bang

If I picked a favorite of the lot, it would be Minesweeper. It is a single game which employs strategy over luck. But I miss it at my office since none of the computers come installed with it. But in the current age of web 2.0 who searches the program menu any way? Its all out there open on the web. And if you think that games are blocked as well you are pretty right. But when the provider itself is Google, who can come as a barrier. It was a startling revelation when I found Google did have its own version of Minesweeper implemented with Ajax.  Google Minesweeper comes in a Google Homepage Gadget. In fact there are 5 games that you can choose from from here.

If you however don’t like the layout of the minesweeper game in your homepage you can turn your heads to the more animated version offered by telerik. It has been implemented Microsoft’s Silverlight. For playing  it, first install the Microsoft Silverlight plugin and enjoy!

Related posts:

• Convert Date to String and String to Date in Java
• Hilarious Web 2.0 Song
• JSON Web Services – the XML JSON debate further ahead
• New Theme for TechTracer
• J2EE or JEE, Java 5 or Java 1.5 – Is SUN Crazy?