Stanford artificial intelligence researchers have developed software that makes it easy to reach inside an existing video and place a photo on the wall so realistically that it looks like it was there from the beginning. The photo is not pasted on top of the existing video, but embedded in it It works for videos as well - you can play a video on a wall inside your video. The technology can cheaply do some of the tricks normally performed by expensive commercial editing systems.

find more here

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Software) has released its 2.6 version which packs lots of new features.

Major Changes:

• Toolbox Menubar Removed
• Toolbox and Docks are Utility window
• Ability to Pan Beyond Image Border
• Improved Free Select Tool
• Brush Dynamics
• Minor Changes
• GEGL

Important progress towards high bit-depth and non-destructive editing in GIMP has been made. Most color operations in GIMP are now ported to the powerful graph based image processing framework GEGL, meaning that the interal processing is being done in 32bit floating point linear light RGBA. By default the legacy 8bit code paths are still used, but a curious user can turn on the use of GEGL for the color operations with Colors / Use GEGL.

more here and here

When asked if and how they plan to match Microsoft Office’s unparalleled feature set, most online office suite vendors simply switch the subject, touting the superiority of their Web-based collaboration, and low or free price.

ZoooS LLC is one of the few vendors that won’t dodge the question.

At the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week, the California-European startup will preview a Web office suite that is based on the free, open-source OpenOffice.org, Microsoft Office’s main desktop competitor.

ZoooS offers Google Docs-like collaboration, such as letting users simultaneously edit the same document. And despite OpenOffice’s size — version 2 for Windows requires 440 MB of disk space when installed — ZoooS offers speedy access to 95% of the features and look-and-feel of OpenOffice.org, said ZoooS’ CEO and co-founder, Hisham El-Emam.

“It’s almost all Javascript, so it runs really fast, you don’t even need Google Chrome,” El-Emam said.

ZoooS already has a “few thousand” paying users at several medium-sized companies and its major client, the German Ministry of Education, making the 20-employee startup already profitable, El-Emam said. The basic cost is $999 for a perpetual server license for 10 users, which includes installation support and a few basic support incidents after that. The price per user decreases as the number of users increases, he said.

Read More

Download Google Chrome Browser here

Chrome’s improved performance is partly attributable to its being based on the very fast WebKit rendering engine—the same one used by Apple’s Safari—and partly to its new JavaScript engine, V8. JavaScript performance is one of the more touted features of Chrome, and in the well-regarded SunSpider performance test, it came in with a time of 3471ms, compared with IE8’s 12,866ms and Firefox 3’s 6,701ms—a marked and impressive improvement that gives a lot of credence to Google engineers’ claims that this will pave the path to far richer JavaScript-based Web applications.

Chrome’s process isolation takes that of IE8 a couple of welcome steps farther: It not only isolates tabs, but also plug-ins such as Flash, and it offers a Task Manager for your open tabs and add-ins. I haven’t seen either of these capabilities in a browser yet. Not only does Chrome isolate simultaneous tabs, but it even isolates individual tabs sequentially; when you navigate to a different domain, the tab process is thrown out and a new one started—just in case there were memory leaks resulting from the previous site. I wondered what effect this would have on the Back button (whether it would remember the session information from the earlier site) but I didn’t run into problems, and was able to check my Webmail using the Back button even after moving to another site.

Read More

Microsoft Corp.’s latest version of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) requires more than double the system memory of its main rival, Mozilla Corp.’s Firefox, and spawns nearly six times the number of processor threads, a performance researcher said today.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) Beta 2 also consumes 52% more memory than its predecessor, IE7, and uses almost three times as many threads, said Craig Barth, chief technology officer at Devil Mountain Software Inc., a Florida-based maker of PC performance testing software.

“IE8 is epically porcine,” said Barth. “Microsoft has gone to epic levels of bloat.”

Barth tested IE8 Beta 2, IE7 and Firefox 3.0.1 in a 10-site scenario that involved media-rich domains such as boston.com, channel9.com, cnet.com, infoworld.com, nytimes.com and others. Each site was opened by each browser in a separate tab, then links on those sites were opened in new tabs. Both Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight were installed as plug-ins for each browser.

By test end, IE8 Beta 2 had grabbed 380MB of memory on the 2GB-equipped system running Windows Vista, while IE7 accounted for 250GB and Firefox 3.0.1, the most-recent version of the open-source browser, had taken 159MB. When the same tests were run under Windows XP, each browser consumed slightly less memory than in Vista; IE8 Beta 2, however, continued to lead the competition by wide margins.

Read More

Some of us have been dreaming of the day we can finally press the delete button on Microsoft Word for good.

Nothing against Word, per se. It has served us well enough throughout the years. Maybe it is the challenge and change of view we’re looking for. The likelihood of a viable replacement grows stronger as you realize most everything you do on Word could also be done in Google Docs or Zoho …for free. However, the major hurdle of any web application is its reliance on an internet connection.

Now, with Gears recent beta release on Webkit-powered browsers, and webkit-powered Fluid for Mac which allows you to download local copies of websites to your desktop, have our dreams of keeping a desktop copy of a web app come true?

Almost.

We’re so close, we can taste it. As it stands, you can have a local copy of Google Docs which allows you to unplug from the internet and open, search, edit, tag, organize and save all of your documents.

Read More