Picasa 3.5 Adds Face Recognition

If you liked the feature from Picasa Web Albums that detects the faces in your photos and clusters them, it's now available in Picasa 3.5. Face recognition works locally, without sending data to Google's servers.

For some reason, the feature is enabled by default and it starts to process your photos right after installing the software. It's pretty slow and the accuracy is far from perfect: you might see multiple clusters for the same person and different people addded to the same cluster.



If you sign in using a Google account, you can choose people from your contacts when you're asked to add names for each group of photos. There's also the option to download the name tags from Picasa Web Albums if some of your photos are stored online.

'As with Picasa Web Albums, your reward for trudging through your photos to add tags is better organization, which for a massive library of old, archived shots can be hugely helpful,' thinks Josh Lowensohn, from CNet.

Another new feature in Picasa 3.5 is geotagging using Google Maps. Until now, you had to install Google Earth to add locations to your photos. The latest version of Picasa has a 'places' sidebar that lets you drag photos to a map.




Three years ago, when Google acquired Neven Vision, a blog post mentioned the goal of the acquisition: improving the way you organize photos in Picasa. 'It's not always easy to search through your personal photos, and it's certainly a lot harder than searching the web. Unless you take the time to label and organize all your pictures (and I'll freely admit that I don't), chances are it can be pretty hard to find that photo you just know is hidden somewhere deep inside your computer. We've been working to make Picasa (Google's free photo-organizing software) even better when it comes to searching for your own photos — to make finding them be as easy as finding stuff on the web. Luckily we've found some people who share this goal, and are excited that the Neven Vision team is now part of Google.'

Update: For now, this is an English-only release, so it's not available if you set a different language for the Picasa page. Here are the direct download links for Picasa 3.5:

Windows: http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasa35-setup.exe
Mac: http://dl.google.com/photos/picasamac35.dmg

Introducing Google Chrome Frame

Today, we're releasing an early version of Google Chrome Frame, an open source plug-in that brings HTML5 and other open web technologies to Internet Explorer.

We're building Google Chrome Frame to help web developers deliver faster, richer applications like Google Wave. Recent JavaScript performance improvements and the emergence of HTML5 have enabled web applications to do things that could previously only be done by desktop software. One challenge developers face in using these new technologies is that they are not yet supported by Internet Explorer. Developers can't afford to ignore IE -- most people use some version of IE -- so they end up spending lots of time implementing work-arounds or limiting the functionality of their apps.

With Google Chrome Frame, developers can now take advantage of the latest open web technologies, even in Internet Explorer. From a faster Javascript engine, to support for current web technologies like HTML5's offline capabilities and <canvas>, to modern CSS/Layout handling, Google Chrome Frame enables these features within IE with no additional coding or testing for different browser versions.

To start using Google Chrome Frame, all developers need to do is to add a single tag:

<meta http-equiv='X-UA-Compatible' content='chrome=1'>

When Google Chrome Frame detects this tag it switches automatically to using Google Chrome's speedy WebKit-based rendering engine. It's that easy. For users, installing Google Chrome Frame will allow them to seamlessly enjoy modern web apps at blazing speeds, through the familiar interface of the version of IE that they are currently using.

We believe that Google Chrome Frame makes life easier for web developers as well as users. While this is still an early version intended for developers, our team invites you to try out this for your site. You can start by reading our documentation. Please share your feedback in our discussion group and file any bugs you find through the Chromium issue tracker.

Video Introduction to HTML 5

Are you interested in HTML 5 and what's coming down the pipeline but haven't had time to read any articles yet? We've put together an educational Introduction to HTML 5 video that goes over many of the major aspects of this new standard, including:

• Web vector graphics with the Canvas tag and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
• The Geolocation API
• HTML 5 Video
• The HTML 5 Database and Application Cache
• Web workers

In the video we also crack open the HTML 5 YouTube Video prototype to show you some of the new HTML 5 tags, such as nav, article, etc. It's chock full of demos and sample source code.



By Brad Neuberg, Google Developer Programs

Help and learn from others as you browse the web: Google Sidewiki

As you browse the web, it's easy to forget how many people visit the same pages and look for the same information. Whether you're researching advice on heart disease prevention or looking for museums to visit in New York City, many others have done the same and could have added their knowledge along the way.

What if everyone, from a local expert to a renowned doctor, had an easy way of sharing their insights with you about any page on the web? What if you could add your own insights for others who are passing through?

Now you can. Today, we're launching Google Sidewiki, which allows you to contribute helpful information next to any webpage. Google Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar, where you can read and write entries along the side of the page.



In developing Sidewiki, we wanted to make sure that you'll see the most relevant entries first. We worked hard from the beginning to figure out which ones should appear on top and how to best order them. So instead of displaying the most recent entries first, we rank Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed. If you're curious, you can read more on our Google Research Blog about the infrastructure we use for ranking all entries in real-time.

Under the hood, we have even more technology that will take your entry about the current page and show it next to webpages that contain the same snippet of text. For example, an entry on a speech by President Obama will appear on all webpages that include the same quote. We also bring in relevant posts from blogs and other sources that talk about the current page so that you can discover their insights more easily, right next to the page they refer to.

We're releasing Google Sidewiki as a feature of Google Toolbar (for Firefox and Internet Explorer) and we're working on making it available in Google Chrome and elsewhere too. We also have the first version of our API available today to let anyone work freely with the content that's created in Sidewiki.

We've been testing Sidewiki with several experts and news organizations for a while and are happy to hear their positive responses. We hope you'll try it for yourself, follow our Twitter feed, and let us know what you think!

If you're ready to start exploring the web with Google Sidewiki, visit google.com/sidewiki to download Google Toolbar with Sidewiki and contribute your own entries alongside pages on the web.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management and Michal Cierniak, Engineering Lead for Google Sidewiki.

Microsoft Silverlight comes to Linux, First stop: Moblin

Microsoft Silverlight comes to Linux, First stop: Moblin: "

Microsoft has announced plans to bring its Silverlight technology to Moblin Linux. This is the first time the company has mentioned anything about Silverlight running on any Linux distribution. Up until now the only way to access Silverlight content including web video and interactive web media on a Linux system was to use Moonlight, an open-source implementation of Silverlight developed by Novell and Microsoft.

Microsoft isn't making a big deal of the Linux portion of today's announcement. Rather, the company is demonstrating that Silverlight plays well with computers using the Intel Atom processor. During an event at the Intel Developer's Forum in San Francisco, officials from Microsoft and Intel showed a demo of Silverlight running on Intel Atom powered devices running both Windows 7 and Moblin Linux. Of course, Silverlight has been running perfectly well on Intel Atom powered netbooks running Windows for the past year and a half, so that's no big surprise.

The question is, if Silverlight is going to run on Moblin, does that mean other Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSUSE will be supported in the future?