Vector Conflict: The Siege is a defense game where you have to keep waves of attacking vector enemies from hitting you. Vector graphics gave us the first true 3D games way back, and ever though they’re unnecessary today, there’s something undeniably attractive about their minimalism.

The game is pretty tricky. You have  a number of weapons at your disposal, and a tiny radar to warn you of approaching attacks. You can be attacked from any direction, so you have to spin round taking out enemies with one eye always on the radar. It plays straight from your browser, after just a little loading time.

Today Google are going to show off their in-development operating system Chrome OS, and possibly even release a beta version. There are already three major OS choices, so what can Google do differently?

The Cloud: It’s expected that the main feature of Chrome OS will be its reliance on being online. Instead of loading your PC with tons of software, as much as possible will be accessible via cloud computing. Most computing is done while online now anyway, so this may make a lot of sense. As Google itself offers an increasingly powerful array of online tools, such an approach meshes perfectly. Perhaps it will somehow make Google’s Wave useful, instead of being the coolest web app no-one is using that it is today!

However, there has to be more to it than that, as you can already use Google’s applications from your browser, and while a stripped down OS will save disk space and CPU usage are there really so many machines out there that struggle with what’s already available? Apple’s OSX has the unique selling point of sleek sexy usability, Linux can be endlessly tinkered with by tech-heads, and Windows 7 is a lighter, better version of the dominant OS around the world. I don’t think being small and lightweight can really be enough for Chrome OS.

Security: It is rumored that Chrome OS users won’t have to deal with viruses, malware and their associated security updates due to a completely rethought approach to security architecture. This would be a godsend for everyone except Symantec and the other security software companies - but to be honest I just can’t see how you can create risk free computing, as hackers have been around forever.

Design: In the same way there is an assumption that a Google branded phone will be the best thing since the iPhone due to Google inherent good design sense, people are assuming the same from Chrome OS. Personally, I think they’ll struggle to out design Apple. Their mobile Android OS is eminently functional, flexible and really neat, but when it comes down to pick up and play design, Apple are the masters.

Maybe Google will prove me wrong. The essence of Chrome OS design is supposed to be minimalism, which I completely approve of, but if it just works like a minimal Windows or Linux like interface - that will be boring. I know it’s a tall order to reinvent the wheel, but that’s still what I want!

We’ll know all this within hours, and will update with our impressions soon.

As crazy as it sounds, these days it’s becoming as important to maintain your online image as it is to make yourself look presentable in real life. Choosing a picture to have as your avatar for Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and the like can be a painstaking task. One simple and effective way of presenting yourself on social networks is to use a cartoon character version of you as your avatar. What’s more, you needn’t feel embarrassed about your profile picture because even if you’re really ugly you’re picture will look good. In fact, the uglier you are the more funny your character will be.

Here’s a round-up of some free online avatar creation tools, along with an image of how my ‘likeness’ came out with each of them:

Otaku - The level of customization available in Otaku is probably the most detailed you’ll find anywhere. There are 16 different categories of elements to tweak, including front and back hairstyles, makeup and hands. Each of these categories gives you plenty of choices of attributes, so you can really fine-tune your character with Otaku. In fact, the Japanese-style image that it produces is probably the most lifelike of all the sites I looked at.

DoppelMe - If you need a profile image or an avatar really quickly then pop along to DoppelMe. The level of detail isn’t as exact as Otaku, but the creation process is much faster. There are only 10 categories of elements to choose from, but there’s enough options within each one to allow you to make something that at least looks a little like you. In order to save your DoppelMe once you’ve finished you need to sign up for a free account.

Simpsons Avatar Creator - You’ve no doubt seen ‘Simpsonified’ versions of people of people in your friend’s lists before and have probably wondered how they did it. Well, there’s no great science to it. All you need to do is visit the Simpsons site and select from the various heads, haircuts, eyes, etc. on display in the avatar creator. Fans of the show will love the clothing and accessories, that reference things from the show in their design.

Face Your Manga - Probably my favorite of the five I tested, this one results in probably the most ‘adult’ looking avatar designs, and I reckon they’re perfect for use on personal blogs. There’s a high level of customization available, allowing you to tweak everything right down to the lines on your face. Once you’ve finished, your avatar will be emailed to you ready for use anywhere you like.

MadMenYourself - If you’ve ever watched Mad Men and wondered how you would look if you’d had the life of an ad executive in 50s New York then wonder no more. Simply go to this site and piece your alternate self together using the wonderfully simple step-by-step interface. When you’ve finished making yourself look dapper, the site gives you the option to save just the head, the body, or the whole scene.

In Pierre: Insanity Inspired, you play an artist struggling to find inspiration to finish his magnum opus. This is done by collecting various objects you need over 6 levels. Each level is a rotating disc that you run around, avoiding dangers and finding enough pieces to get your inspiration back. It’s a pretty simple little game, but gets really tricky as it progresses.

What makes Pierre: Insanity Inspired different is how it treats the player. When you make a mistake, it insults you. Developers at MIT’s Singapore GAMBIT game lab are trying to find out whether this motivates players more or less. My experience was that the insults were irritating to begin with - I didn’t like the voice. Next, I got angry with one insult “butterfingers” which didn’t describe my mistake correctly - I can take an insult, but it should at least be accurate!

Finally, I got annoyed with Pierre: Insanity Inspired, but I’m not sure whether it was the irritating voice, the inaccurate insults, or the game, which gets pretty unfair without being very inspiring! Nevertheless, it’s an interesting idea, so check it out! It plays in your browser and requires Flash.

[Via:  Play This Thing]

Google Reader is the only RSS reader I’ve ever used – except for the ones I’ve had to test and review for Softonic -  and I wouldn’t change it for any other. I simply love all of its features: it works really well, it’s available everywhere as long as you have an Internet connection, it has extensive support for keyboard hotkeys and best of all, it includes some handy sharing features that enable you to easily share interesting articles with friends, workmates or even readers of your blog.

Sharing articles and blog posts in Google Reader is as simple as clicking the Share link below each one of them. If you want to add a personal comment as well, click the Share with note link instead.

These shared items will automatically be added to your public page, a website automatically generated by Google Reader that updates with every story you mark as shared in your feeds. To check all the items you’ve shared so far, simply click Shared items in Google Reader’s sidebar.

But there’s more to this Shared items feed than just displaying a list of selected blog posts. From here you can check how your public page looks like (by clicking the little blue arrows beside the feed’s title), view and edit your Google profile, and also tweak some sharing settings. These settings enable you to decide who can access your shared items, customize the appearance of your public page and find more people to share items with, to name a few. Read the rest of this entry »

During the summer, Gmail increased its maximum attachment size to 25MB, up 5MB on its previous limit. Great news, I hear you cry - now you can squeeze a few more photos into that email or send an album in 2 parts rather than 3!

Well yes, you can, but does that mean you should?

One thing you have to remember about email is that it’s old. Really old. Although it mightn’t feel it, email has been around for more than 30 years and, unlike other technologies, it hasn’t been updated much. This doesn’t have much of an impact on our day-to-day use, but like they say over at the Google Operating System blog, “…sending a large attachment via email is relocating using the U.S. Postal Service as your moving company. It is painful, limited, and expensive.” It will get the job done, but it’s not the most efficient way.

So what’s the alternative? Well, if you are in physical contact with your recipient, you could just put the file on a memory stick. Once you follow the basic security principles, it’s a very simple way of transferring data. Obviously, this only works if you are geographically close to the recipient. In fact, email’s ability to overcome this problem is one of the reasons it became so popular. Just because it’s popular, though, doesn’t make it the best, so have a think about using free web hosting services instead. Don’t worry if it sounds complicated - you’ll get the hang of it quickly.

Go to a free hosting site - Mediafire and Hotshare are two well-known ones - and upload the file in question, just like you would attach it to an email. With 200MB of space usually available, it has a significant advantage over the now elderly email. Once it is uploaded, the service will give you a link, which you email to your friend. Your friend clicks on the link, and downloads the file that you uploaded. If it sounds complicated, it’s only because I have detailed every step - do it once or twice and it will become second nature.

Even though it’s not the most efficient way, you might still have your reasons for wanting to send larger files by email. If you do, you’ll need to make them smaller, and there’s two ways of doing this. You can compress (or ‘zip’) them, or divide them into smaller files. Either way, you’ll need a tool to do this, and the recipient will need a similar tool to decompress or re-join. IZArc and 7-Zip are two reliable - and free - file compression and decompression utilities. Likewise, in the area of file splitting, you’ve got plenty of choice. Even though they’re not pretty (and show little imagination in the name stakes), HJSplit and Gsplit are both fuss-free methods of chopping those unwieldy files down to size.

Exploration is a standard attraction in many games, and Small Worlds makes it a central feature. I don’t want to say too much, as playing it for the first time is genuinely surprising. It’s a platform game - you control the red figure above, using the cursor keys. It’s completely simple to play and not difficult, but really addictive and extremely pretty. Just play it!

[Via: ByteJacker]

Google are taking over the world! We’re entrusting our data with a faceless corporation!

Some people worry about that, anyway, though I’m not one of them. I think Google offer a great range of free services that greatly enhance my online life - even if sometimes I feel left out as a European.

Today Google announced on their blog a great new service that should help make people much more comfortable with using Google - Google Dashboard. This can also be found through your Google account settings. What it gives you is a single page summarizing all the Google products you use, and what is kept on them.

So, I can see how many conversations I have stored in my Gmail, how many albums in Picasa, what’s in my Google Docs and so on. It covers over 20 products, including the aforementioned, Calendar, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and more. From here you can control all of that data too.

Perhaps the data that’s most eye opening is your search history - searching while signed in is associated with your account, and it’s all there! There’s even a calendar that shows your levels of search activity. It’s fascinating, in a narcissistic way, but even better you are put in control of it all. If you want to delete it, that’s easy. You can delete bits, or everything and “pause” history collection.

I think this Google Dashboard really makes you feel in control of your online life, and I would love to see sites like Facebook and MySpace follow suit. Cynics and conspiracy theorists probably won’t be convinced, but it certainly takes some of the wind out of their sails.

*Apparently there are some issues with data collection for Google Apps for Domains.

The 12th Annual Independent Games Festival is almost upon us, and has a huge selection of submissions to check out. There’s a record 306 entries, covering a huge range of genres. Lewie Procter at SavvyGames has completed part one of a ‘Pretend you are an IGF judge‘ series, which usefully brings together all the publicly available submitted games, so you can check them out yourself.

The sheer volume of games is pretty intimidating, but there’s sure to be tons of great stuff. I’ve already reviewed AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, which I love and Terry Cavanagh’s excellent Don’t Look Back is also there, alongside his upcoming and highly anticipated VVVVVV (no demo for this yet, sniff!).

While publishing giant Activision’s Modern Warfare 2 will break barriers by allowing you to be a brutal terrorist, these indie developers are proving that you don’t need to shock or ask ridiculous moral non-choices of your players to do something revolutionary with video games or story telling. There’s also a wealth of humor, weirdness and creative enthusiasm that I feel is lacking from many of the season’s big upcoming releases - which unless I’m forgetting something are all sequels. While there is certainly lots of good stuff to play, like Hollywood before it, the games industry seems stuck in a blockbuster-sequel cycle, making it seem difficult for genuinely new games to make their mark.

One of the most widespread problems people had with Snow Leopard when it launched was a compatibility issue in Mail.app (aka Apple Mail) which prevented messages being sent and even crashed the program in some cases. Nick wrote a guide to fixing these issues, so this obvious failing in Apple’s QA testing needn’t be too much of a hindrance.

That said, my first thought when I read about people having problems with Mail.app was: why are these people even using Mail.app? I’ve had my current iMac for around two years and I’ve never even run the Mail program. Not once. That’s because I use Gmail, a mail application that renders Mail.app and all other desktop email clients more or less obsolete.

For those of you still toiling in the dark with an email client, I know there is sometimes a good reason for that. If you’re trying to handle lots of different accounts, or if you need to connect to an Exchange server, it’s difficult to live without a mail client. But for the average home user and even for most home office users, webmail solutions will always be a better idea than clients. Here’s why:

Security and stability

Desktop email clients are inherently less stable than Gmail or other equivalent webmail services. Storing your data on a local disk (even if you backup) will never be as safe as trusting Google’s datacenters (which are, themselves never 100% safe: nothing is).

But perhaps more importantly, email clients generally rely on downloading message files (and often attachments) to your computer before you filter out content you don’t want. This means that the potential for spam and even malware finding its way onto your computer is significantly higher if you use a mail client application. Read the rest of this entry »

There are several ways to create a collage with your digital pictures: doing it yourself from scratch with Photoshop (which obviously requires a certain Photoshop knowledge), using an automated Photoshop action that does almost all the hard work for you or simply turning to easier, more specific collage-oriented tools like Shape Collage.

This awesome program lets you create completely customizable photo collages in just a few minutes, and without any artistic or technical skill required. As long as you know how to select photos from your hard drive, and tweak a few simple configuration settings, you’re good to go. Shape Collage is completely free for personal use, and works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

But if you’re the kind of person who prefers not to install software if there’s a web app that does the same job, we’ve got good news for you: Shape Collage has just launched an online version! Shape Collage Online is a stripped-down version of the desktop app, with less options and reduced functionality, but it works perfectly fine for the occasional photo collage. Just select the photos you want to use in your collage (they must be all online, either as standalone photos or photo galleries), pick a shape for your collage and hit ‘Create’. After a few seconds, your collage will be ready!

In this brave new world of the internet, the planet, we have been told, has shrunk. Yet for Google, it seems old geographical realities still hold true.

Google Voice sounds wonderful, but I’ve heard so much about this amazing service I can’t use that I’m beginning to hate it. And Onebox music search - it sure is lucky no one in Europe listens to music, or we might be a bit annoyed at Google’s new search feature we don’t have. Thanks for making these tools available everywhere, except in Asia, Australasia, Antarctica and Europe. What’s this all about? When did the US become the world?

North America only accounts for 15% of internet users, so when are the majority going to get some of this stuff? Europe’s a bigger market, and just as developed as the US. I’m surprised that a music search service should need any local restrictions - with streaming services like Spotify there are licensing issues, but search?

With Google Voice, obviously there will be differing telecoms law, but Google has presence everywhere and there seems to be no movement at all. As we follow events around the world with complete ease, the idea of waiting months for something just doesn’t fit. So come on Google, there’s a whole world out there, and we don’t like being ignored! One day, you might wake up and find we’re all using Bing.

Gretel and Hansel is a surprisingly macabre and grizzly take on the classic Brothers Grimm tale. You play Gretel, who becomes alarmed after overhearing her mother planning to send the children away into the dangerous forest!

Presented in really pretty water-colors, with a perfect soundtrack, Gretel and Hansel isn’t particularly complicated (and there’s a walkthrough linked on the game page if you get stuck). It does feature achievements, and some of them feature very dark humor! It’s not a cute kids game, this one.

Check out Gretel and Hansel here.

[Via: IndieGames.com]

NaNoWriMo - no, it’s not an amazing new Apple product or a delightful beach resort in Italy, it’s National Novel Writing Month, a slightly crazy but totally fun international writing initiative that runs from November 1st - 31st 2009. The general idea is this: you write a novel (50,000 words) in just one month. At the end of it all, you upload your work of art to the NaNoWriMo website to be validated and sit back, basking in the knowledge that you’ve just written a novel!

So, why exactly would you want to do this? Well, some people do it for charity, while others really want to set themselves a challenge. Apart from anything though, at the end of it all you’ll be able to tell everyone that you’ve written a novel - how cool would that be?! So why is a software blog telling you all this? Well, we have the perfect program to help you, of course. Write Attack! is the ideal tool, and a very efficient way of dealing with the dreaded writer’s block. What’s more, it has a feature that is specifically designed to overcome the challenges of National Novel Writing Month - the NaNoWriMo function! Just hit the NaNoWriMo button, and the program will automatically set you a target of 1,600 words - precisely what you need to do every day to churn that novel out within the month. Come on, we all know there’s a writer hiding inside you - show us what you’ve got!

Picture the scene. You’re happily surfing the net over the weekend and suddenly this baby pops up:

Lots of things might be running through your head: What is it? Where did it come from? Why me?! Basically, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is part of the Windows .NET framework. According to Microsoft, WPF combines “application UI, documents, and media content, while exploiting the full power of the computer”. In layman’s terms, it is a graphics plug-in.

Some people are in a huff because Windows didn’t ask for explicit permission to install the plug-in and instead sneaked it in as part of the NET Framework 3.5 SP1 update. Geeks have been on the case for a while, and claim that it is not the first time Windows has done something similar, having previously installed the Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant. It only came to the attention of most users, however, when Firefox plonked a giant warning on their screens. The plug-in has been automatically disabled, as Mozilla believes it creates a security problem that leaves Firefox open to a ‘remote code execution vulnerability’ - in other words, makes it susceptible to drive-by spyware picked up while browsing.

For the moment, Mozilla has dealt with the problem, but many will be left wondering if Windows should go around installing things without our explicit permission. If you were reading a software review and the reviewer mentioned that the program sneakily installed things without asking, you’d be rightly suspicious. Should the rules be any different for Microsoft?