Google redesigns itself

It’s not just the search interface that’s redesigned, even the Google logo has been given an extra coat of gloss. Look at the before and after:

Before:

After:

Look closely and you’ll see the differences. Actually, the Google logo on the homepage itself hasn’t changed, but on the Images, Video, etc. pages it has.

Now about the main part of Google Search’s redesign: the search itself. Look at the new design:

It’s absolutely clear that this is a much friendlier interface and is much neater. Now I can finally breathe.

But wait, doesn’t the layout look quite familiar? Perhaps you’ve used Yahoo! or Bing. Let’s take a look at that…

…and Bing:

Notice anything? They all have similar sidebars! Looks like Google finally responded to Bing (and Yahoo) and advanced their search.

Apple employee “loses” iPhone at bar. Could this be a planned leak?

Today, there was a story circulating about the Interwebs about an Apple employee who “accidentally” left an iPhone at a bar. The iPhone was found by Gizmodo (who wrote a post here), taken apart, analyzed, and then returned to the employee. Was the iPhone really forgotten? I don’t think so. There must be a reason for the Apple employee leaving the iPhone at the bar.

Quick Look: DOES Windows 7 copy Mac?

Yesterday, I went to Best Buy to test out Windows 7. Before, I had seen a release candidate of it, and it looked pretty cool. But when I saw it again, it looked so much more fresh.

Just by the look of it, I can’t really judge whether they made Windows 7 less power-hungry. It still looks like it consumes just as much processor power as Vista.

MuseScore: A free music notation program that’s actually good

I’ve been looking for a music notation program forever that’s free, powerful, and isn’t a demo, and I finally found it.

I got the MuseScore application through a newsletter from Mac OS X freeware. It’s quite a big program though, but 100 megabytes later, I finally got to open the application for the first time. At first glance, it was much simpler than other similar programs I had tried previously. There were only a few toolbars for note input, playback, and editing, but that’s all I really needed. I knew this was an app that I would actually keep and use.

Entering notes in MuseScore is a piece of cake, and there are so many ways to do it. Just select a note value in note input mode and move the mouse to where you want the note to be. Or, you can type in notes with the keyboard (A-B-C-D-E-F-G) and move them with the Up or Down arrow. Inputting chords was also easy; just press Shift + (A, B, C, D, E, F, G) and it will build a chord. MuseScore will even fill in rests for me so that I didn’t have to! I especially appreciated the many ways that I could enter and edit notes, whether it be with mouse input, keyboard input, MIDI input, or a combination of the three.

Slurring and ties were also easy to accomplish in MuseScore. I just had to press “S” or “+”, respectively, and it would automatically form a slur. Then, to change the start and end positions, I just did Shift+Right or Shift+Left. Ties were done automatically just by pressing the “+” key.

MuseScore is also very intelligent. It follows the standard rules of music notation. It knows when to beam up, beam down, and how to break the beams of notes. 1st-and-2nd endings, dynamics, articulation, fingering, and grace notes are a walk in the park in MuseScore. However, there are still a few difficulties with voicing, where there are two or more voices in a single staff. MuseScore supports up to four voices per staff, but it can take a while to learn to input with voicing, and MuseScore still has a few bugs to address before voicing gets really simple.

One of the most useful features in the program is the playback. Unlike other programs, you can specify how you’d like the music to be played back, be it at a soft or loud, fast or slow, reverberant or not; it’s your choice. The playback tool is great for checking accurate note input, which brings me to one other point: when entering notes, MuseScore cannot tell the difference between E-flat and D-sharp, that is, no matter how you enter E-flat or D-sharp, MuseScore will recognize it as E-flat. However, there is a script pre-installed called Pitch Spell that tries to guess which one of the enharmonic notes it is.

Along with piano music, MuseScore also handles chamber music, violin music, symphony scores, and even kazoo music, although I haven’t tried them yet.

Other features in MuseScore include:

• Cross-beam notation (see figure at right):
• Automatic note head positioning in a staff
• Highlighting out-of-range tones (which apparently doesn’t work all the time)
• Plug-ins to create chord charts, color notes, insert note names, etc.
• Page and text style editing
• Export as PDF, PNG, SVG, MusicXML and many other formats
• …and pretty much anything you can write on real music notation paper, including triplets, line breaks, and so much more!

A few things don’t quite work yet:

• Voicing has a few bugs, including chord note positioning
• Arpeggiando positioning
• Slurring across multiple lines
• Beaming with triplets
• Mixed meter/key signature

I give MuseScore an 8.5/10 and highly recommend it to anyone who has been looking for a free yet powerful music notation program. Download at http://musescore.org.

A visual guide to Opera 10

Just a few of the many new features in Opera 10:

Of course, there are a few bugs.

The search bar supports multiple search engines

100/100 on the Acid3 Web Page rendering test

Mousing over a tab shows a preview of that tab

The main window

Opera’s preference dialog makes the browser highly customizable

Opera 10 comes with a very stylish RSS feed reader

Speed Dial is highly customizable and provides quick access to your most viewed sites

Right-clicking a web page brings up this context menu

The tab bar can be expanded to show previews of webpages

You can search from the address bar or the search bar

Opera 10 has a sidebar featuring widgets, mail, notes, and much more

Opera 10 has the most advanced statusbar of any web browser

Opera comes with widgets

Opera 10 is the latest installment in the Opera Browser series. It features the Presto 2.2 rendering engine, an accelerator for loading web pages on slow connections, customizable skins and many more that make this browser such a versatile web surfing application.

Unfortunately, it can be very complicated to customize Opera, since there are so many buttons and drop-downs to digest, but once you get the handle on this great web browser, it will integrate seamlessly into your online life.

I give Opera 10 an 8.5/10 rating and recommend it to anyone who hasn’t tried it out yet.

Review: HootSuite 2.0

Just a few days after Twitter launched its new homepage, HootSuite also revamped their interface. They offered an “early upgrade to HootSuite 2.0″ for everyone.

I tried out the new interface, and I must say it’s not bad. For those people who have used the old HootSuite before, the interface isn’t too difficult to navigate. For people who haven’t used this Twitter client, though, the interface may look quite complicated, but is also very intuitive.

One of the major changes in the HootSuite 2.0 interface is the addition of multiple columns. By default there’s the home feed column, mentions, direct messages inbox, and pending tweets in a three-column-at-a-time view. In the old HootSuite, these columns used to be separate tabs. I believe the change from tabs to columns was a smart choice since some people like me want to view multiple things at once.

The multi-user support is also a key feature in HootSuite. In HootSuite 2.0, different Twitter accounts appear as separate tabs. This is also very helpful, since it is easy to navigate to different accounts, but if you manage a lot of accounts, it gets cumbersome. The tabs can also be reordered by drag-and-drop, another time-saving feature.

Other features in HootSuite include:

• User profile viewing
• Favorite, direct-message, reply, and re-tweet
• Auto-refresh
• Embeddable columns (which don’t work for me)
• And much more!

I would give HootSuite an 8.5/10 and would seriously recommend it to anyone who has multiple Twitter accounts or who just loves tweeting.