The Download Blog

Though computer monitor technology has long since passed the days when you truly needed to "save your screen," screensavers are still a lot of fun and a great way to personalize your desktop when you're away from the computer. This collection features screensavers that are most popular with our users.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Free Fire Screensaver sets your icons and windows ablaze. Watch as each item slowly catches fire and begins to smoke on your desktop. Crackling and popping sounds and a musical soundtrack complete the effect. Add your own MP3 to customize your desktop flare-up.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

3D Fish School Screensaver lets you view up to 100 fish swimming peacefully on your desktop. Choose from a saltwater or freshwater virtual aquarium and tweak the settings to allow for more fish and bubbles. Use the settings to display a clock so you can check the time without waking your computer.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Sim Aquarium reminds us more of a sea floor teaming with aquatic life. Watch your fish swim around a coral reef complete with live clams and swaying sea life. Choose from 41 species of fish.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The Matrix Screen Saver is a longtime favorite for many users and continues to mesmerize with its now classic falling digital code. Wait a second, I think I just spotted myself typing this in the falling code. Maybe we are part of the Matrix! Somehow, I doubt Keanu can save us.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Deep Space 3D Screensaver lets you take a trip to a distant galaxy and explore planetary systems and nebulae. As you watch, you may even encounter mysterious items and artifacts floating in the void. Are they manmade? Maybe not. Pleasant music accompanies your journey through space.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

3D World Map lets you gaze upon our planet in full 3D and view detailed information on more than 30,000 cities. Compute the distance between any two points on Earth. Tweak settings to adjust color and saturation to customize your view of the globe. This screensaver comes with a built-in MP3 player so you can view the Earth and listen to your own soundtrack.

Thankfully, recent developments in mobile search applications have given us a handful of sturdy options when it comes to launching search from a Windows Mobile phone. Last month, Microsoft released a credible update to Live Search for Windows Mobile. This month it's Google's turn with Google Mobile App for Window Mobile smartphones and Pocket PCs.

Although Google has a precedent of mobile search applications established for BlackBerry and iPhone, Google's mobile division has tailored this iteration of its Mobile App to the logic of Windows Mobile's Home Screen, to good benefit. See for yourself in this First Look video.

Google has fixed a disconnect between two of its software products, its Chrome browser and the plug-in version of Google Earth.

This Google Earth flight simulator works in Chrome now.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

"As of ~4 p.m. PST today, Google Chrome 1.0+ on Windows is an officially supported browser," a Google employee said on a Google Earth mailing list on Thursday. "That means Chrome users will no longer get the unsupported browser message, and the plugin and API should work just as they would in other supported browsers."

Google Earth is generally used as standalone software, but the plug-in version can be mashed up with Web pages such as James Stafford's Mini Flight Sim and Thatcher Ulrich's Monster Milk Truck.

Ultimately, Google believes Google Maps and Google Earth will converge into a single product; the plug-in is one step in that direction.

The update is also noted on the Google Earth API page from which the plug-in can be downloaded.

In other Google geography news, the company also announced a new batch of public transit map updates Thursday. Houston, Calgary in Canada, and 21 agencies in Virginia include maps and schedules, while Atlanta, Bonn in Germany, and Sacramento, Calif., among others, got maps visible through Google Transit.

(Via the unofficial Google Earth Blog.)

(Credit: Google)

Windows Mobile owners tired of opening their browsers every time they want to start a Google search can now put that habit to rest. On Wednesday, Google released a version of Google Mobile App for Windows Mobile phones (rate it here).

On Microsoft's mobile platform, the free, native application installs a home screen plug-in from which you can launch a handful of Google's mobile services. About two thirds of Google Mobile App is dedicated to its search field. The other portion is populated with thumbnail icons that open your Gmail, Picasa Web albums, Google Docs, and so on, in your default browser, except the Google Maps icon, which will open or install Google's downloadable map and directions application on your phone.

While Google Mobile App for Windows Mobile surfaces your history and search suggestions just like the BlackBerry and iPhone versions, the Windows Mobile version is the first not be a full-screen application. Even when you open Google Mobile App for Windows Mobile from the program menu, you'll see it as a strip floating at the top of the screen.

Treating the mobile app as a horizontal swatch is actually an asset, thanks to some time-saving tweaks Google added to this version--like mapping the app to a hot key so you can start a search without having to first open an app from the program list, and searching within a specific domain. These make Google's mobile application a quick-acting reference resource for anyone with a Windows Mobile phone.

Google Mobile App will work on Windows Mobile smartphones and Pocket PCs in the US, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain.

Google Earth 5's big new features include the other final frontier, the 20th century, and the Red Planet.

For Windows and Mac, Google Earth 5 maps the ocean, explores the past with historical maps, and shows you there's more to Mars than red dust. Check it all out in this First Look video.

Google Latitude shows your friends on a map--as long as they've agreed to share their location.

(Credit: Google)

Just because the Internet has broken down geographic barriers, don't assume that Google doesn't care about geography.

The company plans to launch software called Latitude on Wednesday that lets mobile phone users share their location with close contacts. Google hopes it will help people find each other while out and about and to keep track of loved ones.

"What Google Latitude does is allow you to share that location with friends and family members, and likewise be able to see friends and family members' locations," said Steve Lee, product manager for Google Latitude. For example, a girlfriend could use it to see if her boyfriend has arrived at a restaurant and, if not, how far away he is.

To protect privacy, Google specifically requires people to sign up for the service. People can share their precise location, the city they're in, or nothing at all.

"What we found in testing is that the most common scenario is a symmetrical arrangement, where both people are sharing with each other," Lee said.

The software spotlights Google's fixation with mapping and location technology. Location is an important part of navigating the real world, and Google clearly sees its geographic services as a way to establish a more personal connection with customers who today use Google chiefly for the virtual realm of the Internet. And of course money is involved, too: Google hopes its mapping technology will lead to location-based advertising revenue.

Google's power is firmly lodged in search and search advertising, but the company is trying to expand to broader online services, too. That includes online documents and various aspects of social networking, which are much more personal services and ones that put Google into more direct competition with rivals such as Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo. Like using Google profiles to contact information with select contacts, using Google Latitude tells Google who's who in your social graph.

Latitude lets you contact somebody who's close by.

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How it works
Latitude is part of Google Maps for Mobile, the company's mapping software for mobile phones, but also can be used through a gadget loaded onto its iGoogle customized home page. It'll work in 27 countries at launch, Google said.

Initially, it will work on most color-screen BlackBerry phones, most phones with Windows Mobile 5.0 or later, and most Symbian-based devices such as Nokia smartphones. An update to the Google Android operating system now being distributed to the T-Mobile G1 phone also enables it, and iPhone and iPod Touch users will get the option "very soon," Lee said.

Latitude uses Google's technology to judge a user's location not just by GPS satellite, but also by proximity to mobile phone towers and wireless networks.

That's a much more automated approach than the manual "check-in" process used by Dodgeball, a service that Google decided in January to shut down.

Other competitors exist, though. BrightKite and Loopt offer mechanisms for people to find each other by mobile phone, for example. Then there's MobiFriends, Tripit, and Dopplr.

And Google's clearest competitor, Yahoo, offers some competition with Fire Eagle. That service doesn't provide location information, but it does provide a mechanism to centralize people's geographic privacy choices, in effect taking care of some of the social graph management when it comes to location information.

To use the service, you need a Google account to record who has permission to see your location. For choosing who gets to see your location, you can use contacts stored with Gmail or Picasa, Google said.

The white lie
With the service, you can hide from specific people or disappear altogether. And you can manually set a specific location if, for example, your phone can't show it with sufficient precision or if you wish to tell someone a white lie about whether you really aren't going to go to the candy store.

People must agree to share their location before Latitude will work.

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Google envisions two broad classes of people with whom you might want to share location information. First is a small, close-knit circle of friends and family with whom you're willing to share your exact spot. Second is a larger group with whom you're happy to share city-level detail, convenient for finding out when somebody's in town but not much more.

When somebody is close, the software lets you contact the person various ways--by calling or sending an e-mail or text message, for example. It also lets you hide from that specific person.

Privacy is of course a significant concern when it comes to sharing this sort of information. If you want to use Latitude, you must specifically enable the service.

Meeting your pals at a bar is an obvious example of the software's possibilities, but there are softer cases I see as useful, too.

Lee pointed to a case where a friend's girlfriend, though far away in Seattle, will "virtually place herself next to him." That sounds a little sappy for my tastes, but I can still relate. My wife is on the other side of the country right now, and it would be heart-warming to see just where. There are a lot of occasions where technology is better for maintaining relationships than it is for establishing them, and this looks like one to me.

Google Earth upped the cartographic ante again today with Google Earth 5 for Windows and Mac. As CNET News reported back in April 2008, the latest version incorporates even more data from NASA, the BBC, National Geographic, and other proprietary sources to create one of the most unique map offerings ever, meshing comprehensive real-time data on Earth's surface with information on the oceans, the stars that we see, historical maps, and topographical information on Mars.

Google Earth's new Ocean feature includes a downloadable layer to view global chlorophyll levels.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Conceptually, the oceanic maps are great. It is beyond cool to be able to see ocean-related points of interest like shipwrecks, and have cross-referenced content like undersea explorations. The interface remains flexible in the new version, too. Hot keys CTRL+ALT+B and CTRL+ALT+T toggle the sidebar and toolbar, respectively, making it simple to maximize screen real estate. Meanwhile, Google's use of scientific content from multiple oceanographic concerns makes this one of the few places that the public can access such an incredible range of facts, figures, and true stories of the sea from one place.

Clicking the busted plug-in icon doesn't take you to the plug-in you need, nor does it tell you what the plug-in is.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

However, it shouldn't surprise many that the execution of the new features leaves much to be desired.

Searching in Google Earth is still atrocious. Even when you have Oceans activated, typing in "Titanic" into the search field will get you nowhere. If you adjust the term to "Titanic shipwreck," your results seem to depend on your most recently searched locations. After looking at San Francisco, searching for "Titanic shipwreck" showed me a list of shops and restaurants that had "Titanic" in the name. After closing and re-starting Google Earth, and searching for "Titanic shipwreck" again, the globe panned over to the correct part of the North Atlantic but did not zoom in.

For Google to fail so hard with its search algorithms is like Ford failing to stay on top of developing car tech.

Even once I found what I was looking for, Google Earth was not always free from failure. There is a feature with which you can click on a white and blue circle icon to learn more about the part of the ocean you're exploring. Sometimes this results in a picture, a bit of text, and links to more content online. Other times I was rewarded with a blue puzzle-piece icon. Clicking on this missing plug-in icon resulted in nothing--no jump to download the plug-in, not even a message telling me what the plug-in is called.

The new historical maps feature lets you compare Las Vegas in 1990...

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These mistakes are more than frustrating; they're the kind of basic problems that an outfit like Google should have nailed down by now. Despite these problems, though, the oceanic maps are pretty cool.

Sticking with Earth for a moment, Google Earth 5 also introduces historical maps. Accessible from the clock icon on the toolbar, they're neat to peruse but aren't useful for in-depth data mining. The time-lapse imagery of recent decades in specific urban areas, like documenting the growth of Las Vegas, is fun but somewhat counter-intuitive to the real-world relationship that Google Earth attempts to perpetuate.

Many of the older black and white maps awkwardly overlay the colorful ground beneath them, too. Having access to the images is better than not at all, but I'd like to see future versions of Google Earth improve on the historic map display and rendering.

...to the Las Vegas of 2009.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Thanks to information supplied by NASA and other fact-based sources such as A Traveler's Guide to Mars--not to be confused with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--the Mars map is surprisingly rich with information. From the well-known Olympus Mons to the recent discoveries that indicate the presence of water on the Red Planet, Google Earth's Mars maps are an entertaining, educational delight.

Compiling all this information into one easily navigable place is no small feat, but there is definitely room for improvement. The Mars maps suffer from the same search flaws that plague their earthly siblings, and rendering is often sluggish.

This map of the Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system, hints at the depth of information on Mars that's available.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

You should find that the OpenGL engine is faster than the DirectX version, but if not, you can switch from the second start-up icon loaded in your Start menu. Why you're not able to change this setting from the Options menu is yet another simple fix that would improve the Google Earth experience. Some of the problems that plague Google Earth are long-standing. Let's hope they get addressed before it reaches version 6.0.

• Click here for more stories, and images, on Google Earth 5.0.

Google Earth now works as a Safari or Firefox plug-in on Mac OS X.

(Credit: Google)

Google has released a Mac OS X version of a plug-in that lets people use its Google Earth software as a browser plug-in.

The move means a smaller but significant crowd can rely on Web pages that employ the sophisticated aerial viewing options the software provides. But Mac fans should brace themselves for a 47MB download from the Google Earth API page.

The size is large because Google provided a universal binary file that runs on both PowerPC-based and Intel-based Macs, a Google representative said in a forum posting about the availability of the Mac version. "There are also some other space-saving changes that we may look into later on," he said, adding that Google plans to mention the software in a forthcoming blog post.

Digital Earth Blog, which surfaced the forum post Wednesday, points to a few sites such as EarthSwoop and Mini Flight Sim where people can try the plug-in.

In other Mac news, Jason Toff, an associate product marketing manager for the Google Mac Team, announced Wednesday on the Google Mac blog that the Mac-specific Google page is no longer just available in English. The site now works in German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Dutch, and Italian.

Update 9:45 a.m. PST December 4: Google's blog post about the plug-in is now live.

In it, Google also announced a new Google Earth plug-in game, Puzzler, and some bug fixes in the Windows version of the Google Earth plug-in.

(Via Google Earth Blog.)

When you're wedged next to someone at a conference, you can't help noticing their business from the corner of your eye. That's how I saw that my seat mate at last week's BlackBerry Developer Conference was using FreeMind (for Windows and Mac) to take notes on the talk.

Is this how you really think?

(Credit: FreeMind)

I've looked at the freeware application FreeMind before, but had never seen it in the wild. I have to admit, compared with my two pages of linear notes organized primarily by bold text and a lot of paragraph spaces, my neighbor's mind map looked elegant and compact. I could understand his story at a glance, while a quick look at my document felt like watching The Matrix. It was time to give FreeMind another look.

Like all mind maps, FreeMind gives you the flexibility to organize thoughts on a page as they connect to each other and to the larger picture. After all, not all minds reason in subheadings and bullet points. In contrast, mind maps let you connect thoughts that shoot out from a central concept. You shape, place, and name that master idea (the root node), then create child or sibling spokes that relate to it.

FreeMind encompasses a fine range of features, including scads of icons and color-formatting options to help you visually organize concepts. It also supports hyperlinks, which allows you to link Web sites and even documents to a map. In addition, you'll be able to export your landscape of thoughts in a variety of formats, including HTML, PDF, and JPEG. As flexible as it lets your mind be, FreeMind works within an older-style logical structure that could get frustrating for some. For instance, you must insert nodes by hand or using a hot key; you can't click and drag to create them (a shame).

I can see how mind maps like FreeMind can hasten note-taking, or help you visualize a project, paper, or process. However, a revamped interface with more intuitive drag-and-drop functionality wouldn't hurt, along the lines of MindMeister and Bubbl.us, two free webware applications.