• Viber Launches Desktop Apps For Mac And PC; Allows Video Calls

    // Gradly // blog, Download, Software 1 Response

    Viber Launches Desktop Apps For Mac And PC; Allows Video Calls

    Viber Launches Desktop Apps For Mac And PC; Allows Video Calls

    The popular free messaging and VoIP mobile, Viber, has today released a native desktop apps for both Mac and PC. The desktop apps sync seamlessly with the existing mobile apps on iOS, Android, and other platforms. Viber has also announced video calls, allowing it to offer truly Skype experience alternative.

    Send text messages and make voice and video calls from your PC or Mac. Seamlessly transfer calls between Viber Desktop and your phone.

    Here are some of the features for Viber 3.0 on IOS:

    • You can now send video messages to your friends
    • All new voice engine improves sound quality on both low quality and high quality networks
    • Online status indicator tells you when your friends are connected to Viber. Note: users can receive messages even when not connected!
    • In app banner indicates that you received new messages
    • Automatically download new photos for faster viewing
    • You can now add a caption to the photos and videos you send
    • Easily browse through photos received from specific users or groups
    • Show only groups in messages screen, so you can quickly find a specific group
    • Larger photos and larger photo thumbnails
    • Better looking contact info screen
    • New package of fun stickers
    • Accessibility is now supported
    • Viber is also localized to: Czech, Danish, Greek, Finnish, Hungarian, Polish, Swedish, Turkish, Korean, Dutch, Thai, Vietnamese, Malay and Indonesian
    • Performance improvements and multiple bug fixes.

    The company has now reached over 200 million users in 193 countries. Download Viber Desktop now at http://www.viber.com/

  • Google Announces Voice Search, Search by Image, and Instant Pages For Desktop Computers

    // Gradly // blog, Featured, google, Mobile, News, Tech. No Responses

    Google announced a bunch of new features at Inside Search press conference, June 14th, 2011, which took place yesterday. The new additions are voice search on desktop computers, Instant Search and Image Search.

    Voice Search on the desktop

    Google Voice Search has been available in phones for years. Both Android handset and iPhone via Google’s search app have that feature for a long time, and now the same capability is brought to the desktop and initially, to the Chrome.

    Search by Image

    With this feature you can now upload images straight to the search engine and Google will search through the image file and attempt to locate any similar images and return you the terms they’re associated with:

    If you click the camera, you can upload any picture or plug in an image URL from the web and ask Google to figure out what it is. Try it out when digging through old vacation photos and trying to identify landmarks

    Google has released an extension for Chrome and Firefox that lets users identify any picture on the web by simply right-clicking.

    Instant Pages

    Google is bringing Instant Pages to Google Chrome. Available in all of the beta and dev versions of Google Chrome, Instant Pages is Google’s answer to the pre-fetching features built in to Mozilla’s Firefox. Instead of simply scraping basic HTML information ahead of time, however, Google says that their pre-rendering will grab other resources as well such as Javascript for snappy page loading. Instant Pages are only being used for search results (not targeted for ads specifically), but Google did mention they’ll be looking at how to best deliver ads to consumers in the future. Instant Pages allow the most common results to load instantly (in virtually zero seconds) when the user decides to load them:

    Google pointed out that mobile searches on its site have grown and now surpassed desktop searches.

    [via Google’s Blog]