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visual

Exceptional Web browser

Before you roll your eyes at yet another addition to the overly saturated Web browser market, we recommend that you take the time to try out Visual Explorer. We liked it so much that we made it our default browser.

The interface is colorful without being too cartoonish, and for all of the options it comes with, it's surprisingly uncluttered. You'll recognize all of the navigational buttons and the menu toolbar if you've used any type of browser before. It features almost of all of the options that come with IE, but there were several features that … Read more

Intel creates European visual-computing center

Intel said Tuesday that it is investing $12 million in a visual-computing research center in Europe. This comes as Intel prepares to bring out its first graphics chip in more than a decade by early next year.

Opening Tuesday, the Intel Visual Computing Institute is located at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. The company says the center "will explore advanced graphics and visual computing technologies."

The investment, to be made over five years, represents Intel's largest European university collaboration, the company said.

"Intel's visual computing vision is to realize computer applications that look … Read more

Animation tricks create modern 'Star Trek' Enterprise

SAN FRANCISCO--For Paul Kavanagh, the animation supervisor on the new "Star Trek" movie, one technical element of the film was particularly challenging.

During live-action filming, director J.J. Abrams had done something unusual: In a bid to incorporate a shaky, handheld effect, Abrams would frequently sit behind the camera and literally tap on the back of it with his fingers. But "Star Trek" is jam-packed with computer graphics, and for Kavanagh, it was imperative to find a way to replicate the effect of that finger tapping, even in the purely digital sequences. Not to do so, … Read more

Limited calendar program

Keeping tabs on your time is important for most folks. G-Clock provides a new time and calendar management system for your desktop. The question is, do you really need its help?

This free trial embeds itself in your tray as a small hourglass and appears as a digital clock which tracks the time down to the second. A single click on the hourglass icon brings up a calendar of the month with today's date highlighted. Users can organize the calendar in different ways by right-clicking the hourglass.

The biggest option this program provides is its alarm system. The reminder … Read more

Mash up data like music playlists with Verifiable

Data visualizations are a great way to make something complex more easily understood from any spreadsheet or table. Verifiable, a free visualization tool does just that, by quickly organizing uploaded data sets into charts that can be customized and manipulated using a drag and drop control scheme that feels a lot like making a playlist in iTunes.

What's interesting here is that the service is putting both the charts and the data in the same place, so you can go behind the curtain to double check to see the source numbers. The other day when we wrote a follow up on the TechCrunch50 and Demo conferences … Read more

This one's a dud

After putting CLBrowser - Browse and Search Craigslist Visually to the test, we were hard-pressed to say anything good about it, because it just plain didn't work for us.

The program can be accessed from a desktop shortcut. What opens is a very sparse browser window that contains three navigational buttons and a URL field. There is nothing about the browser that screams Craigslist. The main button, which is supposed to take you to the home page, takes you to a Web site that is unavailable. So, on our own, we paid a visit to Craigslist to see if … Read more

Pstill Psychodelic

G-Force is a free visualizer plug-in for iTunes, which extends your options beyond iTunes' built-in visualizers for displaying colorful light shows to accompany your music. You activate G-Force like any other visualizer, just by selecting it while in iTunes, and then it shows complex, constantly changing visuals that move and react to whatever music you're playing. Because G-Force combines a huge number of shapes, colors, images, and other variables, this app produces millions of possible visual effects. What makes G-Force more interesting than many visualizers is hotkeys for quickly adjusting visuals on the fly (like skipping through effects or … Read more

YouMail gets real with a BlackBerry app

Since its inception, YouMail, a visual voicemail service for mobile phones, has had one big problem. You could view and play your mobile phone's voicemail messages online, or--beginning lat June--by pointing the mobile browser to YouMail.com, but messages weren't stored on the device itself.

Starting Wednesday, YouMail has begun to change that with a native YouMail in-box for BlackBerry phones. Visual Voicemail Plus is a free downloadable app that stores your incoming voice messages along with the caller's name, number, and time of call.

In addition to viewing and playing messages in any order you'd … Read more

MusicBox maps future for managing large music collections

One of the most common complaints I hear from people with large music collections is that browsing through songs as if scrolling through a spreadsheet is tedious. For these file-hoarding music fanatics, aimlessly browsing through their music library holds the same appeal as flipping through the card catalog of the Library of Congress.

The problem is: there comes a point when the iTunes paradigm of presenting your music collection as a column-sorted list of files is just absurd. Thankfully, Anita Lillie from MIT's Media Lab has based her thesis around a new way to visualize song data and she'… Read more