Ubuntu 12.04 'Precise Pangolin' Officially launched. Some cool new features offered

New offerings in  Ubuntu 12.04 Long Term Support code name 'Precise Pangolin'

Ubuntu has released its 12.04 Long Term Support OS for Desktop, Server, Cloud and Core products. Here are some the cool new features offered.

Heads Up Display (HUD):

The new HUD gives you a fast alternative to the traditional, menu-based way of telling your computer what to do. Instead of clicking on menu items to give it instructions, you just press one key to bring up the HUD and start typing what you want to do. You’ll then get a list of functions, without ever needing to know in which menu they live.

 

The Video Lens:

The new Video Lens makes it easier than ever to find the videos you want to watch. Just click on the icon on the Dash and enter your text to search. Whether it’s stored on your computer, on YouTube or anywhere else, you’ll soon see a list of matching content.

Shotwell:

Shotwell is an image organizer designed to provide personal photo management for the GNOME desktop environment. Shotwell is replacing F-Spot as the default image organizer for Ubuntu.

Being somebody interested in multimedia apps, i thought these are some nice offerings in this version of ubuntu. Please do write back if you have explored any other interesting features in ubuntu.

(

)rinivas

Storage wars in the cloud

Comparison of cloud storage services Google Drive and DropBox 

Having received the activation mail from google regarding google drive, i thought about what are the other free cloud storage services available for users like me. I have lots of ebooks, video material, pics and scanned docs which i would like to store online. So let us see whats on offering for users like me:

Google Drive: Actually i have done a exploration of features of google drive here

DropBox (Free version): Compared to Google Drive the space for free account is less. DropBox offers just 2G space. Files stored in drop box can be accessed using windows, linux, mac, ipad, iphone, andriod and blackberry (is there anything left in the list of ways by which a typical user access the stuff online?) The cool feature as per DropBox is it always transfers the part of the file that changes instead of transferring the whole file everytime. This can give the user a nice quick usage experience and also light on the amount of the data to be transferred. I have not yet explored Google Drive completely, but one cool feature in DropBox is it maintains one month history for the changes you make to the files you store. That a huge amount of history for somebody who frequently make changes to their online docs. Also DropBox says any changes can be undone and any deleted files can be recovered. This is also an important feature. I am no fan of google but i have a feeling that google with its huge user base will slowly overtake Dropbox when it comes to the free version of cloud storage apps. Lets wait and see.

There are still some more free services out there which i am yet to review. They are
Microsoft SkyDrive, icloud. I will come up with the details about these two services too shortly so that we have enough data to choose among the best of these.

Good Luck.

(rinivas.
)

Woohooo...Got my google drive with 5 Gig free storage

I just now saw a mail from google-team  regarding availability of google drive for my google account. With over 5 GB of space it should solve all my online data storage problems. I personally collect lot of ebooks, store some important videos and documents which were download from the web and also store scanned copies of interesting material. So, now this one place where i can have access to all my stuff anywhere( i have an andriod phone Sony Ericsson Xperia X10). I say its cool.

I was just checking the features of google drive. Here are some interesting feature.


1) It offers visually pleasing grid view (basically thumbnail preview) and plain old list view. I liked the grid view

2) Other basic functionality like sort your stuff by last edited, last modified, last opened etc.

3)One very useful information for google drive, ie. How much space you have used so far can be found in Settings -> Storage.

4) You have a predefined list of keyboard shortcuts to ease your interaction with your google drive and you can  define your custom keyboard shortcuts too.

5) One more cool feature of the google drive is that you can add interesting google apps and paint your drives grid view with cool games and apps.

6) Google drive categorizes your stuff in to different buckets and provides you option to directly access the desired document type. You have predefined  document categories like Folders, pdfs, presentations, Drawings,  images, tables, spreadsheets, forms etc and many more.


These are just some of the features i explored in the 10 minutes i got access to google drive. Overall i liked it. This surely will help me as a single place where i can store all my data (videos, songs, documents, presentations, ebooks ) and most interesting of all is access them via my andriod device. Good work google.

Guys, please do write in about any other interesting feature of google drive.


-(rinivas
  )