Some Chrome Apps I can't live without

                      

Chrome is really amazing when it comes to speed. Its also second to none when it comes to productivity on the web.

Chrome has a web store that hosts many Apps & extensions that make life a lot easier.
A common question that people ask is How is a chrome app different from a bookmark to a website. Well, there's a subtle difference,

• Some apps are just like 'conveniently located and good-looking' bookmarks
• Some apps point to chrome specific versions of websites (I've heard New York Times chrome page is quite good)
• Other apps make use of chrome specific features such as offline storage, notifications etc in innovative ways

Here's a video that explains what apps are essentially.




Back to the point. Here's a list of my favorite chrome apps:-

• Offline Google Mail
• This app syncs mails from your GMail account and makes them available offline, all this in the background! It also sports a cool 'ios' look and feel
• NYTimes
• Beautiful, All news sites should be like this, makes me feel as if I am reading a magazine. \
• Entanglement
• A cool puzzle game, I can't really explain the concept, just give it a shot
• Flixster
• Nifty looking app to look at the cast/pictures/trailers and more of latest and upcoming movies
• Angry Birds
• These days no compilation of apps is complete without mentioning Angry Birds. This app supports offline game play and uses local storage to store the achievements/scores.
• Sinuous
• A simple yet addictive game
• Quick Note
• A note taking app

Apart from these apps, there is a multitude of apps for Google products like Gmail, docs, calendar, maps, groups, news, reader, etc etc etc phew!

In a later post I'll cover Chrome extensions which offer different capabilities compared to Apps.

Google Talk Chrome Extension

The google talk chrome extension located here is an amazing example of how the gap between web apps and desktop applications is being bridged every day.

I have tried out this app on Ubuntu & Mac so far and to say that I am really impressed would be an understatement.

It has notification, keeps running in the background.. has a tray icon and can be set to notify for new mail too!

Thumbnail Generation for various Video files in Explorer

First of all, follow the previous blog and install the necessary codecs.
At this stage I'm assuming that you already have a directshow decoder capable of decoding the most common video formats. So lets go ahead with thumbnail generation

1. .avi Files
Thumbnails will be automatically generated once you install ffdshow or any directshow decoder capable of decoding these files. eg. xvid, divx

2. .mkv .mp4 files
While installing Haali Matroska Splitter remember to select .mp4 support,
Start->All Programs->Haali Media Splitter->Media Splitter Settings
Options ->Explorer Integration->Enable Thumbnail Extraction YES
Offset to a value between 8000 - 10000




Now add the following to your registry and restart the system. In order to do so, create a file named thumbnail.reg and paste the following into that file (Excluding BEGIN & END). Now double click the file to add these entries.

BEGIN
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mkv\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11D1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@="{327669A0-59A7-4be9-B99E-1C9F3A57611A}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp4\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11D1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@="{327669A0-59A7-4be9-B99E-1C9F3A57611A}"

END

3. .rmvb files
These thumbnails will be automatically generated upon installing Real Alternative Lite