Google Chrome’s Best Apps Tweet

Google chrome is creating history by being The Most-Used Browser in the World, according to statcounter. Google Chrome now has 310 million active users according to Sundar Pichai, Senior Vice-President of Chrome at Google Inc.

  

                                                                                         

Google Chrome Apps are also one of the success keys apart from being Fast, Simple & Secure Web-Browser. Apps are web-based applications or programs that are designed to be used entirely within the browser. These apps serve us for performing tasks like creating documents, editing photos, listening music... and many more, without having to install complicated software in your system. You can easily use them by just installing an app plug-in in your chrome browser.

Chrome provides us several free apps for entertainment, education etc... Here I am listing some of the best chrome apps of their category.

Entertainment Apps: 

TV: The first one here comes in this category is TV app. It gives you an Internet-TV experience. You can find popular TV channels of many countries like America, Europe etc.. You can probably find Indian channels like TV9, ZOOM, and NDTV etc...All you need to do is select a channel & play your favourite program in that channel.

                                                                                                     

Download this Chrome’s TV app

Picasa: It provides you fast & easy online photo sharing. You can upload your photos & videos right from your Chrome browser. Google provides 1GB of free storage for every Google account to upload your photos & videos in Picasa. So upload photos & videos, tag your friends & share with your friends using the 1GB of free storage.     

                                                                                     

Download this Chrome’s Picasa app

MagicScroll: It is a simple eBook reader that provides you unique scrolling experience. You can read millions of books from online libraries using MagicScroll .You can even upload your eBook for reading your book with MagicScroll experience. Most interesting feature is MagicScroll works with offline support and you can enjoy your reading even without Internet.

Download this Chrome’s Magic Scroll App.

AudioSauna: It is a full-featured audio workstation. Here you can apply live effects to your song. You can upload your song from your local system & add effects to your song. You can play & record songs using your computer keyboard. You can download or export your saved song as an audio file.

Download this chrome’s AudioSauna App.

Guinness World Records: Guinness Records provides the absolute entertainment that was being watched in 90 countries worldwide.  Google chrome provides you the opportunity to watch the very best of these Guinness Records through Chrome video channel. You can also create your playlist with your favourite videos of Guinness Records.

                                                                  

Download this chrome’s Guinness World Records App

Utility Apps:

Google Drive: You can access your files & share them with your friends using Google Drive. Google Docs is a built in function in your Google Drive, so you can create & edit your documents, spreadsheets & presentations whenever you want and share with your friends. Google Drive also provides 5GB of free storage for storing your files.

Download this chrome’s Google Drive App.

Boomerang: It allows you to schedule messages to be sent or returned at a later date. Just write your message & schedule your message whenever you want to send it and this app will send your message even if you are not online. It will be greatly useful to people for scheduling birthday emails, people who are communicating with people in different time zones, etc...

                                                                           

Download this chrome’s Boomerang App.

 AdBlock: This is one of the most popular Chrome extensions. AdBlock blocks ads all over the web when you are surfing the web through Goggle Chrome. So you can access your favourite websites like YouTube, Facebook, etc.. without any adds.

                  

Download this chrome’s AdBlock App.

Google Dictionary: It allows you to view definitions easily as you browse the web. All you have to do is just install this app in your Google Chrome and just double click on the word that you want to know the meaning. It is very useful for those students preparing for competitive exams like GRE, TOEFL etc...

                                                                                             

 Download this chrome’s Google Dictionary App.

Personal Blocklist:  It blocks domains or links from appearing in your Google Search results. After installing this app you can find link like “Block www.abc.com” in the Google results. If you click on that link then that link or domain is blocked from your Google results and will not displayed in the results even if you search in the Google until you unblock it again.

                                                                            

Download this chrome’s Personal Blocklist App.

Educational Apps:

Planetarium: It is an interactive sky map for exploring the stars & planets. Planetarium app makes you to feel like that you are looking at the night sky through your Google Chrome browser. After installing this app, it asks you to set your location so that you can view your screen as if you are looking at sky form your location. You can also adjust the time and your viewing location that appear at bottom of your screen to see the sky from any point around the world. You can also view a star’s or planet’s details if you point at them with your mouse.

                                                                                

Download this chrome’s Planetarium App.

TypingClub: This app helps you to increase your typing speed and accuracy. You will have 100 typing lessons and the next lesson unlocks only if you completes the current one. After completing the each test you will be given a rating for your typing and accuracy. This is very useful for those who want to increase their typing speed.

                                                             

Download this chrome’s TypingClub App.

iVocab: It is a set of free quizzes to test & improve your vocabulary skills. These quizzes mainly focus on competitive exams like TOEFL, GRE etc... All you have to do is just sign up , select a course and take a test to analyse yourself.  The quiz timer and the results generation are the interactive features in this app.

                                                                                                

Download this chrome’s iVocab App.

Bio Digital Human: It allows you to explore your body in 3D. This is unique Chrome’s app that allows knowing more about human body. You can explore & examine each every human part through this app. You can also check some diseases and their effective areas in your body and also the symptoms. The 3D view of the body is the most interesting part in this app.

                                                                                        

Download this chrome’s Bio Digital Human App.

 

Daum Equation Editor: It allows you to create & edit your formulas easily & quickly. It is easy to write a formula in this app as it provides all the math & scientific symbols with just a click. You can also change the size and layout of your formula. You can save your formula in either as a text file or an image file in your pc.

                                                              

Download this chrome’s Bio Digital Human App.

Game Apps:

Angry Birds: This one of the most popular games all over the world. The game starts with a small story to take revenge on the green pigs who stole the Bird’s eggs and the updated version of Angry Bird’s has more than 400 game levels to play. All you need have is little logic and skill to clear each level. The next level of the game unlocks only if the present level is completed. Most interesting feature in this app is, it is offline supported.

                                                               

Download this chrome’s Angry Birds App.

Battlefield: It is a free online multiplayer game with interactive graphics. This game takes you to a realistic world through its graphics. You can customize your weapons, you can create your player in game and you can be a lead in your game. Just try this, you feel awesome for its graphics.

                                                                         

Download this chrome’s Battlefield App.

Cut The Rope: The game is all about feeding the little monster, Om Nom with a candy. The little monster Om Nom arrives to your system in a box and each box is a different level.

The outstanding graphics and game playing mechanisms are the key features in the game.

                                                             

Download this chrome’s Cut The Rope App.

Poppit: It is old classic game but still it is made interesting. All you have to do is to pop the group of 2 or more same coloured balloons until you clear entire screen.  You can earn some gifts & some powers during the progress of the game. You can challenge yourself with   easy, medium & difficult levels.

                                                                        

Download this chrome’s Poppit App.

Other Useful Apps:

Full Screen Weather: It is an interactive weather with a user friendly UI. It is having Google maps like interface so that you can view the world and check out the weather condition. You can search a city or place and Full Screen Weather allows you to view the updated weather conditions of that city or place.

                                                                    

Download this chrome’s Full Screen Weather App.

WordPress.com: It provides you an easier, faster and interactive blogging experience. All you have to do just signup and create your own blog or site of your own theme. It provides an interactive UI for blogging and it also provides 3GB of free storage for your pictures that you uploaded in to your blog.

                                                                          

Download this chrome’s Full Screen Weather App.

Turn Off The Lights: It provides you unique video watching experience. All you have to do is just install this app and click on the bulb icon that appears beside that URL box in your chrome browser then you will start experiencing your page fading to dark by highlighting your video. You can also adjust the dimness of the page and this app supports for multiple video sites.  After watching your video, click on the bulb at the URL another time to make your page normal.

                                                                                     

Download this chrome’s Turn Off The Lights App.

Dropbox: It is a free cloud service that allows storing your files in a secure way. You can have your files back anytime, anywhere by using your Dropbox app. You must install this app in your pc to start using it. It provides you 2GB free storage area for your files and you can get an extra 500 MB for every referral.

Download this chrome’s Dropbox App.

Gmail Offline: It is a Gmail app built to support offline access to the mails of your account. After installing this app you can read your mails without any network access. You must synchronize your account to start using this app. This app automatically updates your mails if once you are connected to a network.

                                                                                                   

Download this chrome’s Gmail Offline App.

Try using some of these Google Chrome’s Apps and make your browsing experience better and easier...

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Can games be movies? You think?! Tweet

We love video games, they're fun as hell and sometimes are good learning material. If not for games such as NFS, Gran Turismo etc I wouldn't know how a car works. If not for Call of Duty, Killzone, Battlefield etc I wouldn't know how guns work and what it feels like to be a soldier. That being said, playing games like Resident evil, Max Payne, Doom etc we all think to ourselves "Man, this would make a badass movie" Well, at least I did, many times. And what do we get? Resident Evil: Afterlife, Doom with a "24th" Chromosome, Max Payne with lefty Midget Marky Mark and Mila kunis as Mona sax...WTF?  Well sure, the first 2 Resident Evil movies had some elements that were true to the source material and the movies weren't cheesy. But how can they fuck up Max Payne? The game had good plot, epic characters, lotta action that would look good on the big screen. Watching these shitty movie adaptations (which were agonizing) I thought to myself  "How can these be rectified for future projects?" Hence,besides general essentials for movie making,  I lay down few tips on how to make an epic movie whether loosely or strictly based on a video game (but hey I am no director... so it would seem a li'l narrow minded to professionals)

  

Casting the right actors for the characters
"The first impression is the best impression" We've all heard of that. The actors that play the characters in from the game are the first thing we look for in a trailer.When people saw Mark Wahlberg as Max Payne and Mila Kunis(WTF) as Mona, many got skeptical and jumped to conclusions. Now that is NOT good when it comes to film making. If it's loosely based on the games like the first Resident Evil, where there's no Jill, Leon, Chris or Claire and just fresh character Alice & the T-virus' effects on humans, this doesn't matter. However, an over the top 26 year old playing Wesker in RE:Afterlife, Pretty boy with acting talent at par with a pornstar playing Leon Kennedy...my god, talk about butchering one of the coolest characters in the RE universe. Good thing they didn't mess up Jill, Sienna Guillory was perfect as Jill Valentine. Moreover they must have the voice that suits the game character, need not sound exactly alike. Mark Wahlberg's out-of-breath voice isn't even remotely similar to James McAffrey's cool,deep narrative voice. If you ask me, I would've chosen Bradd Pitt any day. Check out the trailer for "Killing them softly" he still looks like he'd fit the role [In my opinion, of course.]

Do NOT ruin the game storyline

They are called games for a reason, the writing is not gonna be an Oscar worthy masterpiece. If a game's plot is cheesy, over the top then they're just meant to be mindless badass entertainment, like Gears of War, Doom for example.. 
Either don't make a movie and let them remain as epic games or make few reasonable changes  

to the story line and execute it well. Doom's story is pretty cheesy and it's all about mindless fun shooting hell demons that invade mars through a portal!! What were the makers of Doom thinkin? Probably "Alright the recent game Doom 3 seems to be kickin ass in the video game market, Hell let's make a Doom movie with an even cheesier plot, how about a 24th chromosome?" I'm not a big fan of the tomb raider games but judging by the reception of the movies by critics/gamers.... they must have fucked up the game's story line too, i don't know. That being said about games with more action than plot, there are games with intriguing plot such as Resident evil 4, Max payne trilogy, Hitman series, Elder scrolls series etc Hitman movie had good casting but the movie, mehh it's ok and don't get me started on  Max Payne and resident evil post 1&2

Make sure to include game elements

As we play a game, we find certain distinct elements that define it. For eg: Sand demons, rewinding time & puzzles from prince of persia games, Bullet time, shoot dodge & Flashback narration from max payne, Multiple ways in mission completion, disguises from Hitman etc Without these key elements POP wouldn't be POP, Max Payne wouldn't be Max Payne and Hitman wouldn't obviously be Hitman, if made into a movie. And voila... prince of persia had just the dagger of time and NOTHING else, Hitman was a bourne movie with Agent47 instead of Jason Bourne and Max payne,well.....it had reverse shootdodge (diving back in slomo n shootin a person behind him) enough said.

Movie makers/lead actors MUST play the games

After I watched that god awful Resident Evil: Retribution, I bet Paul W.S Anderson never played any of the RE games. In fact, i think he must have just watched IGN/Gamespot walk-through videos on YouTube and then made these movies. Mark Wahlberg clearly mentioned he's never played any of the Max Payne games, good job promoting a video game movie, Mark. Directors, screenplay writers etc of movies based on comics/ novels read the source material before starting the film project hence, no shit....the same thing applies to video game movies as well. I really hope the makers of the Metal gear movie know what they're doing.

CGI or no CGI, Visual appeal must win

We've all been through Mortal Kombat: Annihilation AKA The unwanted MK sequel with the shittiest CGI & fights. I mean, when the Computer Generated Imagery IS the source material... you can't have shitty CGI or other visual FX in the movie adaptation. You're probably tired of me mentioning resident evil like 50 times already, but the 4th & 5th movie in the RE film series had really shitty wire works and pointless Slo-mo!! Hey Paul W.S Anderson, We get it, You're a big Matrix fan... stop using slo-mo everywhere you prick (Sorry got a lil nerd rage there).

And so taking a movie based on a game is not easy, games mean much more to us gamers than just some graphics and objects on a screen, its a second life, a virtual reality and when we don't find those elements in the same movie that took us to places in the game, that's the ultimate crime these directors do... killing the soul of the game they were actually meant to immortalize. This being considered I would comment on my favorite movie that came at par with the game, The batman series! Although some that irritated me was the Harry Potter franchise, i couldn't consider them games, more of another portal to cash in on the actual Harry Potter concept.

Lets hope they make more content rich games and movies that go hand in hand to give us the experience we yearn so much. Games from Tom Clancy have such amazing story lines, I can visualize almost all of them as a movie. Again, its something that rests in the directors hands... 
Bav out! Do post your comments!

Sleeping Dogs: Square Enix goes Oriental! Tweet

I have played as whites [GTA VC] , blacks [GTA SA] , Italians [Mafia II], Russians[GTA 4] and I was wondering, when the Chinese version was coming. I guess they waited for all the good games to release and as always ripped off the good parts from each. This may seem amusing, but seriously, there is no better explanation than that. They did follow the true philosophy of China - Copy and prosper! [Confucius says!]

The game is a 3rd person open-world sandbox, very similar to Grand Theft Auto, fully customized into a Chinese version of the world. We have already seen a Thai version in Just Cause 2, which was again from Square Enix and I have a hunch they might have used the same game engine. 

Now for the ripping part, this game predominantly strains on the character's martial arts skills rather than "ni**as with guns" attitude. So you have more of close quarter combats, knuckles to face types of battles which are pretty neat however not new. For all those who have played Batman Arkham Asylum and City, this game may just bring some nostalgic feelings. There are countless combos to master and the worst part is - most of them don't work on time. The block key usually fail and you end up chicken dancing in front of your chowmein-eating brawler! 

*Cantonese accent* "Someone get the karaoke on! this Ham ga tsan is dancing here" 

So the game has its version of chases and racing and parkour movements and shooting[I'm sure they simulated cheap Chinese guns, it just doesn't work!]. 

About the parkour, its very similar to Assassins Creed and a lot of bits and pieces from L A Noire [chasing the bad guy while you climb and jump your way through the obstacles]. While driving, you can jump onto the next car and hijack that vehicle, although with trucks it gets a little tricky [practice makes perfect!]. Reminded me a lot about the hijacking in Just Cause 2, minus the rope tricks. 

However the story is really interesting, for the most part because its a whole new theme for such an Open-sandbox. Of course for us Indians, this is nothing new, half of our movies run on the same story. The Chinese theme really kicked in the flavors and made the game a lot more colorful compared to its american counter parts. I could also smell a bit of Saints Row theme in this game with the myriad of costumes and gears [especially auto] you get in this game. 

Although the game is highly immersive, certain elements can really bug a gamers. One such example would be the experience points - Cop side and Triad side. One can collect the Triad side points real easy while for the Cops side, even a small dink on a parking meter would void your efforts to get a clean 3 shield finisher. It's irritating to find that keeping both the progression at an equal pace is turning out to be such a herculean task!

Like the gyms in GTA San Andreas, you can find martial arts school here and learn new techniques. With the points you gain from the missions, you can unlock upgrades in combat skills and other skills from Cops and Triads [Again another rip off from Batman AC]. More copies from Batman include hacking CCTV cameras to nail bad-guys [More like hacking in Arkham City]. God! did they copy everything?!

You can find certain elements like "Shrines" and "Suitcases" which boosts your health and finance respectively. These suitcases are often guarded by local goons, so a short spell of fist-fight is required to get your hands on the moolah. 

Then there are countless stores selling "Dragon's Kick" sodas and Herbal Tea which improves your melee attacks and health for a brief period of time. I was intrigued by the "dragon's kick" and its effect, got me thinking - can Coke improve your fighting skills? And then you also have countless street vendors with their noodle and pork-buns, all giving you a tiny health boost. It would be a crime if I missed the massages, for all you out there who played the game - you know what i'm talking about!. For the no-knows, the massage sharpens your senses and increases the rate of your face-meter[I'll let you discover the 'but how?' yourself]. Now the face-meter is something new and interesting in this game. By helping people and beating up bad guys, you get to assert your position and command some respect amongst the commoners. After a while people call you by your name, its an experience!

This game has copied the dance sessions and hydraulic dancing in San Andreas with the Karaoke nights. Girls are aplenty in this game and sometimes you can eavesdrop on interesting conversations about their boyfriends and umm.. the rest of the gibberish. 

Missions are exciting, however buggy game-play makes it painful to play in certain missions. Environmental graphics in this game is more artistic and the in-game physics is decent. Although the controls and game-play takes some getting used to. For example, while driving, as you approach maximum speed, your screen starts to quake inducing a nauseating feeling [especially in 3D] and the mouse control while driving makes the screen swing to either sides uncontrollably. The controls on the keyboard are a pain, in one case - the vehicle access key is RMB and the aim key is E. Most of us are used to Aiming with RMB, and during high speed chases end up clicking that by mistake, ejecting out of the vehicle![Restart Checkpoint!]

Playing this game is a mixed reaction, just like this review. The game is warm and welcoming but the bugs make it a pain to play [at certain points]. For a scrapped project being given a second chance, well, its commendable. But as a mainstream game, a little more polished game-play would have made this game an experience - one of a kind! And of all the proverbs, this one stands out the most - "One man's loss is another man's gain"...Activision, you should have thought about this again....

I would give this game 7.5/10

[Just for the confusion of which side I am actually on!]

What do you think!
Comment below!

@/\/!