Like many other tech nerds, I am often called upon to seize control of some system remotely and rescue its user from some evil manifestation of technology. This isn’t my job (I don’t do this “commercially”), so my free tool of choice is TeamViewer. It’s free for non-commercial use, fast, and very easy to use even for people who don’t know very much about computers. But when I heard Google released something called Chrome Remote Desktop, my curiosity was piqued, so I decided to give it a try. This add-on is interesting because you set it up within Chrome, but you can use it to control the entire computer remotely, not just the Chrome session.

For a Chrome add-on, Remote Desktop is positively huge – it’s a 20MB download, so if you don’t have a fast connection, it might take a minute or two. Just for comparison, the latest version of TeamViewer weighs in at 4MB, so Chrome Remote Desktop is five times as big. Once you’re done downloading it, the add-on appears as a new button on your New Tab page. Clicking this button shows a somewhat-scary “extra permission” authorization page. Not a big deal for users who know what they’re doing, but if you’re guiding someone through the setup process over the phone, this might be a little stressful. You basically need to hit the Continue button:

… and then the allow access button:

And that’s it. Now you’re set up to remote control the computer, or use it to control other computers. When I guided a user through this setup process remotely, the trickiest part was actually getting them to see the Chrome Remote Desktop button on the New Tab page:

The user was looking for a button for an add-on (by the address bar), so I had to guide them to the New Tab page. Other than that, it was a fairly smooth setup process.

You can now either Share This Computer or access another computer:

When you click Share This Computer, you will get a single 12-digit PIN code, which you can copy and paste into a chat session or even dictate over the phone:

This is a nice simplification over TeamViewer, which uses a system of two codes (a user ID and a session password). With Chrome Remote Desktop, you have just a single number. To gain control over the computer, the other party needs to click the “access a shared computer” link on their Chrome Remote Desktop, and enter the PIN code:

Once you click Connect, the remote desktop instantly materializes, and if the connection is fast enough, it even keeps Windows’ Aero interface on, with drop shadows and transparency:

There’s a positively huge “Close Remote Desktop BETA” window that is always set on top, so that both you and the user sitting in front of the remote computer can terminate the session at any time. In fact, the window is so very large, that it sometimes gets in the way and needs to be moved around.

Is It Better Than TeamViewer?

In a word – no. Chrome Remote Desktop is a larger download, and provides less options than TeamViewer (for example, it doesn’t support file transfer). But it does have two very important advantages that might make you use it instead of TeamViewer. The first is that it is entirely free, not just for non-commercial use, but for all use. The second key advantage is that it is fully cross-platform – it works on Windows, Linux, Mac, and even Chromebooks. In fact, I believe it is currently one of the only ways to remotely control a Chromebook computer.

As a beta and a tech experiment, it is certainly impressive. I usually tend to see the browser as a sandbox of sorts – i.e, what happens in the browser stays in the browser. Chrome Remote Desktop definitely breaks that perception, and shows that Chrome can reach deep into your system if you only let it.

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

The wait is over, you can finally get your digital fingers all up in Lion’s mane. Apple released the latest iteration of OS X in the Mac App Store and the hefty download is ready for anyone with $29.99 burning a hole in their pocket.

While waiting for Lion, you’ve no doubt checked out Apple’s Lion Features page. It boasts more than 250 new features, some of them more featurey than others. Full Screen Apps is one feature, counting it as a separate feature for each app, that sort of seems like cheating.

To help you get the most out Lion, we compiled a list of features and tips to help you conquer your new feline friend.

How To Tame Six of OS X Lion’s Early Problems

Apple finally uncaged OS X Lion in the Mac App Store on Wednesday, and as is typical with most new operating system releases, early adopters are already scratching their heads trying to work around some oddities introduced by the big cat. Here are a few suggestions for taming the new king of your Mac jungle.

How To Use the Screen Sharing Features in Lion

The Screen Sharing application has been around in OS X since the days of Leopard (oh so long ago!), but Apple has added some nifty features to the application and underlying support in Lion. From a new tool bar, to a new per-user screen sharing feature, Lion has you covered when doing screen sharing on your local network between two or more Macs.

How To Use Versioning Control in Mac OS X Lion

With Lion, Apple has included a way for developers to implement versioning control in their apps. So when you’re saving files like documents you’ll have access to both the past versions and current version. With a Time Machine-like interface, you’re able to view all of the changes in your documents and restore past versions if you accidentally delete something in the current version.

How To Use Search Tokens in Lion Mail

Apple has completely revamped the Mail application in Lion. Not only are they going for an iPad-influenced user interface, but they’ve also enabled a searching system that makes finding messages easier through the use of tokens. With tokens, you can search by date, name, message contents, or any combination of these.

How To Navigate, Organize and Delete Apps with Launchpad

Launchpad allows you to organize, manage, and launch Mac applications just like you would on an iPad. The feature show and store applications as immediately as they’re downloaded from the Mac App Store, and they can even delete applications downloaded from the App Store.

Does Your Favorite App Work on Lion?

Want to know if Adobe Photoshop CS5 will work on Lion? What about AOL Radio?

The good people at RoaringApps have put together a wiki detailing which apps have been tested so far on Lion, and if they work properly or not. There are currently seventeen pages of apps on their App Compatibility Table, all listed in alphabetical order, with details about each app.

How to Burn a Lion Install DVD and Create Bootable Thumb Drive

Lion is Apple’s first disc-less distribution of Mac OS X, and as such, is leaving many users with slow or no internet connections without any fun today. We’re going to show you how to easily burn your Lion installer to a disc in order to install the OS on a computer without a network connection, or even as a way to make an emergency backup copy of your $30 investment.

7 Annoying Settings You Can Change in Lion

 Lion has a ton of wonderful features, but there are a few new ones that might make long-time Mac users a little crazy. Fortunately, if you’re a creature of habit, Apple has enabled the ability to simply toggle them off in the System Preferences — so yes, you don’t have to live with Lion’s new way of scrolling. Read on to find out which settings you can change in Lion and get back to your normal life.

How To Use Gestures in Safari 5.1 for Lion

Mac OS X Lion ships with a brand new version of the Safari web browser. Version 5.1 of Safari gives many new features, including the much anticipated Reading List. But, Apple has also included some new gestures for Safari that gives the web browser more of an iPad feel.

How To Use Spaces in Mac OS X Lion

Spaces first appeared in OS X Leopard, but in Lion, the feature has been rebranded, along with Expose, into the new Mission Control feature. Mission Control is your one-stop place for viewing all of the opened application windows on your Mac, full screen apps and. Dashboard widgets. It also lets you create multiple desktops, which enables you to organize your windows by the types of applications or by the work you’ll do in each Space. Read on to find out how to best utilize Spaces.

(Via Mac|Life all.)

OS X Lion is now available from the Mac App Store and we know that many of you are preparing or have already started downloading and installing the new cat.

Because installation takes place entirely from within the Mac App Store, the usual ‘clean install’ option isn’t present. If you’ve followed our guide for preparing your Mac for Lion, you’re probably in good shape to proceed with an upgrade. If, however, you long for the ability to do a clean install without having to first install Snow Leopard and THEN install Lion, Mashable has you covered.

If you want to create a bootable USB stick or burn a DVD of OS X Lion, read along.

Step 1: Download Lion From the Mac App Store

Go ahead and download OS X Lion from the Mac App store. This is a nearly 4GB download, so if your Internet connection isn’t super fast, you may want to plan to get some other stuff done while you wait.

As soon as the download is complete, exit out of the installation prompt. We don’t want to do an install right now.

Step 2: Find The Install Lion App in Finder (in Your Applications Folder)

Locate the Lion installation program.

Step 3: Right-Click on the Installer, Select ‘Show Package Contents’

Right click or control-click on the program icon and select ‘Show Package Contents.’ Now, you want to browse to the ‘Shared Support’ folder inside of ‘Contents’ and locate a file called ‘InstallESD.dmg.’ This is the file we will use to create our bootable Lion image.

Copy this file to your desktop or another folder you have easy access to.

Step 4: Start Disk Utility

Open up Disk Utility (it’s in the Utilities folder in Applications). At this point, you should see the various hard drives connected to your Mac. If you haven’t already plugged in an empty USB thumb drive or a hard drive with an empty partition, do that now.

Step 5a: Insert a Blank DVD

For users that want to create a DVD for installation purposes, go ahead and put it in your Mac.

In Disk Utility, click the ‘Burn’ icon and then select the ‘installESD.dmg’ file that we just copied to our desktop.

Let it burn.

Step 5b: Select the USB Drive You Want to Use

Click on the tab that says ‘Erase.’

If, however, you’d prefer to create a bootable USB drive. Select it now.

In the source menu, select the ‘installESD.dmg’ file we already copied to our desktop.

For destination, choose the partition of the drive you want to use. Be aware that you will erase everything on this partition and replace it with OS X Lion, so be sure you don’t have anything important on that drive or partition.

Click Restore.

After the image is burned to USB or DVD, restart your computer by holding down the option key. You will now be given an option to boot from the DVD or USB drive. Go through the installation, ready to enjoy a new, clean install of Lion.

(Via Mashable!.)

Since there’s been quite a lot of new people getting in to Google+ today, I thought I’d share this ‘cheat sheet’ that’s been doing the rounds. Hopefully it’ll help some of you newbies get better orientated.

Apple will be releasing, perhaps as early as July 9th, its latest version of Mac OS X, Lion. Unlike with previous OS X updates, Lion will be significantly cheaper ($29,00), but getting your hands on a physical disc copy of the Lion upgrade will not be possible.  This will be because, for the first time, this OS X update will only be available for download through Apple‘s Mac App Store.

As of this writing, Apple has not indicated that it will provide hard disk copies of Lion. This new method system of updating has its pros and cons, but having downloaded the developer’s build of Lion, I think for many previous users of the Mac App Store, the process should further simplify new system upgrades.

This article does not address all the questions users may have about the Lion upgrade. After the system is fully released, we will address any other major issues (if any) that may arise with the upgrade.

System Requirements

In order to upgrade to Mac OS X Lion, the Mac you want to install it on will need to be at least an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5 or Core i7 processor. I believe most Macs produced in the last five years meet one of these qualifications. To find out which processor your Mac is using, click on the Apple icon > About.

You will need to be running the latest update of Snow Leopard 10.6.6. (See here for more information about the App Store upgrade).

This SL update should include the Mac App Store application in which you use to purchase and download Lion, as you would any other applications in the store.

Download Process

The developer’s build of Lion that I downloaded is over 4GB, and more than likely it will not be any smaller than that in its final release version. So once you pay for Lion, be prepared for a 30 minute to 2 hour download time, depending on the speed of your network.

You will want to make sure you have backed up your existing hard drive onto Time Machine and/or cloned it to another external drive.

If you need to install Lion on other Macs in your home, you can open App Store on those computers and click on your Purchases (located in the App Store menu bar) to download the installer app again to those other Macs.

However, instead of another download through a Wi-Fi connection for your other Macs, you probably should be able to copy the Lion installer app via your networked computers or through a FireWire or Ethernet connection so that process is a little faster.

Installation Process

What’s great about downloading Lion from the App Store is that the process will begin once downloading is complete.

Most users will simply download Lion on top of Snow Leopard, which means that the new system will replace Snow Leopard but all your existing files, applications, songs, movies, and other data will be remain intact, and will appear after you restart your computer with the newly installed Lion upgrade.

There will be a Customize button that you can click to selectively exclude any default Lion apps, system foreign languages and the like that you don’t want installed in the upgrade (in the developer’s build of Lion the ability to customize the installation was not yet available).

After you’re done with the installation app, you can delete it from your Application’s folder, as once you purchase it in the App Store it will always be there for to download again if need be. The big issue with this App Store process is you won’t have an external copy of Lion on disk to plop into your Mac just in case you need to run a fix on a corrupted disk or partition.

Alternative Installations

If you need to, you can install Lion on a separate partition or external drive, so that you can have access to both Snow Leopard and Lion. Why might you want to do this? Well, some applications like older versions of Microsoft Word will not run on Lion, and you’re not prepared to upgrade the software for Lion just yet.

So to create a partition, you will need to make sure you have plenty of internal hard drive space. I would recommend at least 12-20 gigs of space on the partition.

You can create a partition by launching Disk Utility and selecting your hard drive. Click on the ‘Partition’ tab and then click the + button at the bottom of the Volume Scheme. Name the partition ‘Lion’ or any name you like. Set the partition size for Lion to be about 12-20GB. Click the ‘Apply’ button and the partition will be created, similar to how it’s shown above.

Now when you run the Lion installer app, you will be able to select the partition (see the screen in the previous section.)

You can switch back and forth between systems by opening System Preferences and selecting ‘Startup Dist’ under the System category. From there, you can select the system you want your computer to start back up in. Your Mac will boot in the last system you used.

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

After long speculation, Google is officially introducing the company’s Facebook rival today, named Google+. It has a number of unique features to the service. Plus, there is no sign up required for anyone with an active Google account. But is this really the Facebook killer we have been waiting for?

Google+ has five different points of emphasis. The first is Circles, which lets you drag and drop friends into specific groups. Similar to Facebook friend lists, yes, but a lot of the sharing revolves around which groups the user decides to share certain bits of information to.

Building upon Circles is Hangouts, which is really just Google’s fancy term for group video chat. In the stream, users can see who is ‘hanging out’ and decide to join a hangout and participate in a large video conference. Hangouts may consist of random friends or specific Circles of friends.

Sparks is the third point of emphasis, and it stems more from Google search than it does from the social aspects of Google+. In a nutshell, it is a mini search engine. The service encourages the user to search for things of interest and save them in a list. Instead of a standard list of results, Sparks presents different articles or videos the user can watch, read, or share. And using the list of interests, the results for each are accessible again at any time.

Finally, we have two mobile features, available on the Android Market immediately and coming to the App Store soon. Instant Upload plays up the fact that it is a tedious process to upload multiple photos from a smart phone. This feature will automatically upload any photos and videos a user captures and store them in a private album in Google+ for sharing upon the user’s own discretion. Huddle, simply put, is Google’s answer to iMessage. It combines text messaging and chatting into one and allows for group chatting from within the app. Circles plays a big role in this as well.

Those five main features are the stars of the show here. Aside from them, Google+ does provide some more familiar features. A stream shows real-time updates from friends and a hub for sharing statuses, photos, videos, and links. Plus, each user gets an individual profile. The normal bar at the top of each Google product turns black when Google+ is active, and acts as full navigation for the services, profiles, and notifications.

The Google+ project is currently available by invitation-only, but over time Google will roll it out to everyone. So — the question you have been waiting for — is this going to take down Facebook? I think for sure that it has more potential than any other competitor thus far. However, since Facebook reportedly now has 750 million active users, winning the battle will be an extremely long and painful challenge. Google+ is either going to fly or die.

(Via Skatter Tech.)

Updated. The buzz around European music streaming service Spotify’s United States launch just keeps getting louder.

A report published Friday on the Noisecast tech blog places Spotify’s US launch date between July 5 and July 15, citing an email exchange between a Noisecast source and major record label executive. The emails also ‘suggest that Spotify may launch as an invite-only service to start with’ and that the subscription price will be $10 per month, Noisecast reports.

Whether or not it’s totally accurate, the report certainly lines up with other recent talk around Spotify’s stateside debut. Earlier this week, Om Malik reported that Spotify will be a major part of a new music dashboard feature Facebook plans to release at its f8 developer conference in August. And Spotify executive Jonathan Forster recently told Silicon Valley Watcher that Spotify’s US launch is on the way, but would not occur before July 5.

Meanwhile, Spotify has been getting its financial house in order for the US push. Last week the company closed on approximately $100 million in fresh funding to fuel its geographic expansion. The latest round came from a group that included Russian venture capital firm DST and California-based VCs Kleiner Perkins and Accel Partners, all first-time Spotify investors.

Why is Spotify so hotly anticipated in the United States? For one thing, with a Spotify account, you can listen to the same library of music regardless of where you are and which of your devices you’re using. It’s the same cloud-based mentality behind some of the latest big offerings from Google (with Google Music), Apple (with iCloud) and Netflix (with Netflix streaming.) In many ways, Spotify fits right into the increasingly always-connected way many of us live now.

Update: Spotify’s US launch is indeed on track for mid-July — not July 5, as some other sources have claimed — according to a source with knowledge of the company’s plans. That confirms the rumors first published Friday morning that Spotify’s US launch will occur in July.

Spotify will be made available in the US under a three-tiered pricing model, the source said: A free ad-supported service, a $5/month subscription, and a $10/month subscription. The US pricing scheme will be very similar to the three-tiered revenue model Spotify already has in place in Europe.

The company does not have a more specific launch date nailed down at the moment, because Spotify is still sorting out a few kinks associated with the US debut, the source said.

(Via GigaOM.)

Home lighting has certainly come a long way since the days of Thomas Alva Edison, and Philips will be part of a watershed moment as they prepare to unveil the world’s first LED replacement for the 75-watt incandescent light bulb at the LIGHTFAIR International trade show. Known as the Philips EnduraLED A21 17-watt light bulb, this will be the maiden LED equivalent to 75-watt incandescent bulbs, and it is touted to be 80% more energy efficient compared to its outdated predecessor. The new bulbs are also marathon runners in their own right, capable of lasting up to 25 times longer compared to standard incandescent bulbs, adding another feather in the cap of LED technology where everyday LED residential use is concerned. Philips can be said to be an old hat in this arena since they are the first company to develop a LED to replace the 60-watt incandescent bulb.

(Via Ubergizmo.)

Google has begun testing an integration of voice search with the Google.com search engine.

Helpful tipster Matt Schlicht first spotted the feature earlier Monday afternoon. Voice search detects your computer’s microphone settings and can open up a ‘Speak now’ widget to detect your words and transcribe them into a search query.

Android phone owners should be familiar with Google Voice Search; it’s available in the Google Search widget. Google Voice Search on Android even translates voice commands into actions. For example, ‘Directions to Empire State Building New York’ will get you instant driving directions to Manhattan’s famous landmark.

Google has been working hard on improving the accuracy of its voice search product. It now recognizes Chinese and learns from your speech patterns. Perhaps now Google believes it’s accurate enough to begin testing with the general populace.

Right now, voice search seems to be in a limited testing period. We’ve reached out to Google for comment.

While searching by voice may be easier than typing in some cases, we don’t think you’re suddenly going to see an uptick in people shouting out their search queries. As our tipster pointed out on Twitter today, Google Voice Search ‘works surprisingly well but is very awkward to use in the office.’

What do you think of Google Voice Search? Should Google roll it out on its homepage?

Update: Google’s experiment is confirmed. ‘Google is constantly experimenting with new features,’ was the only thing a Google spokesperson would tell us officially, though.

The Google Voice Search Icon

Google.com users with access to the experiment might see this page the next time they visit Google.com

Google Voice Search Widget

Talking into the mic activates the Google Voice Search widget.

Google Voice Search Results

(Via Mashable!.)

The Ion Piano 2 Go is a new dock that transforms your iPod or iPad into a music making workstation.

Features:

• Keyboard and piano performance app for iPod or iPad
• 25-note mini-keyboard for comfortable, realistic performance
• Velocity-sensitive keys for maximum expression
• Includes free App download with four different sounds to play
• Everything you need to practice, perform and write music
• Powered by batteries or AC adaptor

Pricing and availability are to be announced.

(Via Synthtopia.)