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Thursday, December 02, 2010

FindTheBest Compares Almost Anything Online to Find Your Best Option [Video]

FindTheBest is a comparison engine that lets you browse or search for almost anything and provides an unbiased overview of your options so you can choose the right one for you.

In the way travel sites like Hipmunk provide unbiased flight search results, FindTheBest attempts to do that for practically anything on the web. Suppose you're looking for the best blogging platform and our Hive Five on the subject didn't quite do it for you. Search for blogging software in FindTheBest and you'll end up with a page like the following:

(Click to enlarge.)

At first it's a pretty daunting list of your options, but on the left side of the page you'll see a list of checkboxes, a cost slider, and other options so you can narrow down your comparison grid based on things that matter to you.

FindTheBest isn't limited to just technology stuff. You can search and compare just about anything, from pet breeds to vacation spots to the best colleges for a particular course of study. Of course, if you're shopping for the holidays and want to compare a few products it can definitely handle that as well. FindTheBest is currently in beta and available to use now for free.

FindTheBest [via Mashable]

Needle Is a Smart and Efficient Research Assistant [Video]

If you've ever spent hours clicking through web pages collecting data—whether you're planning a vacation or culling data for academic research—webapp Needle (presumably so-named with the haystack in mind) collects and organizes data from any source, online or off.

We could painstakingly explain Needle, but your best bet is to watch the video demo above. Basically you teach Needle how to understand a data source—and it's incredibly good at learning how a data source works, even if it's a tedious-to-navigate web site—and then, once its got the hang of the source, Needle collects all the data you ask for automatically, sorting it into an easy-to-parse format. Once you've got it, you can search, map, chart, and analyze the data however you see fit.

Again, check out the video to see it in action. Needle's definitely not a tool for everyone, but if you do a lot of research online, it seems like a lifesaver. (ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick sure thinks so.) Either way, you can't deny that it's a cleverly built tool. Needle is free for personal use.

Needle [via ReadWriteWeb]

Stream Any Video to Your Apple TV, No Pre-Conversion Required [Video]

AirPlay is great if your video collection is in the right format, otherwise you can only stream Apple-approved videos from your iOS device to your Apple TV. Here's how to circumvent that limitation and how to get the best results.

AirPlay is Apple's great new media streaming technology that lets you stream your music, video, and photos from your iOS device to your Apple TV. Air Video is an iOS app that lets you stream any video from your Mac or PC to your iOS device, converting it on-the-fly if necessary. Wouldn't it be great if you could combine these two things? Then you could stream any video in any format from your computer to your iPad to your Apple TV. Because AirPlay's APIs aren't yet available, Air Video's developer says he can't add this functionality to the application. Fortunately, if you want to jailbreak your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you can install a little hack that'll let you stream anything from Air Video directly to your Apple TV.

This is very easy to do. Here are the steps:

First, you need an iOS device running iOS 4.2 or greater. You'll need to jailbreak your device, and the currently redsn0w is the jailbreak method of choice for iOS 4.2. (Here's how to do it.)
Once you're jailbroken, you need to jump into Cydia—that's the package manager that should now be installed on your device—and download AidVideoEnabler. You don't need to add any special repositories. You should be able to just search for it, download, and install.
Reboot your device.

That's all you need to do to make this work. It doesn't work perfectly, however, so let's take a quick look at how you can get the best experience.

Stream Any Video to Your Apple TV, No Pre-Conversion Required First things first, the bit rates don't matter here—the iPad we used could handle the highest setting in Air Video so as long as the computer converting and serving the video can keep up, feel free to tell Air Video it's okay if it wants to stream at the highest possible bit rate. For reference, that's 2560kbps and you can set it in "Global Settings." The only thing you really need to worry about is when you start streaming to your Apple TV. We found that if you don't let Air Video get a pretty decent head start of at least a few minutes, streaming will fail. If you let it convert for a little bit before you get started, however, it works like a charm.

That's it! Enjoy streaming all your videos!

GameString demos its streaming, custom World of Warcraft UI by raiding on an HTC Desire (video)

We're still not ready to apply the label "Gaming 3.0" here (or to anything, for that matter), but despite its boasts, GameString's making a compelling case for cloud-based play time. We've already seen the company bring World of Warcraft to Google TV, but now the company's showcasing its take on a challenge we've seen a few times before -- streaming a playable version of WoW to a mobile phone. (Gotta get 'em out of the house somehow.) The trick here is a streamlined UI overlay that makes for a every touch-friendly experience; there's translucent "thumbstick" spots and larger buttons for spells. The setup in question here is its Adrenalin Host Server from approximately 80 kilometers away (geographically) and an HTC Desire running over a home network that's 2Mbps down / 2Mbps up. And while there's some notable lag and parts of the interface that's still too tiny to really use, it's still an Alpha build that seems functional for all but the most intense of moments. See it for yourself after the break.

Continue reading GameString demos its streaming, custom World of Warcraft UI by raiding on an HTC Desire (video)

GameString demos its streaming, custom World of Warcraft UI by raiding on an HTC Desire (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Dec 2010 13:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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PeeWee PC netbook moves to 2.0, rated to take the worst your tot can deliver

PeeWee PC netbook moves to 2.0, rated to take the worst your tot can handle

Little fingers can dish out big pain for gadgets, and unless your little one is beefy enough to lug around a Toughbook you'll be wanting something small and durable for them. Enter the $449 PeeWee Power 2.0, the latest revision to the company's series of kid-friendly computers. This netbook is said to survive drops with aplomb, but only has a "water resistant" keyboard, so don't toss those sippy cups just yet. It also comes loaded with security software to hopefully keep your kids from finding the worst the 'net has to offer, but with only a 1.6GHz N270 Atom processor on tap, 1GB of RAM, and a mere 30GB of HDD storage, we're guessing it could also be a good tool to teach them all about patience.

Gallery: PeeWee Power 2.0