Leslie Franke

I have created a new ZLauncher theme and uploaded to the download section of the website. Graphics are based on the Tango Desktop Project. This is a complete theme with all icons skinned, including the Setup List icons. It should look good under all levels of transparency. One background is available in both a 320 and 480 size. Get the ZLauncher Tango Theme here.

Google announced several new products yesterday as part of their media day, including Google Trends, a frequency query tool that displays how often Google users searched for a certain term over a period of time. It also includes a news volume graph which displays the number of times the search term appeared in Google News stories (this does not include blogs). In addition, you can compare up to five terms by separating each term with a comma and the results are broken down by language, region and city.

While I see the usefulness this will be to PR people and marketers, for the lay person like myself it makes for an interesting look at the popularity of certain products against other products or how their popularity has changed over time. For example, take a look at the Palm Treo versus the Blackberry. The slight lead the Blackberry has held over the Treo has remained fairly consistent over time. Compare the searches for the Treo 650 versus the Treo 700W over the last month or different Palm products in 2005. Google Trends is an interesting way to look at the large volume of search data compiled by Google’s users.

Mozilla has distributed a small, but very important upgrade to the Firefox browser. The software is being upgraded to Firefox version 1.5.0.3 to prevent browsers from DOS (denial of service) attacks that could cause the browser to crash (this was not a threat that could comprise a system). Mozilla is recommending that all users upgrade to the new version. The update should happen automatically or can be forced via the Check for Updates option on the Help menu.