可乐福

这个,我也是刚刚从网上看到的…拿出来分享一下

##CONTINUE##访问如下网址：  http://www.google.com/sms/alerts

##CONTINUE##然后选择你需要定制天气预报的城市，选择好后点击“免费订阅”弹出如下对话框：

接下来,自己会做了吧….

此天气预报接收的内容是中文短信提醒,接收到的天气预报也只有未来第二天的预报..8过也可以了..反正每天都有一次..且短信是在下午发送的

Google10周年的确给我带来了惊喜，首先是推出Chrome浏览器，接着又公布了Picasa3,该版本相对上个版本更新很多。好像目前只支持英文版，中文版还停留在2.75版。

##CONTINUE##Picasa 3 下载

下面是来自Ars Technica的评测。

By David Chartier | Published: September 03, 2008 – 07:05PM CT

（点击上图打开原文）

译文：

Google昨日宣布了对其Picasa生态系统两大产品-桌面客户端和网络相册（在线图片发布和共享）-的重大更新。Ars Technica 花了些时间把家里的老照片擦掉灰尘，尝试了下所有这些新的编辑，发布以及识别功能。

Google对Picasa的更新分为两项，包括其桌面客户端和网络服务版，这两款产品如今结合的更加紧密，所以我们将尽量将他们分开分析并特别指出他们以怎样新方式进行结合。由于Picasa在很多方面主要基于其桌面版，所以我们先从桌面版谈起。

Picasa3 Windows PC版(请支持Mac OS X 操作系统）

Picasa3展现了一个精心改进新界面，其新功能和照片发布的整合上千字也很难讲清楚（不过这是我们这个文章要达到的数字）。遗憾的是Picasa3现在只支持Windows，Linux版本依然停留在2.7，Mac版本据说要在2008年底才能完成。Picasa的界面很紧密，只是在顶部工具栏的区域有一些小的按钮。Picasa甚至还采用了像Iphone操作系统的滑块按钮那样新的界面工具，主要用在同步相册或文件夹到Picasa网络相册等开关切换功能上(随后我们专门谈这个）。过去我用Picasa并不是很多，不过这次的变化的确值得称赞，令这个产品看上去更趋成熟。

或许Picasa3最具有意义的新功能就是新的”同步到网络”按钮，支持文件夹和相册同步。你想想，这样就意味着任何新照片，甚至是现存图片做的修改都会自动同步到Picasa网络相册（需要Google账户），Picasa网络相册的竞争对手是Flickr。就照片管理和分享来说，这个新功能自然而然的将Picasa以及其网络版产品变得更具吸引力，因为在线发布图片往往又麻烦又复杂。这样也无需再查找，安装和维护一些第三方上传工具，比如像Flickr,Photobucket和SmugMug这些在线服务就常常借助第三方上传软件。

在我们给文件夹添加新图片和使用各种新工具编辑（随后会谈到）的测试中，Picasa3的自动同步功能确实令人满意，图片更改后很快就会看到变化。然而我们进行大批量操作，比如把平时或者假期拍到的几百张照片放在一个共享文件夹里。如果你现在正在进行类似操作，请让大家分享你的经验。

Picasa3的另一个显著功能是一系列功能增强的编辑工具。用户现在可以使用更多工具进行裁剪，色彩校正和对比度调节，红眼处理，润色，添加文本等操作。Picasa的修改和效果面板也随着这些工具的改变而有所变动，他们的确提供了免费图片管理软件该具备的相当全面的功能。

Picasa3首先展现给客户的新特色功能是—Picasa现在可以代替Windows Exploer成为图片浏览器。默认可以支持大部分常用图片格式，包括JPG,RAW,TIF和BMP，如果你选择使用Picasa,Google也为实际用户添加了一些特殊格式.在Windows Explore双击一个图片，在桌面和任何应用程序上激活一个渐渐变暗的覆盖层，同时以平滑缩放的动态的形式显示一个无边缘的完整图片。在底部，也就是Windows任务栏的上面，是媒体播放条，显示着文件夹内其他图片的缩略图以及基本的视图控制条。

效果很漂亮（虽然对是否有必要存在争议），很容易让人联想到以前曾在一些网站和博客上看到的各种”光箱特效”Java脚本图片组。Picasa的图片浏览器相比Windows默认的图片浏览器加载速度并不慢，而且在我们测试过程中，常常给人感觉比Windows的图片浏览器更生动活泼。

Picasa3所有新特色的最后一个但并非不重要的功能是和Youtube整合的基本短片制作。用户可以将选出的一些图片制成一个简单的短片，可以选择大量的过渡模式以及各种分辨率（最大支持1808p），可以添加滚动文本，并支持音轨。除了单键发布到youtube外，也没有更多的东西可以让我不用设置快门。不过这些功能还是很不错的，至少会令母亲和家人度过一个愉快的假期。

Picasa网络相册人脸识别功能

Picasa3说完了，我们对Picasa网络相册的新功能彻底研究了一下，发现他们对其桌面版兄弟的体验赞赏有加，只是有时这种赞赏需要一些技巧。毫无疑问，令人印象最深的功能是”标签命名”,该功能利用人脸识别技术自动识别照片中的人物。这样可以很方便的自动更新相册中的堂兄弟Erin或者你父母的照片。但是这些操作必须在Picasa网络相册里进行。Picasa3桌面版并不能进行这些操作，好像桌面版在所有这些自动化技术和人脸识别标注上技术上没有得到任何优势.

Google的人脸标注技术在我们测试中有相当不错的表现，当我们从一组不同场合甚至不同光照环境下拍摄的照片里选筛选一个人的时候，该技术表现的十分出色。当然不是每次都有十分完美的表现，不过Google内置一些功能如普通标签命名以及与Gmail联系人自然的结合可以方便我们很快从一群人里选取名称。Google当然不是第一个在网络服务里提供这种人脸识别技术的（Facebook早些时候已经提供过更基础的一系列类似功能），但Google的服务是我们见过最好的一个.

如果你想试试标签命名这个功能，请务必到Picasa网络版设置里开启，因为缺省是关闭的。

对那些对自己照片比较谨慎的朋友来说，Picasa网络相册的提供的另一个特色功能是与创作共享授权的整合。默认的创作共享授权可以在设置里面设为允许重新编辑，允许商业使用，并规定相同方式共享的条款，用户当然可以选禁用所有这些选项。该授权也可以在侧边栏单独为每一张图片自定义。

除了耳目一新的新用户界面外Picasa网络相册也做了一系列的细微改进。最后要提的是一个允许用户搜询Picasa的公共图书馆和精选的精华摄影的浏览页面。虽然更希望看到能提供地理定位工具来进行更有趣的体验，但是热门标签也很受欢迎.

现在超过了我们当初预算的1000字，但是对Picasa的这次更新的确值得更多的介绍。Google在以其特有的潜力投入照片共享空间已有一段时间，现在已有2个独立分离的产品。很高兴看到其线下照片管理工具以他应该的方式同在线发布和共享服务进行整合.Flickr或许还不用过多忧虑，但是如果看到一群新的用户尝试更方便的新Picasa的话，那一点也不奇怪。

原文：

Google announced major updates yesterday to both components of its Picasa ecosystem: its desktop client and Web Albums, a service for displaying and sharing photos online. Ars Technica took some time to dust off the old family photos to see what the new editing, publishing, and identifying features are all about.

Google’s Picasa announcement is two-fold, involving a desktop client and web service that are now much more closely integrated, so we’ll try to cover them separately while pointing out the new ways in which they shake hands. Since Picasa hinges in many ways on its desktop client, though, we’ll start there.

Picasa 3 for your Windows PC (make a Mac OS X client please)

Sporting a much more refined overall UI, Picasa 3′s new features and publishing integration are easily worth more than 1,000 words (but that’s about where we’ll get in this piece). Unfortunately, Picasa 3 is only available for Windows right now, with the Linux version still at 2.7 and a Mac version only rumored to be on its way before 2008 is over. Picasa’s UI is tighter, with smaller buttons in some areas like its top toolbar, and it even adopts new UI tools like the button slider from the iPhone OS for toggling features like syncing an album or folder to Picasa Web Albums (more on that in a minute). We haven’t been heavy users of Picasa in the past, but the changes are definitely welcome and make the app feel more mature.

Probably the most significant new feature in Picasa 3 is a new “Sync to Web” switch that adorns any folder or album. As you can imagine, this allows any new photos, or even changes made to existing photos, to be automatically synchronized up to Picasa Web Albums (a free Google Account is required), Google’s Flickr competitor. This new feature by itself transforms Picasa and its web counterpart into a much more appealing solution for organizing and sharing photos, as it takes the complicated busywork out of publishing photos online. It also removes the need to find, install, and maintain some sort of third-party uploading tool, which is often the case with similar online services like Flickr, Photobucket, and SmugMug.

In our testing with adding new photos to a folder and making edits using various new tools (again, more in a moment), Picasa 3′s automatic sync feature worked really well and kicked in immediately after every change we made. We did not, however, perform any heavy lifting, such as dumping a couple hundred photos from a shoot or vacation into a shared folder. Let us know what your experience was like if you’re doing work like this.

Next on Picasa 3′s notable new features list is an enhanced set of editing tools. Users now have more tools for cropping, correcting color and contrast, fixing red-eye, retouching, adding text, and more. Naturally, these tools are accompanied by changes to Picasa’s fixes and effects panels, and they offer a fairly well-rounded set of features as far as free image organization tools go.

A unique new feature that Picasa 3 presents to users with a first-run wizard is the ability to take over Windows Explorer’s duties as an image viewer. A handful of basic supported image formats are checked by default, including .JPG, .RAW, .TIF, and .BMP, and Google added some special sauce to the actual viewer if you opt to use it. Double-clicking an image in Windows Explorer will evoke a dimming overlay over the desktop and any open applications, displaying a border-less full version of the photo with a slick scaling animation. A media strip sits below, just above the Windows task bar, containing thumbnails of other images in the folder and basic navigation controls.

The effect is nice (though arguably unnecessary) and reminiscent of various “Lightbox” JavaScript image packages you may have seen on some websites and blogs. Picasa’s image viewer doesn’t seem to take any longer to load when compared to Vista’s default of Windows Photo Gallery, and usually seemed to be a bit snappier in our testing.

Last but not least in Picasa 3′s repertoire of new tricks is a basic movie maker with YouTube integration. Users can group a selection of photos into a simple movie, pick from a handful of transitions and resolutions (all the way up to 1080p), add text slides, and apply an audio track. Besides one-click publishing to YouTube there isn’t much to get our shutters out of sync over, but it’s still nice to have features that are sure to make mom and the family happy come holiday season.

Picasa Web Albums does face recognition

With Picasa 3 out of the way, we gave some of Picasa Web Album’s new features a run-through to find that they compliment its desktop brethren’s experience pretty well, if not awkwardly at times. Easily the most impressive new feature is “Name Tags,” which harnesses facial recognition technology to automatically identify people in photos. This makes it easy to, say, keep a running album automatically updated with photos of Cousin Erin or your parents, but this all has to be done on Picasa Web Albums. Picasa 3 does none of this work on the desktop, and doesn’t appear to gain any of the advantages of all this automation and facial recognition tagging.

That said, Google’s facial tagging technology was pretty impressive in our testing, as it did reasonable well when picking the same individual out of a group of photos shot at different events and even in different lighting. It wasn’t perfect every time, of course, but Google built in features like buttons for commonly tagged names and, naturally, integration with one’s Gmail contact list for quickly picking names out of the crowd. Google certainly isn’t the first to offer facial recognition in a web service like this (Facebook has offered a much more basic set of similar features for some time now), but this is definitely one of the best implementations we’ve seen.

If you want to give this “name tags” feature a try, be sure to switch it on in your Picasa Web Albums Settings area; it isn’t enabled by default yet.

Another significant feature of Picasa Web Albums for anyone halfway serious abut their photography is the integration of Creative Commons licensing. A default CC license can be set in the Settings area to allow remixing, allow commercial use, and require share-alike terms, or users can, of course, opt to not allow any of these options. This license can also be customized for each photo in the sidebar.

Picasa Web Albums has received lots of other refinements, in addition to a refreshed UI of its own. Last on our mentionable list for now is a new Explore page that allows visitors to sift through Picasa’s public library and a hand-picked selection of prime photography. Popular tags are a welcome touch, though it would’ve been nice to see collocation tools offered here for an even more interesting experience.

Worth more than 1,000 words

Ok fine, so we went over our initial word budget, but this major Picasa update deserved it. Google has been squandering some unique potential in the photo sharing space for a while now with these two separate components, and it’s great to see its offline photo organization tool integrating the way it should with an online publishing and sharing service. Flickr probably doesn’t haven’t anything to worry about just yet, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see a new batch of users giving the convenient new Picasa ecosystem a try.