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If retail stores are good enough for Apple, they’re good enough for Google.

The search engine company – wait, is it that any more? – quietly opened a mini-sized retail outlet of its own last week, tucked inside a larger consumer electronics store in London’s geekiest shopping street, Tottenham Court Road.

For those of you who’ve never been there, there’s a stretch of TCR (as it’s sometimes known) lined on both sides with electronics stores. Some of them are pretty awful, crammed with overpriced plastic tat in the hope of luring in unknowing tourists. But some of the shops along there do stock the good stuff: authentic parts for people who like to build their own computers, the latest new craziness imported from abroad, and reconditioned or second-hand bargains. It pays to shop around when you visit TCR.

Anyway, Google’s new Chrome Zone is tucked inside a corner of a branch of UK computer chain store PC World.

What does it sell? Chromebooks, of course. Just Chromebooks.

This is Google’s very first toe in the water when it comes to meatspace retail. It will be very interesting to see if it succeeds.

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Google+ is already popular, and it isn’t yet showing any signs of slowing down. If you’re already in, or if you’re eagerly awaiting an invite, there are a few ways you can improve the experience when accessing Google’s new social network from Mac and iOS devices.

Mac

Create a Google+ Mac app with Fluid. Earlier this week I talked about the newest version of Fluid, which lets you create full-screen web apps for Lion using specific websites. Even if you don’t have Lion, Fluid is a great way to create a Google+ application that looks and feels more like a native Mac app than a website. You can even grab a nice Google+ icon to use with your Fluid app, like this one from deviantart user KillaAaron.

Better interaction with bookmarklets and extensions. You can change how Google+ looks and how it behaves with custom extensions for Chrome and other browsers. Go2Web20 has a great list of some of the best tools out there. One of the best is a +1 extension that lets you save any web page you come across to your +1 list in Google+, but that specific link on the Go2Web20 site is currently broken, so check out this similar option from the Chrome web store instead. If you’re not using Chrome, you can grab this bookmarklet for +1 recommendations that should work with most other browsers.

Import your iPhoto albums with Picasa for Mac. You’ve got a lot of iPhoto events, and now you want to share those photos on Google+, which actually has a great photo viewer. Apple has built Facebook support into iPhoto, but obviously there’s no direct method for getting that content to Google+. But with Picasa’s free native Mac app, you can import your iPhoto content and share it to your Picasa Web Albums right from your desktop. Depending on your sharing choices, the pictures will be visible in your Google+ galleries.

iOS

Use third-party Picasa apps to upload your photos. There’s no instant upload for iPhones and iPads as there is for Android devices. But you can get your photos from your mobile to your Google+ account without having to upload to a computer first. Just choose one of the available iOS Picasa photo uploading tools, like Web Albums, and then upload the pic you want to share to a public gallery on Picasa. Once you’ve done that, navigate to the photo in the Google+ mobile browser app and comment on the photo to share it to your stream.

Bookmarklets for sharing. For sharing sites and saving content to your +1 list, bookmarklets that work with mobile Safari are your best bet. The one I mentioned above should work for your iOS devices, too.

Share from desktop to mobile. You can use Google+ as a handy way to quickly share links between your desktop and mobile devices, by adding an email address that you have registered on your smartphone to one of your sharing circles on Google+. So, for instance, you could create an iPhone reading list and re-share interesting links in your Google stream to a specific circle called “for iPhone” that just contains your own email address, or you could set up a circle with the email addresses of your coworkers or project team for easy forwarding of interesting links and notes.

Google+ will likely improve as it iterates, and it will offer even more avantages for Mac and iOS users, especially when (and if) Apple approves the official Google+ iOS application. But even at this early stage, I’ve found that it enriches my computing experience on any Apple platform. Any advice you can add based on your own use of Google+?

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Facebook is planning on launching an HTML5-based web app platform codenamed Project Spartan, according to TechCrunch , in order to take on Apple in the mobile app market. The project will be entirely web-based, which allows Facebook to avoid handing over any control to Apple. Facebook may be great at social, and social gaming, but if it really is planning this, it doesn’t yet have a good grasp on what mobile users are looking for.

Apple’s App Store is a huge success, and it’s ironic that the introduction of native apps came largely at the behest of iPhone owners, who were dissatisfied with the company’s initial policy of only allowing third-party software on the platform via web apps. Web technology has made great strides since then, and HTML5 makes it possible to recreate rich-media effects without resorting to Flash, which is too resource-hungry for most current-gen mobile devices, and is barred from iOS devices. But despite advances, web apps have yet to prove themselves as a viable alternative to local native software. The Chrome Web Store, for example, powered by Google, hasn’t shown any signs of real success, and in fact, some have suggested it’s quite the opposite, including developers actually selling in the store.

Facebook does bring a built-in audience of 700 million users to the table, so it has that going for it. And a decent chunk of those users partake in social gaming from developers like Zynga, the makers of FarmVille, on Facebook’s desktop web platform. But Farmville, and many other social games that use in-game currency to make most of their money, have already found a profitable route to mobile thanks to Apple’s App Store. A Facebook offering might immediately appeal to some of these developers (the social network allegedly has 80 involved in the initial Project Spartan launch), but to prove a viable alternative in the long run, Facebook will have to either offer a better value proposition to devs (by giving them a bigger cut) or show that developers can reach more users than they do with native offerings.

For a store that resides entirely on the web, that’s a tall order, because it means convincing mobile users to shift their idea of what constitutes mobile software once again. It’s hard to understate how different it is to ask mobile users to pay for an application, versus asking them to pay for access to what basically amounts to a website. Facebook web apps will apparently carry a “Facebook wrapper” with basic Facebook functions and access to Credits, Facebook’s virtual currency, but it won’t change the fact that it’s a web page you’re looking at. To mobile users who have embraced the app store model, this will likely feel too much like backsliding.

I’m not at all of the opinion that mobile apps will ever replace the web, but I think we’ve also reached a point where web apps will never replace native ones. And Facebook, which still doesn’t treat the iPad as a mobile device, despite the fact that it has much more in common with the iPhone than with any PC, isn’t going to change that.

Apple may not understand the social web, as undertakings like Ping demonstrate, but it did seem to acknowledge that by partnering with a company that does when it introduced Twitter integration in iOS 5. Facebook, on the other hand, seems to have a blind side when it comes to monetizing mobile users, and Project Spartan is just another sign that it isn’t going to “get it” any time soon.

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We’ve all done it. Half-way through a marathon browsing session, with 15 tabs open in this window and another 24 open in the window behind, and you tap Command+Q when you intended to just close one tab with Command+W.

Pow! Your browser quits and you have to wait for it to restart and re-load all those tabs again. So. Annoying.

The latest version of Google Chrome has a new feature to prevent this. If you type the Command+Q command, it flashes up a little alert.

Refreshingly, it doesn’t say “Are you sure you want to quit?” Instead, it just says that if you really want to quit, you need to hold down on Command+Q for a few seconds. This is great, because if quitting the application was your intention to start with, you don’t need to let go and try again. But if you want to keep browsing, all you have to do to prevent the quit is take your fingers off the keyboard.

To activate this new feature, go to the Chrome menu and select “Warn before quitting”.

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last month google released a new version of google chrome.

copied from google chrome blog:

Since we released Chrome for Mac in beta last December, we’ve been busy adding new features. Today, after some incubation in the developer channel, we’re happy to make some of these features more widely available. The new beta release of Chrome for Mac offers extensions, bookmark sync, and more.

you can get it here

for more update check