To the best of my knowledge, no third-party PDF plugin on the Mac allows for the inline viewing of PDFs in Google Chrome, fortunately there is a way. As of Chrome 6, Google bundles an experimental PDF plugin, which is disabled by default. News from Macworld. Which is the best news reader app for Windows/Mac? Update Cancel. What is the best RSS reader for Chrome Browser or Windows native? What is the web/desktop equivalent of the Pulse news reader app? What is the best free RSS reader app for the iPhone that supports Read-It-Later? Aug 03, 2011 I've found lots of comments on problems with Adobe's Reader in various browsers in Windows. However, I am thinking of transitioning to Chrome on my Mac, but I can't get Chrome to display PDFs in the browser using Adobe's plugin.
Text to speech is evolving. The implications of text to speech technology are really broad, especially for the specially challenged. Even for most of us, who love to tap away on our keyboards, giving our ears a chance over our eyes has some interesting benefits. For instance, we can absorb information when we are busy doing something else.
Most of our information comes via our browser and that’s why the Google Chrome extension called Chrome Speak deserves a mention.
Chrome Speak can read aloud any selected piece of text within the browser. It uses the native text to speech feature of the operating system (Windows, Mac OS X, and Chrome OS). Chrome Speak does its bit to add some more handy ways to read long pieces of text. Just let it roll after selecting text and right clicking on the browser page and clicking on Read the selected text. Click on Stop reading to stop the voiceover.
Chrome Speak offers quite a few options to make the speech work for you.
1. Chrome uses the default voice available with the system, but you can add more to your operating system and select them from the Options under Chrome Speak.
2. Chrome Speak comes with multilingual support including different versions of English and quite a few local dialects from India.
3. Chrome Speak comes with two queuing modes – Interrupt and Enqueue. But I couldn’t get them to work. Probably it’s a feature that’s still in the offing.
4. Chrome Speak gives you complete control over Rate, Pitch, and Volume. You can use the sliders to fine-tune the voice quality. You have to stop and start to see the changes take effect.
I use Chrome Speak to read aloud text when I am absolutely bored of reading or when I just don’t feel like reading an absolutely cluttered web page. How comfortable are you with artificial text-to-speech voices? Let us know if Chrome Speak will find a place in your browser.
Also See#text to speechDid You Know
Oppo used to make portable media players before they ventured into the field of mobile phones.
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When we talk about free RSS news readers, we're usually talking about Google Reader. Or at least we used to be.
The service, launched in 2005 by Google Labs, is the primary force in RSS reading; almost every piece of desktop software or mobile apps out there syncs with it. Even if you haven't ever visited Google Reader, you've probably had it as the backend for your main RSS reading tool. But now, citing a decline of use—there are more likely reasons—Google has announced that on July 1, 2013, it's shuttering Google Reader forever.
What's a faithful reader of RSS and Atom feeds to do? Find an alternative, of which there are plenty. In fact many companies provide an API for programmers to take advantage of so you can sync apps with their services.
RSS readers are bountiful even without sync. Some are browser extensions like Brief and Bamboo Feed Reader for Firefox, or Slick RSS for Chrome. But our Best Free Software series is all about your desktop options, be they downloads or Web apps. Turns out most reader options are the latter, providing access anywhere. All the better to compete with (and now take over for) Google Reader. Many have mobile apps and the best synchronize with mobile so you're never reading the same feed posts twice. There's also a category of mobile-only apps, especially for tablets—products like Flipboard and Zite—that incorporate RSS with their own article choices to get you reading.
If you are a current Google Reader user with a lot of feeds, make sure to back up now. Google's default is to send you to Google Takeout, a service that lets you download the complete feed in an XML file. (Most RSS readers can import or export an OPML file, but it's actually just XML, so you may see both extensions used.)
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One major unknown remains that we couldn't cover in this story: Digg. The one-time powerhouse in social news is under new management and has announced big plans to create a Google Reader clone/replacement/improvement. Unfortunately it still hasn't launched as of this writing. It will have to be pretty amazing to take on a service as thorough and ambitious as Feedly but only time, and testing, will tell.
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Thanks to Jill Duffy for help with this story.