MegaBytes

As I write this on the afternoon of June 30, the weather forecast for Canada Day is looking somewhat iffy. So, if it turns out to be rainy and cold tomorrow, you can still celebrate our country's birthday in patriotic style, thanks to the National Film Board and the iPad.

Yesterday the NFB released "NFB Films for iPad", a free app that is currently topping the iPad charts on the iTunes store. The app (also available for the iPhone, but the small screen size does not do justice to the films) allows you to stream hundreds of NFB films, both short and long, famous and obscure, free of charge. If you can't watch a film immediately, you can save it for up to 48 hours, in case you'll be out of range of a wifi network when you do want to watch it (the app can't stream over cell phone networks). So instead of shivering in the rain watching fireworks, just curl up on the couch with a glass of B.C. wine and your iPad and watch some classic Canadian films.

Last week I finally got my hands on an iPad. Thanks to suffering from a bad cold for several days, I was able to devote a lot of time to putting the much-hyped device through its paces. 

When I first wrote about the iPad back in January, it had just been announced. Few people had seen it, fewer had used it. Since then, it has been released to the masses, first in the United States and finally, late last month, here in Canada and elsewhere in the world. In my initial, uninformed assessment, I wrote that I didn’t need an iPad because everything I could do on it I was already able to do using tools I already had, such as my Mac laptop, my mobile phone and my e-reader. I opined that it would be good for people who didn’t have these devices or who weren’t too tech savvy.

It’s difficult keeping up with technology news. Announcements of new products, news about tech glitches, fiascos and triumphs, quirky stories about the impact of technology on everyday lives, breakthroughs and breakdowns -- there's a lot going on, so how do you sift through it all?

This week's technology news was dominated by the company that dominates the web, Google.

The company that started life as a minimalist search engine held its annual developer conference -- I/O 2010 -- and came out with a flurry of announcements, none of which seemed to involve search. Google Television, Google Wave, the Chrome Web Store, HTML 5.0, a new video format and more were paraded out to the audience of 1000+ in San Francisco.

And what does it mean to us, the average users of technology? It depends on your needs and interests.

Google Wave is collaboration software that Google calls "a shared space on the web". You can add multimedia elements, online polls, Google Map locations and more. You and the people you're collaborating with can make changes to your documents ("waves") and see the changes in real time. It's free to individuals with Google accounts. It used to be invitation only but as of now anyone can go to wave.google.com and sign up. Initially it generated a lot of excitement, but reviews have been mixed as to its usefulness.