It was a pretty big geek news day today, with most of the headlines coming from Google. Early this morning Australian time Google announced that they have finally taken Gmail, and a host of other of their online services (eg Google Docs etc), out of their now previous seemingly perpetual beta. I touched on this a few years ago when I thought that Gmail had outgrown the 'beta' tag. It's going to be a bit weird seeing the Gmail logo now without the 'beta' attached to it.

The other big Google announcement today was their official confirmation of what many have suspected for quite a while now: that they are developing their own PC operating system. Named "Chrome" like their browser, it aims for the same principles, and will be based on the Linux kernel and thus it will be open-source and free. They say it will be initially targeted at netbooks, but most agree that is probably just the beginning.

This is pretty big news in the computing world, and it will be interesting to see what will happen over time once this thing is actually released to the public.

Another big release recently was also the 1.0 release of the excellent media-player VLC. It has been in development for a while now, so it is good to see that the developers finally feel that the program deserves the 'official' release.