techNOcool

Google has announced it's new browser, Google Chrome, to be released very soon in beta (of course - does Goggle ever release a 1.0 version of anything?). The announcement is in the form of a long web comic, but is worth a read.

My initial reaction was skeptism combined with a dose of paranoia: Why should I bother trying out yet another browser and how can I be sure Google Chrome isn't phoning home with my every click through a web page?

The paranoia part I'm willing to set aside for a while after reading the comic. It does sound like Google has a product worth a look here. I'm anxious to see how well splitting tabs up into their own processes works, because I'm fed up waiting for Firefox to let me get back to my browsing whenever it's starting a download, for instance. For some reason that always locks up the browser for an unacceptable length of time.

So I'll be downloading Chrome when it's released and trying it out at work. If anyone else does the same, I'd be interested in hearing your reactions.

Update - I downloaded and installed Chrome just before going home last night. Some quick impressions:

• Surprise! It installs in Docs & Settings. Not just the user settings, the whole program. I logged into an admin account to install. Never got asked where I wanted it, etc. When I logged back into my own account it was nowhere to be found, so I went back into the admin acct and saw it was in the admin acct Docs & Settings. The good news here is that anyone can install it without admin permissions. That may also be the bad news. Not sure.
• The only import options were to import from Internet Explorer. So I'm faced with having to figure out a way to get my Firefox bookmarks imported. Haven't tackled that yet, but hopefully it will just be a matter of copying a file from here to there.
• The interface is very clean. It feels too clean right now - like I'm browsing with one hand tied behind my back. But once I figure out where the stuff I need is, it shouldn't be a problem.
• It logged into MT VERY quickly. I'll have to test more to see if that's a fluke, but perhaps some of the MT slowness we've been experiencing was Firefox's fault??

Posted by Susan Fenton at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Firefox 3 is being released later today. This Webmonkey article urges us all to download it immediately. The article lists a number of new features that sound pretty good - including the ability to click on a mailto link and have it open Gmail (or whatever) instead of a desktop mail client. And the ability to work offline with online apps, syncing up when you next go online. All pretty cool if you're making a move towards online apps.

But what scares me is that I downloaded Firefox 3 beta for the mac a couple of weeks ago and did not have a good experience - the mac didn't seem to like it at all, with kernel panics, freezes, shutdown woes and cpu running at 50% with no apps open. I ended up doing a restore with Time Machine (which works great, by the way, and only took an hour to restore a 60 GB system; the downside to doing too many of these is that the next TimeMachine backup after a restore takes a while because it backs up everything again, taking up another 60 GB of my backup drive).

So someone with a Mac running Leopard - test Firefox 3 for me and let me know if it's safe to go in the water again.

Posted by Susan Fenton at 8:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I posted a while back on the Flock browser and how it had several nice features in that allowed one to pull the parts of one's online life together in your browser. I stand by my comments that it is a nice browser for those who plug into the social networks and applications of the the web but I have still decided to reset my default browser to Firefox.

There are many rational reasons for defaulting your web browser to Firefox. The main reason that I chose to go back home is that it is simply easier to tag things in del.icio.us using Firefox's plugin than it is to use Flock's del.icio.us integrated favorite button.

Often we talk of the next cool thing that we integrate into our technology lives but often ignore talking about our experiments that don't work out. What are your "failed" experiments?

Posted by James Fadden at 9:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My inlaws were in town over break, and sleeping in our office, so I was without my PC. What is a geek to do? Take a four year old laptop downstairs and install Ubuntu (Linux) and use the desparation for diversion to fight through the install process and get the thing to work. How did it go? Keep reading....

Continue reading "Ubuntu" »

Posted by Jason Ramsey at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anyone play around with Live Documents yet?

I am waiting for my invitation email so I have not gotten in to kick it around. I googled it and found a few posts from around the web.

How long do we have before something like this actually replaces Office?

Posted by James Fadden at 9:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yesterday I finally got around to installing Leopard (OS 10.5) on my Macbook Pro. Well, not exactly on my Macbook Pro, but on an external hard drive connected to it. I decided to test drive it this way, mostly to be sure my software and hardware is all compatible, before taking the leap and wiping out Tiger.

So what do I think of it? The box it came in is really cool. It's got a neat holographic image on the front. I'd post a photo, but it wouldn't do it justice and you'd just think I was crazy. Not that you don't already think that.

I guess you have to wonder about an OS when the first thing that comes to mind to comment on is the box it came in. But the truth is that I didn't get to really explore the new features last night. I can say I'm not delighted with the visual changes to the OS - the transparency of the menu bar and the changes to the sidebar of the Finder, for instance. Stacks leave me cold - in fact, I removed the two default Stacks - Documents and Downloads - from my dock. I keep my dock on the right, where the whole 3-D thing doesn't happen, so I'm not bothered by that.

Tonight I'll install Office and Dreamweaver. I know I'll eventually need to upgrade both of those - neither is intel native right now - but I don't use them that often at home so I'm hoping they'll chug along well enough with Leopard. I also want to make sure that iChat works well when connecting to Tiger users, as I don't expect Louise or Tom to upgrade any time soon. Then I'll start testing things like Cover Flow in the Finder, and Quick View.

Stay tuned.

Update: Played some more last night. Office and Dreamweaver act the same as they do on Tiger/Intel (i.e., OK, but DW crashes when you try to ftp within Sites). I explored Cover Flow in the Finder and was underwhelmed. We'll see if it helps someday when I'm having a hard time finding a file - but generally Spotlight works really well for me so I'm guessing I won't have much use for it. Quick Look could be useful. I'm getting used to the transparency of everything, but I'd still prefer more opacity for menus, etc. So far everything seems stable, so I may just bite the bullet and switch over this weekend. I have a disk image of my Tiger drive ready, just in case.

Posted by Susan Fenton at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night I download a new web browser Flock that makes it easy to subscribe to one's various social sites and services.

I first heard about Flock a year ago and thought wow that's a nice idea. After playing with it for a short time I decided that it was just that a nice idea.

Well folks this time it is a nice tool that does a good job of connecting your online life. The one spot were it seems to fall short is that all of the connections are managed locally on the computer. What would be the bees knees and make flock truly a social browser would be to have your profile travel with you as you open flock on the various computers you use.

Posted by James Fadden at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

James recently wrote about 3D Web-Browsing With SpaceTime. Watching the demos on the SpaceTime site reminded me a lot of the Cover Flow features being added to Leopard, Apple's soon-to-be-released version of OS X.

If you have ITunes 7 you can see Cover Flow now - just click View > Cover Flow view - or you can watch a demo of Cover Flow in Leopard here.

My question is this: Is all this really a good thing? Will it help me find things quicker or is it just pretty?

I find Cover Flow in iTunes fun to play around with, but not great for finding songs. The (text) search in ITunes is very good and very quick and I can find what I want so much quicker that way. Plus, having used iTunes the last several years, leaving my old albums and CDs to collect dust, I no longer know what the cover art for an album looks like. As I watch the pretty covers - most of which I've never seen before - fly by in Cover Flow I'm amazed that they belong to songs and albums I own. So Cover Flow is not much use for me - right now - when it comes to finding songs in iTunes.

But I can see how it might be helpful in the Finder. When I'm searching through a folder I usually have a better idea of what the document, photo or movie I want looks like than I do of what I named it. So seeing the document in Cover Flow view really might work to speed things along.

I'm looking forward to putting this to the test when Leopard is released. At least I'll be prepared with a computer with plenty of graphics power!

Posted by Susan Fenton at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Learned about SpaceTimeâ?¢ via a recent post on Technology Review.

As it is hard to judge value of a new technology from the outside, I downloaded it to see just what 3D browsing is. I wonder if this is anything more than eye-candy for your browser. SpaceTime representatives say 3D browsing will provide utility on top of the eye-candy...

"SpaceTime is part of a trend to take advantage of the massive amount of memory that's available in today's standard computers. Software designers are able to build graphical bells and whistles into applications, thanks to the steady increase in computing power with each successive generation of processor. For the most part, says Bakhash, high-powered graphics chips are used to "beautify what you see, to make a video game more realistic, or add more lighting effects." With SpaceTime, he says, "we take that power and give the user more utility."..."

We will see...

Posted by James Fadden at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

As technology is supposed to be fun I thought it a nice way to end the week by linking to Running with Scissors so people who long for hi atari quality video games can feel young again.

Posted by James Fadden at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since Jason is calling me out to compare nerd portfolio's, I got to thinking about online gaming's evolution and it's influence on technological evolution.

Continue reading "Online Gaming's evolution" »

Posted by Brian Pelino at 6:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The ITS Coffee Break podcast shares two tools that I wanted to pass along. The tools Libworm and Del.icio.us are mentioned in the December 18, 2006 episode, that also commented on iTunes U and Moodle pilots Lafayette is conducting so you will need to wade through that to get to the good stuff.

I have not use libworm as of yet but it sounds like the Librarians and Instructional Technologists at Lafayette are intrigued by the potential. According to the about libworm page, "LibWorm is intended to be a search engine, a professional development tool, and a current awareness tool for people who work in libraries or care about libraries." It works by collecting updates from RSS feeds allowing one to search for content within RSS feeds and also generate a feed that delivers new results for your search as they are posted. It sounds like it is the search that keeps on giving. At this point, the service is still in beta so who knows will it stay, go, be bought up by google or yahoo, or start to charge. For now it is interesting to consider but how is it really that different from the search alerts from google blog search or technorati?

The other tool, del.icio.us, is a great tool for collecting, organizing and sharing web resources. It is one of the more popular social bookmarking tools, if not the most popular. I have been using it over a year now to keep track of different sites and resources. I really like it for a few simple reasons. First it is easy. I signed up for an account and was tagging resources in minutes. I can also share my bookmarks with others in a variety of ways including rss, widgets on webpages, and using a for:. All very easy through a few clicks on a web form. Secondly, I can get at my bookmarks from anywhere I can connect to the internet. By being portable I actually use them unlike the bookmarks I keep in my browser. Actually my the bookmarks I keep in my browser are actually not even bookmarks anymore. They are actually javascripts that allow me to post to or collect information from the web.

But that is a different post and enough of me pushing this social software stuff. I often feel like I am floating alone, or nearly alone, with all of this new Web 2.0 stuff. I wonder if there are ways we in computing can help our users accomplish their work more efficiently by taking advantage of the social creation model characterized by Web 2.0?

Posted by James Fadden at 3:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For an hour this morning I sat at my computer with headphones on struggling through audio feedback and the "hello? hello?" of people entering the Skypecast late, to participate in a skypecast hosted by an instructional technologist at Chapel Hill. While it did not go particularly smoothly it did go well enough that the participants were actually willing to give it a second go. A few things came out of the activity...

Continue reading "First Go at a Skypecast" »

Posted by James Fadden at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)