Google launches its own web browser, Chrome, sometime today. Beta for Windows initially. Sounds good though.
Amusing comic explaining what it is.
(thanks for the prompt, Tony)
Separate tabs in separate processes? Love it. (I’m still having problems with The Age’s video player; even after a remove/re-install of Firefox and Flash. Weird.)
Trying to make location descriptions parseable in Google Maps (eg for putting in Google Calendar)?
Include the state and country, even abbreviated, so it doesn't default to DefaultTown, USA. And put the human-descriptive bit of it in parenthesis. After the computer-parseable bit of the address works okay.
So even though the locals will know exactly what y
ou mean, don't use: Parliament House, Melbourne
Instead do something more like this: Corner Bourke and Spring Street, Melbourne, Vic, AU (Parliament House), which GMaps can accurately map and point to — and nicely puts your (Title) in a big font.
Google Maps has launched Streetview for some Australian cities.
Flinders Street Station, Melbourne
View Larger Mapaquaponics aquariuma>
Looks like the Citylink tunnels caused some GPS glitches — it thinks there are little bits of road way in the middle of The Domain.
Do we need to bookmark web sites anymore? Can Google do the job?
With Firefox 3, you can just type a keyword into the address bar and it'll usually take you to the Google “I'm Feeling Lucky” first choice. Most of the time it seems to work, though in some cases (I guess where it's not sure it's what you really want, the first result isn't dominating the rankings) it takes you to the Google search results instead.
I tried a few. These all went straight to the place I was thinking of.
Age — www.theage.com.au
SMH — www.smh.com.au
NYT — www.nytimes.com
Connex — www.connexmelbourne.com.au
Wikipedia — www.wikipedia.org
Metlink — www.metlinkmelbourne.com.au
toxic custard — www.toxiccustard.com
apple — www.apple.com
herald sun — www.news.com.au/heraldsun
bbc news — news.bbc.co.uk
twitter — twitter.com/home
Even, to my surprise, “drive” got me to www.drive.com.au… I suppose me bringhow make money youtubeel> being in Australia ensures I get an AU-skewed result. Or maybe drive.com.au really does dominate that search term.
The only one that landed off the mark was TPN. I wanted The Podcast Network, but it took me to the Wikipedia entry for Total parenteral nutrition.
Searching for my name, and some others terms (eg cameron reilly, geekrant), took me to the Google search results instead.
Some don't work at all. Don't try searching for localhost, for instance! (Not that you'd normally need to.)
And we'll always need bookmarks for private pages, and shortcuts to pages away from the beaten homepage track.
[I think Cameron Reilly wrote on this topic a couple of years ago. Perhaps ironically given the subject, I can't find that posting.]
If you've upgraded to Firefox 3 and are wondering when Google will update Browser Sync to work with it, you'd better find an alternative product.
Google has decided to dump the product.
It appears that for now, Mozilla's Weave might be the best substitute (though it's in beta at present). Or Foxmarks, though apparently it doesn't play well with the Web Developer Toolbar.
Is it just me that’s been getting a lot more of this recently?
It’s not just on slow connections, or even on fast connections when there’s a lot of activity going on. It’s even happening to me on connections where everything is fast, and from a variety of computers (so I doubt it’s a cache problem).
And the Basic HTML view is fast, but missing too many features to be practical most of the time.
Is it Gmail getting too many users per server?
Or is it feature-creep getting into the Javascript? I can think of a few things I’d dearly love to “uninstall” from my personal Gmail experience if I could. I never use the Chat. I turned off the Web Clips. I know the adverts pay for it, so I guess I’ll put up with them. I have turned contacts’ pictures. Perhaps the recent upgrades to speed up the response on the interface is to blame?
I don’t know what it is, but Gmail, especially the initial load, is definitely slowing down for me.
PS. heh. After I ranted, I tried clearing the browser cache. After that it loads up like a dream, very fast. I’ll try it on the other affected machines’ Firefoxen. Maybe some combination of Ajaxy library version clashes did something funny.
I’ve often thought spam was demonic.
I really like Google Calendar. Shared calendars, good interface, it’s becoming my calendar of choice. Except of course the calendar I always have with me is in my phone, a Nokia 6230i.
So I was looking for a way to sync them.
Via Outlook would be pretty easy. Nokia have well-established Outlook syncing software, and you could use Google Calendar Sync between GCal and Outlook.
But I don’t use Outlook since switching to Thunderbird. Ideally a solution would sync with Thunderbird Lightning, but it’s not that important.
I went looking for options:
Open source: GCalSync — for Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Blackberry and a few others that run Java. One weakness: does not update entries that have been modified on the phone. Not updated since 2006 though.
Open source: GMobileSync — for Windows Mobile 5.
Open source: PrimoSync — details vague at the moment.
Commercial: CompanionLink (US$29.95, free trial) — for Blackberry, Windows Mobile via Outlook, Palm OS, Apple iPhone
Commerical with some free options: Goosync — the free option is limited to 7 days past, 30 days future, 1 calendar only. I had to refresh my Internet Access Point settings to get it to work. Seems to work okay… the question might be how much the Net access from my phone costs. But it’s handy that it can be initiated any time from the phone, so I’m going with this for now.
What with the Firefox Google page, and the customisable iGoogle, it’s less common these days to see the full-size Google logo, and its special event variations.
So you might have missed this: Google celebrated the 50th birthday of Lego (which was on Monday).
PS. I forgot to go to the Lego convention thing on Sunday, dammit.
Google Maps My Location uses either GPS (if it's available on your phone) or triangulation from the closest towers to show where you are. And yes, it works in Australia.
But it's not as impressive as I first thought. When I tried it initially in the Melbourne CBD (where there are
lots of towers) on my non-GPS-capable Nokia 6230i, it showed the map and pinpointed to within a few hundred metres of where I was at the time, pointing roughly to the corner of Swanston Street and Flinders Lane. Wow!
Alas it turns out that it points to that location wherever I am in greater Melbourne. Oh dear.
Still, at least it got the right city and continent. That's a start.
I like Google Groups a lot, but it’s far from perfect. Of all its annoyances, the lack of a killfile (filter) is the biggest.
Fortunately there is a solution for those using Firefox:
2. Install Damian’s Google Groups Killfile script
3. View one of the offending posts in Google Groups and click on Ignore User. Hooray, now I can finally read melb.general free of all those MI5 Persecution posts! (You can read all about that here, if you wish.)
So I tried IMAP for Gmail in Thunderbird. And to be honest, while it works, I’ve stopped using it because it’s too slow. Probably due to the sheer distance to the Gmail servers, it plods along compared to my other IMAP servers, and indeed compared to Gmail itself.
In fact, Gmail appears to have had a further upgrade in the last few days which makes the web site even more responsive. Actions such as Delete now appear to happen immediately, with little lag after clicking the button. I reckon they’re doing more processing behind the scenes — the give-away is that if you try and leave the Gmail page straight after doing something like deleting a message, it warns you that you may lose your changes.
They’ve tweaked the interface too, with a highlight > icon showing the current message, a nicer popup for email contacts, and you can Sign Out of chat if you don’t want it bothering you.
And the space available is still creeping up; mine reckons I’ve got almost 5Gb available: “You are currently using 373 MB (7%) of your 4731 MB.”
(I haven’t yet moved all my old Outlook mail to Thunderbird. Want to test out the Windows Desktop Search add-in for Thunderbird, so I know I’ll still be able to find stuff! Alternately I might switch to another search; preferably one that supports both Thunderbird and Gmail.)