Image via Wikipedia

Google have published a design document for adding extensions to Google Chrome.

It’s pretty comprehensive, and even exceeds Firefox‘s extension system in a few areas:

We should not need to disable deployed extensions when we release new versions of Chromium.

Unfortunately it’s fairly obvious that the extension feature is at a very early stage, so we probably won’t see it for a long time – at least months away.

EDIT: Google have published a new Extension Process Model document with some more details about how it’s going to work – interesting reading

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Slife logo

Back in 2007 I heard about a program for the Mac called Slife.  It’s a program that creates a display of your application usage for the day:

Slife screenshot

It looked pretty interesting, but was unfortunately Mac only.

Then in early 2008, a beta of a Windows version of Slife was announced.  I signed up for the beta immediately but didn’t hear back until a few days ago.  I don’t know whether it was a closed beta or whether I just failed to see a download link.  In any case, both Mac and Windows v2 beta versions are now available.

So now that I actually have my hands on a copy of the software, I quite like it.  It sits unobtrusively in the system tray unless you want to have a look at your stats, which is when you see the pretty display.

As well as just showing you your application usage, it also helps you increase or decrease your usage to make you more productive.  First of all you set up an Activity, which consists of one or more applications or websites, and you choose a goal.  For example you might want to spend at least eight hours a day using your line of business application or no more than one hour a day surfing frivolous websites.  I couldn’t get Activities to work because I wanted to use it for web sites and Slife is incompatible with Google Chrome at the moment.

I think if I didn’t know Slife had first been developed for the Mac I’d be wondering why it was so Mac-ish:

• The installer doesn’t put it in the startup group, so as of the next time you reboot it’ll stop stracking your activity.
• The display is very fetching, but there seems to be no logic to where it puts the little coloured dots.  Each time you use an application it adds a dot (or a line if you use the application for long enough without switching).  If you switch between windows in an application you get a dot on a different line (there are five lines per application).  The confusing thing for me is that each line doesn’t represent a window within an application – sometimes the same windw is spread over different lines and multiple windows are in the same line.
• You don’t really have a lot of control over the display – it scrolls horizontally to keep the selected column in the center, but what if you don’t want a column selected?  There are no horizontal scrollbars.  And although you can scale the display horizontally to effectively zoom in and out, it doesn’t scale vertically, and each row takes up a lot of space.  This can be a problem if you’ve run a lot of applications during a day.  Since you can’t rearrange the rows, it makes it impossible to see the first app you used in the day next to the last one.

But then that’s what betas are for, I suppose.

If you’re interested, you can watch a video showing Slife’s features here.

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Image by tchuntfr via Flickr

I have used Norton products since the MS-DOS days.

Although they started off lightweight and nimble, over the years they got more and more bloated.  Just installing Norton AntiVirus slowed any computer down by at least 10%, but in the worsening computer security climate it was unthinkable to not have antivirus software installed.

Over the years there were plenty of competitors to Norton AntiVirus, but either they had the same performance issues or they were from small companies that I couldn’t bring myself to trust with my security.

Upgrading year after year became a kind of reverse Christmas – every year I hoped so hard that maybe this version would somehow be faster, and it never was.

Every computer upgrade was the same – the new hardware was breathtakingly fast, and then I installed the anti-virus software and it was back to the same old grind.

Now with Norton Internet Security 2009, I think they finally get it.  They seem to have actually put a lot of effort into improving performance.

The main screen now has little displays of the current CPU usage of your computer and what percentage of that is Norton.  This feature doesn’t actually reduce the CPU usage, but it makes you more aware of whether Norton is the problem or not.

Norton Internet Security 2009 main screen

You can also bring up a graph of the historical CPU and memory usage and how much of that Norton was responsible for.

Norton Internet Security 2009 CPU Usage display

The features that actually make a difference are:

1. Idle Time Scan – instead of scheduling a weekly scan of the whole computer, it only performs the scan if the computer is idle.  At one point I was (effectively) computer support for a small company and I had sales people complaining about the anti-virus scan happening when they were in the middle of demonstrating software, so this is an excellent feature.  About time.
2. Pulse Updates – instead of checking for anti-virus definition updates daily or weekly, it now checks pretty much constantly.  This means you definitions will be even more up-to-date than before, and the updates take less bandwidth and CPU.
3. Norton Insight – instead of scanning all files every time, Norton now has some intelligence about what the files are and how often you access them, to avoid scanning files that it knows are safe or that you access very frequently.  This means scans can take less time because it’s checking less files, and it avoids scanning frequently accessed files every time they’re accessed, giving a big performance saving.

I haven’t been using Norton Internet Security 2009 for very long, but so far it seems pretty quick.  I’m just glad they’re finally putting some thought into performance.

P.S. At this point someone will say “switch to a Mac/Linux – no viruses!” and I will reply that:

1. None of my programs would work.  A safe computer that doesn’t do what I need it to do is a useless computer.
2. The only reason those platforms have less viruses/exploits is because they represent such a small percentage of computers out there.  That’s security through obscurity – as soon as they were a big enough target they would be attacked more, exploits would be found, viruses would be written and they would be in the same boat as Windows.  So shut up.

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Google Chrome logo

As promised, the beta of Google Chrome was released today.  With great anticipation I downloaded and installed it.

The installer went away for a while, using 100% (of one) CPU, but I think that was because of the sheer size of my browsing history being imported from Firefox.  Need a progress bar there, I think.

When it finally installed, I started it up and…

The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005). Click OK to terminate the application.

I get that message every time I try to load any page.

That makes me a saaaad panda

EDIT: The problem seems to be caused by Symantec Endpoint Security (specifically the Application & Device Control component).  Hopefully Symantec will release an update that fixes this soon.  In the meantime you can uninstall Application & Device Control without completely uninstalling Symantec Endpoint Security.

EDIT: The problem has been added to the Chrome bug tracker, so you can track its progress here

EDIT: The problem has been added to the Symantec Knowledge Base here

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Google Chrome

Apparently Google have sent out a comic book (!?) announcing their browser project – Chrome.

For years there have been rumors that Google was working on their own browser – I guess the rumors were true.

They seem to have put a lot of work into performance, usability and security.  Each tab is a separate process, which makes memory management and security easier and means a javascript-heavy tab won’t slow your other tabs (or the main browser) down.  Hopefully this will also mean that it will take advantage of multi-core/CPU computers.

Interestingly they’ve included an Omnibar which seems to be very similar to Firefox 3‘s Awesomebar and IE8′s Smartbar.  They’ve also made a smart homepage like IE8 beta 2 has and Mozilla is thinking about.  Google Gears is of course included.

They have also put a lot of thought into a fast JavaScript engine called V8.  It seems to do a lot of the optimizations that Mozilla were talking about for Firefox 3.1.

An advantage Google has when developing a browser is the enormous resources of their index – they can run automated tests against millions of websites without ever leaving their own data centers.  So by the time their browser gets to beta it should be much more stable than other betas.

One interesting thing is that Google and Mozilla just renewed their relationship for a few years, and now Google will be in competition with them – I wonder how Mozilla feels about that.

I’ll definitely check Chrome out when it’s released, but the one advantage Firefox will still have is Extensions.

EDIT: Apparently they’re releasing the beta tomorrow

EDIT: Google Blogoscoped have found some more info about Chrome

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As an example of how quick it is to create commands for Ubiquity, Zemanta have already made a command that takes the selected text from a web page and comes up with related tags, articles, pictures and links (the same thing the Zemanta plugin does).

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Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 was released yesterday.

I’ve been a fan of Firefox for years, and nowadays I only use IE when I have to (i.e. when someone’s web site only works in IE), but I still keep track of what they’re doing and of course I’m into anything with “beta” written on it.

Beta 1 was a bit of a disappointment because it was a lot slower than IE7 and had a lot of rendering problems on sites I use regularly.

Beta 2 is faster and has less rendering problems than beta 1, but it’s still not release quality.

What I really like about beta 2 are the features they’ve added to keep pace with Firefox:

• Smart Address Bar – so far it seems basically the same as Firefox 3′s smart bar (and there’s nothing wrong with that)
• Favorites Bar -seems a bit smarter than any of Firefox’s bars, not sure how much I’d use the cleverness though
• New Tab Page -Mozilla are only at the Labs stage with coming up with this type of feature
• Tab Grouping -I think there’s a Firefox extension that does this – meh
• Find on Page -as of Firefox v1…

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A couple days ago, Mozilla Labs released a preview of a Firefox extension called Ubiquity. The blog post and video do a very good job of explaining what and why it is, but basically it lets you easily combine information from different web pages and services.

For example you can select an address on a web page, look up a map for it and put that into an email in one step.

It works like Quicksilver (Mac) or SkyLight (Windows) – you press a hotkey (default ctrl+space, which is reminiscent of SkyLight’s alt+space) and then type a few letters.  It shows you matching commands, and you keep typing until you find the one you want (e.g. just pressing “g” is enough to select “google search”).  Then you either type some data for the command to use (in “natural” language) or type “this” to insert the current selection and hit enter.

Additional commands for Ubiquity are easily written, so it can be extended very simply.

The preview is obviously not release quality yet – the UI is pretty basic and if you put the wrong input in you get a floating error message that you can’t get rid of.  Nevertheless it is extremely impressive, and I can’t wait for the final version.

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Years ago, Microsoft released previews of a technology called Photosynth that takes photos of a place and builds a pseudo-3D model of it.  You can navigate around in 3D and view the photos from that angle.

One of the problems with the technology are things that aren’t the same in all pictures.  For example if you took 100 pictures of a monument from all different angles, that would be an ideal subject for Photosynth, but if there were tourists in the photos that would confuse it because they’re in some photos but not others, and they move around between photos.

Photosynth looked really interesting and I was very excited to try it out, but apart from periodically updating the previews, nothing was released.

And then out of the blue, a few days ago they released it!

I’m eager to try it out, but I don’t have a lot of photos of one subject to use.  If I ever get around to it I’ll post the results here.

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This article illustrates the problem Microsoft has with public perception of Vista.  It supports my point about how terrible their Vista marketing has been.  Basically they got people to try out a new OS called Mojave and asked them whether they liked it – 90% of them did.  But it wasn’t Mojave, it was Vista – which shows that the problem is the perception, not reality.

There’s also news that Microsoft is starting a new marketing push for Vista, to finally start countering Apple’s “I’m a PC” campaign – and about time too.

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I don’t know why everyone complains about Vista – I like it.

Sure, the UAC prompts are a bit of a shock at first, but the price you pay for security is having to be aware of security.  In the current climate of viruses and spam, you have to be aware.  There was a recent study that showed UAC stopping every rootkit they tested from installing – that’s damned impressive.

For years people have been complaining that Windows was insecure – now it’s more secure and they’re complaining that security is annoying.  Also the UAC situation will improve in the future as software writers learn to separate ordinary activities from activities that need a higher security clearance – then you’ll only see UAC when it’s really necessary.

People also complain about the Glass UI.  This makes no sense to me – computers are always getting faster and more capable, so why not have the option to apply some of that power in your daily usage?

One of the things in Vista that I really like is the Windows Experience Index.  As far as I’m concerned, everywhere that sells computers should list the scores of the components in each computer.  It would be a fair way of comparing computers, and of making sure they weren’t trying to rip you off by slipping in a cheap component (which is why they won’t do it).  For example I’ve used a lot of laptops with very fast CPU‘s that was unbearably slow because of the ridiculously slow hard drive it had (I’m looking at you, Dell).

I’ve also heard people complain that Vista takes up all of your memory – and if you install more, it uses that too.  That’s a feature, dumbass – free memory is wasted memory; Vista fills the free memory with cached data that it thinks you might use (based on your previous usage).  If you then run something that’s cached, it’ll load faster.  If you run something that’s not cached, your program will load as if the cached memory was just unused memory.  All win, no lose.

I do think Microsoft must have made some marketing mistakes for the majority of public opinion on Vista to be so negative, and incorrectly so.

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Image via Wikipedia

I like the new look in v3, the speed and memory usage improvements are great (although apparently 20 tabs take up 200Mb of RAM in any browser…) and I love the Awesome Bar. Between that and the Awesome Search extension, the search box may be a thing of the past. Of course Awesome Search doesn’t work in the release candidates, so I’m still stuck with the search box for now.

The extensions I use don’t seem to necessarily be the same as everyone else’s, so I thought I’d list which ones work with the current release candidate and which ones don’t.

• Adblock Plus – Works. How did I ever live without this?
• AutoCopy – Doesn’t Work. I really miss this.
• Awesome Search – Doesn’t Work. This will be really cool when it works.
• Download Statusbar – Works. Even in Firefox v3 the default download manager is pants.
• Evernote Web Clipper – Doesn’t Work. I don’t use it anyway – I either use the web interface or the app.
• Faviconize Tab – Works. Pretty essential for saving space when you have as many tabs as I do and a lot of them are ones that are always open (e.g. Google Reader, Gmail).
• Google Gears – Works as of todayish. I can see how useful this would be, except I’m always online, so offline access is a bit surplus.
• Google Toolbar – Doesn’t Work. This one is a biggie for me. I can get along with the built-in Firefox search bar but without the Google Toolbar, Google Hisory isn’t tracking what sites I visit. To be honest, that’s really the only problem – I don’t use the rest of what the Google Toolbar does – they need to be careful they aren’t obsoleted. If I remember correctly, they didn’t update the Google Toolbar for Firefox v2 until after it came out, so I’m not really expecting it to work before that.
• Google Web Accelerator – Doesn’t Work. Not a big deal, the acceleration still works (as it’s just a proxy), the bit that doesn’t work is the little speedometer graphic, and I switch that off anyway (it’s already in the systray).
• Greasemonkey – Doesn’t Work. But there is a pre-release version that does.
• Hide Menubar – Works.
• IE Tab – Works.
• Image Zoom – Works.
• Menu Editor – Works.
• Open Link In… – Doesn’t Work. I miss being able to right click a link and open it in a background tab.
• Open Download – Doesn’t Work. I really miss being able to just run executables I download instead of having to navigate to my download directory and double click them. I realise it’s a security feature but I feel grown-up enough to fly without this particular safety net.
• Open New Window From Here – Doesn’t Work. I don’t use this too often, but I do miss it.
• Prism – Works. It’s new for Firefox v3 so it had to work really…
• Show Picture – Works. Why is this not part of Firefox?
• Stop-or-Reload Button – Doesn’t Work. I really miss this one. Why is this not part of Firefox? Having stop and reload as two buttons when only one at a time will ever be enabled is such a waste of space.
• Tab Scope – Works. I’m a bit on the fence with this one. It’s mostly only useful to tell whether a slow site has finished loading without switching tabs.
• Tabbrowser Preferences – Doesn’t Work. I really miss this one.
• Weave – Works. It’s also new for Firefox v3 so it had to work really… I’m replacing Google Browser Sync with this, but it’s still very buggy.
• Zemanta – Works (as evidenced by this post)

Vista logo

So Vista SP1 is publicly available now. I downloaded the preview versions and I can’t say I noticed that much difference. I guess we’ll see whether the final version is any better.

In v2, synchronization was a premium feature, but they seem to have changed direction and in v3 it’s the major push. Notes you take on your computer are continually synchronized with their server, meaning they’re always available to you wherever you are. This sort of thing seems to be a trend in modern applications, and it’s very handy.

v3 actually has a few features of v2 missing, presumably because they did a ground-up rewrite but I imagine by the time it’s released it will be complete.

You can also publish notebooks, but I think I’d prefer if there was an option to publish tags (or exclude certain tags from publishing) so I had more control. As it is, I have public and private notes all mixed together, so I have publishing switched off.

IM-History logo

IM-History is a fairly new service (still in beta) that stores all of the logs from all of your chat programs online.

I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and apart from some teething problems it’s really good.

There have been several times in the past when I’ve reformatted or bought a new computer and lost years worth of chat logs – all of that information is gone forever. It’s nice to not have to worry about that anymore.

IM-History also combines all the logs from all of my computers, and it’s all available on a (password protected) web page, so if I’m at home and I need something that was sent to me at work I can find it.

I use Trillian Astra so that I can use multiple IM mediums within one program, and IM-History plays with it very well. Alternatively, IM-History can collect logs from all popular chat programs, so if I had multiple chat programs installed it would collect and combine all of those logs.

I’ve been active on the IM-History forums and the developers are very keen on fixing any problems that arise and take feature suggestions.

AppRocket screenshot

In the beginning there was AppRocket. AppRocket was an application launcher. AppRocket was good – in fact it was pretty much perfect. It indexed without slowing the computer down and it was practically psychic when it came to accurately predicting what application I wanted to run, just based on a couple characters.

Then along came Vista, and it turned out that AppRocket wasn’t compatible with Vista – the installer refused to even install on Vista. So I learned to get used to the search on the new Vista start menu. It was great at indexing and searched quickly but wsan’t as good as AppRocket at predicting what I wanted to do.

Candy labs then released MediaTrain. I was hoping for effectively a Vista compatible AppRocket, but MediaTrain was a completely different kind of application – it was for indexing media instead of launching applications (the observant among you will have noticed that from the names of the applications). While that was all well and good, I never really used the media features of AppRocket, let alone an application dedicated to media alone. I guess I just use the computer to run applications more than to access media.

SkyLight screenshot

Then completely out of the blue (as far as I was concerned), CandyLabs released a beta of SkyLight. CandyLabs seems to have split the media indexing and application launching features of AppRocket into two different applications, and SkyLight was the one I really wanted!

It’s not perfect – as an early beta it’s got a few bugs and isn’t feature complete yet, but it seems to have that psychic predictive ability that AppRocket had, so I’m happy

Zero-config VPN. Genius.

Download v2.0.0.87 here or look at what’s new here….

I’ve yet to try it out but will do in a few seconds… hitting “Check for updates” every day pays off! Must have latest version, must have, must have

Not obsessive compulsive, really

After a silence of… years… VNC has reappeared with a whole new version! Yaay! Well alright