Engwar » google

What the Buzz!

Chintana — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:22:46 +0000

No wonder Google Buzz has created so many mixed reaction. Besides being one of the — if not the most — coolest and elegant social media service to date, it’s a good example of a non intrusive design. Integration with Gmail is one huge selling point to begin with. Connecting with a handful of other social media sites is again done wonderfully. The list will increase in future no doubt. It’s one of those things that you’ve always wondered what’s wrong with all the social media sites out there and boom someone comes with a solution having everything exactly the way you want. I am hooked!

Web is the OS

Chintana — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:12:53 +0000

… or is it? After seeing the official announcement I was kinda interested in trying it out. But Prabath beat me to it. With ubiquitous Internet access, making something like this can be advantageous to some. Everything being a web app is great if all of them work. Hulu for example, with its geo IP blocking goodness will not work in this part of the world. For me, the other biggest disadvantage is lack of spinning wheels. Well, I like my data on ze hard drives, thank you. Having data in the cloud is certainly beneficial but, ugh … I shall pass.

But wait, it gets better. You have to login with your Gmail account credentials to the OS. Whaaaaaat?! So, in effect, Google knows every keystroke you do on your computer. That’s a bit unsettling to me. I can easily imagine this being another argument with Shankar about the pros and cons As for those who doesn’t know, I tend to prefer using the search engine without having to login to gmail. Blog on that later. So yeah, that’s a gigantic risk for user privacy there.

It’s exciting new technology nevertheless. But for the foreseeable future I’m fine.

Chrome

Chintana — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:05:11 +0000

So, yeah, google browser. For me the most compelling UI change is the tabs on top of addressbar. Had some tabs open and after switching between each other I’m feeling almost tired of the way it’s in Firefox/Opera/IE. That’s brilliance. The other brilliant idea is processes. It’s one of those simple things which make you realize, duh, now why didn’t I think of that before. If you look at some of the brilliant ideas for problems people came up in the past you’ll see that those are things which have been known previously but people have overlooked until someone come along, pick it up and wave it in front of their faces, hey, you can do it like this.

Javascript devs will still be at home with Chrome’s inbuilt javascript debugger. That’s another smart move. For me the Resources option takes a bit of time, but that’s okay. Incognito mode seems to be a bit redundant given the fact that you have the option of clearing the browser history.

The browser, IMHO, is not much of a bigger deal these days. True, you have to have a solid architecture and all that but nowadays, cost of Firefox crashing is negligible. Restart, and you’ll be where you were before the crash (most of the time). The rich ecosystem of browser extensions is more important. Now, it has become the case where I can’t use any other browser without Adblock, Noscript, Taboo and a few other extensions. I tried getting adblocking plus noscript behaviour with Opera without much success. There might be a way, but for me Noscript make the task dead simple.

It’ll be interesting to watch how things will develop in time to come. I’m still happy with Firefox even if Chrome had a Linux version. For me, extensions I’m using are more important.