gBrowser? No, Chrome

Looks like the rumors from several years ago were pretty accurate; Google just released a new browser named Chrome that they have apparently been working on for several years. This thing has been in the rumor mill for ages but it was kept so closely guarded that no one but a select (very) few even knew the project existed. There’s been several dozen reviews/ criticisms written on the browser and it’s features, namely Incognito (read porno) Mode where no history or cookies will be recorded for that window, the new super-duper awesome V8 Javascript Engine that multiplies the JavaScript performance of websites through this browser, and it’s speed both in page and javascript rendering. So many articles that I felt it worthless to write anything like that myself so I decided to link to what I found to be the most interesting ones here so you can check those out.

Fanning the Flames

The main reason for this article was just for me to be able to say that although I was initially against YET ANOTHER browser crowding the marketplace I’ve actually become quite smitten with the little browser that could (and probably will, in many respects). Not to use, oh dear no for my heart is still with another, but as I mentioned in that past ‘Google Browser’ article I love how things like this light the fire under everyone else. This is ultimately going to spur on so many new developments in browser technology faster than it would have happened otherwise. The fact that many things like the aptly named V8 Javascript Engine is open sourced is going to make progress all the faster and, according to their comic, they’re hoping that’s the case as well.

Another big reason that I’m now willing to welcome Google Chrome with open arms is because it’s using the open source WebKit Rendering Engine (also utilized by Apple’s Safari) so your sites should render pages the same as Safari. You are testing your sites in Safari right? Right?

Sorry, this post ended up having way more links than I originally anticipated. I think they’re all good reads/resources though so when you get a chance check them out! And as always i’d like to hear what you thought about this article, Google Chrome, and the state of web browsers in general either through comments or via the contact form!

From 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 winning it the most downloads in 24 hours. What an amazing achievement, I’m glad I was able to be a part of it!

Check out the official release here and get your own personalized Download Day certificate.

Anticipation

I’ve been (not so) patiently waiting for FF3 for months, I remember reading with joyful glee about the ‘awesome bar’ and increased performance. I was right there when the Download Day was announced and I pledged to download Firefox 3 on all the computers I use on that day to assist in achieving a Guinness World Record.

And now, finally, the wait is over!

It was exciting to see people pledge in the millions but seeing that number multiplied several times over the 24 hours of Download Day was truly amazing! At the end of that 24 hours the download number ended up at over 8 million, it’ll be some time before we know for sure we made a record but I gotta say that seeing the world come together and make such a splash was awesome even if we don’t get it.

Initial Reaction

I downloaded and installed Firefox 3 both on my computer at work and at home and now, after a solid day of getting a feel for it, I’m ready to say that the wait was well worth it.

I think the additional security and performance alone would have been enough to make this a successful upgrade. Instead of firefox taking up 120,000 K with a few tabs open in Firefox 2, it now takes 70,000 K with Firefox 3. Believe me, I checked! After hearing from more than one source that performance was a big priority I wanted to be sure that’s what I was getting. Now, so far I haven’t noticed much of an increase in pageload speed but it’s only been a day and having a browser with almost half the footprint it used to is a great start.

Plugins

I rely pretty heavily on all the plugins I have installed to get my work done. So needless to say having any of them unavailable would have been an inconvenience. My heart dropped when I upgraded and saw that the Firebug plugin I had installed was incompatible and disabled. Luckily the authors of all the plugins I used had released new, and some improved, versions of their plugins (including Firebug) compatible with Firefox 3.

Congratulations!

I would like to thank all the people that work on the browser and all of the various plugins for their hard work and dedication. Sometimes I forget how lost I am without Firefox and my installed plugins and i’m positive i’m not the only one. I read that Firefox 3 has already broken past 4% in market share after just 24 hours, that’s truly a testament to their work and dedication. I’m hoping that the trend continues and Firefox becomes the leading web browser, it truly is at the top of the heap in every way.

As of Adobe Creative Suite 2, thumbnail previews in Windows Explorer no longer are supported by default. I don’t know about any of you but for me these thumbnail previews are vital to everyday production. I can understand why it’s no longer supported, the included Bridge application covers previews, organization and so much more for the whole creative suite. That said, sometimes I just want a preview of the files in a folder and don’t want to have a whole separate program open to do so. Lucky for us there’s a solution to this mild annoyance. Follow the instructions below to get those previews showing up for you again. This was apparently developed for Windows XP but I can also verify that it works for Vista. Obviously, I cannot be held liable for anything you do to your machine so be careful and get help if you don’t know what you’re doing.

1. Download this AI and PSD Windows Preview Files zip.
2. Shut down all Adobe programs.
3. Set a “System Restore Point” just in case something goes wrong, it’s an option located in your control panel.
4. Unzip the file to C:/Program Files/Common Files/Adobe/Shell. You’ll see four files and a readme, you can delete the readme if you want.
5. Double click on ‘aiicon.dll.reg’ and ‘psicon.dll.reg’ to run them. These files will automatically update your registry settings so you don’t have to go about trying it yourself.
6. Restart your computer to let these changes take effect.

There you go! Preview to your hearts content!

Last month Google announced the development of a new free tool called ‘Knol’ [stands for a unit of knowledge]. The goal of Knol is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. Using it is by invitation only currently but based on their screenshot example it looks to be a lot like Wikipedia with a few rather significant differences. In their announcement on their blog, Google noted that this tool would highlight the author, which in my opinion is a feature that is sorely needed. It gives the information found on these pages at least some basis of credibility. Also introduced in the beta of knol is common social networking tools such as an area for comments, questions, edits, additional content and even ratings, giving the content even more credibility if you ask me. Check out the knol screenshot and the Google blog post about knol for even more information. I think this is just the latest in a long and successful string of Google taking a basic idea and adding a little Google magic to it to make their version a major competitor in that market.

First of all, as a techie myself, this list is mainly just crap that i’d love to have but don’t want to pay for myself. That being said I think there’s some viable gift ideas for the techie on your list that has everything else they could want.

1. IronKey: The World’s Most Secure USB Flash Drive with Internet Protection Services

from $79 It’s a super-duper USB flash drive that offers a rugged military quality design, secured encryption and a ton of other high tech features. The best one of all is that it’ll self destruct after 10 incorrect password guesses or if someone tampers with the case. Obviously way over the top for the normal user but I must admit it’s pretty great to think of a place I can store anything without ANYONE else getting access even if they tried.

2. Optimus Maximus LED keyboard

~$1564.37 OK, this one is a bit of an overshot but it’s so damn cool that it has to be on the list. Each key of this fantastic keyboard has a tiny screen on it to show what the key is supposed to do, not only will it capitalize the letters and show the special characters across the number row when you hit shift, you can also program it to work with your favorite programs like shortcuts in Photoshop or even show graphical representations of the hotkeys for your games. But with a pricetag at almost $1600, i’m sure it’s not going to be on many people’s lists this Christmas.

3. Kidz-Med Thermofocus

$99.95 I don’t understand how, but someone made a device that finds your temperature without any kind of contact using totally harmless and safe infrared technology. Just move it close to the forehead and wham-o you got the temperature. I can imagine this being a supremely convenient and safe alternative to the conventional means of taking ones temperature.

4. VX Nano Cordless Laser Mouse

$69.99 I admit, this is something I actually already own, so I can say with confidence that it’s absolutely amazing because of one single feature i’ve never seen before. The Logitech peeps aptly call it ‘Hyper-fast scrolling’ and it’s amazingly awesome, basically it’s a scrollwheel without the tactile clicks at every turn. You can swipe the wheel and (depending on how hard you swiped) it’ll continue to spin for several seconds. This is perfect for scrolling quickly through webpages and documents once you get the hang of it. I swipe the wheel and then tap it to stop it ‘on a dime’ right where I want to. If that wasn’t enough you can click the wheel and bring it back to the familiar tactile precision scrolling. Because this is activated by clicking the wheel, they added another button right under it that can act as the action that normally happens when you click a scroll wheel (e.g. auto-scroll). Finish it off with a forward/back set of buttons, side scrolling capabilities and the fact that it’s a laser mouse and you can’t get much better. I must mention that there’s been a few comments on Amazon that this mouse is not as easy to set up on macs because apparently it’s not included on the provided CD.

5. InferPoint Slimouse SlimPad

N/A Everything you know about the design of the mouse has been turned on its ear, this thing is square in shape and super thin. It has a scroll ‘wheel’ but the wheel is nonexistent, it uses a sensor touch-scroll that apparently allows for greater precision.

BONUS Geeky Wrapping Paper

$5.99 With all the awesome geeky gifts listed above, you’re going to need something to wrap it in! Choose from 6 different designs including binary, equations and emoticons.

Saw an amazing web campaign for Diesel Clothes that blew me away. I wonder how long and how much that took to make! This is the kind of stuff i’d love to do, although the video portion would probably have to be done by someone else.

Found a cool blog-like resource of cool AJAX and ‘web2.0′ applications and tools over at ajaxFlakes. Looks like it’s only been around since August but it already has 6 pages of cool helpful tools. I’ve already added it to my del.icio.us, will you?

Finally, a friend turned me on to this freelance hub called freelance switch that I thought was a great implementation of a job listing database. There’s definitely no shortage of such sites out there these days but something about how this is laid out and organized really made it easy to use. I’m not much one to actively look for freelance gigs but if I did I’ll be sure to check out this site first!

Finally got a new laptop to replace the old Dell that crapped out on me back in March. Went with the powerhouse Satellite X205-SLi1 because not only do I need to have many large programs open to work but sometimes i’m going to want to play awesome games to blow off some steam. Who knows, maybe i’ll start getting back into learning video editing and 3D rendering. But another huge thing for me was to have the ability to take it with me occasionally on the go or even just to the couch. So here’s some photos of the awesome X205-SLi1, be prepared though because I don’t want to be the one responsible for you ruining your keyboard with all the drool.

I recently had the opportunity to delve deeper into MySQL and how to optimize and generally better my database structure and queries. There’s a lot of information on this topic so I thought i’d share the top ten things that matter to me when creating and querying databases.

1. Make the fields of your tables as small as possible, if you know a varchar field is never going to need a value more than 10 characters, set it to varchar(10).
2. Always use auto Increment IDs in your tables, even if you don’t expect you’ll need them now they always seem to come in handy.
3. Index all the fields you will be querying directly, especially those that you know an exact value for.
4. Normalize the data structure as much as possible, duplicate data is just more for the server to wade through when running a query.
5. If you’re querying something against a number e.g.( WHERE x = 12 ) there’s no need to use quotes around the number value, this actually slows down the query because it needs to convert from a string to a number.
6. Limit the use of LIKE and the % wildcard e.g.(WHERE userName LIKE %Woods%) as this slows the query considerably. If you know that the value is always going to be at the beginning of a field, be sure to only use the wildcard at the end to speed up the query e.g.(WHERE userName LIKE Woods%).
7. Multiple field indexes are good at speeding up queries but be aware that the first field in the index must be the first item from that index searched in the query or the whole thing won’t be used the way you intended.
8. Be aware that there is a cost to indexing, both in time and space. Indexes speed up select queries but slow down deletes and inserts and basically any other queries that involve writing to the DB. The more indexes a table has the slower these write queries will be because the indexes have to be changed with the data. The indexes also take up disk space which may cause a database to reach its disk limit more quickly. The practical implication of both these factors is that if you don’t need a particular index to help queries perform better, don’t create it.
9. Use the EXPLAIN keyword with your query to get important information on the query including the possible keys and estimated rows that will need to be searched to find a result. Especially handy with multiple table queries with joins.
10. Be careful with joins, if used incorrectly they can slow down a query considerably. Values from the preceding table (as listed in the output of EXPLAIN) are used to find rows in the current table. So if you have three tables each with 1000 rows to search you’re actually returning 1,000,000,000 rows of data. Obviously this is too many and indexes should be employed to reduce this number to something more manageable.

I came back to work today after the weekend “fall back” and noticed that my Dreamweaver CS3 was starting to act up. Ever since we got it it’s been running like a champ so I googled “dreamweaver CS3 crashes” and lo and behold one of the first results is a TechNote posted today on adobe.com that links the frequent crashes on the DST ending. Of all the things I thought it could be, changing the clocks back an hour wasn’t even considered. That’s why i’m posting this in the attempts to spread the word about this odd error. Here’s a quote of the Issue as explained in the Technote.

Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 crashes when working with certain PHP or ASP files in Code view or Design view after the clock goes back one hour, when Daylight Savings Time ends. The crashes only occur when selecting certain lines in Code view, or selecting certain objects in Design view. The crashes only occur in files that have PHP or ASP code, intermingled with HTML code. The crashes do not occur in Dreamweaver 8 or earlier (Ref. 229536).

Click Here to read more and to find out how to fix this issue.

It’s an amazing feat to put the 200 most successful websites on the web into any kind of organization but to order by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective? Unheard of! That is until now, somehow the people over at information architects expanded upon their previous version to be more consistent and therefore more revealing and ultimately more helpful. Check it out, there’s images PDFs and webpages and if that wasn’t enough you can even get a printed poster!

Here’s a Firefox extension that I can see as being another vital tool to web developers trying to get those pixel-perfect web 2.0 applications done faster and with less hassle. It’s called FireBug and does a lot of things that the popular Web Developer extension does such as highlighting and code views but this also give additional support for Javascript debugging, CSS and JS tweaking on the fly and Exploring a treeview of the DOM. One of the coolest features, however, is the ability to monitor network activity so you can see exactly what is taking your pages so long to load. With the increasing complexity of even the most basic websites, tools like this are going to be a vital resource to keep production time down.

On their website they sell it as the “Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library” but the skeptic in me chose to determine that on my own. So I gave it a shot, tried animating some dropdowns using one of the tutorials on their site and I couldn’t believe it. In 3 lines I had finished what would have taken me a whole separate file to accomplish. Even more amazing was that it was set up in less than fifteen minutes, that alone makes this script gold to me. But there’s so much more it can do, i’ve hardly scratched the surface myself but had to write about this amazing time-saving library. I think things like this is the true direction of the “Web 2.0″ phenomenon, coding smarter and not harder. Write it once and use it forever, spend that extra time developing something even better, more usable and more accessible than we ever dreamed possible a short year ago. I’m keeping my eyes open for libraries such as this for other applications, I can see such libraries becoming as crucial to my arsenal of tricks as my stack of code snippets I pull from regularly.

Site Pro just released a new design for their site - http://www.sitepronews.com/ A cool resource for web scripts - http://protolize.org/ A free audio editor, anything this cool that’s free is pretty sweet - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/