While it is admittedly early to be talking about a full-blown review, I’d like to at least take a moment to discuss one of the most significant browser releases in recent history.

As someone who has spent the last 13 years writing web applications I’ve seen first hand the path modern browsers have taken to get to where they are.  Knowing what I know about this path, I can also say that the journey has been a long one full of good intentions and without much concern for developers (or standards).  That’s why I’m so impressed with what Google is doing here.

Apparently Google “accidentally” sent a notification about their browser intentions a day early, resulting in a frenzy around their creative and informative announcement “comic.”

Then, today, they officially released the browser that was the source of all of the discussion.  With their claims of speed, performance and standards compliance I was skeptical.  After all, like I said I’ve been fed the “we made it faster” line a thousand times over the past 13 years and I’ve almost never been impressed.  Sure, you can benchmark browsers and prove a 3% increase in speed but what does that buy me in the real world?

When we’re talking about Chrome, however, we’re talking about insanely fast.  Let me be clear, I’ve developed a LOT of applications for intranet usage (internal company networks) and I can say that the “slowness” often felt while using web pages is not a result of bandwidth limitations or slow downloading.  Instead, it is a latency experienced while the inefficient browser engines parse through the code needed to create a web page.  This is even more obvious when the page has complex (read:  useful) JavaScript in place.  All that is to say, Chrome is so fast it does away with the expectations you have about using web pages.

I’ve read where some folks had problems with pages, but I’ve looked at all of the ones I am responsible for and found no issues whatsoever.  This is probably because I test them in Safari, which uses the same engine for rendering as Chrome.

So for now, those are my thoughts.  I’ll post more here if things go insanely awry, but I plan to use Chrome as my primary browser at home for a while to see what I run into.  Oh… and I posted this using Chrome on WordPress, so we know that works!

More Chrome Information:  http://tools.google.com/chrome/intl/en/features.html

Download Chrome:  http://tools.google.com/chrome/

Online Life Tool: Gmail

Replaces: Outlook (and the associated old-school mail servers)

As you read through this series of articles you will find that I depend on Google for a lot of functionality. The primary reason I chose Google springs from the great approach to online e-mail that they pioneered, Gmail. With virtually unlimited storage and the recommendation that you archive instead of delete messages you have only yourself to blame if an important e-mail goes missing. If you are careful you will find that you can find anything you need very, very quickly using their approach to categorizing and filing messages. Of course, all of this and more has been said before about Gmail, so I’ll stop the fan-boy praise and get to the nitty gritty.

I use Google’s Apps for your Domain for all of my e-mail needs. The great thing is that all of my sites and e-mail addresses can play together nicely because of Google’s “share and share alike” approach to their services. So using Google Apps is equivalent to having a Google account (which anyone can get for free). For most of these services, their web based interface is way up the list of good web-based applications and while their e-mail interface is definitely no exception.

While it would be easy for me to assume that people reading this story, owning and iPhone and wanting to live an Online Life would be able to set up e-mail without assistance, we all know what happens when we assume. So here’s how I roll in regards to e-mail:

1. Get a Gmail account
2. Register your Gmail account on your iPhone
3. Learn to deal with the envy of your peers

So just use the IMAP client on the iPhone to connect to your Gmail account. The two synchronize beautifully (much better than with my Windows Mobile phone) and working between them is really transparent.

If you want to label and archive something via your iPhone, just drag it to one of your “folders” and presto chango Gmail will handle the rest for you. When you set up your account your iPhone automatically added a special set of folders which have a [Gmail] folder as their parent. These folders allow you to do all of the special things Gmail’s web interface allows you to do. For example, if you want to “star” an item, simply place it in the [Gmail] > Starred folder. All of the special folders work the same and with them you have all the tools you need to keep your inbox in order quickly and easily. If you’re like me, with time you’ll find yourself using your iPhone for all of your e-mail related tasks even when you’re sitting right in front of a computer!

For an obligatory comparison, this approach replaces Outlook for me. While I don’t have many complaints about Outlook at all, it really is very nice to be able to have all of my messages stored on the web instead of in an archive file on my hard drive. Now that I’m using this approach I can’t count the number of times I have been out and wanted to pull up an e-mail. If I were still tethered to Outlook (without a mobile device) that wouldn’t be possible and even with a mobile device (Outlook works pretty well with any Windows Mobile device as well as the iPhone) if I hadn’t synced lately I would be out of luck.

Something else to remember that I will definitely be mentioning more later is that almost all web-based applications support some sort of interaction via e-mail. Because the SMTP (e-mail) standard is so widely accepted, having a good e-mail client is paramount to achieving any goal as an Online Lifer (woot, I just made up that term, I Googled it to be sure).

So on the e-mail front I would say that not only have I been happy with my new approach, it has been better than I realized it could be which in the end is what we should all hope for when we try something new.

I am a web developer which means that I spend my days (and often nights) designing, implementing and supporting useful software which runs in a web browser (preferably all web browsers). A couple of months ago the thought struck me, “If I’m writing all of this great software for the web why am I using so many non-web based methods of keeping myself organized?”

Why, indeed? At the time I simply didn’t see how I could accomplish everything I wanted or needed to get done using only web based applications. After all, most web-based applications required you to be at a computer to use and if I was going to be at a computer anyway why wouldn’t I just use desktop software? And if I was at a computer using desktop software, why not depend on my trusty old notebook and pen which would inevitably be available.

Then I met the iPhone. It was a chance meeting, I had fully intended to just upgrade my Windows Mobile device (I had been using them for over three years) and continue on with the way I had been going. But after toying with an iPhone for a while I decided to buy one.

There’s really something to be said for what Apple has done with the iPhone. And I don’t mean sales success or over-hyped marketing and fan-boy addictions, I mean what they have actually done with the thing. When they released it there was no SDK and a requirement that you purchase a data plan. The obvious intention was that if you wanted to do something, do it using the web browser or one of the few built-in tools which supported internet protocols other than http (such as the e-mail client).

Because Apple did this and because I bought the iPhone I am now revisiting my previous idea of moving more and more of what I do every day into web applications.

Now with an initiative like this there are always risks. People I’ve talked to along the way have warned me of the impending attack of our information hording overlords and how keeping personal (but not necessarily private) information online would only seal my fate as one of their minions. As someone who has spent my adult life giving the government personal information and handing my credit card to the random shady figure waiting my table I figure it’s a risk I’m either willing to take or a risk I’ve already been taking all along.

I required that my new approach meet the following requirements:

• Convenient - Be easy and non-intrusive to my daily life
• Collaborative - If others are involved, let me involve others
• Available - I need my information when I need it, not later
• Portable - It needs to work equally as well whether I’m at a computer or not
• Complete - This is an all or nothing deal
• Cost Effective - I’m an Open Source fan, don’t make me pay too much

My progress has been surprisingly good and now I’m ready to begin sharing my experiences in this adventure with the world and that’s where this series of articles comes in. I will be writing these articles as I have time to outline how I have accomplished keeping myself organized using just my iPhone and the internet.

I knew the day would come, it had to.

For a long, long time I have accused console games and the overlords who control them of ruining everything that was once sacred in video games. In a rush to make more money the big console companies would blitz right past all of the important things in games: fun, originality, playability, FUN; and instead focus on the quick fix items such as graphics and speed of play.

While graphics and speed of play are a necessary component to any great game, losing the fundamentals of what a game is, by definition, loses the purpose to have a game in the first place.

Then Nintendo decided to change everything. More after the flip…

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I love open source products. I love the way they branch out and provide competition for each other from the same base code. I love the way the software is generally released often and I love the way that user feedback is the driving force behind the majority of changes.

Now I have another reason to love open source software. It forces proprietary software to evolve… even against the will of the author of that software.

I have long contended that in the future when we speak of Firefox in a historical sense the only benefit we will remember will be that it made IE better. I just didn’t expect it this soon.

About 10 minutes after my first test drive with IE7 I spent some time staring blankly at the Firefox icon on my desktop. I hated to admit it, but Microsoft had out Firefox’d Firefox.

Read on for why I think that…

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