And I’m posting from it now. All in all a VERY satisfying browser, and this just from impressions of the first few minutes. Four tabs open and the memory footprint is similar to Firefox, and it’s running much faster than even that browser out of the box and unencumbered by add-ons. The interface is very clean. I do miss Live Bookmarks – I’ll have to find an alternative of some sort. It handles google applications very well, predictably. Netvibes is a little worrying though; it seems to be chewing up memory at a rate of knots – 8-16kb per second adding to its stack, maxing at 64Mb.
What the comic said about being able to use the task manager to target poorly programmed web sites appears to be correct! As to whether the browser is as bad an idea as some may think, I doubt the most pessimistic of predictions. Its built in VM for Javascript is a very good idea and appears at first glance to have the desired effect. Isolation of tabs into processes is a significant improvement on previous single-threaded browsers, and though it may yet just turn into a vehicle for google services, ads, and information gathering, its challenge to the duopoly of IE and FF and its use of new techniques is a great leap forward.
The only down side I have is that it will make testing more laborious for any development once it emerges from beta (if that ever happens, given the perpetual beta of gmail and google calendar!)
Update: A security flaw (due to the software being based on an old version of WebKit) has already been discovered in Chrome. I guess there will be more… And some people have chosen to comment on the browser in the same comic form used to Press Release it.
Off the back of the presentation at OFFF Lisbon earlier this month, where Stuart, Ben and Stephen presented Rhythm of Lines, GT have launched their GT Labs website, where cool stuff will be dropping every month or so, to demonstrate things that we do and to open up some of our work to wider communities for use and re-use.
The R.o.L code released there last week is GPL’ed and doesn’t represent the entire code base for the project but does give enough away to demonstrate working end to end from Maya into Flash and Papervision.
Though the project work represented there took place before I joined GT, it represents something I’m happy to shout about; a successful technical project which is aesthetically beautiful. It encourages play and user-engagement, and has rightly won awards and accolades.
I look forward to adding to the GT Labs contributions some time in the near future.
A new bike to replace the one stolen last week, and its arrival has cheered me up no end, deciding as I did to go up the range to console myself. First ride on it this morning. So, I leap on, all togged up and ready for an entertaining ride to work. And I can’t clip in to my pedals. And for 30 minutes I’m slipping off them in annoying metal-on-metal-in-rain ways. And at every lights I have a false start because I can’t lift accelerate. Every attempt to clip in, at any angle or force fails.
So I get to work and do a quick search and (nesto, this might be relevant to you to…) it would appear that the SPD cleats I have in my shoes are not compatible with the crank brothers clip pedals fitted to the new bike.
And a pair of cleats is going to cost me frickin £18 :/. And that’s if I’m able to remove the thoroughly gritted-in ones already on my shoes.
This message comes to you from the “should have bought Shimano M520 after all” dept.
I’ve never been entirely happy with the phrase when applied to a web application, but I do have to admit it’s just about applicable in context. For me a mashup will always be Bastard Pop and not a way of linking RSS and geolocated widgets together. Anyway, nice post from Dion Hinchliffe and a screencast of an IBM application called QEDWiki. It’s an AJAX application for creating AJAX applications, and this is just the sort of approach to producing web tools I’ve always most admired. Rather than making the tool, you make the tool which makes the tool. It’s a much more lateral “meta” approach than much online development.
I’ve yet to see exactly what makes these tools and applications ready for Enterprise level application, and I guess giving them to suits is a prime way of kicking the fun out of them. So I’ll be watching with the sort of disengaged interest required when watching one of your underground heroes selling out.
A tiny bit of digging has led me to some interesting info – it started life as a wiki built on the Zend framework. And develops the concept of situational applications.
Everyone got very demob happy at work yesterday afternoon. Some sort of collective madness overtook us all. I___ seemed to want to wear a pot of flowers on his head Carmen Miranda style, and the Comms team were understandably distracted by videos of sneezing pandas. The jovial Canadian who presented Thoughtfarmer to us in the afternoon helped too. It’s a very well engineered product, but getting the company to accept the shift in psyche involved in adoption of it or a product like it will be tricky. The Cluetrain Manifesto really should be required reading for CTO, CEO and COO by now.
But I think it was the fact it was Friday. Simple really.
