All posts tagged google.
There’s all this crazyness around the Google Chrome OS. I don’t understand it. This sort of OS has been predicted and thought up by lots of people (even Arrington is doing it with the crunchpad). The only thing that’s different is a reputable company is backing it.
This is hardly shocking news and it’s something that has been inevitable for a while now. Will this kill Windows? no. Will this kill the iPhone? no. Will this put a dent in netbooks? probably. It’s something that’s necessary but hardly major. It’s only an accessory that will probably be less versatile than an iPhone but has one important feature: a larger screen.
Bottom line, I’m looking forward to it but it’s hardly a game-changer.
Official Google Blog: Google Voice invites on their way
I wish I could add phone numbers to my current account like this. But if you haven’t used Google Voice yet you should. I’ve been using it for a few months now and it’s incredibly useful.
The iPhone creates an interesting platform for HTML5 because you don’t have to worry about backwards compatibility. The upside of having such a controlled system is that you can control the environment and allow for the creation of new features and technologies which don’t require backwards compatibility, a huge hurdle to innovation.
Even after HTML5 is implemented in all the major browsers, web apps will have to maintain several versions. This won’t be a big deal for companies like Google, but smaller web apps will be reluctant to implement new features in HTML5 due to the limited exposure. The iPhone provides an environment in which a developer can count on most users having an up to date system.
All of this could be moot depending on if HTML5 was built to be fail back to HTML4 smoothly.
This appcache functionality is something I’ve been waiting for for a long time. This demo is more interesting as an example of of HTML5 then a specific iPhone app. Regardless this does seem like a huge step forward in ability for both the iPhone and web apps in general.
Official Gmail Blog: Spice up your inbox with colors and themes
I’ve been using an addon as a custom theme for a while now. I’ll have to disable it and see if I like these more or not.
User-agent: zombies Disallow: /brains
An interesting google labs product that shows quotes from the candidates with certain key phrases. I like the use of “spin” to pick different quotes. Nice double entndre.
- about:memory
- about:stats
- about:network
- about:internets
- about:histograms
- about:dns
- about:cache
- about:plugins
- about:version
Via lifehacker which featues screenshots of all of them.
I don’t think chrome is out to “kill” any browser. Especially not Firefox. Google recently signed an extension on their deal with Mozilla. The primary purpose of Chrome, I believe, is to get Mozilla and maybe Microsoft and Apple to include certain technologies in their browsers. Namely the V8 java VM.
Two things I notice right away about Chrome is how fast it loads and how snappy gmail runs inside of it.
The other big feature of Chrome that isn’t really being leveraged right now is gears. Eventually Google, i imagine, hopes that gears functionality would be fairly ubiquitous across the internet. Why this is so compelling to them I’m not exactly sure but I think that Chrome is the reason we haven’t seen a lot of development with gears recently.
NB: While writing this inside of Chrome it considered gmail to be a misspelling :P
