With all of the hype surrounding whatever it is Apple is planning on announcing next week, Gizmodo takes an in-depth look at the somewhat tragic history of the original Apple tablet, and device that started the whole PDA market to begin with, the Newton.
It’s a bit of a long read, but very interesting, especially if you happen to find computer history, not to mention the history of Apple, interesting.
I’ve been using Chrome as my default Windows browser since it was in Beta. Today, I finally switched my default browser back to Firefox. This comes after about a week of using both. After continually waiting for a site to open in Chrome, then switching to Firefox and have the same site come up while Chrome was still trying, I just gave up.
When I first started using Chrome, I loved it. It was fast, it renders pages almost as well as Safari does, and it has a lot of nice features. But, as time wore on, Chrome started getting slower and slower.
Sure, I tried emptying the cache, download history and whatnot. That helped at first, but it wouldn’t take too long for Chrome to slow down again. After a while, it didn’t help at all.
So what’s going on? Why is Chrome slowing down? I think it’s simple, really. If you use Chrome, open the options and try to set how many days of browsing history to remember. Go on, I’ll wait.
Can’t find it, can you? There is no setting to tell it how far back to remember. Basically, Chrome remembers your entire browsing history, until you manually delete it. And then, your only options are to delete only the recent history (up to four months), or everything. This is exactly backwards. I’d much rather keep my recent history, and delete everything older than, let’s say, a month.
I went ahead and deleted the entire history, and guess what? Chrome much faster now. But, I find this an unacceptable solution. Having a recent history aids in browsing sites I routinely visit, and quickly finding things I’ve recently looked at. The only choice with Chrome is all or nothing. That’s too bad.
The other problem that I’ve run into is that Chrome is just is not as stable as Firefox. I’ve had it lock up on me too many times. And, although Chrome opens each tab as a separate process, so that one locked tab theoretically won’t effect other open tabs, this doesn’t seem to work so well. What I’ve found is that, if and when a tab does freeze, you can’t actually switch to any of the other tabs. So, while it’s well and great that the processes in the other tabs weren’t effected, it really does me no good if I can’t switch to them, because the tab I’m looking at is frozen and won’t let me close it or switch away from it.
Yes, I know I could kill the tab with the built in process manager, but a) that doesn’t always work, and b) most people probably don’t even know that’s there, or how to even get to it.
Having said all that, I haven’t made up my mind 100% just yet. I’m going to put on Firefox for a while, and see if it still fits. But, the one thing I really love about Chrome is the “Application shortcuts” feature (which is basically a site-specific browser). I’ve used that for my email and for the web-based help desk system we use at work.
Maybe in the end I’ll wind up running two browsers at once, Firefox for general web surfing, and Chrome for the SSBs.
One of the biggest argument ISPs seem to use against any sort of net neutrality regulation is the “bandwidth hog”. Analyst Benoît Felten argues against the existence this phantom threat: Is the Bandwidth Hog a Myth?
Here’s a great quote:
For those service providers with data caps, these are usually set around 50 Gbyte and go up to 150 Gbyte a month. This is therefore a good indication of the level of bandwidth at which you start being considered a “hog”. But wait: 50 Gbyte a month is… 150 kbps average (0,15 Mbps), 150 Gbyte a month is 450 kbps on average. If you have a 10 Mbps link, that’s only 1,5 % or 4,5 % of its maximum advertised speed!
He ends the article by issuing a challenge to telcos to supply him with data that he can analyze to determine decisively whether or not these “bandwidth hogs” exist. Let’s start taking bets on how many take him up on the offer.
The band Phish were one of the first bands* to offer their live concerts available for sale and download online the day after the performance. Now, they’re once again leading the pack by offering HD audio (three times the definition of CD audio) downloads, starting with their upcoming Festival 8 shows.
I hope this becomes a trend with digital music, as personal storage space and bandwidth keep growing. MP3 was developed at a time when hard drives were much smaller, and dial-up was still the norm. Sacrifices in sound quality were made to obtain smaller file sizes. Today, that’s no longer a necessity, yet the default standard in digital audio remains lower-quality file formats. It’s time we moved passed MP3 (and AAC, even though it’s better than MP3, it’s still lossy compression) for better formats.
I do think their price point may be a little high (twice the MP3 price, one and a half times the FLAC price) for what the demand will be, but we’ll see. I may download the Festival 8 shows just to see how good they sound (of course, the performances themselves are bound to be worth the download).
*They’re the first band that I know of that did this, but I can’t say whether or not they’re the first ever to do it.
UPDATE: It turns out Google is “bucket testing” variations on its homepage, apparently completely at random. I guess I’m one of the lucky few to get this so far. Read more at Tech Crunch.
This is something I’ve noticed lately, but have seen no mention of on the internet: When I go to google.com in Safari under Snow Leopard, all I see is the “Google” logo and the search box. That’s it. No buttons, no links, no nothing. If I move the mouse, the other elements on the page then appear, but if I just type in my search and hit “Enter” it takes me to the search results.
I like this sparse design, but I only see it in Safari under Snow Leopard. I’ve tried the latest versions of all other browsers on Windows (Windows 7), including Safari, and I get the regular old Google page.
What’s going on here? Is anyone else seeing this new, sparse Google page? Am I going crazy?
With the Canvas tag coming in HTML5, Flash’s days are numbered. This will certainly help push it over the edge:
Make sure to check out and play with the demos, they really give you an idea what of is capable with this. And just imagine, it does all this without crashing your web browser or slowing your computer to a halt. One can only hope that web developers discover and start using this, and it spreads quickly throughout the web.
Goodbye, Flash, and good riddance!
I hate having my computer desktop cluttered with icons. The more stuff you keep on the desktop, the more unorganized it all becomes. But, the desktop is a convenient place to keep things that you frequently access, projects you’re currently working on, and things you just haven’t filed away yet. This puts me in a daily dilemma, both at work and at home.
Well, Stardock has a solution to this problem (for Windows, anyway): Fences.
This is easily one of the coolest, and most functional, GUI add-ons to Windows I have ever seen or used. Basically, it’s a desktop icon manager that makes it easy to organize your desktop and optionally hide the icons until you need them (no clutter!). Why didn’t anyone think of this sooner? If you have a bunch of icons all over your desktop, and you are running Vista or Windows 7, you need to go install this right away. Seriously, do it now, I’ll wait.
See? What did I tell you?
Someone needs to create the equivalent of this for OS X now. If I had any programming abilities what-so-ever I would go home and spend my entire weekend working on a Mac version of this.
John Gruber gives a fairly decent rundown on the issue of Creator Codes vs. UTIs, and how UTIs do not replace creator codes – C:\ONGRTLNS.OSX. Money quote:
Snow Leopard, effectively, gives us the file-to-application binding policy from Windows 3.0.
Go read it, he makes some really good points.
John Siracusa, over at Ars Technica, discusses the ongoing debate over Creator Codes. He also offers up suggestions on how Apple could have phased out the creator codes in favor of UTIs (rather than just dump them altogether, with nothing effective to take their place).
This is something I hadn’t noticed, but am completely disappointed to find out about: Snow Leopard disregards files’ creator codes.
Ugh. WHY?
If you don’t know what creator codes are, they are four byte codes that tell the operating system what application created a file. The OS uses the code to determine what application to open the file with (there is also a “type” code, that takes the place of file extensions – which can also help determine what application can open a particular file). These codes can be used to make sure certain files of a specific type open in certain applications, and other files of that type open with a different application. By default, the application used to create the file will automatically open it when the file is double-clicked. This is useful if you have different applications that handle the same file types. A good example of this is if you are doing web development, you’ll likely want the .html files you are working on to open in the editor you created them with, instead of your web browser.
Well, with Snow Leopard, that is no longer true. New files created in any application will open with whatever the default application for that file type is. So, if you create an .html file in BBEdit, then try to open it later by double-clicking on it, the file will open in Safari. This is bad behavior. This is Windows behavior.
You can still bind a file to a certain application in the “Get Info” window in the Finder (which uses a different method than creator codes), but this forces users to take an extra step to accomplish what used to be the default. Nobody is going to want to do this for every single file they are working on.
I can see how, for some people, this may be the preferred behavior. For example, if I’m working in Photoshop, and I want to create a .jpg (or .png, or whatever), I select “Save for web and devices” to do that, and keep my working project file as a Photoshop .psd document. In this case, when I double-click the resulting .jpg file, I prefer that it open in Preview, rather than launch Photoshop, since I’m not planning on editing that .jpg, but would rather go back to the original .psd file to make any changes, then re-save using the above method.
That is, however, the only example I can think of where I would want a file to open with a different app than the one I created it with.
Also, I can see that most “average” computer users won’t be affected by this at all. Here, I’m talking about people who are using their computers to surf the web, check their email, work with Office files, use iTunes, iPhoto, etc. These people are never going to notice this behavior. But, at the same time, keeping the creator codes is not going to affect them in the slightest, either.
So why do it, Apple? Why get rid of one of the (simple) things that lifted the Macintosh experience above that of other operating systems? If it’s something that the average user isn’t going to notice in the first place, but “power” users will, what is the point in doing it? It should at least be an option that power users could turn on or off.
I really hope enough people make a stink about this for Apple to reconsider, and reinstate creator codes in a Snow Leopard update. If you are one of the people who thinks this might affect you, let Apple know about it:
Read more about this issue:
Ross Carter – Snow Leopard’s Giant Step Backward
TidBITS – Snow Leopard Snubs Document Creator Codes
via Daring Fireball
