As announced on the official Google Blog, tomorrow will see the initial release of Google Chrome. This is Google’s next step forward on the web. Instead of just creating what you interact with in their web applications, you will now end up using Google’s own web browser to access them instead.

But why would you switch to Chrome when we already have great browsers like Firefox and Safari? Here’s what Google have to say feature set wise, lets go through them shall we…

The browser has an address bar with auto-completion features called “omnibox.”

Well, hopefully this will be much like Firefox’s 3 “awesome bar”, which provides users with a lot more interaction with their search history and their most used web-sites. Especially with the new bookmarking support.

The browser includes an open-source JavaScript Virtual Machine implementation called V8.

Ahh, a new JavaScript engine, hopefully this one has vast improvements in speed, as currently that seems to be the on-going problems with most browsers. We can only but hope!

Chrome has a privacy mode, disabling all logging for a certain window.

It seems everyone has finally reaslised that porn is a big deal on the internet, and that it’s big money, so why not help out the porn sites keep everyone viewing them without being caught? (You could of course use this mode for things like buying presents for people and you don’t want them finding out, but honestly, what do you think its going to get used for most?)

Web applications can be launched in their own browser window without an address bar and toolbar.

This is going to be used quite obviously for Google’s own applications like Google Mail, Documents, Calendar etc, and should be quite useful and be a space saver. Again, its a step from taking the web and putting it on your desktop, rather than it being within your browser.

Chrome includes an automatically updated blacklist for malicious sites.

Ahh the security, hopefully with an actively updated blacklist this could help improve browsers for the overall community, especially for those users without high technical know how. Although, if this isn’t by-passable, and false positives go through which has been seen in Google’s search results. It may annoy some people who class themselves as clever enough to know what they are doing, but does Google know better?

Supports third-party plug-ins.

I think if a new browser didn’t support these, it might as well just stop developement all together. Let’s hope that it’s as easy as Firefox for extension development and that its powerful enough to be useful. If we don’t get things like Firebug (not just the JS in-page version) then it might shoot itself in the foot. Let’s hope not!

Uses the WebKit Rendering Engine.

This is the same rendering engine that Safari uses, and its been proven over time that it’s very good and very compatiable across operating systems. Let’s hope they don’t mess with it too much. This also means that if your site already works in Safari, it’ll work in Google Chrome. Which is always a bonus when there’s already quite a few browsers out there right now.

As much as I love Firefox for development right now, im slowly beginning to shift over to Safari as I like the way it renders pages and makes them look more soft than usual. However, there are some things about both of these browsers which I don’t partiuclarly like, so here’s hoping that Google Chrome gets rid of those for me, and that Chrome can be my new browser for everything, rather than for one specific task.

I recently changed the background image for the Today screen on my XDA Orbit, however when you set an image to background it washes it out with a grey layer so that text is still readable. However, if you used a very light image to begin with, the standard white text of the Today screen becomes almost unreadable.

In true Microsoft style, there’s no way to change this easily through the Settings pane, or through the Theme settings pane either. So how do you do it?

1. Download Mobile Registry Editor
2. Make sure your phone is connected over ActiveSync
3. Load Mobile Registry Editor
4. Goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Color\

If you see a binary key named 4 simply edit that and if you want the colour black, put in 00 00 00 00 then save it.

If you don’t see a binary key named 4 then you’ll need to create it. Do this by right clicking and going to New -> Binary Value…

Value Name: 4
Value Data: 00 00 00 00

If you had to create the key then the colour change should be immediate, if you were editing it you probably need to restart the phone.

After finally giving in I decided to work out how to get Firefox 2.0.0.11 and 3.0.1 running side by side. It turned out to be much easier than I thought, so I thought I’d share this with the world (although its probably posted on about 5million other blogs), either way…

• Download Firefox 2.0.0.11 from OldVersion
• Change the installation directory to something other than the default

That’s the easy part, now for the more complex bit…

• Make sure all your Firefox windows are closed (yes, this one too)
• Start -> Run -> “firefox -ProfileManager“
• Press “Create Profile” and call the new profile “ff2“
• Once it’s created the profile press “Exit”

Now navigate to the folder you just installed Firefox 2 into, and create a shortcut to the firefox.exe

firefox.exe -P ff2 -no-remote

Put that wherever you please and then you can load Firefox 2 and 3 at the same time!

This video is shows off what Microsoft’s Research team have been doing since they initially did work on an idea called Photo Tourism. This is where you take lots of photo’s of a location and using those to generate a 3D area which the user can move the camera about in. This is the next step up from that with many improvements, and quite frankly, is a fantastic bit of software engineering.

For those who know me (hi people on facebook) you might know that over the past few weeks I have been slowly making a gallery in Rails for my personal photos. This started off the back end of being annoyed at Flickr’s free account only allowing you to create 3 sets (or albums) before you had to pay for more. This annoyed me as I do like the Flickr layout, but I’m not really prepared to pay for it just yet.

So instead, I decided to make my own Flickr clone, and this has been aptly named Snapr!

I started off by looking through their design, seeing how they spaced and laid things out, but one thing in particular that interested me was how pictures seemingly look better on Flickr. Now of course, its not just because of its design that compliments images and that’s enough to make them appear to be better. But as stupid as it sounds, pictures on Flickr do look better, it took some research and testing to finally work out how they do it, but here it is.

After digging through the code in the Mac Flickr Uploader, which is quite handily open source, it was just a case of attempting to follow the code through to work out what they did. They use GraphicsMagick for image manipulation and this is the code that makes images look great…

// Find the sharpen sigma as the website does
double sigma;
if (base <= 800) { sigma = 1.9; }
else if (base <= 1600) { sigma = 2.85; }
else { sigma = 3.8; }

// Create the actual thumbnail
img.scale(dim.str());
img.sharpen(1, sigma);
img.compressType(Magick::NoCompression);
img.write(*thumb_s);

This is the last part of the generation of thumbnails, and as you can see, it scales down the image, then sharpens it by this magical sigma amount. To replicate this I had to actually play around (for quite a while) with that sigma figure so that I could make a like for like replication of their images. Obviously they don’t compress the thumbs, as if you do, they look horrible.

Now initially, this was easily to replicate in Rails with RMagick, however when I switched over to JRuby there isn’t a RMagick gem, which is more than a slight annoyance. After some help from a friend I had my own implementation of pure Java for image manipulation, and this worked fine. However I had been using the attachment_fu plugin to make uploading and resizing of images a breeze. (Read: if you aren’t using attachment_fu, use it!). So the next step, how to get this new Java code to work with attachment_fu. 2 evenings worth of playing and testing later (and my complete lack of any real Java knowledge) I admitted defeat. So, at this point I have a fully working gallery, minus image uploading and processing, which as far as galleries go, meant it pretty much useless. What was I to do next?

Some Googling later and ImageVoodoo was my knight in shining armor! ImageVoodoo is a JRuby gem which has like for like API methods for ImageScience (an image processor supported by attachment_fu). Everything looked like the gallery could finally begin working again. However the next stumbling block was going to appear, ImageVoodoo doesn’t support image sharpening. I was wondering at this point just how much more annoying this could get; this project was only meant to be something quick to get me back into writing Ruby again, but was quickly turning into a complete headache. After some more eventual playing I again had to admit defeat, not so much through not wanting this to work or lack of knowledge, but the want of a working gallery was greater at this point.

Where am I at now then? Well, the gallery is operational, but image sharpening & image compression are out at the moment. So thumbnails look like a 4 year old has been let loose with Photoshop and somehow managed to find the resize controls but on doing so, decided to lower the quality to about 10. Meaning that my lovely photos don’t look as good as they could at this moment. However with attachment_fu storing the original image all is not lost just yet, as when I finally figure it out I can simply regenerate the thumbnails.. (well, I hope I can, haven’t actually looked into how to do that yet).

It baffles me however that RMagick, which is quite frankly a huge part of Ruby image manipulation, doesn’t have a JRuby gem. Admittedly there is RMagick4J, but it’s lacking the same problems as ImageVoodoo, no sharpening support or image compression controls. If only RMagick worked on JRuby without having to think about it…

Well, I think I have decided against getting the new iPhone as a replacement for my trusty XDA Orbit. The reason why I was going to get one was so that I lost no functionality between my current phone and the new one, that included GPS functionality. I was very happy to hear on launch that the 3G version was going to include A-GPS technology, that was the last thing on the check-list I had against getting an iPhone.

So after a few weeks of looking forward to the 11th of July today I have decided against getting one, but why? The GPS, by Apple terms and conditions, cannot be used for navigation…

Applications [that use location-based APIs] may not be designed or marketed for real time route guidance; automatic or autonomous control of vehicles, aircraft, or other mechanical devices; dispatch or fleet management; or emergency or life-saving purposes.

Fantastic, so just what is the GPS used for then?

• Photo Geo-tagging
• Location finding

So.. Apple make possibly one of the most sought after phones this year, yet put a stupid restriction on the GPS side of it. I expect GPS was a real deal breaker for lots of people, but will those users ever be told about the restrictions? I wonder what will happen if I go ask the people in the o2 shop about it, I wonder if they’ll try to sell it to me neglecting to tell me that fact.

Guess I’ll be waiting a month or two after release for the jail breakers to take it apart, and allow the functionality that Apple have restricted…

• No VoIP Apps on EDGE
• Only Apple Approved Code
• No Background Processes
• Applications are sand-boxed
• Only Official APIs
• 3rd party applications without $99 charge

Congratulations Apple, you’ve not only shot yourselves in the foot again, but also given the jail breakers more reason to carry on their work.

Well, this is something I’ve been trying to work out how to do for quite a while, I had browsed the entire file system of the phone through Windows, and by looking at it specifically through the phone, but couldn’t find anything as to where it stored SMS text messages. I have over 4,500 text messages on my phone, and I have made it a habit of mine to never delete anything, this includes every e-mail I send and receive and all IRC channels.

So when Apple announced the iPhone 3g, I needed to find a way to save or backup these messages, otherwise they’ll be lost forever and stuck on this little XDA Orbit. o2 came to a possible rescue with their Bluebook website, however this only backs up messages once you sign in and agree to it, no storing things from the past. You can however send it new messages, but im not going to forward it 3000 text’s, no only will it take me forever, itll probably cost me a kidney (or 2).

Instead of the obvious health problems I would get after doing that, I started Googling for a solution, and it seems that quite a few people want to be able to backup their txt messages from their Windows Mobile phones. Luckily after a little time I managed to find something partly useful which just about does the job while providing a few extra little functions.

This program is called Jeyo Mobile Extender, this allows you to backup all your text messages from your phone into Outlook. It also provides you with a way of responding to text messages through that, so if you have your phone connected via ActiveSync no longer do you have to reply through that! It’s SMS downloader however is a little buggy, when telling it to download every text message I have it took a little while to think about it, then just crashed out telling me my phone was not connected. I then found a way to tell it to download certain text messages from certain folders, and it seemed to be much happier doing it this way.

This appears to be a nice solution to a problem lots of people are having, and seems to work quite well, other than in the extremes of thousands of messages. Either way, i’ll be using this until my new iPhone arrives!

Although that bodes the next problem… how do I transfer these text messages onto an iPhone? Doh!

It’s going to be that time of year again soon, when a browser gets updated and all developers frantically have to make their websites compatible and all working fantastically. However, this time around the team behind Internet Explorer 8 are going to make this much easier on all us devs.

They are doing this by allowing the web-site itself to control which rendering engine IE8 will use when you browse. This will mean if you site is already compatible with IE7, it can also be compatible with IE8 by simply including one line of HTML in the header…

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7″ />

This will apparently force newer version of IE8 to render the current page in IE7’s format, which from a standpoint on the priority of getting things upgraded, can allow it to go a few notches down on the list rather than being the number one.

For once it will be nice to worry about feature sets, improvements and bug fixing rather than worrying if the styling will still work when the next version of IE comes out.

Thank you Microsoft IE team!

This is something I have been noticing over time, and has been steadily getting worse over about the past 2-4months. Back in the end of October last year I posted about how Gmail had finally added IMAP support to their giant web mail service, this was of course fantastic news! After various amounts of hacking with Gmail settings to get IMAP on my account I had it delivering my mail through Thunderbird with little to no effort.

Initially, this was fine, had no problems with it, a bit of confusion on how folders/labels worked, but once you get your head round it was ok. But I’ve just noticed that a growing problem is occuring, and it’s that the IMAP server they have, or the code behind it, just can’t keep up with demand anymore.

I find that especially in the mornings Gmail’s IMAP generally becomes completely un-contactable, and even if it is, my login details won’t work and Thunderbird will be constantly asking for them in its attempts to log me in. The length’s of these outages can range anywhere from 5minutes to 5hours, I’ve gone the entire morning without access sometimes. Obviously if I was really desperate to read my mail I would use the website, which I don’t think I have ever had problems with, but that’s not the point, I prefer to read my Gmail in a standard mail client.

Google had to come up with some sort of major hackery to get IMAP working with their product, is it finally showing the flaws now since that I suspect every man, woman and dog are using it? Only time will tell, I’d like to think that it’ll get better and these stability issues will disappear, as quite frankly I love my Gmail account, and it would be a shame and a major pain in the arse if I had to give it up.

If you own a Wii you can get a free jacket to stop you destroying your nice big telly with one of these jackets that Nintendo are giving away. They don’t look too cheap and useless either, they actually look rather chunky which you can see in the picture below. Nintendo have also said they are shipping these with new Wii’s sold. They have also been designed in a way that they are easy to remove when you need to change the batteries (something which my current covers have issues with).

If you want your own, simply fill out this form if you are in the UK, or if you are in the US, call 866-431-8367.