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.

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.

• 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!

sudo gem update --system

It goes…

/usr/bin/gem:23: uninitialized constant Gem::GemRunner (NameError)

Which is really useful and does exactly what you want it to.. not. The fix is to go edit the gem file…

/usr/bin/gem

In there, hunt for the line…

require 'rubygems'

…and just after, put this…

require 'rubygems/gem_runner'

Problem solved!

Once I’m restarted and on the go again, I go to browse one of my SVN directories and I’m greeted with some disgusting icons. They’ve gone and replaced the XPStyle icon set with some… quite frankly, god awful ones. They blur horribly at 16×16 size and just don’t look nice at all in my opinion, so it was then finding out how to change the icons.

1. Right click on the desktop and in “TortoiseSVN” click “Settings”
2. Select “Icon Set” from the left tree menu
3. Then using the drop down to change to which icon set suits you.
4. Restart the machine (*sigh*)

%commonprogramfiles%\TortoiseOverlays\icons

The part of TortoiseSVN that really slows down PC’s is the “TSVNCache.exe” file. This basically allows for drawing of the icons on-top of files and folders to indicate their SVN status. However, doing this requires a lot of monitoring of literally all your files and folders. So whats the most obvious thing to do? Restrict what Tortoise monitors as it goes about its work. We do that as follows…

1. Right click on your desktop and select “Settings” from the Tortoise context menu.
2. In the tree view on the left select “Icon Overlays”
3. In the “Exclude Paths” box put in C:\*, this will exclude the entire drive from being monitored. You’ll want to put in the drive names of all your fixed drives to stop those being monitored as well.
4. In the “Includes Paths” box put in the root of your development directories, I only use one, however you may use many scattered across your drive. I simply put in C:\SVN\*
5. Press “ok” to apply these changes.
6. Either reboot your machine, or, if your like me, open up task manager and kill “TSVNCache.exe” and load up a folder associated with SVN and it should re-start itself.

Other improvements can be made by setting Tortoise to only show the icon overlays when you are browsing directories with explorer. By default whenever you have an open/save dialog it will load in and show you those. These can be disabled by the following…

1. Right click on your desktop and select “Settings” from the Tortoise context menu.
2. In the tree view on the left select “Icon Overlays”
3. Check the box for “Show overlays and context menu only in explorer”
4. Press “ok” to apply these changes.
5. Either reboot your machine, or, if your like me, open up task manager and kill “TSVNCache.exe” and load up a folder associated with SVN and it should re-start itself.

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…

Firecookie

Allows the same controls that you get with HTML to apply to cookies, so far I had been using the Web Developer toolbar to view/change cookies, however this allows for much easier editing. It also has a feature to show you when cookies are changed, which is great for debugging.

YSlow

This is useful to work out either why your site is running slow, or for you to make improvements to make it faster. It has various rule sets which can be found here which define what exceptions it allows.

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.