Tag Archives: Google

Chrome OS isn’t (can’t be) the new Windows

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So everyone is talking about how all of our normal applications are transferring to the internet; the cloud. But if you haven’t noticed, people are still buying powerhouses and desktops and the netbook business ain’t doin so hot. The iPad is selling like hotcakes but think about it: it’s not completely web-based, you can download games and things. Why isn’t the world using just the web for everything?

Because people in the world have more to do than just email and flash games and facebook and spreadsheets. The web isn’t powerful enough. Google Docs can’t do quite as much as iWork or even Microsoft Office. Because it isn’t as powerful. And we can only diagnose this if we dig down a little technically deeper.

When we are using a web-app, for example, google docs, not everything takes place on the web. The potential is actually downloaded to your computer and then executed in this tiny little cache. The processor isn’t web-based. You are just keeping the stuff up there. And this tiny little cache where the web-app is downloaded is just too small for anything more than a very lite application. If we were going to use a full featured but “web-based” Microsoft Word, it would take 10 minutes and 2 GB of a cache to download. The web isn’t fast enough to support powerful applications. What about the video editors out there. What about the photo editors out there. As amazing as it seems, The web doesn’t have enough power bandwidth to do advanced things such as video rendering.. That’s the reason that there is no online version of Final Cut. Developers can’t make their applications to rich because they are limited by the capabilities of the web-browser, download speed, and cache. But what do we get if we eliminate these barriers? We get a desktop application. What i’m trying to say is that Desktop applications are virtually unlimited. . Lets say I’m in a taxi and I just remembered that I had to do a presentation in a few hours. If I have a computer running ANYTHING OTHER THAN chrome OS, then I can open up my handy dandy presentation creation application and whip up a quick and easy slideshow. But if I’m web-based, then there is the variable of internet access. A netbook running chrome OS is completely useless if you are in a plane (unless of course the plane has WiFi).

So when google is trying to launch their Chrome OS, keep in mind why you are getting this computer/netbook. For some people, it may be fine. Maybe they just want to have a simple lite computer to use when in a meeting. But remember, if you opt for this the web is your only option, therefore you are limited in power, features, and accessibility.

Wireless Tether with Droid Incredible

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So let’s just say that you are driving somewhere and you have your computer (or iPad or iPod touch for that matter) along with your droid incredible. Well now for free (actually, the expense of battery life) you can use your Droid Incredible as a wifi tether, so you can have an iPad on verizon.

Sadly, the speeds are dramatically reduced to a groping 70 kb/s. But I think it’s better than nothing. Can load pages, not so great for downloads and video/audio streaming such as youtube or pandora.

Step 1. Make sure your phone is rooted. Just do steps 1-4 of the tutorial HERE (continue the steps to install android 2.2, if desired!).

Step 2. On your incredible go to THIS LINK (try using chrometophone, review on that soon!)

Step 3. Once the link is downloaded open it and install the application.

Step 4. Open the application on your phone.

Step 5: Press menu and go into the settings and change around your preferences. change the SSID, and add a passphrase. Enable access control if desired.

Step 6: Press the big tether button.

Step 7: On your wifi enabled device go to the network selection and select the nework name that you had entered in the SSID preferences. Enter your asscode and Voila, you can connect to the internet!

One of the cool benefits of this is that you can be on the internet while in a car. Cool, eh?

New view on apple

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I used to dub apple as the greatest of all. But my view is changing as apple begins to turn into the evil empire.

If you look at some of the press you will see how apple us taking a very bad response to this iphone for antenna problem. They have been saying nothing to the press and they are not anything their problem. This is kind if odd for a company so focused on its reputation and good press.

So here what I now say: apple has some of the best computers and electronics and design basi (plural of basis?) But as a company are entirely evil.

On the good side is google, but o don’t really dub apple and google in the same field other than mobile operating system (where I dub android better, more on that later) so I cant really call them head on competitors. But I praise google for being so open. I mean I even have a google socket on the back of my macbook and iPad.

So I guess I like them both.

As far as pcs go, I’m less crazy about mac. I man, people have their reasons, but overall I still dub apple as the best overall computer creator.

Swype

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These days, to type on a keyboard, you press the touchscreen. This usually requires thumbs, which can get VERY tired after a lot of typing. It can also take a while…………

Swype is a way to replace typing by instead of touching the keys you swipe over the letters on the keyboard to create the word instead of typing them. It has already broken the world record for fastest typing speed.

Luckily, Swype is allowing beta users on Android. And thanks to my Droid Incredible I got the chance to try it out.

As you can see, it may take a little bit of practice, but there are other videos where people are much faster than me. I’ll probably be able to swype a bit faster when Im not in japan, as here it is so humid my screen fogs up and becomes sticky.

Swype is rolling out on many new phones and the beta seems to work just as advertised.

To get swype, you need to have an android phone, an internet connection (which it looks like you have), and an email address.

Just go to beta.swype.com and register. Make sure you can access that email address on your android phone. After registering, check your email on the phone and click the link. You will need to allow third party installations, which the process varies depending on your phone. Once it is downloaded, open it and login with the information you entered into the swype website. Continue through the rest (it is quite self explanitory) and once it is done installing, just long press any text field, select input method, and select swype. Tada! You’ve just installed swype on your android phone.

New betas are always on the way, and there are numerous tips for Swype here.

Traitor? I think not.

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Some people have said some hurtful but understandable things about me, as said in the title of the post.

Well, allow me to say, that I’m not switching over to chrome OS. I’m not switching to windows either, I’m just switching over to android.

What’s the big difference between Mac OS X and iOS? Well, I mean other than one is a mobile operating system. Mac OS X allows development to run in the background. Mac OS X also allows applications to manipulate the core of the operating system (although not preferred).

iOS is completely shut off. For example, people can’t even use their own APIs! It is a closed off system and it is completely CLOSED source.

Android on the other hand seems more like Mac OS X. It is open source, so people can use their own APIs to do whatever they want. Apps still need to be accepted into Android Market, but there is an option to allow other applications that weren’t approved by the app store to be installed. And that’s what makes the difference.

So I’m not exactly a traitor, I’m just supporting what I believe in and personally is best for me. I’m sure I’m not the only one…. Anyone?…….. Comments welcome.

Change your Google background

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If you’ve been sing bing instead of google (I sure hope not, google overpowers all), you may have noticed that there is a beautiful background picture that changes daily on the hmepage. Google is finally allowing some more customization, and you can add your own picture to the google background! Here’s how:

1. Sign in to google

Go to google.com and click sign in on the top right. Enter your google username and password and you will be signed in and redirected to the main Google page.

2. Select a photo

If you want to upload a photo from your computer, it needs to be more than 800X600. In the bottom left, click change background image. You will be given the options to get the photo from your computer, picasa albums, or public feed stuff.

You can click browse to select a file on your computer’s hard drive. Then click Upload and your photo will be added to a picasa album and applied behind your Google logo. But if you don’t find a background you think is fitting, you can select a picture from the picasa public gallery and picasa editor’s choice.  Now beware that the Google Logo will be white, so if you want it to stand out make sure you select a picture that is not white or yellow. Now beware that the picture will only appear if you are logged into your account.

How did Google get their Street View Images?

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Many of us use Google Maps. If you don’t have a GPS, it is usually the #1 site you will go to to get directions. It is mostly accurate, clean free, and of course, by Google.

But one thing that many people find useful is Street view. Before they go, they can see whta their destination should look like so you arent frantically searching for house numbers when you supposedly arrived.

If you have played with Street View before, you may have found that you can drag 360º PLUS go up and down. How were these images captured?

And just in case you havent played with Street View before, click here to go to google maps and click the little golden dude over the vertical zoom bar on the left of the map to get a street view of times square, NY. Click and drag the image to pan this 360º panoramic snapshot. The truth will be revealed now…

It’s a normal monday. La la, coming home from school, lots of traffic WHOW WHAT IS THAT!!

It took me a few seconds to realize t but it was the same kind of rig that google used to get their Street View shots. Here’s the pic I took with my phone:

Wow...

As you can tell, it is this sphere mounted on top of a car. the sphere has numerous cameras in little holes that all take pictures at once. Then, someone puts them all together. So if you see this UMO (Unidentified Mobile Object) around your town, start jumping around in hope that your streets may soon have street view in Google Maps.

Have you found something cool just like this, but have nowhere to post it? Don’t want to start your own blog because you might not actually have THAT MANY thoughts to post? Post it to the community for free at http://community.goodmorninggeek.com!

Google Chrome

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As many PC users know, Google Chrome is by far the fastest most stable most simple and most versatile web browser in existence. It’s lean and makes sense. But many Mac users are stuck with Firefox, which is bulky. And even worse some PC users still use internet explorer: The bulkiest, fattest, slowest, most insecure, and overall worst web browser.

So all of those Mac users wanted Google Chrome. And right then what did they get? They got a buggy, unstable, feature barren dev-release alpha of the web browser. I had it, an I was not happy. No flash! Back to firefox I went.

The Google Chrome omepage always had a sign-up button for the developer emails, but no browser.

UNTIL NOW!

On 11/8/2009 Google released the official beta of Google Chrome for Mac.

And it’s everything you expected.

Speed

Google Chrome got its reputation for speed. It’s fast, fast, and literally seems to suck down all of the information and coding and stick it right in front of you in the form of a web page.

I decided to test the speed of it against the other most popular web browsers.Here’s a countdown from slowest to fastest.

Safari: Believe it or not, but Safari was the slowest of them all. It took a painstaking 11.488 seconds to load Good Morning Geek! [Yawn in anticipation of the page loading]

Internet Explorer: Yes, Safari was slower than internet explorer. Internet explorer was able to get the text fast, but not the images. It took a total of 9.62 seconds to load Good Morning Geek. [Yawn in anticipation for the page to load]

Firefox: Just as predicted, Firefox came in second place for the web browser race. It took Firefox 5.607 seconds to load Good Morning Geek. [Small Yawn]

Google Chrome: is the winner (after all that was the whole point of the testing)! It got a remarkable 2.49 seconds to load Good Morning geek with images and all. Google chrome is FAST…


Stability

Yup, it’s stable. This is because Google Chrome has a new process for each tab. If one tab crashes, that oe process crasher, and the rest of the processes (tabs) are left intact.

I tested this using the Activity Monitor and just deleted one of the processes called Google Chrome Helper; the title for the process of each tab.

An the result I got was the tab looking like this:

Crashed Tab

But the other tab:

The other tab survives!

Yet, there is in fact a downside to this. It sucks up all of your CPU! But the results always vary.

I’m writing this post in Google Chrome. I have the post edit open in one tab, and Pandora [link] in the other. I am using very little CPU, but at points depending on what you’re doing it can max out a 2 core intel processor.

But yesterday when I was doing the same thing but had another tab open, my CPU was in fact maxed out.

Google chrome is fast and stable but because of its stabilization techniques it tends to take up memory and CPU.

Features

These features work on PC Mac and Linux, so first download the app (bottom of the page) and try them yourself.

  • Rearrange tabs by clicking and dragging them.
  • Make a new window from a tab br dragging the tab out of the window.
  • Drag a tab back into a different window by dragging it from one window and dropping it in the desired window.
  • In the OmniBar type in the name of a search engine like google.com or ask.com and press tab. What you then type will be searched by the search engine without loading the search engine’s homepage.

And many more!

So go get your copy of the fastest cleanest and stablest browser ever!

Google’s write-up and videos of Chrome’s Features

Mac

PC

Linux

Google Chrome (Dev Release)

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This one is not a necessity. Why, because it’s in developer release. It’s a little slow and incomplete.
I have in fact been waiting for the official Chrome to come out for Mac (not CrossOver Chronium!!), and here is the Dev release. It does have some of the features as the Windows version, but let’s compare them side-by-side. First thing, it’s grey. Too grey. I like the blue, and having a blue one would be nice. Second, th File and Settings buttons were fropped for the menus in the Mac menubar. Also, no SpellCheck as demonstrated in the spelling of menubar. The tabbing system seems about the same, butI don’t know if each tab is a different process like on the windows version. Also, it is overall a little bit clunkier. For example, when loading a page, next to the name of the site in the tab it should show a little spinny thingy. in this dev version, the sinny thingy freezes. Also, when you boot an app it usully bouncesin the dock a couple of times. Nope. Nada (where is the spellcheck?!?!). But wow, it takes up absolutely no CPU at all! Also, the dev version comes with no flash: the reason I am not going to use it as my primary Web Browser. But there is 1 big good thing about this: it means an even better version should be on the way (I hope)! PLEASE DO NOT DOWNLOAD THIS! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software. Download for Mac OS X right here!