The FuNK Blog

We’ve got a lot of people wondering why Google recently renewed the search deal with Firefox when they had plans to release their own browser. Why the answer to isn’t obvious is beyond me but hey I’ll take my own shot at the obvious answer anyway. So how do I put this simple, let’s see. How about, urm, because it makes damn business sense. Firefox drives a lot of traffic through Google. If Google were to decide to not extend the deal, it would lose anywhere between 15-30% - depends on what continent and service you’re looking at - of the browser share market.

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So Google Chrome has finally arrived; merely a day after it’s announcement. I’ve been excited for the product from the first moment I laid my eyes on the webcomic. As any self respecting geek would, I downloaded and installed the browser as soon as possible.

It seems fairly stable. Having launched more than 25tabs in lesser number of seconds seems to have had no effect on the browser. From the limited testing I’ve given it , it has worked quite smoothly and fluidly. The version of the browser is 0.2.149.27, but no beta tag anywhere. Tabs being on top only bother you for the first few seconds after which I didn’t have any problems getting used to it.

A lot of the shortcuts were supported out of the box including Shift + Ctrl + T (reopen last closed tab) and Alt + D (highlight the address bar). These shortcuts exist in Firefox so this makes migration a lot easier. I don’t have benchmarks but gmail opened up in roughly the same time as it does in Firefox 3.0.1

Downloads are shown in a bar below, which looks quite good. A blue arrow animation is displayed when a download begins. I captured a screenshot just in time for your viewing pleasure.

Ctrl + J (another Firefox native shortcut) brings up a nice little list of downloads which looks quite good in my opinion with pie chart style completion icons.

I tried running a few javascript annoyances on java-scripts.net. The browser has a box which ‘prevents this page from creating additional dialogs’ for websites which keep on throwing boxes at you not letting you switch tabs or close the browser without assistance from the task manager. The tick box didn’t work on the first time always and a second hit of the ‘ok’ button was needed sometimes. But it’s only 0.2 so the behaviour is forgiveable.

There is one major bug though; upward scrolling on touchpads doesn’t work. This is the case on many notebooks, not just mine. So Google take note.

Chrome needs a lot of work before it replaces your full time browser yet. But with Google’s hands in it I only salivate at the possibilities. More on that later.

I’ve been using Outlook for about two years now. It has done an excellent job at sorting my life out, whether it’s been keeping up with my calendar appointments, making sure my contact details stay upto date or I always have a copy of my current task list. In addition every mobile phone manufacturer supports synchronisation out of the box so setup seems to be relatively painless.

It’s only after the end of the honeymoon do you realise Outlook’s shortcomings. Like most software built by Microsoft, it’s highly functional. But the functionality comes at the cost of bloat. While most people get used to the sluggish nature, you really realise the difference when you try an alternate solution such as Thunderbird for email. Outlook crawls to its knees when using IMAP, presumably because Microsoft wants to push Exchange usage. However this is inexcusable when a relatively newer software like Thunderbird is lightning fast. Scrolling through contacts, adding calendar appointments do seem to have a considerable lag. All of this on a fairly decent machine (2GHz, 2GB Ram).

It’s a shame Outlook has had no real competition in terms of an alternative that would offer the entire PIM solution. Calendar and Contacts are only basic in Thunderbird when compared to that of Outlook. In addition there is no solution for synchronisation between Nokia and Thunderbird. Such a shame considering Nokia is the world’s largest consumer mobile phone manufacturer.

It’s almost a year since Thunderbird branched out as a seperate company and we’ve seen just two alpha releases of Thunderbird 3, which isn’t exactly impressive as their roadmap suggests we should’ve seen a beta release by Q3 and it’s only two weeks ago that a second alpha was released. However all this is secondary as Thunderbird has miles to cover in order to be a true alternative to Outlook. And until that day arrives, Outlook is king and will continue to rest on it’s laurels for a long time. And like all Microsoft’s products, innovation will only start when some real competition starts to kick in.

When Asus entered, nay, started the netbook market, the device didn’t have a named category to fall under. Mini laptop, UMPC, ultra portable were some of the names given to it. Hell even on this blog I’d tag posts posts as ultraportable until recently. It’s been about a year and the market is now saturated; much credit blame directed towards Asus. However there still lies a sense of disconnect between consumers and manufacturers. Why is it that most of them find it so difficult to produce a decent product which covers all bases. Read the rest of this entry »

I was reading Matt Mason’s book titled The Pirate’s Dilemma which, broadly speaking, narrates how pirates have changed our world in more than one way by their own altruistic ways (we’ll come back to that later). A while after I remembered reading a quote by Machiavelli in the book but couldn’t find a reference to it in the index. That’s when I realised how useful it would be to be able to search through a book much like the way we search through a virtual document everyday with our Ctrl + F. This got me thinking and I thought it would be quite easy to do that if I had the electronic version of the book.

I decided to search for a pirated version of the book (oh the irony) as soon as I was done with the chapter. When it came to it, I decided to look at the author’s website wondering if did actually practise as he preached and offered a digital copy of the download. And surely enough he did. The way Matt set it up was any website visitor is able to click on the link and download the book. In doing so the user is presented with an option to enter an amount he would like to pay the publisher. I of course selected zero because I had already paid for the book.

Later it got me thinking that what did in a way impress me (the digital download on the author’s website) should in fact become what Herzberg describes as Hygiene Factor, in the non business sense of course. Each purchase of a hardcopy of the book should be accompanied with a digital version of the book so the buyer is able to consumer the product wherever, however and whenever he chooses to. For those concerned with the issue of file sharing and distribution let me point you to Music Industry who has already, for most part of it, abandoned DRM and is still doing fine. The fact of the matter is those who wish who pirate, will pirate. I was going to have no qualms or difficulties in obtaining a pdf ebook version from one of many websites. But the fact that Matt and his publishers made it available to me was nice and got me thinking, why aren’t we given a digital copy with our purchases.