Let’s face it, Facebook has become a hub of daily activity for a large number of people, including me. This is specially true for university where birthdays and socials are organised over Facebook and if you’re anywhere as obsessed as me about having an organised calendar, you would have noticed the lack of a true solution to have that information automatically imported in your calendar and more importantly mobile device. This is because most mobile phone sync solutions only allow you to sync one calendar to your phone and while you may be able get an internet calendar running in Outlook you can’t update it on your device. I tried copying event information from internet calendar to local calendar but that would mean doing it periodically and it beats the purpose.

Fortunately, there is a, tricky but working, solution to that problem. In this scenario I’m going to use Outlook, Google Calendar and a Nokia E90.

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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.

Google has released a refresh to the Android SDK. The improvements are most noticeable in the GUI which now look a lot more acceptable. I still think they’re very candy-ish but it’s a huge improvement from what we saw recently on the dull palm-esque devices. Developers will now also be able to create their own animations for their applications. In addition the platform now supports OGG among other media codecs. This is a big step forward in maintaining the same concept the platform is built on, openness. While Microsoft may boast of the big depth of 3rd party applications available for it’s products, the WM platform’s openness is limited. Apple at this point is not even worth mentioning. But they should take a page from Google’s book and the direction it has taking the Android platform in. I believe the platform will take off even more once the initial wave of devices start coming out this summer.

Screenshots: http://www.helloandroid.com/node/258

Google adds yet another egg to its basket of acquisitions. The latest being California based Green Border which it acquired on the 11^th of May for an undisclosed amount. “GreenBorder creates a protected environment on your computer. Any type of activity and interaction, while you are on the Internet, will be directed to the protected environment. For instance, if you go to a website that is trying to maliciously infest your PC with malware, GreenBorder will keep the malware contained to the protected environment and simply discards it at the end of the session”

While many are speculating this to be a move towards establishing it’s own desktop antivirus, I believe Google has much bigger plans. Given what we know, or assume that Google’s OS will be a Linux Live CD with a built in browser with all apps working on top of that (think Docs, Spreadsheets, Calender); the “protected environment” will actually serve as an online defence mechanism. The browser bundled with the distro will have GreenBorder built right into it confirming to the ‘all apps be web based’ structure.

While the speculations may never come true, one thing we can almost be sure about is that the GreenBorder services will become free. And anything free can never be bad, right ?

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