A brand-spankin’-new browser has just been released by those crafty future-masters-of-the-universe at Google, called simply Google Chrome. I haven’t played with it much yet, but I like the lack of clutter in the toolbar, and there are some other nifty features as well:
- Create desktop shortcuts to your favorite web applications
- Freedom to surf Lolcats or Oprah’s forum ad nauseum without your judgmental roommates finding out, thanks to incognito mode - A custom starter page that you can use to quickly access favorite sites, ala Opera, the Steve Buscemi of web browsers.
On the downside, on a number of sites, I have had to reload pages after getting a “page cannot be loaded” error, in order to get them to display in the browser. Also, no StumbleUpon toolbar integration…yet. Sad face.
I will post updates as Chrome and I get more acquainted.
Google has developed FriendConnect as an easy way to take friends from social networks (eg., Facebook, Plaxo) with you to sites without previous social networking functionality. FriendConnect allows site owners to embed code into their sites to display the social networking FriendConnect apps in an iframe. The closed beta is available now, we’ve registered and hope we get picked!
According to Marketing VOX, Adobe has released a tool to Google and Yahoo to interpret Flash content for search engines. The tool will allow search engines to read text and links from within SWFs and display them in search engine result listings. Google is apparently using the flash-indexing tool already, so we can now look for SWF results in our searches. This starts to address Flash SEO issues, but using something like the Gaia Flash framework to display unique page URLs still seems necessary.
Further, the wider discussion of proprietary media formats and where they fit in is the more interesting discussion. Apple developed the new version of .Mac, MobileMe, using SproutCore, an open source Javascript framework.
This will make designers everywhere happy! EveryStockPhoto allows you to search all stock photo sites from one search site. License information is displayed with the image.
As an update to my previous post, I wanted to follow-up on my complaint that it took forEver to get my login for the EverNote beta (ok, forever was 2 and a half days). I got my login and have synced my desktop app with my web based notebooks. EverNote has been great. I’ve started to organize files and notes I’ve been keeping in several places on several computers. When I ran into a glitch (I was having trouble with the drag and drop functionality) and submitted a bug report, I got an email back pretty quickly. Geek out here, but I kinda like to troubleshoot bugs on good software. I like a lot when the software people write back and ask more questions, which the EverNote people did. And I still am loving the web design. I heart EverNote…
There’s a lot of information, images, video and audio out there to keep track of… it can become quite daunting. So, I was happy when our “find everything” co-worker found Evernote. Evernote is a desktop app and an online repository for all the things you want to remember. There’s some great drag and drop functionality for populating your different notebooks, which are the organizational metaphor. There’s a good demo on the front of the site. One bit of functionality that’s quite exciting is text and handwriting recognition, or the ability to take photos of objects (notes, tickets, etc.) or scan in written information and the Evernote search will look within the content of the image itself.
I have downloaded the desktop app for my MacBook Pro and all seems to be working. However, I also tried to sign up for an online account. The Evernote servers bear the load of much of the functionality, so the desktop app without server support is not fully functional. So, that text recognition search I’m so excited about trying is not possible. The online version of Evernote is in beta and I still haven’t gotten my password mailed to me. I have come to expect my login info to be waiting in my inbox minutes after I click submit. Not the case, it’s been FOREVER…or actually 48 hours.
So, I love the idea of the app but I don’t love the wait to play with it. However, when I start to get cranky about my ever-futile sync button spin, I gaze at the site design. That helps!
In our ongoing search to find fun online tools, we found Jing. It’s a great tool to annotate screenshots and includes a really easy upload component so that sharing is easy. You can also create a video of user interaction on a site and share that. However, the best thing we found on the site is the refreshingly lo-fi demo video. It’s a simple and fun use of Swift3D.
We’re trying Stixy as an internal collaborative work space for projects. As long term Basecamp users, we’re used to a digital project management solution and Basecamp works well as a tool to share with clients. However, it always seems too structured as a workspace. Stixy, however, is a free form desktop that can be used to share notes, to dos, photos, calendars and is much more intuitive for our designer minds (i.e., it allows you to be messy as well as make things pretty)!
TechCrunch provides a nice overview of Stixy, as well as calls out future enhancements that include chat/messaging as well as drag-and-drop functionality. TechCrunch also points out negatives like lack of Stixyboard ownership and file versioning. For now, we’re fine with the lack of these features as long as we can color theme our projects.
