I don’t understand; I really don’t. There is a big (growing) movement among the haters. Facebook is getting closer and closer to forcing everyone over to the new layout and phasing out the old one, and they’re becoming more and more frantic. There’s a couple of groups over a million members strong: Petition Against the New Facebook, 1,000,000 Against the New Facebook Layout plus plenty others of smaller sizes but the total Facebook population is over 100 million; are these significant numbers in the big picture?
I take back what I said. I can understand a little why people are so upset, but only because the changes are so radical. I’m not too proud to admit that the new interface isn’t flawless. It’s stumped me more than once while trying to find my way around, and in a couple of places it was downright broken. This hasn’t been the norm for the new Facebook layout, and compared to a lot of applications out there, it’s a shining example of navigation design. The problem with all this noise people are raising is that they could spend as much time as they are joining groups and posting in forums to just get used to the new site. Complaints about being lost in the navigation are only a part of the complaints. A lot of them are just plain ignorant. I’ll tackle this top ten list posted by the leader of the Petition Against the New Facebook group.
Continue reading ‘To the Haters of "New Facebook"’
Score! I found benchmarks of both engines on one of the dev’s blogs. Check out this sweet action, then click through at the bottom for more.
Brendan’s TraceMonkey Update
Go do a YouTube search for “swype demonstration” or “swype tc50″ to see what I’m talking about.
Please, oh please Apple, license this and put it in the next big iPhone 2.5/3.0 software update next year or whenever that’s lined up. As nice as the iPhone software keyboard already is, this is somewhere in the neighborhood of next best thing to the invention of the PC (which was also yours, Apple). Obviously this software was aimed at the iPhone from the start, not some Windows Mobile pressure based touch screen junk, so do the mobile world a favor and let destiny take its course.
We want Swype on out iPhone’s!
All the talk Google’s new browser is getting on Twitter is a little dizzying. People have been both terribly excited about it and pooh-pooh’ing it for the past 12(ish) hours that it has been available to the public. It’s not like anyone in this line of work didn’t see it coming, it’s just a little hard to believe that it’s finally here.
Enough on the build-up, what about the browser man? Fine, Google Chrome as they call it ends up being a very impressive piece of software, if incomplete. If you’re rockin’ Windows, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go download it yourself, but if you’re just here to take my word for it, I’ll keep it short. TechRepublic has a short post on cool things in Chrome or you could get the long of it in webcomic form. I’m not doing any screenshot work because there’s so much out there and I’m lazy.
I am going to spend a moment to mention the problems I’ve found with it so far. You’ve discovered a cool new webcomic that you’d like to subscribe to in Google Reader? You’re using Chrome? Too bad, Chrome has no idea what RSS or Atom are. You’re out of luck, son. Maybe you’re really attached to your extentions in Firefox? It’s the standard situation here, you’re just going to have to deal with life without them. Just found yourself a nice new background? You gotta do it the slow way (save to pictures folder, find it, then set as background). All of these are fairly trivial in that you would expect this kind of thing for:
- Browsers that are not Firefox (in the case of extentions), or:
- Any software not yet at 1.0 status, which Chrome is clearly not
I also had trouble on Facebook. Some of the javascript powered links just didn’t work at all (i.e. leaving a comment on someone’s status update, removing an application). This might not be entirely Chrome’s fault though. I remember having an identical issue with Firefox 3 beta releases that mysteriously fixed itself between releases.
Over all, the feeling I get from Chrome is that it’s some sort of weird Google version of Safari with heavy influence from Firefox. Of course, that’s a good thing in my book. It does feel a lot faster than FF3 (that’s saying a lot) and there are a couple of really nice ideas here, separate tab processes being both the most revolutionary and my personal favorite. The implementaion still has some non-essential features to add and some bugs to squash, but there’s no reason to not have it as a secondary to Firefox. Really, I think this tweet just about has it nailed: Chrome makes you feel like you’re playing with internet Play-doh.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve started using two really neat websites. I like using them, but at the same time, using them makes me sad. Both of them constantly remind me that I don’t have any friends also using the site. This is my desparate plea for you to fill that role.
Continue reading ‘I Need Friends’
