Digitally Refreshing

I long for another phone (but not an iPhone yet).

I’ve been using my HTC Diamond for 3 months.

I’ve persisted with the touch screen, I’ve researched speed issues, I’ve trauled forums, I’ve edited settings and I’m still unhappy.

I’m fed-up with having to restart my HTC Diamond to get the menus to work, or having to switch the power on and off (the small black button at the top of the handset) to kick start the thing into reposnding.

I spent 2 hours yesterday trying to figure out why Gmail won’t send emails, but will receive them (you have to actually delete the Gmail account and start again).

I hate the way Windows 6 Mobile pokes its ugly head through the HTC Diamond’s (redeeming) slick look and feel.

The browser is not good. This dissappoints me as I’m a desktop Opera user. it’s not clear when you’ve tapped a link, nor is it clear when something is happening – or how long it will take for a page to load – the green loading bar doesn’t work for me.

Screen gestures just aren’t clever enough, I end up tapping when I mean to scroll and vise versa. I don’t know how Apple do it, but gestures are practically flawless on my iPod Touch.

The Accelerometer, when used with the browser, is sluggish and jumpy.

The battery life is abismal – but this isn’t out of the ordinary for a device such as this.

I could go on, but this is turning into a rant …

Download now: http://www.google.com/chrome

Google have built a browser and they’ve called it Chrome. You can read the Google Chrome press release for all the technical and aspirational commentary. Read on for my take …

Things I like:

Tabs
Yep, all browsers have tabs – thanks to Opera (at least that’s where I first saw it years ago) but Google have done it better. Without getting into the complexities let me just say that now a tab can crash horribly and it won’t crash your whole browser session – fantastic!

Tear off tabs
What a pleasure, use this all the time – maybe because I have 2 screens in front of me and like to reference two pages at the same time. For example, I can see Chrome now whilst I write this – I don’t have to ctrl+tab constantly.

Most-visited thumbs on new, blank tab
A great interpretation of what Opera have been doing for ages. Last time I looked/updated which was several months ago I had to set up my favourites manually in Opera, which I did – but I lost interest quickly. Google Chrome does it for me, handy little thumbnails of my favourite sites laid out nicely for me.

A Private mode
Great for when you’re gift shopping for someone else who has access to the browser in your household. No more sifting through your history to delete that one ‘give-away’ website. Just launch the special private surfing window (it’s not a tab) and surf away.

It’s faster – by far
Check out these stats to see how quickly Google Chrome runs JavaScript.

There are things I need when I browse, such as Web Developer Tool Bar made popular by Firefox and Drag and Drop Attachments – but I expect these will come in time. I also wish that I could double click in the empty tab space to launch a new browser – but now that’s like clicking on the window itself.

So, I like Google Chrome (love it really because it will force M$ to build a better browser or knock it out of the market all together)

I’ve just downloaded and installed Open Office 2.3. The main reason I did this? So that I could use it to save my documents in Google Docs.

Using an extension called OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs, much the same way that Firefox uses extensions, I am now able to create a document locally on my PC and then easily save it to my Google Docs folder.

However, when I actually tried to save my document to Google Docs I ran into an error (I’m working on Windows XP):

Problem: no object DCH for MIME type application/atom+XML

I’ll do some research now and see what I can find out. Will keep you posted.

This time of the year, being so close to Christmas, I wake up in the morning an throw on my jeans, tshirt, jumper, socks and slippers and rush downstairs to put the kettle on for a nice cup of tea – making sure the central heating is working, on the way.

In South Africa I would have have thrown back the sheets – thrown on a pair of shorts and enjoyed a glass of ice cold orange juice on my stoep.

After warming up with my cup of tea, I hop on the tube with the other 8 million commuters working in London and surfaced somewhere in the middle of town with another cup of piping hot tea. I take a walk through Hyde Park, the sun rising behind me, warming my back and the backs of others as they jog and cycle towards the heart of London. How they cycle through the bitterly cold wind amazes me.

In SA driving to work would have been a breeze – does everyone really leave Gauteng in December? Where do they all go? I wish the traffic could be like this every day! I get to work, park underground, arrive at my desk via a lift and gaze through the window into a crystal clear summer’s morning.

Back in the UK I take half a day at the office and come home to finish up. That’s not a problem as I have an 8MB line running to my house and then a wireless network set up from there so my whole family can be online at the same time. The the whole thing costs me a monthly fee equivalent to a dinner for two. In fact technology is cheap – allowing me to run a home office.

In sunny SA I would have driven home in the evening and made my way to a long awaited braai to welcome the festive season in. The sun’s just beginning to go down, along with a few drinks! Right now I would be standing around the fire discussing, rugby, cricket and the finer points of lamb fillets.

Meanwhile back in the UK, it’s down to the pub with a few mates. Glad I’m taking the taxi, it’s dropping down to -1 tonight, after a pint I’ll be over the limit anyway. Besides you can’t park in London for less than a bank loan – and that’s if you’re prepared to fork out for the mandatory congestion charge. But I’m not complaining – the rest of London is a £1 bus ride away.

For every statistic you could hope to get your hands on. NationMaster really does have it all, from coffee drinking to Linux web servers.

Make sure to check out the Internet section.

We all know YouTube; I’ve been impartial to it up until very recently, when I discovered that there are hundreds of guitar lessons all at the click of a mouse. Just another example of how people are willing to give up their time and money to share their knowledge with others.

Now I can play Last Kiss, by Pearl Jam and it’s all thanks to this man from the TheNextLevelGuitar.

I decided to become an avid supporter and subscribe, easier said than done as it seems there are more Matthew Bowdens out there than I first realised. Feels like years ago when I couldn’t find the hotmail name I wanted!

Make sure to keep up to date with browser stats when designing for the web. Take time to check out who is using which browser and operating system. Ensure that your design will work for the most popular screen resolution and see how many web users have javaScript enabled.

See all this and more online at W3Schools

I’m all for free content, who wouldn’t be? But, when you can’t trust what you read what’s the point of reading it at all?

Change perspective, imagine you’re the contributor. What if you spend hours researching and writing a piece of content only to have it plagiarised, and what’s more, to have it copied incorrectly?

Last month the prestigious journal, Nature claimed that Wikipedia offered content that was, by far, more accurate than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Their report was fundamentally flawed and quite frankly, I was horrified to the extent that Nature had lied about what they had published.

Read the original BCC news story. Read what Britannica and Nature had to say.

Now for the theft part of this clip: I’m (Matt) teaching myself how to play guitar. I use a number of sites for reference. One of which is Ultimate Guitar. It’s a great site, loads of music (tabs) and tutorials for free.

However, after trying for hours to get my guitar to make a noise similar to that of a Blood Hound Gang song, I learned that the tutorial I was reading had actually been plagiarised by the Ultimate Guitar’s contributor. It was stolen from another guitar website, Ape Guitar. When I went to the source of the tutorial, Ape Guitar, I was able to spot the mistake I had been making.

Now that publishing to the Internet is almost as cheap and restriction free as preaching in the middle of the town square we (readers and writers) have to keep an eye open to the pitfalls of free and contributed content.

I’ve spotted differences in stats data between my hosting provider’s records and Google’s new stats engine.

For example:

Hosting Provider: 195 unique visits
Google Stats: 59 unique visits

Have anyone else experienced this?

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