Google Chrome talk at BayCHI

I will be giving a talk at BayCHI about Designing Google Chrome in the evening of December 9. Hope you can make it!

The Google Chrome/Chromium Photoshop File

I just posted the Photoshop file used in the creation of Google Chrome's imagery to the Visual Design section of the Chromium documentation. It contains all the layers, smart objects and slices you should need (though some showing, hiding and shifting of layers will be necessary to slice all the images correctly).

Have fun, and if you spot some daftness in my use of Photoshop, let me know.

TabsLock for Google Chrome

I open and close browser tabs all day long; frequently I find myself in a state where I'm using some client software (Visual Studio or Photoshop) and out of habit, I press Ctrl + T to get myself a new tab to do something else. This context-dependence annoys me - having to think about switching or launching applications in order to start new web navigation/search tasks is like cognitive acne.

So, in my spare time on a recent weekend, I created TabsLock - a utility to let you use your Capslock key to launch or create a new Google Chrome tab from anywhere, so you don't have to think about whether Chrome is running or what application has focus. Consider it a global Ctrl + T replacement.

Hope you like it.

Google Chrome

Dearest Friends,

Thank you for putting up with so many seasons of silence, and so much hand-waving about what I actually do at Google. I'm now super pleased to be able to tell you all that I work on the very-recently announced Google Chrome as its designer and as a front-end engineer, where I frequently have to suffer through implementing my own designs. You may also read a little bit about what I work on in the comic we made, the designers amongst you may wish to read some stuff I wrote about our design philosophy, and finally you can see my ugly mug in our explanatory video

More later, maybe - we're pretty busy right now.

xox,
Glen

Exodusurus

I am back in Melbourne visiting friends and family, and we worked out that future trips may not be quite as successful. In a couple of months, the distribution of my high school / uni friends will be:

• England: 1
• Denmark: 1
• Denmark + Motorbiking across that continent: 1
• Bangladesh: 1
• America: 2
• Mozambique: 1
• Korea: 1
• Melbourne: 2
• Darwin: 1

It's interesting to ponder who will not return.

Why It's Good to Share Items

The following has happened more than once:

andras: "That Wired article you shared was a good read."
[5 minutes]
gmurphy: "Yes, that was a good article, thanks for filtering it for me."
andras: "Weren't you the one that shared it?"
gmurphy: "I did, but I didn't bother reading it until you told me it was good."

Everyone wins! Although after reading this, people will likely put less stock into the things I share, decreasing the chance that they'll read them, subsequently decreasing the chance they they'll tell me whether I should bother looking at the full thing. Complicated.

(Even now, the lies continue - I'm still only 1/3rd of the way into the article. I guess this all goes to show that the quality of things has become so predictable that opinion can easily be timeshifted into something more useful).

Two Kindle Notes - Converting PDF and USB Charging

While I may write something more about how awesome I'm finding the Kindle to be, here are two quick notes:

1. You can use Mobipocket Reader to convert files of different types (including PDF and RSS feeds) and send them to your Kindle - this allows you to use your Kindle like a regular eBook reader. If Amazon had included something like this, I think there would be a lot less complaining about Amazon owning the experience. The daft thing is, Amazon owns Mobipocket.

2. While the charging light goes on when a USB cable is plugged in, it doesn't appear to actually charge the Kindle - in a few short hours of testing, the battery meter continued to go down normally (and the charging light doesn't go on when the Kindle is off). The Kindle's DC port takes 5V 2A (compared to USB's 5V 200-500ma), so it's possible that a USB > DC tip could work.

Kindle NowNow

So I got myself a Kindle (given that I only read books once, the negatives don't really bother me, and the browser lets you read blogs without paying). One of the first things I did was ask the built in 'NowNow' service about whether the Kindle would support PDF, and got back the following highly-bitchy answer:

"Not directly, you need to convert the files

Unfortunately, none of us answering your questions has ever seen or used a Kindle. We're not Kindle customer service representatives and we don't have any special information about how to use one or any of its features. NowNow never even bothered to tell us that we'd be answering questions from Kindle users. So unfortunately, I don't think you're going to find much help here with your problem. Your best bet is to try to contact Amazon's customer service (which is not us) and maybe someone there will know more about it:

[...]

Sorry I can't help. I checked through the user guide and I saw nothing about disabling the buttons. I tried, but I'm sorry they haven't given us a way to answer this type of question.

Good luck!!"

(This is not to pick on NowNow - the rest of the answers provided were great, and pointed me in the direction of a PDF to .mobi converter).

Apple Wireless Keyboard and PCs

So I love the new Apple Wireless Keyboard, however, you should be aware that it's a pretty crappy PC keyboard - as the fn key doesn't work (at least not in Vista or XP), you don't have access to pgup, pgdown, insert and (most importantly) forward-delete, which makes deleting files pretty hard.

You can use SharpKeys to rebind some existing keys, but it's not a perfect solution.

I bought the wireless keyboard as I wanted to reduce the distance between my mouse and my keyboard - ideally I'd like the new wired Apple Keyboard (which I also own) but without the numpad area.

Unfortunately for you

Despite currently being the top result in searches for his horribly-misspelled name, I am not the person all you inbound searchers are looking for.

Blogger needs a "this really doesn't need to appear in my feed" button.

Lumus Optical Update

TFOT has a hands-on look (with video) at the Lumus Optical glasses, which promise low-profile see-through AR. This is the first new information on the Lumus HMD since their website surfaced sometime last year.

[Posting because I've only so-far seen this article in appear in my keyword alerts]

The iPhone Halo Effect

Despite its pretty limited featureset, I love my iPhone - it is typical Apple - do a very small range of things, but do them really well .. so well that people actually use the feature and think you invented it. After realizing this, drooling over OmniGroup apps, reading about font-smoothing choices, and after setting Vista back to Classic mode, I began to again look at OSX as a platform choice. So with Parallels and Nicholas' subtle evangelism pushing me over the edge, for the third time I'm giving the whole Apple thing another go with a new MacBook.

Maybe I'll be more accepting of the OS because I'll attribute failures to Apple "not focusing on it" rather than "being stupid" as I had before. I'm also not writing much code anymore, so my use should be pretty different to the previous attempts.

It's time for ranting, regardless - I still don't like the window management as I use apps with large numbers of palettes (Photoshop). In MS' world, an application controls a big window with an ugly grey background that contains all smaller windows and palettes/panels - this neatly separates different applications, and lets you define regions of the screen to be dedicated to a single application, which works well with large monitors. Apple's approach is like having the same thing but being stuck with a maximized transparent main window, making your windows all kind of blend together in confusing ways (especially since palettes of unfocused applications are hidden, meaning that a refocus can cause windows all over the screen to appear and disappear.

I'm also getting bitten by the different focus models - In MS' world, application focus doesn't really matter if you're a heavy mouse user, since clicks always 'carry though' to the application, even if it isn't in focus, in Apple's world, your first click on an unfocused application only focuses it - this forces you to keep track of what application is in focus, since a click you do to focus an app may end up doing something if the app is actually in focus, or vice versa. It doesn't help that the visual distinction between focused and unfocused windows is even more subtle than Vista's.

Lauren gave me a week before I give up, though I think that was wishful thinking since 'someone' has a G4 Powerbook that is suffering from a distinct case of "I wish I was Glen's nice fast MacBook that will have no owner when he gives up on it".