Christian Geekery

This morning Google announced Buzz as kind of a country cousin of Google Wave integrated with Gmail.

The idea is to bring social networking into Gmail and even the rest of the Google apps.
Top list of features:

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Dan Shafer wrote that Chrome; “Cool but Not (Yet) Compelling on Mac”
I agree with most of what Dan says, but have found that for myself Chrome is compelling and just stable enough for me to continue using it as my primary browser, at least for now.

Firefox is pretty bloated, but powerful enough due to its plugins, to continue to be valuable for many.  Safari is very fast, sometimes I can not tell the difference in speed between Chrome and Safari, but Safari has less critical (for me at least) extensions then FireFox does.  That is how it was, until The Chrome folks added extensions for Mac in the dev channel.  Shortly after that 1Password came through with a very alpha  extension that works pretty well for logging in.

One of my biggest gripes that I share with Dan is the inability to open a group of bookmarks into tabs.  Today I started looking around and found a workaround for part of the problem.  The extension is called “Sticky Tabs” and it gives you a way to save urls that open as tabs when you start up Chrome.  I will keep looking through the extensions and see if there is a better solution, or perhaps the developer of Sticky Tabs, could be convinced that adding a bit more functionality would be a good idea.

I run roughly twice the Chrome extensions then the number of plugins I run on Firefox with no obvious slowdowns in Chrome like I see in Firefox.  Not too shabby for Chrome, eh?

So for now I am still using Chrome as my main browser, even if I do occasionally wonder about the G-men taking over the digital world.

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I have been using Google Chrome almost exclusively since extensions became available to the Mac in the dev channel.  Today I worked out the last issue that I had with not being able to log in to Springloops, and discovered that there is an alpha version extension for 1Password.  Chrome is so much faster then Firefox, perhaps a bit faster then Safari, and I have some very useful extensions!  I may have reached the tipping point where I will no longer fall back on Firefox and Safari for more then testing.  Not bad at all!

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I just bought the $20 AudioTools app for my iPhone and used the Real Time Analyzer “RTA” to help “flatten” the sanctuary in our church.  I have been wanting to get an RTA and other tools for some time, but my church is a small country church and available funds are better used to help others.  After all we already had some pretty decent sound with minimal problems, or so I thought.

After using the RTA, I was simply amazed at how much crisper the sound was.  I was even able to put the lapel mic inches away from the mains without feedback.  The best I was able to do previously was about a foot.   I have no serious training other then what I can glean from others and reading a lot, so this may be no surprise to professionals out there. 

Personally I am very happy that a $20 investment in an iPhone App was able to help me to do a better job without spending hundreds more for professional quality audio tools.

And the latest version of the WordPress app…

I was reading about some of the toy camera apps available for the iPhone the otherday and was inspired to check a couple of them out. The one that I really like so far is the hipstematic. It does a very good job of recreating the color and images of some of the old plastic lens camera’s, and even different films.

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To being useful to people that really need to work with unmodified microsoft office files.

I personally like google docs, so far it has handled any kind of document that I have used it for.  Granted, my needs are sparse compared to some.  I don’t write a lot of documents and my spread sheets are pretty simple.  I use spread sheets for tracking my time on projects, invoicing, and sometimes even tweaking csv files. My most complicated spreadsheet tracks and graphs my blood pressure and heart rate.  However there are some issues that seem to drive MS heads nuts when Google Docs converts their docs.

Now Google docs allows you to upload any file unmolested up to a total of 1 Gig of storage.  You can also buy more storage pretty inexpensively.  This should get more people interested in using Google Docs for collaboration.  But there is a piece still missing.  Many office heads don’t want to deal with accessing their files through a browser and won’t even look at a solution like this without the ability to access their files as if they were mounted as a drive on the system.  This is one of the reasons why systems like DropBox are growing in popularity.  Now Google, or some other third party developer needs to come up with a slick and affordable solution to accessing google docs as if they were in a locally mounted drive.

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I have been playing with the dev channel Google Chrome for Mac for about a week now, and so far it is pretty cool.  I took a glance at it a number of months ago, but only for a very short time since there was no extension support, or bookmark management.

This is not to say that there are no problems.  for example, I can not log into one of my most important sites, springloops.com.
Another issue that is is not Chromes fault, is the lack of an extension for 1Password, which they say is in development now.

There are already some very nice extensions available.  My current list of installed extensions that I am experimenting with are:

• Better Gmail - Version: 1.992
• Evernote Web Clipper - Version: 1.1
• Firebug Lite - Version: 1.25
• Google Mail Checker Plus - Version: 1.1.5
• Google Similar Pages beta (by Google) - Version: 0.5.2.19
• Google Voice Notifier (by Google) - Version: 1.0.2.1
• Google Wave Notifier - Version: 2.2
• Send from Gmail (no button) - Version: 1.11.1
• Zemanta - Version: 0.5.1

Overall, this is more then I normally use with FireFox, and I will probably pare it done quite a bit after a while.  For example I generally use MailPlane for gmail access, better gmail  and Google mail checker will go away if I revert.

Zemanta is one of the most intriguing extensions at this time.  Zemanta finds keywords in posts and searches for related stories, and will even create links in your text automagically…

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Noticed that wave was down for maintenance.  Cool notice.  chillax’n

I have inserted a public Wave in this post.  Let us know what you think?

[wave id="googlewave.com!w+6hCYHtw-A" server="https://wave.google.com/wave/"]

Now to go mess with it a bit.  It is very rough, but that is exactly what they said it would be, so no worries.