Christian Geekery

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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A friend just turned me on to reQall. It is an interesting web based reminder system, that is supposed to support location based reminders. Somewhat like an uber electronic GTD(Getting Things Done) system, it supports adding items by voice, email, IM and text messaging. ReQall will also send reminders to email, IM, and SMS.

One of the things that caught my attention is that IM reminders are interactive. ReQall will ask you if a certain task is done, and you can reply with a yes or no. A “no” will re-que for another reminder.

There is also an iPhone app that makes adding items by just speaking it very easy. ReQall has what appears to be an excellent speech recognition system that rarely misses.

The app is not without some issues though. One of the features of the Pro version is to be able to assign items to map locations, and reQall is supposed to remind you of items when you are close to the location using the GPS in the iPhone. The problem is that I can not seem to set locations to a map like they say I should be able to.

There are many other features, like integration with Evernote, Google Calendar, iCal

I have been using Gmail as my central online communications hub for a long time now. I was using Mail.app to pop my mail from Gmail until about month ago. Now with all the improvements to the Gmail interface I even stopped using my local mail client with great success. All my email accounts get forwarded to my Gmail account with one exception that I kept out of the loop as a backup for when Gmail goes down (yes even the best systems will have downtime). I get far less spam this way since Gmail’s spam filters are better then any others that I have used. My iPhone takes advantage of Gmail’s imap service so that I have access to my mail when I am without a system.

Now with all these new fast browsers running around the net, the question becomes… Which is the best browser for Gmail? continue reading…