Initial thoughts on Google Chrome

When I wrote the last post, Google Chrome seemed like vaporware, but just as I hit publish, a release time was announced for later that day. Now that I’ve had a chance to have a play with the beta, here’s a brain dump of initial reactions:

• It’s fast and nimble. In a Camino way.
• It looks like a Fisher Price browser. Simplicity is good, but the style is very child-like, and it makes me worry about the OS X version* (Update: I think the Fisher-priceness is more of an XP issue, it looks much better on Vista). I thought the tab icons were nicely executed though:
  
• The location bar search is much better than I thought – giving solid URLs rather than just a ‘search Google for X’ option. For example, typing ‘Jeremy Ke’ brings up ‘Adactio.com’.
  
• It doesn’t look as if the ‘drawing layer’ in Chrome is quite up to scratch yet. It shows my naivety that I though such things were all part and parcel of Webkit, but it seems not. Text-shadow and border-radius in particular are broken.
• It does include the Webkit Web Inspector, so right-clicking reveals the familiar ‘Inspect Element’ command.
• I mentioned yesterday about the problem of multiple tabs, and lo, it was a problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a beta, yadda, yadda.
• The ‘New Tab’ view is more useful than I thought it would be, with it’s inclusion of history and recently bookmarked and closed tabs.
• It does allow the use of other search engines, which is a good sign.

It’s a fairly promising start, but it feels more like a browser I would recommend to my parents than use myself. It also worries me using a Google browser, it feels like too many eggs in one basket. Or too many potentially prying eyes?

*Just found out that Mike Pinkerton, the Camino lead is working on the OS X version as we speak. I feel more hopeful about the OS X UI now.

Google Chrome

Google have just announced their new open-source browser Google Chrome, via the ingenious medium of a comic strip:

It’s good to see a new approach being used like this, particularly commissioned illustration.

First of all, the good news is they’re using Webkit. I remember John Allsopp joking about how great it would be if there was just one rendering engine, that was downloaded just like the Flash plugin. It’ll never happen, but the rapid adoption of Webkit outside Safari is getting to be the closest we’ll have to that. I had expected them to go with XUL and Gecko, in order to support other platforms with ease, so a voice at the back of head says this will be Windows only.

I can’t comment on all the talk about architecture/background processes, it all sounds very cool, but I have no idea if this really is a new approach or not. The main interface details are on page 19, where we see nothing new. Each of these features are currently available in other browsers:

• Tabs on top (or the ‘Omnibox’): Been in Opera for years, and more recently in Coda. While Safari doesn’t visually show tabs on top, if you have inquisitor installed it behaves in the same way as the Omnibox, in that each tab has it’s own URL bar and Search.
• Location bar that searches pages in the history: Another Opera innovation, recently added by Firefox. Also, for a few years now, Omniweb has enabled you to search the full text of pages in your browsing history
• New tabs show most used sites: Opera’s speed dial feature. Also, Camino has always had a dynamic ‘Top 10 most visited sites’ bookmark list, although I find that the 10 most visited sites, and the 10 sites I’d want to quickly access aren’t the same thing. I’d prefer to choose my sites manually.
• Privacy Browsing: Safari. Cough. Bless ‘em though, I like they way they use ‘buying a present in secret’ for the real world example.
• Pop Up Window Control: Most browsers have this, but in particular, the pop-up control sounds just like Omniweb.

They start by telling us how they’re rethinking the browser, and then go on to repeat what has happened before in others. I would’ve liked to see them approach another problem – namely ‘too many tabs open’. Beyond the performance issues, the more tabs you have open, the more difficult it becomes to know what you have open, and in which tab it is. Omniweb gets around this with it’s lovely visual tabs. Opera uses an alt-tab switch with thumbnail preview (which has also found it’s way into the latest Firefox nightlies).

The comic site itself highlights another web problem – loads of ‘next’ links, something Omniweb solves with a magical press of the enter key, and I’d love to see implemented in other browsers.

Knowing Google, ‘Chrome’ will most likely work really well, but not allow ads to be hidden, and of course, have the standard insipid google style. In fact just as I was writing this, a screenshot has appeared on news sites

I’m excited about the spread of Webkit, but at this stage Chrome doesn’t seem to offer me much. If they do make an OS X version, I’ll be duty-bound to try it of course!

The Dell Hybrid

Ye gads, Dell have shocked the pants off me with this tasty piece of industrial design! The diminutive Dell Hybrid PC comes with optional coloured sleeves, but in particular I rather love the bamboo sleeve version:

This kind of thing adds warmth and organic feel into something where normally only cold industrial aluminium or cheap black & grey plastic was before. Granted, there may well be cheap plastic in there, but this is a Dell that I would be proud to have on my desk. The specs also show it would make a good TV media centre – if only I could install OS X on it! More details on the Hybrid here

Maybe I’ll buy a bloody Dell after all.

Tags: dell, design, hardware, natural

Listen with Delia

Delia Derbyshire has long been considered ahead of her time. One of the earliest creators of electronic music, she is most famous for her work with the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop in Maida Vale, at which she created the haunting original Dr Who theme, in an age without synthesizers:

A lot of modern musicians like Orbital, Stereolab and Spacemen 3 cite her work as an influence, and it’s easy to to see why.

What sparked this blog post was the news that more of her work has been discovered, some 267 tapes to be exact! All of this is going to be digitized and made available, but in particular was this experimental dance track that she created in the 60’s. Made decades before ‘electronic dance music’ really happened, and yet it sounds like something created today.

This clip from a BBC Four documentary gives some insight into how she created music with reel to reel tapes:

Sadly she died in 2001 at 64, just after rediscovering her love of electronic music, working with Peter Kember (Spacemen 3, Sonic Boom), of which she said:

“Working with people like Sonic Boom on pure electronic music has re-invigorated me. He is from a later generation but has always had an affinity with the music of the 60s. Now without the constraints of doing ‘applied music’, my mind can fly free and pick-up where I left off.”

Discover more about her life at delia-derbyshire.org

Tags: drwho, electronica, music, sound

Geneviève Gauckler on CBBC?

I’m big fan of the French artist/illustrator Geneviève Gauckler, having discovered her work via the Guardian Angel Room project.

Now, I’m not sure why, but I was really surprised to see her work (or at least her style) in the backgrounds of CBBC, the site for BBC’s youth output.

I’ve tried to do a bit of searching, but no information is forthcoming, and I can’t see a credit anywhere. I’m surprised, can anyone tell me if these really are her work?

There’s also wallpapers available too:

Tags: art, bbc, cbbc, illustration