Wave? Yeah, I got that...

So how 'bout them Google Waves you guys?

I was fortunate enough to get an invite from one of my old high school friends to join Google Wave about a week ago, if any of you have read my first post you'll know that I've been waiting to try it out for a long time. After having tried it for one week I feel I can sum it up in one sentence, perhaps even one word:

Meh.

Meh, indeed.

It gets a meh for now, but eventually it could become something far more interesting and useful. If anyone of you has watched the unnaturally long demonstration video that they have going you'd know what Google Wave is about, I'm not going to try to explain it, just go ahead and watch the hour long demo video:



You watch it all yet? OK then, let's move along.

One thing that I noticed when I first got Google Wave is that when I tweeted about it I got a mountain of PMs from Twitter users begging and in rare cases demanding my handing over of one of the precious invites that my account came with. Here's the thing, I have no invites, I wasn't given any. I did some Googling and apparently I might end up getting some invites to pass around, but I don't know how likely that is.

Another interesting thing about those PMs I got was that a large number of them were from people who started Twitter accounts solely for begging for Wave invites. I kind of hope that those people get their invites so that they can have their dreams crushed when they realize that they can't do anything with it. Well, that's not entirely true.

With Google Wave there is a command that allows you to view public Waves made for discussion with everyone and anyone, to summarize, public Waves are Message Boards.

Along with Wave comes some interesting features, along with having actual human contacts in your contact list, you have the ability to add special contacts to your list, in my case, I have added Tweety and Bloggy to my contact list. Tweety is a Twitter app that allows you to update your Twitter feed from Google Wave, Bloggy allows you to update your Blogspot blog from it's own Wave. Unfortunately, I can't get Bloggy to work for the life of me, and Tweety doesn't seem to update it's Tweets beyond the first time I opened it, that's why it's invitation only, folks, lots of bugs.

So, in the end, it's pretty snazzy, but I'd recommend that you wait until the Public release to Wave for yourself, but even then, you'll have to have a Gmail account.

My Chromes. Here’s more of them…

A new update on the Dev Channel for Mac and Windows versions of Google Chrome now allows themes to be implemented in the browser.

So that’s cool, I’m sporting this saucy number, kind of a squary camo.

Makes sense, since this theme is called Camo (download).

The second theme available for download is called Snowflake (download). This theme is for the less hardcore Chrome users who can't take the squary manliness of the Camo theme.

If you try these themes and neither strike your fancy, you can still go into the options menu and reset Chrome to the default theme.

I must reiterate that this is a feature that is currently exclusive to the Developer version of Google Chrome, this is an incomplete but fairly stable version of Chrome. If you're using the Beta or Final releases of Chrome, you won't have this option. If you are a Chrome user and wish to switch to the Dev Channel simply click on this link, there are links to all three flavors of Chrome (Windows, Mac and Linux).

On a different, yet still Chrome related note, I just learned that the Mac version of Chrome has yet to have plugins implemented. I still encourage all Mac users to try it and then subsequently be converted to using it.

My Chromes. PART TWO

You should now be excited.

I was going to post a couple days ago, but I'm lazy and that's part of my manly charm, so I have to keep that up from time to time.

ANYHOO...

A couple days ago, and update for the unstable release of Google Chrome I'm running on my Ubuntu PC was released and I grabbed that right up, this update was special for one specific reason, with this latest update, plugins are now implemented.

Needless to say, awesome. Not only because I no longer need to rely on two browsers to surf, but also because I can tell people this: it's still fast. I haven't noticed a single ounce of slowdown with the implementation of plugins.

My desktop looks considerably different from last time, but that's just a small testament to the versatility of the Linux Platform.

Anyways, moral of the story: go download Chrome.

My Chromes. Let me show you them...

For the past few weeks, I've been using my Ubuntu PC as my predominant computer due to Lil' Jim still being in the shop (we miss you, man), so without the luxury of Windows Live Writer for writing my blog posts, I've been forced to use the in-house writer built into Blogger, but I digress.

The true nature of this post is to impart upon my fellow geeks and people who come here accidentally that Google Chrome is the bestest thing in the history of forever. Now, to some of you, you may think of this as some sort of metaphorical poke with a stick. Some of you may be thinking "But James! You cruel, un-moustachioed man! Chrome isn't available on Mac and Linux yet, stop torturing me!"

Well, you're right, Chrome is indeed not avai- Oh hey! Look at that!

That, dear reader, is Google Chrome running on Ubuntu 8.04.

Granted it's a dev build and not the final release, it's still Grease Lightning, no, it's Greased Grease Lightning. That's even faster.

I'm not kidding when I say that Chrome is fast on Linux, it's the fastest browser that I've ever used on any Operating System ever. However, it's not the final release for a reason, it's still not done. According to the splash page you see when you first open the brower, the following features have not been implemented yet:

• Plugins, including Flash (so no YouTube, Hulu, etc.)
• Printing
• Complex text
• Complex tab dragging
• Gears support

Looking at the first bullet, you can probably figure out why Chrome can be so fast, there's no plugins. That's not to say that it isn't still fast with the inclusion of plugins, it's just alot faster without.

When I first downloaded Chrome, I spent the first few minutes attempting to make it crash. I only found one way to do it, and that was to exploit the lack of Complex tab dragging. This is where you drag a tab out of the browser window to form a new window out of the tab. It's not too bad until you try to drag the new window back into the old one again.

At least that was a problem until the alpha build was updated. With the release of the new Dev build a few days ago, the complex tab dragging seems to be working, soooo I don't really know why that's still on the splash page.

Now I'm stumped. This build is supposedly a minefield, yet I can't crash it, but maybe you can! Just visit the following link to download the dev build of Chrome for Mac and Linux (32-bit, 64-bit). Have fun.

Oh man...

This is my first blog post, this could either be totally awesome or totally... not.

I need to start this out on the right foot, I should write the way I feel. My ears feel like they're losing their circulation thanks to these fancy new Skullcandy Headphones, I hope they relax their vice-like grip soon enough, I like my ears.

Let's see here... Edit Html, eh? Let's try setting the text to Heading 1...

butt. HA!

That was pretty crazy right thurr.

I suppose my blog should have a purpose, but what would one write about in a blog? I suppose I could write about anything and everything. The hardest part of writing this will probably be writing it under the knowledge that nobody might ever see it, like my own private corner of the internets.

This is going to be interesting, though I suppose it could get even more interesting once the inclusion of Google Wave is made. I'm really excited about that personally, has anyone reading this actually sat through the entire demo video? If you haven't it's one hour and twenty minutes of interesting stuff that I barely understand, but I was still able to come away from it with the impression that Google Wave will make stuff super-special-awesome.

There are a few concerns I have towards taking full advantage of what Wave has to offer though. For starters, I have a grand total of two contacts who use Gmail; one of my Instructors, and one of my friends, this isn't including my Dad who uses it to view his POP mail account from his iPod. So essentially, unless Hotmail and the lot decide to make a Wave protocol, then Google might not get the kind of attention they wanted, but that's not to say that they won't get hoards of ravenous fans banging on their door, myself being one of them.

I'd have to say one of the more impressive things I saw while watching that video was the dragging and dropping of photos directly from Windows Explorer into the browser window. I certainly hope that that becomes a standard for Html even though I already have Gears installed.

Another thing I remember from the presentation was the realtime typing on both browsers. While it may be interesting to actually see what the other person is typing instead of just seeing the old fashioned "herpaderp is typing something...", it could also turn out to be some sort of curse. Think about it, you might start typing some kind of reply to a wave and then erase it, if the other person was online, they still saw it. I hope they implement that private typing thing they talked about early on.

I hope that Google Wave is released soon, it's interesting to see how Google continuously manages to draw people to the power of the browser in comparison to actual downloaded and installed programs.