Author: nocturnalknight

Become a Chrome Guru

Become a Chrome Guru

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Warning: Before you brand me as a Chrome fantic, and brand this blog as Chrome centeric, let me explain we all have fetishes, and mine is Goooooogle, besides this is really earth shattering, consider this 1% userbase in single day. then we got o cover/uncover this.

Now that you’ve been enjoying Google Chrome’s headliner features and speed for almost a week now, it’s time to dig into the less obvious functionality and options you don’t already know about. Become a keyboard shortcut master, take a peek under the hood, and customize its behavior and skin with some of the best shortcuts, bookmarklets, themes, add-ons, and subtle functionality in Google Chrome.

For One I’ve always loved KB shortcuts ratherthan Mouse getures even in FF and I think it all started with Lotus123 and I’ve never looked back.
OK If you want some KB shortcuts here they are,
  • (Chrome only) Ctrl+B toggles the bookmarks bar on and off.
  • (Chrome only) Shift+Escape opens Google Chrome’s Task Manager.
  • Ctrl+L to move your cursor to the address bar.
  • Ctrl+K moves your cursor to the address bar to enter a Google search.
  • Ctrl+T opens a new tab.(in all major Browsers)
  • Ctrl+N opens a new window.(in all major Browsers)
  • Ctrl+Shift+T opens the last closed tab. (in all major Browsers)
  • (Chrome only) Ctrl+Shift+N opens a new window in “Incognito Mode.”
  • Ctrl+Tab cycles through open tabs; Ctrl+Shift+Tab reverse cycles through open tabs.(in all major Browsers)
  • Ctrl+J opens the Downloads tab.
  • Ctrl+W closes the current tab.
  • Ctrl+R refreshes the current page.
  • Ctrl+H opens the History tab.
  • Alt+Home loads your homepage.
  • Ctrl+1 through 9 switches to a particular open tab position.
  • Ctrl++, Ctrl+-, Ctrl+0 Enlarges, reduces, and restores default text sizes, respectively.
Get some eXtra Mileage,
We’ve all had some boring Welcome to Firefox/Opera startpage /Safari Startpage loading all these days (assuming if you haven’t tweaked around) for advanced FF users know that FF can be used to open Multiple set of pages evertytime it starts, similarly chrome can too, 
Go to the Options(the Spanner icon) , to customize Chrome’s behavior even more.
  • Set multiple tab as your home page. While Chrome’s default thumbnail page of your most visited sites is pretty cool, you might want to just skip that step and set the browser to open certain tabs every time. Like Firefox, Chrome can set several tabs as your homepage. In the Options’ dialog Basics area, under “Open the following pages,” enter the URLs. 
  • Open the last session’s tabs automatically. Also like Firefox, Chrome can automatically restore the tabs from your last browser session. In that same Options area as above, just select “Restore the pages that were open last.”
  • Add the home button to your toolbar. Chrome’s toolbar is pretty sparse by design, but once you’ve set your homepage(s), you might want to get to them in one click. In the Options dialog’s Basics tab, you can also check off “Show Home button on the toolbar.”
  • Set your default Downloads save location. Also in Options—but under the “Minor Tweaks” tab—you can set Chrome’s default download location to something other than the “My Documents” folder.
Master Chrome’s Startup Switches
Like all good open source software, Chrome comes with a long list of “startup switches”—that is, parameters you can use when you launch the program to customize its behavior. While most of the switches are only useful to developers, a handful let power users do some handy stuff.
Quick primer: To use a startup switch, create a new Chrome shortcut on your desktop (or elsewhere). Right-click it and choose Properties. In the Target field, add the switch in question immediately following the path to chrome.exe.
 For example, your target using a –disable-java switch might look like:
“C:Documents and SettingsusernameLocal SettingsApplication DataGoogleChromeApplicationchrome.exe” -disable-java
Here are some things you can do with Chrome’s startup switches.
Tweak the number of suggestions the address bar offers. Increase or reduce the number of suggestions in the address bar drop-down using the -omnibox-popup-count switch. For example, to increase it to 10 suggestions, use -omnibox-popup-count=10. [via The How-To Geek]
Create and maintain multiple user profiles. Since Chrome learns so much from your usage patterns, you might want to create more than one user personality based on the task at hand. For example, you can set up a “work Chrome” and a “play Chrome” user profile (like you can with Firefox’s user profiles). While Chrome doesn’t offer a handy utility to create new profiles like Firefox does, all it takes is creating a new user directory, and then using Chrome’s –user-data-dir startup switch to point it there. The Digital Inspiration blog runs down how to create and use multiple profiles in Chrome.
Speed up browsing by disabling functionality. When you want to surf Flash-free, Java-free, or even Javascript-free (even though that’s not really the point of Chrome, but whatever), there’s a list of -disable Chrome startup switches that can block plug-ins, content, or features you don’t want, like:
  • -disable-dev-tools
  • -disable-hang-monitor
  • -disable-images
  • -disable-java
  • -disable-javascript
  • -disable-logging
  • -disable-metrics
  • -disable-metrics-reporting
  • -disable-plugins
  • -disable-popup-blocking
  • -disable-prompt-on-repost
Chrome even has a Stats option like Google web-accelerator hough it cannot be compared with Firefox’s super functonality Abou:config, it has many about pages as well,
Try “about:stats“
Next:  Part2 of Chrome guru 
Eric Schmidt admits to 'defensive component' of browser launch

Eric Schmidt admits to 'defensive component' of browser launch

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Google’s chief executive admitted Thursday there was a “defensive component” to the Web search giant’s launch of its own Internet browser, thereby pitting it against Microsoft’s dominant software.
Speaking to the Financial Times from the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Eric Schmidt said: “Microsoft has a history of favouring its own applications and I can give you 500,000 pages of court testimony, document web blogs and so forth and so on about that.”
Schmidt added that “there is a defensive component” to the launch of Google Chrome, the code of which will be open source so no rights will have to be paid by anyone using or adapting the software, which will be a competitor to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the dominant Internet browser.
“It is true that we actually, and I in particular, have said for a long time that we should not do a browser because it wasn’t necessary,” he told the business daily.
“The thing that changed in the past couple of years … is that people started building powerful applications on top of browsers and the browsers that were out there, in particular in Explorer, were not up to the task of running complex applications.”
Schmidt continued: “There is an opportunity for a platform and that platform for running these new applications is something that you can’t really do on IE7 (Internet Explorer version 7), and that’s the argument.”
Chrome is Google’s latest weapon in its bid to become the leader in all Internet areas. The last major browser war was won by Microsoft when it won the battle for dominance in the 1990s against Netscape Navigator.
The move comes amid growth in browser market share by Firefox, a project of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which ironically get a large portion of its funding from Google.
According to estimates by the research firm Net Applications, Internet Explorer is used by 74 percent of computer users worldwide compared with 18 percent for Firefox.
Unravelling the Chrome masterplan… with Windows 2.03

Unravelling the Chrome masterplan… with Windows 2.03

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Technorati Profile


Analysis of The Google Masterplan :
When people buy software – buy it in seriously large amounts – it isn’t just today’s binary they’re choosing. They’re buying what they think is a bit of the future – they’re buying a piece of risk insurance. This explains why very mature and well-proven systems often lose out to the Newest Kid on the Block. It also explains the enduring effectiveness of FUD and Vapourware.

And it’s not just software. From TP monitors, to minicomputers, to Novell Netware, recent history is full of examples of perfectly splendid systems being thrown out and replaced with something that doesn’t live up to the billing – and perhaps never will. Which sounds wacky, but that choice is being made on the rational calculation that the software or hardware of choice today won’t be made or supported, or the standards that bind the parts of the system together will become obsolete. (Which leads to the same thing.)

Sometimes a brave company bucks the trend. Most famously Microsoft refused to “eat its own dog food”, and stood firm against the move to client/server computing running PC or Unix-based databases like Microsoft SQL Server, instead insisting that its mission-critical accounts department ran on, er, an IBM AS/400 mini.

But by and large, the strategy works very well for companies that trumpet a “paradigm shift”, or “new era in computing”, and convince people that they own a secret part of the future – one that no one else can yet see. It worked for Microsoft, and Google hopes it will work for it, too. The Chrome browser today is little more than a piece of demoware, but it’s not just about “today”, is it?

Before we see what Google is hoping to achieve with Chrome, let’s take a look at a precedent from history that I find quite spooky. Old-timers may excuse this brief wallow in nostalgia.

In the 1980s, PC business software was dominated by three names. Ashton Tate, Lotus and the WordPerfect Corp. The former two produced dBase III and Lotus 1-2-3, which were practically mandatory. Each product had what your modern, New Age marketing-droid would call an “ecosystem” around it – the value of the choice was as much in third-party add-ons and libraries of macros and scripts, as in what came out of the box. Developers skilled in these black arts were plentiful too.

For their part, Ashton Tate and Lotus had grown fat and lazy from astronomical growth, and had been slow in updating the software. They had seen off competition from integrated suites, and looked formidable enough to keep superior rivals from gaining much market share. And they were very expensive – dBase IV retailed for $795 in 1990.

But buyers, who were in no rush to migrate, knew there were two events in the coming years that might force them to re-evaluate at some point. 32bit computing would eventually supplant the limited address space of DOS running on 286 or 8086 machines, and eventually – at some far off date in the future – graphical user interfaces would come to the PC.

Microsoft knew this too, but it had a few problems. Its own clunky GUI, Windows, offered no advantages to the business user. The giants of the DOS world wouldn’t run very well inside Windows – if they ran at all. There was no unique killer application for Windows, either.

Worst of all, few people really believed that Microsoft owned that vital secret of the future, or knew something no else knew. Apart from DOS, Microsoft simply sold a few compilers, while its own applications rarely got to a medal position in the shoot-out comparison tables in the computer press. And that was about it.

As Software Magazine, reviewing Windows 2 in 1988, wrote –

“There are challengers, including Desqview, and entries from Hewlett-Packard, Xerox and IBM’s own Presentation Manager.”

In other words, if the PC went GUI, it would probably be thanks to one of the grown-ups. Apple had priced itself out of the business market and refused to license the software. However, what credibility Microsoft had rested entirely on hanging onto IBM’s coat tails with its work on OS/2. And few people had any great enthusiasm for a future that returned control of the industry back to IBM.

So Microsoft bundled a Windows “runtime” with one of the few prestige applications that had been ported to Windows. Typically this
might be Aldus Pagemaker, or Microsoft’s own Excel spreadsheet, because there weren’t really any other heavyweight Windows applications. The runtime was a limited version of Windows that started when PageMaker ran, and ended when you closed it.
Unravelling history

Like Microsoft 20 years ago, Google wants to shift users to a new platform – its own – for which there is much hype but no great enthusiasm. Like similar migrations the new platform offers very few advantages – and plenty of disadvantages. Not only are great chunks of functionality missing, but even when you’re supposed to be “online and always connected”, you might not be.

There have been plenty of hiccups in the “cloud”, recently. As Ted Dziuba wrote here recently, it’s captivated the investors for several dubious reasons – one of which is that a “cloud” is ever so easy to draw on a White Board.

That’s where the “runtime” comes in. Today, Chrome is simply a technology demonstration – and I can’t see Firefox users with their carefully-cultivated selection of add-ons, or Opera users, making the jump any time soon. But Chrome is a Trojan Horse for bundling Google’s Gears onto your PC – and in the hope that manufacturers look to Google services for new Eee-type lightweight PCs, perhaps running something like gOS, the Ubuntu-derivative.

Gears is simply designed to make Google’s online services more attractive, and makes it looks like Google’s is setting the standard: leading where everyone else follows. (That isn’t entirely unfair.) And as a technology demonstration, Chrome succeeds.

Google has two powerful arguments for software as a (Google) service: it may be cheaper than licensing Office, and less complex than running client/server in your office. Uncannily, that’s the two things that helped swing the market Microsoft’s way, too. Migrating to a GUI required more powerful and expensive PCs, but it would save large amounts in training costs.

Microsoft then played its ace: it began bundling a not-very-integrated “suite” of applications for around $500 – less than the price of dBase or 1-2-3, and that’s before you’d bought the essentially companion software such as Clipper. In a recession, that started to look quite attractive.

Windows also offered a “cockroach” alternative to some of the grander vapourware designs on offer. Rather than wait for the Next Big Paradigm Shift (there were many of these vision-things being touted back in 1990, invariably including the words “Object” and “Architecture”), users smuggled in a copy of Windows for Workgroups and tried to get it running on the company network. Google services have the same appeal: people simply start using them.

So will Google succeed? Well, you tell me (below). But your 80s throwback will offer a couple of perspectives, that I’ve looked for this week, but failed to find.
Clever is not clairvoyant

One of these is that “the company that knows secrets about the future™” is a myth created by the press – particularly the glossy end of the US business press. It’s a powerful narrative, and suits their lazy writers, but the reality turns out to be very different.

Years later, we discover the company was simply blundering on in a state of chaos, slapping tactics together until they passed for a strategy, and winging it. And so a consequence of this myth-making is that it makes the poster child – the Google or the Microsoft – look much cleverer and more coherent than it really is. It’s an elaborate game of bluff.

At the time Windows offered business a cheap and cheerful “standard”, but Microsoft’s success was not based on technical excellence – on any unique knowledge of 32-bit computing or excellence in UI design – but rather more to its iron grip on the PC distribution channel. PC manufacturers paid Microsoft whether they shipped MS-DOS and Windows with the PC or not. So why ship anything else? Antipathy to IBM helped Microsoft enormously, too, of course.

But I simply don’t see where Google has the same grip over routes to market that Microsoft could exploit. And while costs can certainly be lowered by throwing away all your useful software, I don’t see that Microsoft generates the same animosity that IBM once did. I’m confident that we’ll be using web services more, as they get richer and more functional.

I’ll predict that Linux will thrive as a kind of bootloader on low-end PCs designed to use these services. And that Microsoft, as a result, will face continual margin pressure on Office and Windows in the years ahead. But I can’t see either Microsoft, or the idea of local applications, fading very far from view.

While much of the press has creamed itself over Chrome this week, it’s almost rude to point this next one out. 

When there’s one computer serving the planet – even if it’s Google’s – that’s a single point of failure.

And in that sense, Google’s vision of computing looks less like a piece of risk insurance, than a very big risk indeed.



Sorry to get the last thing rolling, But remember DO NO EVIL!!!??

Try as we can…
Google Chrome: 1% Market Share In Less Than a Day

Google Chrome: 1% Market Share In Less Than a Day

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Spoiler Warning : While I intend to develop this blog into a web-design and UI resource and discussion lounge, I cannot refrain myself from tracking the progress of Google Chrome.

While the early release of the Chrome comic might have changed the way Google went about launching its new browser, it definitely did not hurt Chrome’s early success. According to data from Net Applications, Chrome captured more than 1% of the browser market within its first day of release. Since then, it has been growing steadily and is now at around 1.5%, as both technology blogs and mainstream publications have written about it almost nonstop since Monday morning. Good Timing Even if it was accidental, the timing of Chrome’s release could have hardly been any better. 

Good Timing

Even if it was accidental, the timing of Chrome’s release could have hardly been any better. As the news leaked during Labor Day, which, by all measures, is traditionally a very slow news day, anticipation built quickly in the blogosphere and Chrome easily dominated the tech news cycle for the coming days. Also, the fact that Google streamed the announcement live and had the browser ready for download even before the announcement had finished surely helped to keep the momentum going.

What About the Rest?
In this short time, Chrome managed to become the 4th most used browser on the net after Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. As Chrome only runs on Windows so far and given that Safari has a far smaller user base on Windows, Chrome is now the third most used browser for Windows users. 
Here are RWW, we have been seeing the percentage of Chrome users rise steadily over the last few days. As of this morning, about 3.3% of RWW readers were using Chrome.
This quick ascent for Chrome is even more astonishing, given that Apple had to resort to all kinds of tricks to even get to 0.2% of the market.
Firefox and Safari Lose
Clearly, there is a demand for a better browsers. According to StatCounter, Chrome’s users have been coming from Firefox and Safari, while IE actually gained market share. Most of current Chrome users are still early adopters, but over time, we think that Chrome will mostly drain users away from Opera and IE, as its simplicity and ease of use would most probably appeal most to these two groups, while a lot of advanced Firefox users won’t be able to switch until Chrome supports extensions.
My Interpretation 

While I am not a certified industry observer, I can comment on this Owing to my extensive work in the web-develoment and promoion area. The Chrome does sure canabalized FF users as i thought, coz’ the die-hard MS fans and dumb-ass IE users will never feel the urge to experiment and explore any way!!?? ha ha?
But, as it hapens I cannot use Chrome for my day to day browsing habbits, as It depends a lot on the 20+ extensions in FF that makes my work a breeze or so i think. May be I’ll get quick peeks in Google services using Chrome. (As u understand I use GMail, GCAl, Gdocs, Blogger, Adwords, Adsense and Analytics not to mention Webmaster central) 
For others I have FF2 and 3 (yes FF3 doesn’t yet supports my fav extensions(or the developers of that extensions are more lazy than me, it seems.)
Keep on guys, In the next post I’ll explore the implications of Chrome in Detail.
–Ramkumar.

A comic that changed the Strategic stability in Browser Wars!

A comic that changed the Strategic stability in Browser Wars!

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With the possible exception of the Watchmen trailer, I don’t remember a comic book ever stopping the web community in shock. The surprise unveiling of Google Chrome yesterday—in comic book form—did just that.

Google leaked news of the browser yesterday by releasing a comic book (by comics legend Scott McCloud) describing the design decisions that went into the new browser.

For users, Chrome is a brand new web browser with blazing fast load times and a minimalist interface, designed to highlight page content over (ironically) browser chrome. Customary browser features are tucked away behind clever user interface elements, most of which are easily discoverable as you need them.



For developers, Chrome uses the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari, but bundles its own screaming fast JavaScript engine, called V8. The browser’s common ancestry with Safari will help to reduce the testing burden on developers of a whole new browser, but when testing is required, Chrome includes a DOM/CSS inspector, an HTTP profiler, and a JavaScript debugger.

A beta of Chrome is now available for Windows, with a Mac version under development.I am already posting this Blog via Google Chrome! See screen shots for more idea/Information.



Welcome to User Interface Design

Welcome to User Interface Design

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Well,

 It has been a long year and the Much hyped about Yahoo Takeover/Merger with MS fell apart like  dominos.
Google Taking over as much Infrastructure and Brainpool as anyone’s  guess, what more The worst fears of Microsoft has spawned back with a vengance…
Yes I am Talking about Google Chrome.
Lets welcome this new addition to our existing list of browsers and hope it dwindles IE’s  share rather than Canabalizing on either Safari or FF.
Happy Designing.
Ramkumar
Bitnami