Development Blog

As a consumer in the age of the iPhone, I encounter frustrating user interfaces on a daily basis, whether it is with said iPhone, a poorly designed doorhandle, or otherwise. Often, with little tweaks, these could be remedied. Expect this to be a regular feature, as there is always more assclownery about.

Google Chrome

The Ctrl+K shortcut

Background: Chrome has brilliantly mixed the search bar with the URL bar. Using small, custom keywords, I can quickly point my browser precisely where I need to. For example, if I type “wiki cow,” I’ll soon be reading about domesticated ungulates.

Problem: Let’s say I’m done looking at cows, and want to look up sheep instead. I could press Ctrl+T, open a new tab, then type “wiki sheep.” However, if I don’t want to open a new tab, I need to get a cursor in the URL bar. I could take my hands off the keyboard and click. Chrome, however, has a shortcut: Ctrl+K. Ctrl+K automatically clears the URL bar, and sticks the cursor there so the user can navigate. However, Chrome also sticks a question mark in there.

…WHY?

Ctrl+K is brilliant! I love being able to quickly bounce around the nets without a mouse. Ctrl+K lets me do so… but not without deleting the mysterious question mark that jumps in my way for no apparent reason. Who the hell put that in there in the first place?

The Fix: It’s beyond my reach to modify Chrome code, but I can’t imagine it would be a difficult fix on their end.

Irritation Level: 3 of 5

Extra point for the problem being so obvious and basic.

I’ve decided that, for this next week, I really want to focus on writing and so I’m going to do an experiment of weaning myself off the internet. Starting from 1AM Tuesday, July 28th, I’m going to try and go for one week without the Internet and see how it goes.

The ground rules are as follows:

I’ll be disconnecting the ethernet cable from my desktop & disabling wifi from my laptop.

I’ve disabled both safari & facebook from my iPhone but I can still use it for maps & to reply to urgent email.

If I need to use the internet for whatever reason, I am allowed to crawl under my desk to reconnect my ethernet cable but I can only use it for a maximum of 1 hour.

I will presumably be posting something about my experiences at the end of the week.

Google’s ChromeOS is heavy on vaporware and light on details at the moment which leaves fertile room for random speculation. Most of the guesses I’ve been reading are really kind of boring so I’m going to sketch out what I think a truly exciting ChromeOS cold be.

I’m extrapolating my guess from three pieces of data:

1) The Chrome moniker is deliberate
2) It’s targeting netbooks for a reason
3) Google has in it’s DNA, the instinct to play David to Microsoft’s Goliath (cf. Google Docs)

Netbooks are great in theory but as soon as you buy one, you run into all of the classical frustrations of owning more than one PC, namely: trying to keep all of your various files, bookmarks & settings synchronized. Sure, you can get your files synchronized and there’s probably a firefox plugin to synchronize bookmarks and probably another one to keep your open tabs in sync and… blargh, who could keep up with all that? My hypothetical ChromeOS solves this by simply saying all your netbook is is a portable browser window. You won’t be able to run photoshop, notepad or even a command prompt. Instead, the only thing running will be Chrome.

But, at a stroke, synchronization is no longer something you have to think about. ChromeOS won’t be an OS in the traditional sense. It’ll just *be* the Chrome browser window you have running on your desktop. Open a new tab on your desktop Chrome, a new tab will appear on your netbook Chrome, half compose an email, go sit in a park and you’ll magically have that half email for you to resume work on, get halfway through a game of Bejewelled and go finish the rest while you’re on the throne. For the first time, you’ll be able to stop in the middle of something, move to a completely different machine and be confident that you can resume exactly where you left off.

What would be so brilliant about this move is that it enters into a space that Microsoft can’t replicate. ChromeOS works, not by doing more than Windows, but by doing less. ChromeOS correctly recognizes the tradeoffs inherent in netbooks. Would you like to run photoshop on a netbook? Maybe once in a while. But what you would really like much more is never having that pit of the stomach feeling when you realize that presentation file is on your home desktop and you’re in Iowa with the work laptop.

Will the real ChromeOS be anything like what I’ve sketched out? Well, here’s hoping…

Everyone’s all atizzy about Amazon’s recent decision to removed unauthorized copies of 1984 from the Kindle. All of a sudden, we’re reminiscing nostalgically about the freedoms inherent in paper and how the new digital era represents a grave threat. Seriously?

When we were all napstering and torrenting away, digital information represented us sticking it to the man and a sign that RIAA was so desperately out of touch with the changing media landscape. But as soon as the same phenomena hits us, we end up responding exactly the same way that RIAA did, desperately trying to preserve the institutions of print media despite arguments from first principles about how such a thing is impossible.

I hope there’s some dude at RIAA right now who is fully appreciating the irony of all this.