Hooked on safari

 

 

I have dabbled in the world of Macintosh web browsers for quite some time now. Camino, firefox,webkit were my main subjects in this quest to find what browser performs best in terms of speed and elegance. When firefox 3 was released, I was jumping with joy and exploited its excellence to safari users. I told everyone that safari 3 was too slow and had memory leakage issues. Now I find myself eating my own words. My primary browser is safari 3, once again.  

No matter how hard  I try, my taste admires the elegance and beauty of safari. Yes, with firefox 3 you get the native UI, but it still feels like a windows app. The gecko rendering engine greatly differs from the webkit engine adopted by safari and other OSX apps such as Mail. Webkit renders pages with a sophistication that the gecko engine simply can not match. This same engine is what powers the safari browser on  the iphone. It is extremely efficient and speedy.  On the downside, safari lack the expandability  of firefox with no support for add-ons. Add-ons cause frequent browser crashes! Add-on instability has eternally plagued firefox. 

At the end of the day, sacrifices must be made, but when you want absolute elegance and a native feel safari is the way to go. Browsers like firefox, camino and flock only provide temporary satisfaction until you eventually get feed up with the bloated bugginess. It is that simple.

 

Why i quit facebook( a rant)

Why I quit facebook

My passionate hate for social networks began as far back as I can remember. I guess I never really understood the social psyche. To me,facebook, myspace, and social networking sites alike are too telling. These sites provide a virtual Rolodex of deeply personal information, such as a persons address or phone number.  Another thing that griped me is the bizarre pictures that get posted on user’s profiles. It seems all sense of taste and decency gets lost when users decide to upload pictures of them selves striking rather tasteless poses. From day one, none of this appealed to me. The sluggish performance and unresponsive behavior of facebook caught me shouting at my computer screen in anger  time after time. The real last straw of my quest on this less than pleasing site was the flood of messages for this, and that. The constant request for installing buggy apps, or accepting friend invitations epitomizes my point. So, I finally quit. Just as easily as I signed up….I quit. Heck, it was fun!!! You should try it!(cue awkward enthusiasm)

    What is next?: twitter and friend feed.  Yes, they are not as vast and expansive as facebook, but then again that is a godsend. People should not know more about me than I know about myself.( ok, that does not make sense, but sure sounds good) What I love about twitter and FF is the conversation. FF in particular build a mini forum around your ramblings, or shared media files. I have no problem with strangers digesting my thoughts and ramblings, it just creeps me out when they know where I live and could recite my favorite color or food……not for me. To summarize: Nuke your facebook account, then sign up for twitter( super easy) and discover great content. 

Follow Me On Twitter!

I have just started to venture out into the Wide World Web! My friend showed me this site called twitter. At first I wasn’t that into it, but after reaching a large fan base on YouTube, I thought it could help. So I made an account, and so far it has been really fun! The main purpose of twitter is to tell people what you are up to. From taking a nap, to eating cereal. Also, you can follow people on twitter. This means that you can see what they are doing! It is really great! I encourage you to go to twitter.com and make an account, and then go to my twitter and push the follow button!

 

A new kind of dance for those who can’t dance

wakoopa:

Web 2.0 has brought us an abundance of neat webapps and  services that offer what some would consider “useless”  functionality. The site I have been playing with recently is called Wakoopa.( I do not know how to pronounce it either) Wakoopa lives both on the web and desktop. Its purpose it to track what applications you have and currently are using. This may seem like an obtrusive service, but it is kinda neat once you get used to it.

To get started you must make a free account that requires no more than the standard user name,password, and an email address. Once your account is created all you need to do is download a light-weight pice of software( mac&pc) that tracks your activity then beams it up to the web and provides a real-time snapshot of what apps you are using on your public profile. You do not need to get stressed out about people “spying” on you because the website only provides the app you used, it does not give info on what you did with the app. For example if you are browsing the web with firefox, the tracker will not collect info on what sites you have visited.  

The Ui is quite sleek and is easy to navigate around. On your profile page, the site will automatically compile the apps you have used into sub-categories.  One of the categories is “top ten”. This category calculates the average of the most used applications and sorts them accordingly. 

If you want part socail network, part semi-useful website you should defiantly take a look at Wakoopa.( ah…that name is NOT English.)

another idea for ya……….

I am guessing from your accent, you are from the NYC area.  U should do kcheets tour of New York City with some of your favorite places in it.  NYC rox.  What a town, if I had $$$$ I would live there.

Hidden youtube: unknown feutures

I do not tend to recycle info I heard from other blogs or videos; however, the one I am about ot discuss is to good to pass up. See below.

 

 

“I was surfing YouTube and I don’t even recall how I stumbled into this but if you go tohttp://www..com/my_videos2 - it looks like the YouTube team is revamping the control panel.  It is definitely better organized and easier to navigate.  I do think however, it needs a few tweaks in terms of the way it displays the information.  It’s still a bit “scattered” and “out of the way”, but overall, much nicer than the current control panel UI.”

    -article by jeff of besttechie.net

Steve

 

Happy 4th of July

Happy 4th of July!

On the topic of simlifying the interenet and RSS aggregators

In the past few months, I have been absorbing an enormous amount of blogs via RSS aggregator Google Reader. I treat the various blogs I read the same way I would read a book or newspaper article, that is with an enormous amount of interest as well a genuine focus. It seems that often online or electronic based writing or ” blogging” has been treated with very little respect, which is partly due to the fact that many still regard the computer and internet as a toy for amusement, that is IM’ing friends or watching dumb little videos on youtube of a dog riding a skateboard. I’ll admit, I used to have this warped, one-dimensional view of what computers were meant for…but now I have a much more mature attitude toward the capabilities of the web. The turning point in all this for me was using an RSS aggregator like google reader. RSS( really simple syndication) is protocol that allows users to have a “feed” of his or her favorite web-site which they can then plug in to a program( web based or desktop) called an ” RSS aggregator”. This process is done mostly for convenience, especially for those of us who consume dozens of blogs and news sites.
The term blog really gets in the way of things. Part of the reason people have such trouble getting used to technology is that there are an enormous amount of arcane terms thrown at them with little explanation. I happen to be a big supporter of digesting these seemingly complex terms into a much homier form. For example, I have been a huge advocate of dropping the “E” off of E-mail. At this point, the internet and  electronic mail use is so much so that “E” is too much of an eye sore. Admittedly it would onset a minor haze of confusion, but as is the case with many terms( mainly slang)
I guess I got on a bit of a tangent in the previous paragraph…..I will be honest….I have not grand plan that will let me swiftly end this rant…so I am going to end it with out dear old friend of punctuational joy, the period.
***The topic  of dropping the “E” from”E-mail” has been somewhat controversial between me( steve) and kcheet I am sure he will leave an interesting comment)*****

idea

Why dont you pick out something from the news or an issue and just tell us what you think.  Be totally random.  What about that?