OhRyan.ca

I’m sure these sentiments will be echoed around the around the blogosphere (including 4 posts on GigaOm…seriously) over the next couple of days, but I just can’t contain myself. I think I now know what it feels like to be an Apple fanboy when Steve Jobs announces one more thing. I haven’t been this excited about a browser since NCSA Mosaic. 

Hearts 

• It’s fast! Really fast! I haven’t bother running any benchmarks, it’s not necessary. This browser is quite obviously insanely faster than any other browser I’ve ever tried. Pages load instantly. Any and all javascript elements load and react noticably faster. 
• The striped down UI is a nice change from the odd UI choices in IE 7&8 and what now seems like an extremely bloated FF 3. The tab animations are nice and smooth. The ability to detach tabs is a great addition. 
• Site search. Chrome remembers when you used the search inside a site and then allows you to use the search from the “omni bar.” So, if I type “wik+tab” it will bring up a “Search Wikipedia search:” labe, then any keywords I type get routed to wikipedia’s search engine. This works with amazon, ebay, blogs, anywhere Chrome can recognize a site search field. 
• Developer tools! Chrome includes tools similar to Firefox’s firebug plugin, including an HTML/CSS element inspector, javascript debugger and a native, colour-coded, line-numbered HTML viewer. 
• The default start page is innovative. In addition to showing my 9 most visited sites, it also shows my top site searches, recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs. In theory, this is super useful, but it’s one of those features that takes some getting use to. It would be kind of neat to pull RSS feeds or other widgets into this. 
• Ability to resize textboxes. It’s minor, but useful. 

Hates 

• Doesn’t resize properly on my second monitor.
• Opening and closing tabs is sometime sluggish – especially when there is a large flash element on the page being opened or closed. When this happens it actually causes the entire browser to be unusable. 
• Flash sometimes loads noticably slower than the rest of the page – even on youtube. This could be due to my older cpu. 
• Browser become slow when I’ve got 10+ tabs open. Again, could be due to my machine. 
• The task manager is a GREAT idea. I haven’t had to use it yet. But, if a tab or a pluggin is ever so slow that it’s affecting my ability to browse, my machine is probably going to be too bogged down to actually use Chrome’s task manager. So it might actually be useless. Now, each tab does still appear as a seperate windows task, so I should still be able to close them that way. We’ll see. 
• Missing extensions. It’d be nice if Chrome included an implementation of XUL and directly import Firefox exentions. 

Bits & Bobs

• ctrl+k brings you directly to a search in the OmniBar – using your default search engine. 
• Matt Cutts has a blog post addressing some privacy concerns: Link
• It’s interesting that every major browser except Firefox now has a private browsing mode.
• The options menu is divided in a really clever way, 3 tabs: basic, minor tweaks, under the hood
• There’s a “stats for nerds” button

Suffice it to say. Chrome is my primary browser. I’ll still use Firefox when I need the web dev toolbar or some other extension. Mozilla and Microsoft have some serious catching up to do.

In a flip-flop move reminisant of John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, Rogers Wireless has reversed it’s policy regarding smart phone tethering. I’m not even going to try to speculate what’s going on internally with this company. Buried in this CBC article about Rogers’ (baffling) new data plans is this nugget:

Unlike other cellphone carriers, Rogers is allowing customers to “tether” their smartphones, or connect them to a computer and use them as a modem.

This new policy was one of the reasons I decided to jailbreak my iPhone earlier this week.

Finally got around to trying it out tonight. A quick google pulled up a very ominous looking 9 step How To. In actuality there are only 3 things you really have to set up. 1) ad-hoc network on the pc, 2) run ‘socks’ on iPhone, 3) set up SOCKS proxy connection in your browser

First Impressions:

• 3G is fast! Speedtest.net gave me 2742 kb/s down and 246 kb/s up. That was with full bars of reception, during off-peak. This is definitely fast enough for standard browsing and not too bad for file downloads. I’ve gotten worse connections with paid wifi.
• Because it’s a browser based solution, it’s somewhat limiting. I suspect there’s some software available that would hook into a proxy server at on a lower level, it might even be a standard configuration setting in windows. I didn’t look into it.
• Either the socks app stopped working and/or firefox randomly forgot my proxy settings. Over the course of my 15 minute trial, I had to reset firefox’s proxy settings 5 or 6 times.
• Battery drain on the iPhone is high. You probably only have an hour max.

Overall, it’s pretty cool.
That said, I’m not entirely sure where I’d use this. Most of the time the iPhone is going to be as much internet as I need. I might use it at an airport, if I wanted to sync some podcasts before a long flight or something. I may use it if I wanted to work in a wifi-less location. Other than that, it’s a good backup incase the cable ever goes down.

Podcaster.fm is a iphone optimized website that aggregates a tonne of popular podcasts, so you don’t have to. Basically, it gives you a very iPhone friendly interface for finding and listening to podcasts.

A common complaint of cranky geeks everywhere, is the iPhone’s inability to sync with iTunes over the air. With podcaster.fm – as long as I’m planning on staying in 3G range – I don’t think I’ll ever worry about syncing my podcasts again. We’ll see.

The first time I used the site I accidentally discovered that when you load an mp3 file directly from a website iPhone’s version of quicktime actually continues to run in the background! I’m not sure if it’s a bug or a feature, but I like it!

The only thing I don’t like about the website is the interface. Switching between pages is really quirky. I don’t know exactly how to describe it… it’s kind of like the destination page loads twice. The navigation itself could be improved somewhat, it’s 4 or 5 taps to find and play a podcast, that’s 2 taps too many.

I tried to watch a live stream of Revision 3′s Tekzilla yesterday, at revision3.com/watch.

It was absolutely painful!

I was under the impression that Tekzilla was going to a Live format. To my dismay, they were simply broadcast the recording of Tekzilla. This meant getting to see Patrick Norton, redo portions of the show, over and over and over and over again; and other tedious “behind the scenes” stuff.

Maybe this is just a baby step, testing the waters of their streaming infrastructure. But they’ve certainly got a long way to go before they’re on par with the old TSS.

Data & Rogers
I’ve been using significantly less data than I anticipated. After three weeks I’m just under 100MB total usage. I attribute this partially to: being in The States last weekend; staying within wifi range a lot; and mainly Rogers’ terrible 3G network. The network in Winnipeg is not very good (It’s currently been down for 2 days). I ran a couple of speed test – with full reception, in a stationary position – I was only able to get  200 – 400kbps. More often then not loading extremely light-weight pages, like google or wikipedia results is nearly impossible. Using any sort of streaming is out of the question.

As I mentioned earlier, I think the poor quality of their 3G network might have been one of the main reasons Rogers was so hesitant to offer unlimited data plans. Until now, I don’t think Rogers has been treating their wireless data service as a serious consumer product.

Apps
If it wasn’t for the iTunes App Store I would have jailbroken my iPhone by now. We’re finally starting to see some interesting apps bubble to the top.
Twinkle is great! Twitter + location = pretty genius.
Dynolicious, looks like a pretty intense car performance meter. With the ability to generate, graph and store stats like 0-60, lateral Gs, Horsepower, it’s probably worth the $12.99. I drive a Yaris, so it’s kind of pointless for me. It would be pretty hillarious to take on a plane (GPS and accelerometer still work in flight mode).
Starting to see some good free games as well. I’ve been playing BreakClassic, Moonlight Mahjong Lite and Jawbreaker…Wonder if there’s a minesweeper clone.
The facebook app is still great – I think they came out with a 1.1 release since my first post. You can now view all user data.

[if someone knows how to link to the iTunes Store, please leave a  comment]

Syncing
Ok seriously, why does syncing take over an hour?!
When iTunes does it’s once a day iPhone Backup it takes me at least an hour and a half to sync. And I can’t seem to stop the backup process.