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Rocking out with RockMelt

November 14, 2010 by Gabe S. 2 Comments

On friday my invitation to RockMelt, a new social media browser, came through.  So naturally I have promptly downloaded the software and spent some quality time with the browser.  Yeah, its only been a few days, but so far I’ve come to some pretty good conclusions.  The primary one being this: RockMelt is a total winner, providing some of the best integration with Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feeds that I have ever seen.

RockMelt, at its core, does what I had hoped programs like Adium and Socialite would do: make my access to Facebook, chat protocols, and RSS less obtrusive and tab-dependent.  The system is depends on two columns on the left and right of the primary browser screen.  The left is devoted to Facebook, allowing you to see (or search for) friends who are online, look at your profile, see friends’ activity, post to walls, leave messages, and chat with them.  The amount of things you can do through simple icons is pretty extensive.  You can also star certain friends to a favorites list.  This column is in many ways more in-depth than Facebook’s design, as clicking on friend icons does not just bring up a chat menu, but lets you see what they are up to.  RockMelt also supports Growl notifications, so you can get status updates on the fly, another cool inclusion.

Sharing with friends is also easy.  A “Share” button on the tool bar allows you to post whatever URL you are on to a friend’s page, but you can also simply drag and drop links into a friend’s icon to share it on their wall or in a chat.  RockMelt has effectively taken the Facebook Graft API and applied it to the entire web, regardless if the site has Facebook pre-integrated.  Search is also interesting on RockMelt, though also a mixed bag.  Like Chrome, you can search in the omnibar where you type URLs, but the browser also offers a designated search bar in the right hand corner.  What is unique is that this search bar generates results in another sub menu instead or linking to Google.  It’s nice, but it’s also less powerful than a full google search – no picture or video search results come up.

The right column manages feeds.  RockMelt comes standard with access to your Twitter feed (I don’t use twitter so it’s inactive), your Facebook notifications, and your entire Facebook news feed.  As updates come in, a small badge on the icon indicates the amount of updates waiting for you.  RockMelt also has subtle clues to tell you what you’ve already read on the feed wall.  New updates have a bright, white background, while previously read posts have a more subdued grey background.  Small visual cues like that are a sign of excellent attention to detail.  Along with social network feeds, the right column supports RSS feeds and adding new sites to keep track of is as simple as typing in the URL.  Clicking on the icon brings up subwindows that let you browse content.  Clicking on links brings up the site in the background, which I thing is a nice touch.  You can also drag these sub windows out of the side bar to make them float permanently.

As a general browser, RockMelt works very well.  Being built on Chromium gives the browser some strong source code with good performance.  It performs just as well as Safari and Chrome 7.  It’s also very stable for what is still a beta release.  In my two days with RockMelt, it has never freaked out, slowed down, crashed, or had a single tab become unresponsive.  In contrast, Chrome 7 still freaks sometimes, and Safari became unresponsive an hour ago, requiring a force quit to stop the spinning beach balls.

Is RockMelt perfect?  No.  Chrome extensions are still finicky, and themes work, but seem to mess up the spacing of the UI in some cases.  And as much as I like the columns, I wish I could also hide them at times.  Just so I can focus on other things for a bit.  I have no doubt most of these very minor issues will be ironed out by the 1.0 release.  All in all, RockMelt is a great browser now, and will only get better.  This is the first effort outside of the Chromium-Google alliance, and the RockMelt team has done a great job.  Check out my video overview below for a more visual demonstration of the browser.

[UPDATE] Sorry about the video being private for a little bit, launched a new Youtube account today for the blog and apparently Youtube makes the video private as default.  Should be working now.

Filed under Internet, Software Tagged with ,

Meet RockMelt: A Social Browser

November 8, 2010 by Gabe S. 5 Comments

In the world of computing, I face few dilemmas more daunting than which browser to use.  About 6 months ago, on the eve of Firefox 3.6 release, I even published a basic break down of the multiple browser options so I could weigh their pros and cons.  Ironically, in those 6 months I have removed Firefox from my list of usable browsers.  Today, I share my time between Safari and Chrome due to their more aggressive update schedule and use of the faster WebKit engine.  Unfortunately I can never decide which one to stick to.  I love Chrome’s split process model, the omnibar for searching, and its restore on crash feature.  However, Chrome doesn’t play nice with the security needs of my University’s VPN so I still have to launch Safari in order to get online.  Running two browsers = waste of resources.  Safari seems just as fast as Chrome, but lacks some of the features I like on Chrome.  It’s a juggling act between the two as my tastes change.

That juggling act may be getting more complex in the coming weeks.  Today, a friend of mine directed me towards a project called RockMelt.  This is a new browser labeled as a “social network browser” running on the Chromium platform (the open source project that Google uses to make Chrome).  The most novel thing about RockMelt are two columns, one on each side of the window, reserved for social network access.  The right column has your Facebook profile, Twitter feed, and ideally other streams that you can pin to the column for constant updates.  The left has your friends profiles and other information.  RockMelt is designed around the notion of sharing, going so far as to include a share button in the menu bar for quick access to Facebook.  Alternatively, you can simply drag links into your friends’ icons to share web pages.

RockMelt seems like a really cool project.  I’ve registered for an invite to the closed-Beta which should be coming in the next few days so I’ll tell you all how I like it.  Coming off my last post about looking for aggregation software and their failures to be replacements for Facebook, RockMelt could be the answer I’m looking for.  Here’s hoping that RockMelt runs quickly, is stable, and plays well with GW’s VPN requirements.

Check out RockMelt at their website, and watch the video to see it in action: RockMelt

Filed under Internet, Software Tagged with , ,

Can Apps Beat the Web?

November 8, 2010 by Gabe S. Leave a Comment

As I sit at my computer on a daily basis, I find that Safari (or Chrome depending on my mood) has no less than 7 or 8 tabs open on my browser window.  This should not be an uncommon phenomenon.  Actually, given my raising on an anemic iMac G5, I’ve always been pretty cautious about having too many tabs open on a browser so performance doesn’t fall off the face of the earth.  Compare this to my mother, who has unending amounts of tabs open on Firefox, sometimes 15 or more.  Suffice to say, while tabbed browsing is very useful and is a landmark improvement over multi-window browser, things can get cluttered.  The biggest complaint I have with tabbed browsing is how many chat tabs I have to keep an eye on.  See, my friends like to use Facebook chat, but my family uses Google Chat instead.  I have to keep track of two chats at a time, trying to listen for the barely audible “pop” sound from Facebook, while relying totally on visual cues for the silent G-Chat.

At the same time, tonight I was having a chat with a friend on Facebook about this issue, wishing there was a way to combine these into a single aggregator so I could go to one place for all my instant messaging needs.  That was when I remembered Adium!  Adium is a great messaging client for the Mac that I used to use back when AIM was relevant.  Over the years, I stopped using Adium but development has pressed on for the app.  Adium can aggregate and link to your Google and Facebook accounts, allowing you to chat with all your contacts from a centralized program.  The notion of having a single place to go for chatting is intriguing so I downloaded it.  But then I began to wonder: could I take that farther?

There are staples of my tab bar.  Sites that WILL be on my browser no matter what.  Facebook, Google Reader, and Gmail are the first three tabs on my window at all times.  I began to wonder if I could reduce that.  Years ago I resigned that the online Gmail client was plain better than using another client like Apple’s Mail or Microsoft Entourage (may it rest in peace), but is there something I can do about Facebook and Google Reader?  Turns out there is.  It’s called Socialite, and it is a social network/RSS aggregator akin to Adium.  Linux distros like Ubuntu are known for using aggregators like Gwibber, but they are not that common on the Mac or Windows.  Still, Socialite is an application that I am aware of, so I figured why not give it a whirl?

My plan was to develop a challenge: for the next two weeks, I would not launch Google Reader or Facebook on any browser on my computer.  I’d spend a significant amount of time with Adium and Socialite to see if these customized applications can do a better job than the interfaces provided by Google and Facebook.  I hoped to yield some interesting insights into how Facebook and Google can improve their services, and how these applications can improve.  But you’ll notice this is all in the hypothetical past tense.  Why didn’t I go through with the challenge?  Because even though I wanted to believe that these could be alternatives, in the end tabs win the day.

Socialite is a very pretty program, and as an RSS and status aggregator it does a great job.  However, it’s simply not a Facebook client in the end.  I cannot go to Facebook pages, search for friends, or see the contents of links/pictures that people post without going through extra clicks.  As a separate program, it also uses far more resources than any extra tab would use (it even calls upon my GT330M in automated graphics switching).  What I DO like about Socialite is its integration with Growl.  Growl is a notification utility that you can install.  Other software vendors bake in Growl support so that you get new notifications whenever a change occurs in the application.  gfxCardStatus uses growl to tell me when I’m switching over to discrete graphics, Skype can tell me when people are sending me messages, even my HP printer uses Growl to give me updates.  Socialite and Adium’s use of Growl is impressive and deep – every single status update generates an update along with its content.  That is appealing, but a good notification system can’t make or break anything.

As for Adium, its a good program with nice customization.  But resource management when you’re tethered to a battery must be priority number one and the program simply requires more processor cycles than a tab will in my browser.

People keep saying the web is dead, that apps are taking over what web pages used to do.  Well on the desktop, I don’t think that’s the case.

Filed under Internet, Software

Apple’s Triumphant Return to the Mac Platform

October 20, 2010 by Gabe S. Leave a Comment

Over the past year or so, many have worried that Apple doesn’t care about the Mac.  iOS on the iPhone and iPad is now their bread and butter, many assume.  Mac computers and Mac OS just don’t matter any more.  Well, sorry to disappoint you all, but the Mac is very much alive and kicking.  Today, Apple not only showed how successful and important Mac computers are, but has given us a glimpse of the very bright future to come.  Software, hardware, and a lot of stats, it was a big day for Apple and I’m super excited.  Let’s hit the ground running.

This One Goes to 11

Apple’s first big unveil was the release of iLife ’11, the next version of their comprehensive “digital lifestyle” software suite.  The majority of the time was spent focusing on iPhoto, iMovie, and Garageband, all of which have really good new features.  iPhoto now supports fullscreen editing and sharing.  The app can now take up the entire screen, pushing the dock and toolbar out of sight so you can focus on your work.  It has a lot of new UI features that are very similar to an iPad app, which I love.  Facebook integration has been improved along with a new email client that is built into the program, allowing you to easily email photos without going back and forth between Mail and iPhoto.  It also comes with new slide shows with music composed by the London Symphony Orchestra, and has much more impressive photo book system.  Apple is really pushing the ability to make professional-grade photo books and letterpress cards. I’m inclined to agree: these look top-notch.

iMovie ’11 has brought some very cool new enhancements.  Apple took the audio editing system out of Garageband and has dropped it into iMovie, allowing you to edit the audio tracks of your movies with much more accuracy.  iMovie now has a movie trailer builder which looks awesome, I mean just a ton of fun.  Sure, we’re going to see a plague of stupid trailers now because of it, but they are very cool and professional looking.  Apple also took the facial recognition software out of iPhoto and put it in iMovie, allowing you to track your “actors” in each shot, you can even group shots by who is in them, allowing you to focus on footage with specific people.  An excellent addition to the software I think.  Apple has also added in more post-effects, slowly returning to feature parity with iMovie ’06…. very slowly. Read more of this post

Filed under Apple, Hardware, Software

OSX 10.7 Lives!

October 13, 2010 by Gabe S. Leave a Comment

This was a delightful surprise for me to gush over with my morning coffee: Apple has announced an October 20th press conference titled “Back to the Mac”.  Obviously the conference will deal with the Mac platform and may include new hardware and a most definitely a preview of Apple’s newest operating system: OSX 10.7.  See the lion peaking through the apple logo there?  Guess that confirms that this release will be titled “Lion”, which seems about right.  Now the question is what will the new OS have in store?

Snow Leopard was had a feature-freeze in order to do some serious work under the hood, so now it may be time to bring user-end features back.  Off the bat, I’m pretty sure we’re going to see a new UI style to replace the depreciated and now inconsistent Aqua design.  Back during development of 10.6, rumors swirled that Apple was experimenting with a new UI called “Marble” that took many iOS design cues like glossy, glassy blues and black window frames, more color, and tighter integration.  Apple has already experimented with this in 10.6, as seen by Quicktime X which has a black, glossy window frame.  As well, the UI design of iTunes has changed several times between 8 and 10, making me think that Apple is experimenting with different styles to see which consumers enjoy the most.  Along with UI changes, I expect that Apple is going to bring some kind of iOS integration back into the mainstream platform, maybe in the form of a new app launcher to replace the dock or some kind of “Instant-On” OS that side loads with the main system.

As for under the hood, I’m praying that Apple updates their graphics stack to support OpenGL 4.1, because right now that is an Achilles heel in a platform that is finally having a gaming renaissance with Steam.  I’d expect some improvements to OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch as well.  Overall though, we will just need to wait and see.

October 20th ladies and gentleman, mark on your calendars!

Filed under Apple, Software Tagged with , ,

Microsoft Makes a Comeback with Windows Phone 7

October 12, 2010 by Gabe S. 1 Comment

When people talk about smartphones these days, two kinds really come to mind: the iPhone and Android.  These are the two dominant factions in the minds (if not wallets and market shares) of consumers today.  Though RIM’s BlackBerry still holds the #1 spot in raw market share, clearly Apple and Google own your desires.  But while RIM is attempting a coming back with Blackberry OS 6, long left in the cold has been Microsoft.  See, back in the “good ‘ole days” before Apple came along, if you wanted a smart phone you had three choices: RIM’s BlackBerry, Palm’s Treo, or a Windows Mobile neé PocketPC device.  That was it.  They weren’t good, they got the job done, and they were meant for business users.  Back in the “good ‘ole days” a smart phone was not for us, it was for the people who were doing “smart work”.  When Apple came on the scene, they changed everything.  The smart phone was now about consumers, about apps, about us.  While RIM and Palm both adjusted to that market (albeit very slowly and with big stumbles) Microsoft just sat around, twiddling their thumbs with Windows Mobile 6.  Outdated, inefficient, and ugly, Windows Mobile rotted away into the least desirable mobile OS while iOS and Android have flourished into a beautiful renaissance. Read more of this post

Filed under Mobile, Software

Briefly: MPEG LA Ends H.264 Royalty Fees

August 26, 2010 by Gabe S. Leave a Comment

Ok, so that’s a lot of letters and numbers, but what does it all mean?!  H.264 (also known as MPEG-4 AVC) is controlled by a working group known as the Moving Picture Experts Group or MPEG.  MPEG’s charter is to forward the development of video and audio compression technology in the form of codecs.  Virtually all modern video and audio codecs originated from the efforts of MPEG, including MP3 (the audio layer of MPEG-1), AAC (a more advanced audio codec derived from MPEG-4), MPEG-2 (the video codec used in NTSC broadcasting and DVDs), and MPEG-4/H.264.  This last one is pretty important since it has become one of the most popular and advanced video codecs now available – used on Blu-Ray, iTunes, ATSC digital transmission, and large amounts of Flash video i.e Youtube.  MPEG releases every standard they make for adoption by tech companies for a small royalty fee.

Why the termination of these fees is important is because it affects the future of HTML5.  As many know, several important groups and companies are urgently trying to promote HTML5 – in particular its video capabilities – as an open replacement for Flash.  Apple should ring an ironically huge bell here.  Apple really loves HTML5 but also loves H.264 to death, and for good reason since it’s such a versatile and high quality codec.  I should also disclose that Apple has a bit of stock in MPEG-4 as well, the standard was built off the Quicktime video technology.  But while Apple was fine and dandy with paying a little bit for H.264 in royalties, others were not.  HTML5 was to be a free and open standard and this mission seems contradictory if the writers of the technology have to kick back cash to the MPEG to use their codec as the basis for HTML5 video.  For this reason, the W3C – the body which wrote and developed HTML as the basis of the World Wide Web – chose to use the free Ogg Theora as the foundation codec for HTML5 video, much to Apple’s chagrin.  While Theora isn’t as versatile or high in quality as H.264, it is free and open source.  This is very appealing to browser makers like Mozilla and Opera, who pride themselves on using completely open standards without royalty payback.

But there was a clear schism occurring between the supporters of Theora and H.264.  Apple and Microsoft looked to be supporting H.264 in Safari and Internet Explorer’s HTML5 support, while Firefox and Opera stick with Theora.  In the middle of the battle was Google, with their Chrome browser.  While based on open source technology under Chromium, Chrome does not stick to stringent “open” standards (Chrome 5 has the Flash player directly installed) and as such, they could have gone with either side.  However, Google instead used their recent acquisition of On2 – a video codec developer – to create a third option.  On2 is notable for creating the VPx series of codecs, which have seen more adoption than you’d think.  VP3, released in 2001, is the foundation of Ogg Theora, while VP6 and VP7 became the codec for Flash 8 and 9, respectively.  Google bought On2 while the company was completing work on a new codec: VP8, which allegedly has the same quality as H.264 without needing royalty payment.  Google released VP8 as WebM, an alternative codec to H.264 that would be totally free and open to use.

WebM has received some controversy and support.  Mozilla and Opera have agreed to add WebM support to future versions of their browsers, while Google is adding WebM support to the next version of Chrome.  Conversely, MPEG lawyers believe that VP8 may share a little too much similarity with H.264, to the point of possibly infringing on some patents.  However, VP8 was rolling ahead.  MPEG’s decision today to end licensing fees on H.264 may finally end the codec spat on HTML5.  H.264 is generally considered the best video codec currently available, due to its fantastic quality and scalability from HD Blu-Ray to small-sized YouTube videos.  Now that H.264 is a free technology, I hope to see adoption occur at a faster rate for all browser vendors.

Filed under Google, Internet, Software

Briefly: I Was Right, Just Late

June 17, 2010 by Gabe S. Leave a Comment

Remember my WWDC 2010 wish list?  Well I got one thing right: there would be a new iPhone.  On everything else, I didn’t do as well.  There was no mention of OSX 10.7, nothing about a new Mac Pro, and nothing on my pipe dream of a driver initiative.  Or was there?  While it wasn’t announced at WWDC, Valve disclosed some very nice information a few days ago regarding driver issues on the Mac.  Reports are that Macs running Steam are, on average, more powerful than their Windows counterparts.  Yet even with that stronger hardware, the performance of these games don’t seem to be up to snuff.  This is partly due to poor driver support for the graphics cards used in Macs.  Drivers are the software that allow for hardware to interface with the OS.  Good drivers allow hardware to be more efficient and more properly interface with APIs and such.  Valve has alerted Steam users that Apple, ATI, and Nvidia are all working together to improve the quality of drivers on the Mac platform.  While initial improvements will be more slight, Valve is telling us that future updates will bring massive improvements to performance.

Oh Valve, in one small gesture to the Mac platform, you’re bringing it ever closer to feature parity with the PC.  Now Apple…. about those graphics cards….

Filed under Apple, Software

Witness the Power of HTML5!

June 4, 2010 by Gabe S. 2 Comments

Now imagine that title said with some intensity and you’ve got the kind of feeling Apple wants to convey to you.  Today Apple opened up a new section of their website for developers lauding and showing off the abilities of HTML5 with a few demos of the technology.  Included is an example of text manipulation using CSS3 and Javascript, slide transitions a la Powerpoint using HTML5 and CSS3, photo gallery animations using 3D effects, embedded video and audio, 360˚ image rotation, and virtual reality overlays.  Apple is really pushing the combined technology of javascript, CSS3 and HTML5 as an alternative to Flash and these examples do a lot to show the power of these standards.  One of the big pluses that Apple is focusing on with these little demos is that you don’t need plug-ins or even embedded images and files, everything is augmented by HTML5.  Take a look at the demos here: HTML5 Demos.

So how well does it work?  Pretty well.  Video was exceptionally clear and high quality, but then again it was on Apple’s website using highly optimized H.264 video.  Playback was choppy at higher resolutions, but I blame that on my slower computer.  All in all it performed just as well as Flash does.  All the demos are pretty impressive, but it remains to be seen if web developers will put that much effort into it as Apple has.  Also, keep in mind that not every browser full supports HTML5 and CSS3 + SVG, so these features may not all work exactly the same on Firefox, Chrome, or Internet Explorer (though the next version of all these browsers will probably fix that).  In a bit of irony, I actually could not run one of the demos (the VR segment) because it requires support for CSS3 3D animation, which Safari 4 on Leopard does not support.  I’ll have to revisit that one once I get my new computer for college.

So, what do you think?  This good enough to replace Flash?

Filed under Apple, Internet, Software Tagged with , ,

Google Invades Your Television

May 30, 2010 by Gabe S. Leave a Comment

Coming off earlier news about the possible Apple TV reboot, I figure it’s about time I weigh in on some other Internet-TV news that shook the world this week.  Looks like Apple isn’t the only one that wants to bring their mobile OS to TV interactivity.  Google announced Google TV this week, a new software platform built on Android that will be placed into a number of partners’ products.  The core of Google TV is the ability to access the full internet – through the use of the Chrome browser – from your TV, along with access to the Android Marketplace to increase the abilities of your TV.  The system is pretty ingenious actually.  Any set-top box or TV with the Google TV software will come with a remote that allows you to access web content, quite possibly the entire internet because of the software’s support for Flash 10.1.  In addition, you can use any Android-powered phone or device as a remote as well.

The current list of partner’s is a very well-rounded group composed of Sony, developing Bravia TVs and Blu-ray players with the software integrated; Dish network, who will offer set-top boxes with the software; Logitech, who will also develop hardware for the platform; and Intel, who has established the base requirements in hardware for the software.  While these are only the established hardware, Google wants this service available to all users on any service regardless of provider.  Right now, the service does not look terribly revolutionary.  Most of these features have been provided by other  hardware manufacturers in some shape or form for the past few years.  Companies like LG and Panasonic offer network connected HDTVs that allow access to networking sites like Youtube, Netflix, and Flickr to browse content, while HTPCs have offered full internet access for almost a decade.

What does make Google TV unique, or at least better than these offerings, is that it will be open and not limited to one system.  Any TV, even those who have their own networked service, will have access to Google TV and all of its services as long as you have some form of hardware that carries the service.  I also like how seamlessly it will integrate all of Google’s online services.  That seems like a given since it’s Android, but the integration of Google search, Youtube, and the Android marketplace looks like it will be very impressive.  The Youtube service will be specifically enhanced.  Now called Youtube Lean Back, the player has been redesigned to play like a regular TV station – playing videos at random continuously without the need for deciding on what to watch next.  If you don’t like what’s playing, just skip it and something else will immediately start afterwards.  Most likely there will be a search option for specific videos and you will be able to focus on specific Youtube channels if you want to watch the works of specific artists, but overall its designed to be pretty seemless.

If Google TV’s other applications can be reformed to fit the TV paradigm as well as Youtube is, then they might actually have something here.  Integration with other service like Netflix, Facebook, and (hopefully) Hulu, could make Google TV a powerhouse.  Hulu is an up-in-the-air option right now because Google is giving content providers the option to opt their online content out of Google TV, and for good reason.  The networks don’t want to lose primetime ratings or valuable and still lucrative advertising dollars to the shaky profitability on online video watching.  As such, don’t plan on being able to watch 30 Rock on NBC’s site with Google TV instead of actually tuning in to see the show when it premieres.

Also, today I’d like to announce the new Google category on the site.  I’ve realized that we have a pretty healthy amount of Google oriented articles on the site that probably merit their own section.  As such, here it is.

Filed under Google, Internet, Software Tagged with

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