I downloaded Chrome, Google’s new web browser, today and gave it a short test drive. There’s not much to say about it, but here’s what I found:

• No menu bar They’ve taken the application-ness out of the application, and turned it into a direct-to-web browsing experience. This change also leaves more screen real estate for the actual web sites to be viewed without scrolling.
• Less clutter Not only is there no menu bar, but there’s also no status bar, no search box, and with the exception of the start page, there’s no favorites toolbar. It’s a sleek, experience-centric design that reminds me of browsing on the iPhone.
• One box In true Google fashion, everything can be done from one text input box: navigating, searching, opening a bookmark, etc.
• Incognito browsing This is the first time I’ve seen such a straightforward way of surfing the web without leaving a trail. While most web browsers offer cleanup after the fact, Chrome’s incognito window never creates a trail to begin with. I think this is something that most people want, but which might scare managers and parents who want to know what their employees or children are doing online. This may be the one controversial feature of Chrome.
• Fast, attractive rendering Being built on top of Apple’s WebKit browser framework, Chrome loads pages super-fast, and renders them beautifully.

After messing around in Chrome for a few minutes, my experience is basically positive. To a certain extent, I miss the extensibility of Firefox, but at the same time I’m tempted to prefer not having it, due to the incredible performance bloat that occurs once you install a bunch of add-ons. Still, I’d like to be able to hide ads the way Adblock lets me in Firefox. Still, it supports Flash, so apparently there is some extensibility in place already.

I think I’m going to spend the next week or so using Chrome as my main browser and get an idea of how I really feel about it.

Finally, a rap that I can relate to.

After installing the Firefox 3.0 beta, the majority of my extensions stopped working. I had gotten rather spoiled with them, so I decided it was time to learn about writing Firefox extensions so that I could a)fix the ones I like which aren’t being updated, and b)write my own for the things that don’t exist yet.

For my first foray into writing Firefox extensions, I decided to go with something simple, but which I find useful. So I made PlusOne.

What PlusOne does is quite simple. It finds the numerical part of the current URL you are browsing, and simply adds 1 to it. (You can also subtract 1 from it.) So, if the page you’re viewing is called page1.html, you could right-click on the page and choose “Plus One”, and it will navigate to page2.html. Likewise, if you are viewing britney-spears-naked-17.jpg, you can right-click on the page and choose “Minus One” and it will navigate to britney-spears-naked-16.jpg.

Of course, if the file doesn’t exist, you’ll still get a 404. But often you can discover many interesting, and somewhat hidden, gems just by exploring the possibilities of incrementing the URL. It’s also easier than searching the entire page for the tiny “next” link hidden at the bottom when you’re reading a six-page scientific essay. (Yeah, right… you’re looking for naked pictures of Britney Spears.)

Please try it out and leave any comments on this page.

Last week I was talking to Matt Medlen about new Adobe products when he asked if I had heard of Lightroom. I had not.

We went to Adobe’s web site and watched the video demonstration, and I knew immediately that I had to have it. Photo editing software designed for photographers by photographers? They’re not kidding. It works exactly the way I do!

Where Photoshop can be thought of as a digital darkroom, offering all the tools you need to make a single photo great, it is unfortunately quite cumbersome for any task involving more than one photo, and its tools are extremely technical and powerful, but this comes at a major price of user-friendliness. Anything I want to do to a photo can be done in Photoshop, but it takes a great deal of time, and comes with a high learning curve.

Enter Lightroom. The first, and most important feature of Lightroom is that it is 100% nondestructive. You can edit a photo all day long without ever altering the original. This not only allows you to preserve the maximum original quality of the photo, but also makes possible some space-saving ideas like burning a session to CD, and then working with the photos right from the CD rather than having to use hard drive space.

Because the edits are non-destructive, they’re treated as a series of actions, and that brings to mind another killer feature of Lightroom: if you have a series of photos all shot in the same conditions (for example, low light), and you make the necessary edits to one photo, you can then highlight the rest of the photos and apply those actions to the entire session.

The cropping tool actually overlays a rule of thirds grid onto your photo to assist in finding the best crop. And better, if you have to correct the horizon, the crop is constrained to the boundaries of the photo, rather than having those triangle-shaped white (or black) strips of background color on each of the corners.

And another huge feature for me is that exporting the session as JPEGs does not force you to do a bunch of math in order to calculate dimensions. You choose a maximum width and a maximum height and click export, and it will resize your photos for you, to within your constraints, while maintaining your aspect ratio.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg, but it was enough to make me certain I had to have this software. So now I have it. Of course my iBook was running OS X 10.3.9, and Lightroom requires 10.4, so after it installed, it refused to run…

Take a photo on your iPhone and then automagically post it to Twitter, Flickr, Wordpress, Facebook, Blogger, and more, all in one shot.

I had to find this the hard way, so I’m posting the info in hopes of making it easier for others.

After you’ve done the jailbreak app, you’re probably looking at the list of apps and thinking “is this it?”

Well, it’s not. You have to add sources to the installer. Go to the section called SOURCES and add the available ones. Next time you look at the selection, there will be much more available!

If you haven’t yet tried Firefox, you need to. Firefox is a fully standards compliant browser, which is important if you’re developing web sites because you need to know that you’re writing standards compliant code. Firefox is faster than Internet Explorer, and it’s also far safer, lacking all of the security holes that IE provides for hackers to access your system. And if that’s not enough, Firefox also provides tools to block popup windows, and extensions make it easy to block ads anywhere in a web page.

Get Firefox now!

Some people have already managed to get versions of Mac OS X to run on their PCs. Here are links to some information on doing that.

• Uneasy Silence
• 360hacker.net
• OSX86 Project