Autiofill is quite useful, of course, as it lets you quickly enter in information like user names, your address, e-mail, etc… and it is an excellent implementation of it, but something I was surprised Chrome didn’t have earlier. The ability to remove websites from your “Most Visited” list, which appears when you open a new, blank tab, is nice. However, I never actually make use of the opera-esque feature. If I could assign websites to each of the squares specifically, then I might. Otherwise, I’m scanning my bookmark toolbar first.

The new JavaScript engine and Webkit have certainly helped things out though, and the already-fast browser seems even more speedy. Over all, I’m pleased with the update and it is nice to see Chrome hit this latest milestone – although I still hope to see a Linux and Mac version soon.

I have been using Chrome as my primary browser lately and I’m actually finding myself being won over from Firefox. While there are still a few features I am missing – which will hopefully be fixed once Google implements extention support – Chrome offers up a number of its own benefits. The faster browsing, slick interface, and general usability is pretty nice.

I attended the basic session, where I expected a bit of lecturing on how the iPhone works and what it takes to develop for it. Given that I’m doing some independent game development with a friend and we’re looking at the iPhone as a possible distribution platform, this seemed like it would have been quite useful. That isn’t quite what happened, though. Instead, we split off into small groups and started going through a tutorial book, building applications. This was actually fairly interesting, however, and I was surprised at how easy it was to pick up some last coding skills, even if nothing was terribly advanced.

After that, we headed off to dinner and got to know each other better. It was an interesting group, ranging from long time mac developers, to hobbyists, to a few game people, such as a fellow from Gendai Games.

Of course, it does have certain benefits. For example, say you are meeting Bob at a coffee shop – but you have no clue where that shop it. You can just grab your phone, see Bob on a map, see your location on the map, and head on over to where he is. Useful.

Useful, but you are also allowing your position to be tracked and it is entirely likely that this will cause trouble at some point or another.

Frankly, if I want someone to come to me, I’ll just tell them where I’m at. They can then take that information, load it up into Google Maps, and get a market for that location. I don’t really see what Latitude adds, other than for the stalker-on-the-go. Still, I’m sure some people will find use for it all the same.

As for my thoughts? I’m pretty ambivilant for now. I don’t have any real experience with Android outside of fiddling with the SDK (although I hope to pick up a G1 in the near future), which isn’t really enough to show me how it really functions. I wouldn’t be surprised if it could translate to a small, portable computer pretty easily with a few tweaks. Personally, I have a hard time imagining I would favor it over an actual Linux distrobution, but for the public at large, it could prove to be a good plan. Hard to say.

But, that isn’t what I’m actually writing about. Its easy enough to see that I’ve changed the site, its far more interesting to talk about why I’ve changed it. Or rather, why I’ve felt so compelled to change it as many times as I have. Alright, so I probably haven’t been as design-changing-happy as some people on the good old Internet are, but that’s somewhat of the point. People like to change things up every now and then. I find that I like to change the looks of an awful lot of things. Heck, half the reason I prefer Linux over any other platform is the sheer ability to change how it looks and functions. I routinely change Windows Manager, wallpaper, menu systems, programs, panels, themes, and far more. A little bit of change, and the ability to make that change, is important to me.

Part of me wants to say that this is true for many people. Individuality tends to be rather important to people. Yet, at the same time, I know an awful lot of people have a desktop displaying a blue sky and a grassy hill, with a blue taskbar running along the bottom of their screen, with a green button stating “Start”.

Is it just that I’m weird, then? Well, alright, that’s a given, but do people not care that much about how their computer looks? How about how a website looks? Do they care about how much flexibility they are given within a program? Does the ability to tweak the visual look matter? Does the ability to tweak functionality matter?

Firefox is a huge success partly because it offers a huge array of extensions. At the same time, Firefox is also a huge success because its a really lightweight browser that just gets the job done well, and there’s plenty of people out there who never install a single plug-in.

There are, of course, plenty of examples where the ability to customize a program or a website has been put to greater use by the users. I would be curious to know what the percentage of MySpace pages are not using a default theme, compared to those that are. In a way, I suppose you could also state that any time someone partakes in user content generation, or even so much as just adding some text to a website is a form of customization. The web, after all, offers people a huge amount of ways to share information and communicate – and also to stand out as individuals. It seems intuitive that the ability to heavily customize something is a nice feature.

Of course, the difference between, say, a Windows Desktop and Firefox, compared to something like MySpace, is fairly significant. After all, one of the perks of a social networking site is that you can put yourself out there as an individual, as well as making connections with your friends and gaining new ones. Then again, Facebook allows users much less visual customization than MySpace – but it also allows people to customize its functionality with the addition of applications, similar, in some respects, to things like Firefox.

I know my mind would default to saying a user should be given plenty of (easy to use) options to customize program, but should they at all? Should a program being developed for a general audience worry about stuff like that, and to what degree? Is visual customization important? Functional? Does it matter if the program is something public or not?

Next up Google has taken a step in an interesting direction with how they’re handling tabs and various elements of webpages. Each tab is separated into its own process. If your browser is acting slowly in one tab, because the webpage isn’t coded well, or for some other reason, instead of the entire browser becoming sluggish, only that one tab is. The rest are totally separate. This also helps to eliminate the memory leak issue that Firefox has run into. When a tab is closed, the process is killed off and the memory is then totally freed.

Next up, the UI is amazing. It pretty much is the type of a UI that I would design – which I find rather amusing. Its very minimal but it packs in everything you need. I would certainly like a little more customization than what is currently present, but I imagine that will come with more time and development. What is here is quite beautiful though. It removes a lot of the UI for one. There’s no menu bar at all, for example. Instead, on the navigation bar, there’s two buttons that hold everything for page settings and another for browser settings. The URL bar is basically exactly the Awesome Bar from Firefox, but with a less grating name (The Omni Bar, I believe), which nicely combines URL input and searching via various different engines – Google being the default, of course.

Surprisingly, the positioning of the tabs makes a bigger difference than I would have ever expected. When Google stated that they were just putting them above the URL bar I thought to myself “Well, that makes sense, but so what?” The reason that this is nice, is because it places the tabs on the window bar, on the opposite side of the minimize/maximize/close window buttons. This normally totally wasted space is now very useful. It also keeps more viewing space open as well.

You know the status bar in Firefox, IE, and other browsers, right? That little bar at the bottom that displays useful things, like what link you are loading, what the URL of the link your mouse is hovering over is? I hate that bar. I love the information on it (hey, it prevents random rickrolling!) but, it always just took up space and seemed ugly to me. Chrome doesn’t have a bar like this, instead a little, barely noticeable, box appears to give you the same information, then vanishes as quick as it appears. It saves the space without losing the helpful information.

Downloading is quite nice as well. No, there’s no window that appears at all. Instead you click on a link, and a new tab is created with bars showing your downloads. Nice, simple, effectively, and it doesn’t get in the way.

The default page for a new tab is nice as well. It reminds me very much of Opera’s Speed Dial, but both more and less useful at the same time. Unlike Opera, you don’t set what these pages are (unless that’s changed in recent Opera builds). Instead, Google picks the pages you most commonly visit. In a way, that seems almost less useful than letting you pick the bookmarks… but that’s the thing. You already have bookmarks. Instead, this page is just handy for launching common websites that you visit, as well has having a list of recent bookmarks, and quick access to a search of your web history.

It also has various other interesting features as well, that I’m discovering as I go. The task manager (shift + esc) is interesting and potentially useful for web development – I also appreciated the ’stats for nerds’ link at the bottom of it. I also enjoyed being able to resize input box – which came in handy with this post, enabling me to view the entire thing without having to scroll. I also didn’t have to worry about losing Firefox’s built in spell checker either.

Oh, and because I am a Linux user and I do lean towards Free/Open Source Software ideals… Yes, Google Chrome is fully open source and I respect that greatly. I hope that other major browsers on the market make use of that and adopt some of the ideas Google has implemented.

So far, I am rather impressed. It still has a little ways to go yet, but Google Chrome is shaping up rather well. The browser needs more customization options and the interface is fairly different from what most people are use to, which is going to cause some confusion at first. It also does seem to have a few rendering issues yet – I had some trouble with the back end of my website, for example. However, it does seem to be well designed, and as it is still in a Beta phase, development should continue to, hopefully, fix some of the issues with it.

First off: Warhammer Online . I pre-ordered a while ago and thus was allowed to participate in the Preview Weekend last week. There’s a ton of information out there on the game, but I will give my general thoughts on the game briefly. First off, PvE is pretty much your standard flavor of MMO that you’ve been playing for years. However, it was smooth, felt polished, and it was fairly fun. There was also a ton of content, at least at lower levels – hopefully something that will carry throughout the game. Not only that, but it also contained a few interesting features of note. First off was public quests, which I thought were an absolute blast. It was cooperative, in that I was working to complete the quest with a few dozen other people, but at the same time, I was also competing against them to rank highly in the scenario as to ensure I’d get some decent loot from it. Over all, from the PQ’s that I went through, they were very nicely done and an awful lot of fun. Next to that, you had Open Groups. If a group is set to ‘open’ (which is the default), it means that people can invite themselves into your group. That might sound a little weird to many people at first, but it actually is quite nice, even more so in public quests and open field RvR.

Next to that, RvR is just awesome. Flat out. I didn’t touch scenarios as much, as I was far too enthralled with open field RvR, but what I did do was fairly solid as well. Open field RvR is where it shined. The battlefields seemed well designed and it also gave me a lot of flashbacks to Dark Age of Camelot… but without some of the nagging problems, such as abuse of crowd control and stealth. While the game isn’t going to shatter the way MMOs are made, or is even really original, it still looks to be a good, solid, surprisingly polished, release.

Next up: Android . No, it isn’t a game. Yes, it is Google’s phone. The HTC Dream has been getting leaked out a bit and I want one. Also, it appears Google will be working on a browser that sounds particularly interesting, more so for web-based applications, and even more so with ones taking heavy advantage of Javascript (which is many of them).

Finally: It appears that I am back at college once again, where I will be attending a US University once more, instead of an… interesting Japanese one (Japan was awesome though). It actually feels pretty good to find myself getting back to work – not to mention back to all the excessive tabletop gaming that always takes place when I’m here. Before I got back I was already volunteered into two 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons games (so I can finally expand my 4th edition review!) and I’ll be running one of my own. However, with a far, far superior system: Fudge.

So, I’ve been pretty much assimilated, I suppose.

I can’t say I can really complain either. I actually feel much more comfortable running inside of linux these days than I do windows. Its quicker, seems much more efficient, and I have an interface that conforms to what I like – not to mention a very minimal look, which I love.

Of course, getting linux installed, which I’ve done quite a few times now, is not going to be the easiest thing for the computing layman to do. That said, once you get past the initial setup of the OS, actually using linux can definitely be a snap. Alright, not quite so much in fluxbox with its configuration files that you need to edit, but other Window Managers that I’ve tried – including GNOME, KDE, XFCE, and to a (vastly) lesser extent, Elightenment – are pretty simple.

It is a bit amusing to see how much my computing habits and interests have slowly evolved over the last year or so.