Of course it's shiney... it's Chrome!

Well for just under the past month I have only opened up Internet Explorer on my computer about 1/2 a dozen times... and no.. it's not cause I have banned myself from using the Internet... I have made the migration to Google Chrome.

Google Chrome is Googles new offering to the web browser market, and was released not so long ago as a beta release that you can download from their website.

I must say that for an initial beta release, Chrome is already an incredibly stable, and feature rich piece of software, and when it becomes more mature I think will give the Firefox browser a run for its money... and cause everyone already knows and loves Google... may tempt some of the long time devoted Internet Explorer users over.

So it's a web browser... How much could Google actually do to improve a web browser?

Well lets see... here are some of Chromes features I like:

One of my superiors is well known for here motto "less is more" and Google has taken that approach with Chrome. Both IE and Firefox offer you a barrage of buttons to click up in your top toolbar... by default, Chrome offers only 5:

• Back
  
• Forward
  
• Reload
  
• Page Settings
  
• Settings
  

And that is it... no file, edit, tools, menu's ect.

Chrome devotes as much space to the actually website you are visiting as it can, so less up the top, and no status bar down the bottom.

One of the best features, and the thing that makes me really love Chrome, is where the newer versions of IE and firefox have the address bar, then a search box where you can search the Internet directly, Chrome merges these into one bar.

In a single text bar, you can type a url to vist a site directly, or enter a search term to search your favourite search engine with (it does not have to be Google), search your Internet searching history, bookmarks ect.

Tabs... yes they are cool, Firefox has used tabs for yonks, and IE finally came on board with tabs in IE7, so we all know how good it can be to have multiple websites open in a single window. The biggest advantage Chrome has is that each browser tab is independent, so if you visit a website that crashes the tab, only that one tab dies, and your whole browser does not crash as it would with Firefox or IE. The flip-side of this however, is because each tab is running independently, if you have many tabs open, Chrome can become quite resource hungry and eat up a fair bit of RAM.

What happens when you open a new tab? Each time you open a new tab, Chrome has a little page it displays in the tab that gives you little screenshots of all your most visited pages, and a list of all your latest bookmarks... making it very easy to return to some of your favourite sites.

Another cool feature with tabs.... you can rearrange the order they appear in, by simply clicking and dragging the tab to the order you want it in... simple, but makes life easy if you have 10+ tabs open and are constantly jumping between a few of them.

So overall... Do I like it? Yep... Love it, and won't be going back to IE or Firefox at the minute.

As it is still a beta release, there a few little bugs, I have found some CSS renders a little odd sometimes, but overall is pretty good. At the minutes, if you open an RSS feed directly in the browser it just displays as a heap of unformatted text, but hey, you can do all the important stuff.

Reflections from above

Well, today marked the end of my month and a bit as acting branch manager, Sydenham Library. Looking back on over the past month, it has given me a new appreciation of what my boss actually does.

I guess from the point of a worker, it is very easy to sit back whenever something goes wrong, or something just does not seem fair, and wonder to yourself "What exactly does my boss do, it doesn't seem like she does anything". Why, yes, to an extent they do none of the labors that make the place function, they are like the mortar in a house. When we think of a wall, we think of the bricks, and they make up the wall... but there is one thing we really don't think about that is holding all those bricks together... the mortar.

When I was first asked to be acting manager, I thought to myself, this is going to be a breeze, the place will pretty much run itself, and I will have so much extra time to get little tasks I have been putting off for ages finished. I can now say, out of all those little tasks, I probably only got around to doing one. I can always tell when I am challenged at work and enjoying it, cause the days and hours just fly by. This experience was like that, it feels like only a couple of days ago I was waving off Inna thinking of what pranks I can set up in her office for when she returns.

This experience has also given me the opportunity to see how things flow from the other side attending co-ordinators meetings and the like. I can see why sometimes despite our constant nagging at the branch, it can be difficult for Inna to commit to trying different things, or improving some workflows.

It appears to me that libraries have so much potential to deliver valuable services to the community and help people better themselves and become technologically more advanced, and lets use the catch cry, become life long learners. I think there is really only one thing currently holding libraries back from achieving this with fantastic results... Librarians. The sooner all these old dinosaurs retire and die, the better. I know it sounds a bit Nazi like, but fire the librarians and burn the books. Whilst trying to give the world the impression that they are now hip, know what a blog is, and can be cool. They are a bunch of scared little old ladies who are too obsessed with trying to keep the piece with everyone, and try to create a model of services and workflows the suite everyone... when basically different areas have different needs, and different needs are often addressed in varying services and procedure to match those needs.

If you are a librarian reading this, yes congratulations you are actually using a fang-dangled computer and reading one of those modern bloggy-who-ze-what's-it's... but maybe you should retire now - Why we are at it, lets change the name library to 'community learning centre', 'technology and information hub'.

To close... the biggest thing I have learnt from my manager stint... write everything down in a diary. It's bloody hard trying to keep track of everything that's happening, and where all your staff are. I shall now go back to being mortal.

New/Improved Web Toys

Well, I haven't posted anything serious lately... except for the seriously easy mug cake... so thought it was time for something with a bit more substance.

Playing about on the net as of late, and a few new/improved services have propped up that could be some fun to have a play around with.

Firstly for whats new....


Google Maps Streetview
http://maps.google.com.au/

You can kill hours satisfying your inner stalker with Google Streetview. Google Maps and Google Earth gave us all the ability to look down onto places via satellite imagery, which was all pretty cool (oh look there is my house, taking up a total of 1 cm of screen space)... now Google has introduced to Google Maps Australia streetview.

Streetview allows you to select a location on almost any Australian street, and get a 360 degree vantage point, as if you were standing there on the street. Its truly amazing. Like the satellite images, it is not live images, and it appears most of the Melbourne stuff was done around Christmas time, as I have my Christmas wreath on my front door.

I knew streetview was being launched this year, but I was truly surprised at the coverage. I was expecting the inner suburbs of the major capitals to be done, but to my surprise you can visit many country towns and have a peek around. With such broad coverage the biggest surprise for me has been that they have not covered Geelong???

You can imagine all the people moaning and groaning out there about privacy, but really, they need to build a bridge and get over it. The images are already at launch over 6 months old, peoples faces, and car number plates are automatically blurred out so you can't be identified. The images are from the view of the street, so if someone really wanted to see what your house looked like they could just drive/walk past and get a more detailed view, as the streetview images loose quality when you zoom in.

What has been improved:

Delicious
http://delicious.com/

Delicious has just recently launched a new platform and interface. Most of the base functionality of delicious appears not to have changed, and most of what has changed seems to be purely cosmetic.

Some of the other changes to the platform include:

• new name... the url is no longer del.icio.us by is now delicious.com this is apparently to make it easier for people to remember the correct URL.


• When you manually post a URL now by typing in the URL to save, delicious now goes and automatically fills in the name/description by checking the URL and returning its page title... this I think is very good functionality, and is one thing I could not understand why it was not in the old del.icio.us


• In the improvements they have dropped support for HTML feeds of your bookmarks. Most people won't even know this is gone because they never realised it existed, but for people like me who built apps from it (for work) we have now had to change to using the REST APIs to return the same data.

Facebook
http://www.new.facebook.com/

Facebook has also undergone some cosmetic changes. At first I was not a fan, but now I can not comprehend what I would not have liked about it.

The new interface loads a lot faster, as not as many elements appear on your screen at once.

I love the new look of profiles, as if you look at someones profile who has installed 101 apps, you don't have to wait for each app to load as you did in the old Facebook, as they are now kept on a separate tab.

The new platform also encourages a lot more social interaction with the ability for people to comment on pretty much anything that appears on your profile, such as your 'status'.

LibraryThing
http://www.librarything.com/

LibraryThing has released a new service which makes all the cover art available on LibraryThing accessible by external app's. In library land, this could be a big competitor to services such as Syndetics which charge for such a service.

The downside... They will only allow you to download 1000 book covers a day, so if you try and integrate the cover art into your library opac, and your opac returns result sets containing 20 items, you will hit your thousand pretty quick.

At Brimbank Christian is working hard on a new catalogue interface to better integrate the catalogue with our web site. To help integrate enhanced features such as cover art into this I have written a little API that sits on our web server, that cache's the cover art from LibraryThing when we initially get it, so we can provide most of our cover art from our own server (its only the first time an items cover is ever displayed it will come down from LibraryThing).

Well that is all I can think of, so if you get bored, have a play on the web and checkout these new/improved services.