I looked at Google’s Chrome browser by going through the walk-through clips, and it actually has some merits! People have complained about an increased memory issue. I can’t believe people actually worry about memory usage nowadays. Even my 2 year old laptop has 2GB of memory.

I’m not here to slag off Chrome (it is ‘beta’ after all), or worship its greatness, but to just adjust my thoughts on the browser according to the hype. What’s important is not how badly it does things other things do better, but how Google has tackled an extremely difficult problem of redesigning a web browser, in a way that it simplifies browsing for most people. Please note, I haven’t tried the browser, as it’s only for Windows right now.

One box for everything

Makes sense. Most browsing tends to start with a search nowadays, even if it’s a site you know address to.

New Tab page

Requirement in every browser. makes sense.

Application shortcuts

Silly. Makes things more complicated. Adding more ways of achiving the same task (loading web page) may confuse people.

Dynamic tabs

Good innovation that I first saw with Safari (3?). Should be there in all tab interfaces

Crash control

lol. reminds me of how Windows Mobile has a task manager. There are simpler ways of task managing and indicating misbehaving apps! E.g. press close on the tab or fade window to show it’s not active.

Incognito mode

Makes sense for secret browsing. Incognito is a bad word to use though. I didn’t even know what it meant at first.

Safe browsing

These big messages confuse people – I remember when designing Firefox 3, the Mozilla Foundation went through loads of different designs for notifying users that a certificate is invalid/to warn people about installing add-ons. The ones rejected for being too scary were less scary than the Chrome ones. Actually, a quick search showed that for managing current-page SSL certificates it still shows a scary box. We’ve all seen it.

Instant bookmarks

Is this in terms of interaction? Because that doesn’t seem so instant to me. Needs to be synced easily and searched via web! I assume, though – and it would make sense – that the address bar also searches bookmarks.

Importing settings

*Yawn. But I agree that it has to be shown as a feature.

Simpler downloads

Now THIS is a worthy feature that I am genuinely impressed with. Even a web geek like me gets ticked off with the complexity of viewing download progress, extraction, finding files.This fixes part of that problem by taking up screen space, which forces you to keep your downloads organised. I guess, same principle as the downloads drawer in Leopard.

I was involved as web consultant and designer for the rebranding of The British HCI Group to “Interaction”. This involved the complete transfer of all content from their old website into the Drupal CMS and redesign based on their new image. This site was optimised for AA accessibility, a simple user experience and of course, SEO. In fact, I’m proud to announce that searching for HCI on Google actually results in my site being second place, after Wikipedia!

Visit the Interaction website.

Just been getting to grips with the CodeIgniter MVC framework built on PHP using the book from Wrox: Professional CodeIgniter. Having tried RoR and ASP.net, and gone through the days of highly productive but low maintenance spaghetti code, worshipping the monolithic PEAR libraries, making my own frameworks around templating engines, I think – why do I even bother? Why not stick to the language you know better than your mother tongue – in my case – PHP. The author, Thomas Myer, makes a convincing argument about this, saying that some people may view this as being an intellectual coward. But if we achieve tasks and make the client happy, why waste their money training yourself to learn a new language?

While I haven’t worked on a proper project with this framework yet, it seems an awesome blend of MVC’s simple-to-understand coding structure with a massive time-saving library of helpers. Never before has web development with PHP seemed so friendly – times have moved on since I was an active freelance developer 3-4 years ago, and is my cue to get my ass into gear and keep up with the times!

What’s the difference between the agile software development methodology and user-centered design I learned so much about in the HCI courses? I guess, theyre both based on the same core concept of letting the client have a core part to play in development and have iterative cycles.

Everyone is incorporating social into their web applications, to the point where there is so much noise created by the new startups. The few that do emerge as being widely used can provide inspiration for the mobile. We can take aspects from the successes, remix them, and apply them to other settings. Notable here, as part of my ongoing interests in mobile UE, is the importance of mobile search. When we’re out and about we may want to find out that quick snippet of information nagging you on a train. Or maybe you want to find out the best restaurant in an unfamiliar area. These are typical use scenarios that are immediately obvious. If we turned the latter example on its head, and describe a use scenario where people want to find better restaurants in a familiar environment, the situation becomes more difficult. No longer would users be content with a simple average “star rating” given by other visitors to the restaurant. How about finding the best steak amongst the local chinese take-aways? (Believe me, people love these wok-fried steaks.) How about the best place for a quick desert, that offers a comfortable local atmosphere?

Whoever provides a solution that lets you quickly assess the surrounding areas for recommendations based on relevant filters based on social context, specific culinary preferences, time of day, and dynamically changing qualities of restaurants that in the past can only come from word of mouth are sure to make a few bucks. Maybe we can take inspiration from (social) web 2.0 and bring this into (social) mobile 2.0.

“There is also a fundamental design problem that has never before occured in the past, but will completely free and open-ended interface designs hinder the end-user at all?”. “With the advent of these two new technologies (Adobe Flex/AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight and WPF), has come the first wave of experimental applications. I’ve been testing a few Adobe AIR demos and I’ve noticed one very significant thing.

Never before has any programming API allowed such flexibility and ease and above all, creative freedom when designing user interfaces.”

My reply: this thing about consistency in Nielsen’s 10 user interface heuristics is probably a good thing. We now find UI consistency in websites more than ever before – you expect top-level navigation to be at top of screen, then sub-nav somewhere along the side and content in the middle column. We also tend to ignore adverts on the edge and extreme top of the page, because that’s where we expect them to be. Web users have learned this model of presentation, and as a result spend a little bit of time working their way around sites that don’t abide by these “urban standards”. But the time taken is probably no more than a “consistent” client application.

WPF style apps will allow UI designers to flexibly present their UI together with the context-sensitive help we see in websites next to everything – so that we don’t need to remember where things are, just know how to read labels. So if the push goes towards the web paradigm–consistency like how the web turned from the geocities era to the present web 2.0-style sites–then I think all this won’t be a problem.

Additionally, consistent UIs for the web would be boring! For client apps, yeh, that’s good. WPF apps strive to present information in a more dynamic and visual way (what people want), and wouldn’t all this be made a bit boring for the user with a consistent UI, using exactly the same widgets everywhere?

Apart from a select few, the life-cycle of “applications” are changing. Widgets and apps exchanging data from the web are the new. Interoperability of data is now so important because of this. We now have the choice to choose the UI we use to access the same data! (Think Netvibes, Google Maps/Flickr mashups and OSX’s Dashboard.) Semantic web people are loving all of this change…

Thanks Phi

I tested this out, and I can surely say that the feature is cute, and so worth checking out if you like cute stuff. It’s nothing amazing, though, but this is a sign that Google is really learning from the insane desire we have to customise our mobiles.

• Similar to this: weather desktop background changer (MyDreamApp.com)
• Read more at Google’s blog

Socialight, like Plazes, does what it can within the technical limitations of Java ME phones; searching for and manually placing notes in locations or by using an SMS-based interface.

The partners, in a paper entitled “Socialight: A Mobile Social Networking System [pdf]” mentioned that Socialight can glean location data using a number of different methods – Bluetooth, GPS and network operator data. However, this functionality has yet to filter itself into usable form.

So far, nothing new. Plazes.com did all of this at the end of 2005, and Google Earth Communities enabled people to label positions in the world in August 2005. What kind of emergent sociality will arise from situated information spaces? How can we harness all this data in a more useful way?