Rant: Chrome for Android
I have yet to understand why Google Chrome for Android never bothers to synchronize your profile and passwords. It is kind of frustrating to be using the same web browser that I use on my desktop. One I know synchronizes my usernames and passwords and yet I still have to enter in and resave all my usernames and passwords for any website that I decide to visit on my Android tablet. It is kind of ridiculous.
How Software Ruins Ratings
I'm a long time Harry Potter fan. It's part of my childhood like most people my age. I'd gone to the theaters to see every single movie, except for 7P2. I read today that Amazon was having a rental sale on the movie (apparently it normally costs more than $1.99 to rent it on Amazon?). Either way, I went to the page and I was absolutely surprised to see the rating for the movie was only 2 and a half stars!
Even if the movie was terrible, there would clearly be such a massive amount of fans rating the thing that it'd probably hit four stars.. but two and a half? Not even a full three? What was going on here?
A quick glance at the "customer reviews" told me everything I needed to know. The full copy included some software called "Ultraviolet," the main cause of over 200 1 star reviews.
Ultraviolet is another feeble, doomed attempt by some dinosaur brain Hollywood execs to restrict the use of your legally bought digital purchase. Ultraviolet is NOT a digital copy that resides on a device of your choice to be used on a device of your choice. It is a streaming service, for which you have to sign up and maintain an account, at the expense of your bandwidth, compatible with some but not all mobile devices. If you're willing to wait another 4 weeks, order this disc set from Amazon's UK website you can do this with your current US account). Not only are you getting a REAL digital copy, but the Blu-ray disc is region free too!! Price + shipping is the same as the price in USD with free shipping.
So, that wrapped up that mystery. Horrible software is murdering ratings. A damn shame.
Something Chrome Needs
There is a very common type of extension for Google Chrome, and that happens to be the “Notifier” type.
You have GMail Notifiers, Google Voice Notifiers, Google Reader, Google Docs, OWA, Facebook, Twitter, etc etc. Wouldn’t it be nice if Google Chrome just had a single Notification Center with a fantastic User Interface for showing notifications from whatever services register themselves with it?
I think it would, and over the summer – if I have spare time – I think I’m going to program an extension that will can accept additions for showing notifications. I’ll then ask around for help and/or program some basic services for it to use, and post it to the Chrome WebApp Store.
My next questions are:
- Would you use this? Is it a good idea?
- Would you code for this?
- Would you purchase this for $1?
At the moment, I’ve got plenty of cool programming projects, and I’m not making money with any of them. GVOMS is almost entirely free (no companies have purchased a license to use), and anything else I’ve done so far has been free and open source.
So unless people are going to start donating to me – which I’m pretty sure you aren’t – I need to find some way to make money. I’m a college student, after all.
And I don’t think $1 would be too much to ask for a unified notification center in Google Chrome, do you?
A Desired Feature for Cydia
I’m not really a gigantic apple fan, but thanks to my parents and the art of Hand-Me-Downs I managed to acquire an iPhone 3G.
I’ve been using this 3G for awhile, and of course one of the things I absolutely had to do with it was Jailbreak the device. I don’t pirate or anything, but Jailbreaking it does bring fantastic changes to it that simply would not have been possible on the 3G otherwise.
For example, I use Z-Toggle and Bootlace: Z-Toggle for activating nice little features (Background Wallpaper, Battery Percentage) and Bootlace for giving me Android as an optional boot-method (iDroid is far from completion, though), and I just now finished installing and modifying the settings for Backgrounder, since 4.2 broke native multi-tasking on the old 3G device (I have no idea why), and I’ve already got accustomed to using it.
But there is one problem with Cydia I don’t believe has been addressed yet, and it would be nice if Cydia were to automatically store your custom sources and a list of the programs you’ve installed, so that when you re-install a new iOS (by starting from scratch so that you don’t continually lose space on your iPhone) and re-jailbreak your device, it sees the file and also helps convert your iPhone back to the jailbroken way it was.
This would be a very nice feature, and one I’m sure anyone would welcome.
Making More Natural Desktop Notifications in Chrome
Do you have a website or application that uses Google Chrome Desktop Notifications? Well, let me just share with you this very simple snippit of code that will make their interaction a lot more natural.
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <style> html * { font-family: sans-serif; } h1 { padding: 0; margin: 0; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: bold; } body { font-size: 10pt; } </style> <script> function changeLinks() { for(var i = 0;i < document.getElementsByTagName("a").length;i++) { ele = document.getElementsByTagName("a")[i]; ele.target = "_blank"; } } function detectClick(e) { var rightclick; if (!e) { var e = window.event; } if (e.which) { rightclick = (e.which == 3); } else if (e.button) { rightclick = (e.button == 2); } if (rightclick) { self.close(); } } </script> </head> <body onload="document.timeout = setTimeout(self.close,5000);changeLinks();" onmouseover="clearTimeout(document.timeout);" onmouseout="document.timeout = setTimeout(self.close,5000);" onmouseup="detectClick();"> <a style="display:block;cursor:normal;padding:0;margin:0;color:black;text-decoration:none;" onclick="self.close();" href="/link/" target="_blank"> <h1>Title</h1> <span>Message</span> </a> </body></html>
Thats really all there is to it. Lives on a 5 second time. If you hover over it, it stays longer, if you right click it it closes. If you click it it goes to /link/. Quite nifty, if I do say so myself.
Its slightly buggy regarding links in the message.. but meh.
Using Google Voice with Outlook’s Dialer
Microsoft Outlook has this very nifty feature where you can connect your computer to the phone line and use your Outlook Contact List to instantly dial someone’s number. Of course, when they created this they needed to add support for using a calling card, as long distance in the same country hadn’t even begun to be free.
Now if you use Google Voice, you can use this to your advantage with the simple addition of just a few seconds to the call.
Continue Reading for Instructions on how to Outlook up to dial through Google Voice
Features Wanted in Skype
I realized there are some neat little features I would love to see in Skype (while playing around with Microsoft Outlook and getting it to call out using Google Voice, I’ll blog about that next).
Calls Out Using Modem
Doesn’t Skype do some fantastic Skype-Out thing where you can even use a specific number as a calling card and call out using it? A whole crapload of notebooks and desktops still ship with modems, why not utilize it! If you don’t have a connection to the net (or you’re just crazy), you could call out using a Skype-Out Call-In Number! Wouldn’t that be AWESOME?
Calls Out with Calling Card through Modem
Yeah, yeah, companies don’t like competition or whatnot, but if the previous is supported, why not spice it up a little and allow us to use a different calling card through the settings? That would allow Google Voice users to make outbound calls using Google Voice through Skype, and that would just be AWESOME.
Answering Calls Through Modem
Is your phone ringing? Yeah, don’t you wish you could pick it up using Skype? All it has to do is learn to speak through the modem and BABOOSH, you can now answer your landline ON SKYPE (GOOGLE VOICE MAKES THIS MORE AWESOME).
Contact Synchronization with Google
Come ON. EVERYTHING needs this.
Dear Chrome: What the Hell is This?
I love that you finally added previews for each of your tabs, that amazing Windows 7 feature that all of your competitors adopted before you…
But what the light is this? Why on earth are there this mini-windows, and why are the preview windows themselves so faded out? Not to mention it doesn’t even WORK when you have Chrome minimized…
I love you Chrome, but you need to fix these in the next dev release. NEED.
My Problem with ID3 Taggers
I have yet to find one that will automatically tag my vast library of music that isn’t English.
I love animé, and until about my third girlfriend I didn’t have much or any music on my computer, I didn’t watch many videos either. My library was dull and void. But now, I have 532 songs occupying 2.7 Gibibytes of data, and I’m pretty sure less than 100 of those are English. Some of the music I don’t expect to get any data from, music my friends made, or I don’t know the origin of at all, but I have a lot of Japanese singles that were openings and endings from anime, or were in an anime, but all of these singles also belonged to albums, or had album artwork, or an artist, or all kinds of rich information that isn’t in my library – or are in any of the main databases.
To top it off, I tried using some auto-tagging software I don’t remember the name of anymore, didn’t clearly understand the instructions, and screwed up the tags on a whole heck of a lot of my music, so now I have some songs I don’t know the names, artists, or album info to at all as its improperly labeled (and in Japanese).
Someone (I’d be willing to help any way I could) should compile a database of the way songs sound (Some type of wavelength ID that could easily identify a song via a piece of it, identify different versions, etc.), approaching music labels and artists from the United States, Britain, Australia, Japan, and all those other countries.
Or does such software already exist, and I simply don’t know about it? If you know something I don’t, please leave it in the comments =)