Today, the team released a series of eleven short films about the browser, and they’re really worth a watch. “Features List” happens to be one of my favorite ones because it presents the browser’s key features in an unusually refreshing manner.

The “Google Chrome” clip, with its upbeat music and trippy colors, almost feels somewhat like a mix between an ad for Target and an Apple product.

And then there’s “Evolution of Simple” — which is just brilliant in its own simplicity. :)

Watch them all on the YouTube Google Chrome channel.

But there’s one thing I was never quite happy with — Outlook Web Access, the Exchange webmail interface. Firstly, if you’re using any browser other than Internet Explorer, OWA falls back to a clumsy, limited-functionality mode. And even when you are using IE, the 2003 version of OWA has really started showing its age. While cross-browser support has improved somewhat in OWA 2007 (which I tested in a virtualized environment recently), it’s still not quite where I’d like it to be.

When it comes to web-based email, I consider Gmail to be the shining star — the UI is clean and simple, navigation is blisteringly fast, and its threaded messaging implementation is an absolute killer feature. Offline access to Gmail and Google Calendar is now possible using Google Gears. iPhones and other smartphones can also synchronize with Google Contacts and Calendar using the recently released Google Sync service (which, interestingly, happens to use Exchange ActiveSync to “push” updates back and forth). The only missing piece now is push Gmail, and that might be coming soon too.

So will the Google Apps suite finally be a truly viable, free alternative to small-scale Exchange Server installations like mine in the coming months?  I think so. After all, it’s basically becoming something like a hosted Exchange account with a vastly better webmail interface. So if and when “push” Gmail does become available, I’ll definitely be giving it a very close second look.

After my previous post on the subject, I decided that I really needed to get some hands-on time with a few netbooks in order to make a decision. Because they’re all so similar in terms of hardware configuration, it really comes down to the smaller details.

So I went downtown to the J&R store here in NYC to have a look. They seem to have the widest selection of netbooks on display, compared to other retailers like Best Buy, etc. For about 20 minutes, I tried out a few different ASUS Eee PCs, the MSI Wind, two HP Mini models, the Acer Aspire One, and a white Samsung NC10. They didn’t have the Dell Mini and the Lenovo S10. The choice wasn’t very difficult…

I immediately realized that I simply couldn’t put up with anything smaller than a 10″ display, and that narrowed down the selection considerably. Next, I knew I wanted all the battery life I could get — after all, these things are meant to be on-the-go machines, so you don’t want to worry about hunting for the nearest power source all the time. The Samsung NC10 ships with a 6-cell battery;  reviews indicated that it could easily pull off 6 – 7 hours with WiFi on, and the brightness turned down a bit. And because the 6-cell is standard on the NC10, it doesn’t stick out like the “extended” batteries do on most other machines.

I liked what I saw of the NC10 — the build quality was solid, the screen appeared bright and sharp without the awful glossy coating that seems all too common these days, the keyboard had a good size and feel, and it was tiny and light. But I wasn’t quite sold on the toy-like white model that J&R had in stock.

So that night, I ordered a black one from Newegg, and it arrived the next day in a shockingly small box. My initial impressions were summarized in less than 140 characters, and that opinion hasn’t changed since… :)

Recently, I’ve been thinking about getting a laptop again. I still don’t foresee myself using it every day, but I’d like to have one to carry on trips, and something that I can occasionally use outdoors, or in the living room, etc. Plus, it’s always handy to have a second machine to experiment with.

With that in mind, my requirements this time are a little different…

1) Small and light.
2) Great battery life. Higher the better.
3) Cheap.

Since it’s a secondary machine, I’m willing to settle for a small display and take a hit on performance. After all, the desktop’s always around when I need two big screens and enough horsepower to run three operating systems simultaneously. :)

Looking back at that list, I realized something. I realized that this relatively new class of sub-notebooks that people are calling “netbooks” fits the bill almost perfectly. And with nearly every major computer company jumping on the bandwagon, there’s certainly no shortage of choices!

So which one is it going to be?

“Garamond Powerline” is something of an intricate experiment in typography — a typeface composed entirely of images of electrical power lines. Each letter of the alphabet is beautifully crafted with its own unique personality.

Taken as a whole, the typeface is also surprisingly usable; scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the “quick brown fox” sample.

Kudos to the designer, Daniel, for this little gem!

[via waxy.org]

The latest Messenger beta build introduced a number of major changes, including what appears to be the removal of the “Shared Folders” feature and the official “add-ins” API. As you might imagine, Twessenger relied on this API in order to hook into the application.

I haven’t had the time to dig deeper to figure out if there’s anything I can do to work around this, but the odds of a fix coming anytime soon, if ever, are very low at this point. I’m going to steer away from attempting to use undocumented and unofficial methods because they’re bound to break with any future Messenger updates, and I really don’t have the time to provide support and write patches.

I’m sorry if this answer is a let-down for you. I hope that someone out there can provide a working solution that you can migrate over to soon. Thanks for all the feedback and kind words that many of you sent in during Twessenger’s lifetime. It was fun while it lasted. :)

So what’s new?

• More reliable: Completely re-written from scratch to use the latest Twitter API.
• Easier to set up: Just install, enable the plugin, and enter your Twitter username. You no longer need to search for your numeric Twitter ID.
• New options: You can now change the update interval, and choose to ignore all Twitter replies – i.e. messages beginning with @
• Automatic update notifications: Twessenger 2.0 will automatically notify you when new versions are available!

Download: Twessenger 2.0

So I’ve finally decided to start working on an update – Twessenger 2.0, so to speak. Since there have been major changes to the Twitter API since the last version was released, I’ve decided to simply start afresh and rewrite Twessenger from the ground up. It’ll be more robust, more user-friendly (no need to hunt for your Twitter ID anymore, for example), and it’ll have some new features that people have been asking for.

No promises, but I should have a download link ready this weekend. :)

If you’re still hesitant, watch this screencast by Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner, in which he introduces some of the major new features; you’re bound to be impressed.

If I had to pick my favorite feature, it would have to be the revamped address bar (check out the screencast to see it in action), but I also like the integrated add-on manager, and pause/resume support in the new download manager.

Vista users – install the Glasser extension to enable the Aero Glass effect on the browser chrome. Now you’ve got a browser that fits in much better, visually, with the rest of the system. :)

The most significant bit of news – my brother officially got engaged on May 25th in California! I took a week off from work to fly there and spend some time with the family. He will be moving there in August to start a post-doc at Stanford, and his fiancé works at IBM in San Jose, so it works out perfectly for them. The marriage is scheduled for December 25th in India, and I’ll be making a trip back there after nearly 5 years!

Work has been keeping me busy. In fact, I hear that June happens to be one of the craziest months every year for our team. We’ve been working on a major re-architecture of our application during the last couple of months, and we’re now just days away from wrapping it up and pushing it into production. I’ve also been spending quite a bit of time on the trading floor and learning more about the business side.

Apart from that, the fun goes on during weekends. It didn’t take 10 months of living in NYC for me to realize that it’s easily one of the best cities to be in, but now I simply can’t be convinced to believe anything else!

I’m playing around with a few ideas that might help me to keep more frequent updates coming in the future; let’s see how that works out. Hoping it doesn’t have to come down to another flu next time. :)