Shane Fagan » Google Chrome

Packaging and ppa firsts (for me at least)

Shane — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 02:31:53 +0000

Today I spent the day messing about with local packaging and manually uploading to my ppa. I had already done some ppa and packaging using quickly but its a lot easier than I thought to do it manually. So what I ended up with is jorge’s chromium google apps package but one that works with chrome from google itself. You can find it in my ppa and the code for it is in my bzr. Oh and I found out something cool, apt url works in chrome (dont ask me how it just does and it doesnt work in the omnibar) Try it out here if you want.
Update: just realized that it uses xdg-open to open the link which explains why apturl works. Its still awesome that google got it working.

Google chrome hidden but awesome feature

Shane — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:32:36 +0000

Ok at the moment chrome does most of what firefox does at the moment but not much difference. I found a button in chrome that does something awesome.

What that says is “Create application shotcuts”. No its not a funny way to say bookmark it to the desktop. Its the exact same idea as mozilla prism. Its a website acting like an application on the computer. So it adds a menu shortcut or desktop shortcut to run the website like an application.

Then it runs in a window with just webkit.

It is a nice feature and it adds the menu shortcuts itself witch is great too. I didnt notice it before and in truth its not the most special feature but it is good that they thought outside the box when it comes to the web becoming more application like. The lines really do blur when you start seeing google docs like an application on your computer.

Oh OGG when will it be your time….?

Shane — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:56:42 +0000

I’m an optimist, specifically for ubuntu and the open source/free software world. One thing that puzzles me is OGG Theora and Vorbis. We see Wikimedia (Wikipedia, wikidictonary…etc) using OGG technologies as well as mozilla, google and opera embracing it. It is included by default in nearly all linux distributions (I say nearly all because I cant think of any that dont but id say some don’t have it). They are the only freely distributable codecs around.

So why am I still unsure about OGG being used worldwide as the standard for audio/video files?
1. It wont be standardized as part of HTML5
2. MP3 although outdated are still installed on more devices sold on the market.
3. No big company is pushing its adoption
4. Even people who support free software have no reason to encode their library into free formats.
5. The ubuntu one music store (going by the meeting at the UDS) more than likely wont offer OGGs as a download option.
6. Google bought On2, so they might push VP8 to the main stage by using it in Google Chrome (the browser and the OS) and on Youtube as embedded HTML5 video.

I think at the moment more can be done to encourage the use of OGGs, comparing sizes and emphasizing the free part is all well and good but it doesn’t push it to the users. Its an aggressive market, MP3, MP4 and WMA all are pushed to the users by massive companies like Apple and Microsoft. Ubuntu, Fedora, Open Solaris, FreeBSD and Opensuse (there are loads i’m not going to list them all) all distribute OGG codecs but it just seems that not many users use them and thats a shame.

Me personally I don’t use them because I have way too much music and video to convert and there wouldn’t be much point because if I convert it all I will have a degradation in quality because each codec removes different parts of the tracks. Plus I have an iPod and that doesn’t play OGGs. (before anyone asks I looked into it and I couldn’t find any OGG players in any of the shops I visited in Ireland)

One thing I have to say as a great side note is that FLAC is the most used lossless codec around and that is such a awesome example of how a free software product can dominate just because its great.

Google Chrome

Shane — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 02:42:14 +0000

I downloaded chrome from the dev preview thingy and I have to say im very happy. The level of detail is bloody awesome, like they added a repo for updates and they have an option to respect the gtk theme you have installed. I never thought chrome would be that unstable since the main engine is based on webkit which im a big fan of already. So all in all I like chrome and if there is a stable release version before lucid+1 id love to talk about including it by default.

Google chrome weirdness with basic html

Shane — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 02:37:42 +0000

I just looked at my site and google chome doesnt understand height or width tags for images. I only use it for the ubuntu logo for my link to the ubuntu website but it looks really large in Chrome. Firefox and internet explorer handle dimension changes fine but chrome has some trouble.
On the website front I added a cool timeline for (almost) everything I do online looks nice and its really easy to set up.

Update: Alls fixed now, I was using the native dimensions to set the size for me. Firefox and IE both managed to use the image small but chrome must render the image differently on the page so it wasnt the height and width tags after all. I was just being dumb.