I’ve just installed the brand-spanking-new Google Chrome beta (previous post), and I must say, I like the way the UI feels and works. The interface really allows you to focus on the site or webapp you’re using. Google pays homage to browsers like Safari, Opera, and Firefox in their introductory comic (http://books.google.com/books?id=8UsqHohwwVYC&printsec=frontcover), but my initial impression is that Google has done an incredible job of adapting and improving other’s implementations.

Now for some screenshots for those who’ve not yet installed it. The “Stats for nerds” link in the memory usage dialog box made me chuckle a little (third screen below). And notice that in the memory usage screen, Chrome shows memory utilization for other browsers (Firefox 3 is listed in the fourth screen below).

Chrome has insanely fast JavaScript execution via the V8 engine created by Google Denmark. See the Dromaeo results for Chrome (381.20ms - http://dromaeo.com/?id=30827) versus Dromaeo results for Firefox (1338.60ms - http://dromaeo.com/?id=30827) and Safari (1399.60ms - http://dromaeo.com/?id=30842). Of note there is that I have Chrome running in a virtual machine, VMWare Fusion, which means it could be even faster when running natively on the Mac.

While I haven’t necessarily put Chrome through its paces, I have gotten it to Sad Tab once so far - and it was while using Google Analytics. Maybe their test driven development process (mentioned in the comic) should have stuck closer to home awhile longer.

Chrome also seems to have trouble vetting its own Adsense site’s SSL certificate, but that’s probably related to my not having placed the www in the URL.

In all I’ve found Google Chrome to be an excellent browser thus far - it’s fast and stable, and integrated Google Gears is going to mean a much higher rate of adoption by developers. Time will tell if this is truly an early phase of the Google OS, but as web browsers go, Chrome is top-notch.

Google Chrome is a new web browser built on WebKit (the same HTML engine used by Apple Safari) designed from the ground up with web applications in mind. Security, speed, and stability in Google Chrome is paramount, with sandboxed tabs, the V8 JavaScript engine, and a multiprocessing architecture.

See the Wikpedia entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome

Prior to the press conference being held at 18:00 GMT (GMT converter) where the beta will be announced, Google has released a comic about Chrome. In my opinion this is a really interesting way to generate buzz about a product. http://books.google.com/books?id=8UsqHohwwVYC&printsec=frontcover

Paul Thurrott, noted Microsoft and Windows pundit, has an early preview and his take on Chrome. http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/google_chrome_preview.asp

Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters paint the Mona Lisa in 80 milliseconds. Check out this video taken during NVIDIA’s NVISION show.

Mark Anders from Adobe gave a preview of Thermo and Flash Player 10 at the 360|Flex conference. It’s a good video for designers interested in Flex-based RIA UI development and for Flex programmers interested in what’s on the horizon for designer/developer collaboration.

For those not familiar with Microsoft Photosynth, and even for those who are, the following video might knock your socks off.

Hilarious and astoundingly accurate map of the brain of a web developer.

http://mingle2.com/blog/view/web-developer-mind

Love the “deprecated brainmeats” callout.

Grant Skinner and his team have created a new tweening engine for AS3 that, in his words, better fit the needs of his team. And may fit yours better, too - it’s at least worth checking out.

http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/08/gtween_a_new_tw.html

Aspects that look interesting to me: the Proxy tweening feature, the timeInterval and timingMode (frame, time, or hybrid) properties, sequencing tweens and synchronizing tweens. All in only 4.5 K.

Once I get a chance to do some experiments with gTween, I’ll update this post.

From their FAQ:
pptPlex is a research prototype developed by Microsoft Office Labs as an exploration of an alternative method of presenting Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 slides. This plug-in allows you to arrange slides on a canvas then zoom between the slides during the presentation. You can move around the canvas and show groups of slides, individual slides, or even zoom in to show a particular section of a slide.

pptPlex is based on the Plex technology demoed by Bill Gates in the TouchWall at the Microsoft CEO Summit 2008 (also developed by Microsoft Office Labs).

Videos available here:
http://www.officelabs.com/projects/pptPlex/Pages/default.aspx

Ryan Lanciaux, a .NET developer and friend of mine, has created a JavaScript-based Visual Studio theme generator. Use it to create great looking color schemes for viewing and editing code in Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008.

http://www.frickinsweet.com/tools/Theme.mvc.aspx

Adaptive Path (including Jesse James Garret, who coined the now-ubiquitous term “AJAX") and Mozilla have been putting together Aurora, their vision of what the landscape of web browsing in the future could look like.

I think the radial menus look like an interesting concept - although their behavior probably needs to be fleshed out better to be to be used rapidly by most users. It’s probably more of an advanced user feature - the 3D modeling and animation software Maya has had radial menus for years, which makes sense for that demographic, but hasn’t really caught on in other areas.

The woman in the demo video is able to change her focus quickly using a three-dimensional “spatial” view of open “web pages”. Along with that, one feature that looks incredibly useful is the highlighted contextual grouping of pages and other elements in this 3D view.

See the video for part 1 below.

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.