Just downloaded Google Chrome, the new web browser from Google. The name itself carries so much trust and weight and this browser gives you such a light feeling. I am writing this after using it for 10 minutes and these are my first impressions.

Plus:
1. Very lightweight user feeling as you browse. Fast and responsive.

2. When you open a new TAB using Ctrl-T it shows you a list of the most visited sites with thumbnails. Most often you will click one of them.

3. Smart text formatting of the address in the URL box. The site URL is highlighted and the remaining query string grayed out making it more readable. If you are visiting a site with https which has a wrong certificate, the word https is crossed with red font.

4. Most distinguishing feature is that it uses more space by getting rid of the window borders at the top and the bottom. The top window border is used by browser tabs and the status bar only show up when there is something to show.

5. It can get and import your Firefox bookmarks.

6. All common controls like Alt + <- , Ctrl+, Ctrl-T, F5 implemented properly.

7. One text entry box for everything. The URL entry box also serves to be your search box too.


Minus:
1. It creates a new process for every tab you open. So if you have 7 tabs, you would have 8 chrome.exe running, with one being the parent process. For me, the parent process occupied around 50+ MB of memory and each tab, occupies around 10 to 30 MB. So its kind of a memory hogger. With Firefox I have around 80MB usage with 7tabs and many plugns installed. With separate process, one important thing they achieved is that if there is a crash on one site only that tab gets crashed and not the entire browser like Firefox or IE.

2. Saved password not controlled by master password. Atleast I could not find it in my 10-minute review. If I cant find it or it does not come in a Google update, I will definitely not be using this browser. I cant remember all my passwords and I want my browser to save it but protect it by a master password.

3.Ctrl+ only does a text zoom, unlike in Firefox 3 where it does image zoom too. Not a big deal, but just a thing to note.

4. No third party plugin integration. One big factor why people like Firefox.

5. No built it spell check when you type in text in forms' text area.

6. Could not post this blog entry using Chrome as some of the review and edit buttons were not working :-(

Interesting link:
1. Chrome's lead engineer was Firefox's lead engineer once and how Google abandoned Firefox

2. A simple way to make Chrome crash.
Happy Chroming.//

A must use tool for every high-productivity desktop users and a great relief for people coming from Linux or Hummingbird interface which always supported multiple desktop sessions.

Download the recently published, small (62KB) tool called Desktop v1.0 from Microsoft Sysinternals and try it out. You have multiple options to toggle between desktops including the linux conventional Alt-F1,F2,F3,F4 keystrokes. I just installed a few minutes back and I am loving it.

As a side note, it allows you to create up to 4 desktops but I get an error saying that enough space is available to create the 4th desktop.

Happy Desktopping.//

__LPREFIX is actually not a pre-processor macro though it is used like a macro. It is the MS VC++ compiler and not the pre-processpor which actually handles this. This can be used to add the L-prefix to a string thereby making it a wide string (wchar_t).

Example: The following two lines are the same.

wchar_t* msg = L"Hello World!";
wchar_t* msg = __LPREFIX("Hello World!");

This however does not explain the need to use this prefix. Where would it be useful?

If you have something like

#define MSG "Hello World!"

You cant do

wchar_t* msg = L MSG;  //error

The only way to get around this is either to call the Narrow to Wide conversion routines or just say

wchar_t* msg = __LPREFIX( MSG );

If you are using only wchar_t in your code and you want the wide version of macros like __DATE__, __LINE__, __FUNCTION__, etc then this could be helpful.

#define __WDATE__ __LPREFIX( __DATE__ )
#define __WTIME__ __LPREFIX( __TIME__ )
#define __WFUNCTION__ __LPREFIX( __FUNCTION__ )

As a side note, a cross platform (and the correct) way to get the wide version of a predefined macro like __FILE__ is :

#define WIDEN2(x) L ## x
#define WIDEN(x) WIDEN2(x)
#define __WFILE__ WIDEN(__FILE__)

Another undocumented VC++ related string "macro" is __SPREFIX which is used to create a managed string object(.Net) from a string.
Example:

System::String^ date = __SPREFIX( __DATE__ )

Fun: The MS VC++ 2005, VC++ 2008 compiler crashes if you try to compile the following program:

#include <windows.h>
#define DATA __SPREFIX( __DATE__ )
int main() {
	DATA;
	return 0;
}

Well, they never documented it anyways.

Related link: Go get Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition. Its free.

Happy Prefixing.//

1. 30 Great Website Designs - Part 1

2. 30 Great Website Designs - Part 2

3. 30 Great Website Designs - Part 3

4. 30 Great Website Designs - Part 4

5. 30 Great Website Designs - Part 5

6. 30 dirty web designs

7. 50 Beautiful CSS-Based Web-Designs in 2006

8. Web design inspiration set at Flickr



Happy Designing.//

I have learned and practiced "continuous development" and "continuous engineering". Does something called "continuous destruction" exist? I think it does exist, its just that we don't consider it as an area of study or practice in the Software Development Life Cycle. I think disposition of a component of a system is critical to its survival in this fast moving world of technology.

Continuous destruction should happen at all levels of the engineering community. From the top level product management to the individual coder, we should probably have the attitude to identify what to throw away and come up with something better.

It usually happens that we wait for the system to become obsolete or wait for someone to tell us that we need something better. After a new system is developed and delivered we generally sit down and relax and go into dividend earning mode.

So what’s stops you from destruction? Is it the lack of courage to change your “presently good system”? Is it the courage to tell yourself what runs short in your existing system? I think it’s the lack of inputs to decide what’s important and what’s not important for the system. What else?

In my current life as a developer, most of the successful designers are those who seem to have the guts to throw away their existing work or constantly evaluate parallel technology. These developers end up delivering more quality components. How many time shave you seen successful consumer products change their User Interface. Many do. Dont they?

The idea of "destruction" however is not studied as a phase in the Software Development Life Cycle, which I think we should be doing. Not doing so, makes different people with different roles in the project have separate ideas and energy about the idea of software destruction.

Related interesting link: Would Google destroy Digg or take it to the next level?

Happy destruction.//