Nick.pro

Mofuse.mobi down with MySQL Errors

NickMoline — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:20:30 +0000

The Blog Mobile Site creator service Mofuse is down today with a MySQL Error.

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Nick.pro Migrated to Drupal

NickMoline — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:14:55 +0000

I have successfully migrated the nick.pro site from the Wordpress blog that it has been for ages, into Drupal. This is perhaps the most unusual migration of this blog (and I've moved this blog several times now), in that I don't actually consider Drupal to be a better blogging software then Wordpress, in fact, I find Wordpress to be the absolute best blogging software available today. However I've long wanted nick.pro to be something more then just a blog, I've wanted it to be a whole site showcasing what I'm up to online and off, and Drupal is a far better CMS platform for a more robust site then just a blog.

While Drupal works fine as a blog, where it really shines is in it's flexibility. There are Third Party Modules available to do almost anything you can imagine, and for those things you can't imagine, it's a robust php framework for coding my own modules to do even more incredible things.

For the moment, all I've accomplished is migrating my old blog content, making sure all of the URLs redirect correctly, and adding an activity stream to show my recent activity on various online sites (twitter, digg, youtube, and flickr to start, more to come).

This is far from the first time I have migrated my blog. Stay tuned after the break for a brief glimpse of how this site has progressed from "Cap's Log" on Movable Type 2, to Nick.pro running on Drupal today.

Originally, this blog (which used to be a subdomain of subspacelink.com) ran on Movable Type 2, which at the time was an excellent platform (and still is in it's version 4 update). At the time I was primarily a perl developer, so it made sense to standardize on a perl platform, I quite enjoyed finding Plugins for MT and even writing a few of my own.

Nearly a full year after the blog launched, I made it's first major migration to BLOG:CMS, which is based on the Nucleus CMS Blogging platform. My primary reason for this migration was that I could no longer upgrade Movable Type without paying a license fee, and as I much preferred Open Source software, I decided the time had come to migrate to a new platform.

Unfortunately Nucleus never quite seemed a clean enough system for me, and BLOG:CMS made it much messier, and upgrades to new versions were a real pain, so I was always on the lookout for another blogging platform to switch to.

The Nucleus system was such a pain to work with, that eventually I just stopped blogging entirely, and there came a point where there was a space of over 15 months with not a single post. Eventually I Migrated to Wordpress in May, 2006 and used it continually until today.

As I said above, Wordpress is a phenomenal blogging software, the best there is, and I will miss some of it's simplicity and functionality on my site now that I have Gone Drupal, but the time has come that I want more out of my personal site then a blog, and Drupal will give me the flexibility I need to do much more with my site then ever before.

HTC Magic (G2) vs iPhone 3G (and 3G S)

NickMoline — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:25:28 +0000

Check out my review of the HTC Magic (T-Mobile G2) and the comparisons against the iPhone 3G and 3GS on LLRX. This is my third article published on LLRX. I am writing another article for the site, with my review of Google Wave, which should be out in the next week or two. (By posting this here, I am forcing myself to get it done, hopefully.)

I was wrong, Turns out Chrome Extensions aren't ready yet

NickMoline — Thu, 28 May 2009 02:04:09 +0000

I'm attending the Developing Extensions for Google Chrome session right now, which is hosted by Aaron Boodman who is noted for being the creator of the Greasemonkey Firefox Extension and who now works at Google, and is working on Chrome Extensions. He Started this session with a disclaimer "This is alpha code, we are not announcing Extensions for Chrome today" (see my Tweet of Disappointment at that).

That said, the way extensions are handled in Google Chrome is actually really cool. Extensions are very simple to implement, and I'm probably going to write some development Chrome Extensions as early as this week, unfortunately no NORMAL user of Chrome will be able to install it (only people using the dev release of chrome and who manually install it can use them). Still interesting, but my exclamation of February that earned me lots of pageviews as it showed up on Techcrunch, CNET, Lifehacker, and Mashable (and many others), was unfortunately wrong, and I'm not to big to admit it (certainly if I didn't admit it, someone would do so in the comments, and rightfully so).

Am I totally disappointed? In this yes, but in I/O, for one thing, it was announced during the keynote today that every attendee of I/O gets a free unlocked Android Mobile Phone, WITH a free month of unlimited voice and data service on it, very cool.

UPDATE: The Session video is now up on youtube, I've embedded it below:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g03bcb70kFQ[/youtube]

Ready for Google I/O 2009

NickMoline — Wed, 27 May 2009 12:12:41 +0000

My wife and are are checked into our hotel in San Francisco. Tomorrow begins Google I/O 2009 at the Moscone Center West in San Francisco. I'm quite looking forward to two days of Google Developer Goodness. I'm hoping that we'll learn about a lot of great new updates to Google APIs and developer tools, and of course, I haven't forgot about my prediction that Google Chrome will get Extensions at Google I/O. I'm a little more cautious about saying that for sure, but I'm still pretty optimistic that it will happen, or at least we'll get some sort of time table as to when we will.

After all Developing Extensions for Google Chrome is still on the Agenda, in the very first timeslot of the conference (after the Keynote that is) in fact. I'm expecting to get a formal announcement about Extensions either during the Keynote itself, or at least during that particular session. But we'll find out if I'm right tomorrow. Hopefully I'll find time to write up some notes I took from the Conference over the next couple of days, but if it is anything like last year, time will be short indeed.

On a related matter, if any of my readers are here at Google I/O, leave me a comment, or tweet to me @nickmoline, I'm looking forward to meeting with fellow developers during the conference.

Internet/Computer Classics Dieing off...

NickMoline — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 07:21:45 +0000

Yesterday I retweeted a post by ReadWriteWeb concerning Yahoo's announcement that they are closing down GeoCities this year.

This was particularly sad news for me because GeoCities was where my first website was hosted. Within a day of getting the internet at home for the first time (On December 26th, 1995) I signed up an account at GeoCities, which was at Area51/Labyrinth/1226 (it's long since gone so there's no point in me linking to it here), but that site eventually evolved into The SubspaceLink.

I had a great time on GeoCities back in the 90s, and even was a volunteer for them as part of their Community Leader program, and even had stock in the company (a measly 10 shares, but stock nonetheless).

In 1999, Yahoo purchased GeoCities for about $4.5 billion, and my 10 shares of GeoCities became 6 shares of Yahoo, their stock split twice since then (in 2000 and 2004), so now I have 24 shares of yahoo, which I still hold today.

Yahoo didn't waste any time in terminating the Community Leader program (a decision I always thought was a bad one, as the since of community was what made GeoCities great).

Anyway, this is more rambly then most of my posts, so I'll probably end up editing or deleting it later, but I wanted to do something fun. I just checked to make sure it's true but my old geocities email address still works (after all these years), so drop me an email at it at sttngfan@geocities.com so I can enjoy it again just a little bit more before Geocities dies forever.

Google Tip: Tracking Yourself in Google Blogsearch

NickMoline — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 07:58:35 +0000

Earlier this month, I wrote about tracking mentions of yourself on twitter more completly then just checking the @replies tab on twitter (or in tweetdeck). Keeping tabs on what people say about you in twitter is only one step in effectively tracking references to yourself online.

So here's step 2, if you want to really know what people are saying about you online, take the search a step further and check out what is being said about you on blogs.

Here is a slightly modified version of the same search string I used on Twitter to track mentions of me.

"Nicholas Moline" OR "Nick Moline" OR NickMoline OR link:nick.pro -site:nick.pro

Now when I plug this search in at Google Blogsearch, I see mentions of me on blogs around the web.

Think of -site:nick.pro the same way we thought of -from:NickMoline on the twitter search, it is pointless to see mentions of my own name on my own site, so I quickly filter out my domain name from the results.

The link:nick.pro is similar to to:NickMoline on twitter search, by adding in "OR link:nick.pro" I will get posts that link to me even if they don't mention me by name.

Once I had the results, I sorted by date, and then clicked the link on the bottom of the page to view the feed in Google Reader, now whenever someone mentions me on their blogs, I'll be notified as soon as Google ads the post to their index.

Shut down for an hour

NickMoline — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 17:50:35 +0000

For the second year in a row, my wife and I participated in Earth Hour. At 8:30 I hit the main breaker in our apartment shutting everything down for an hour. During that time we read together by candlelight and reflected on just how much energy we use on a day to day basis. It was amazing to us how quiet it was without the ambient hum of electronics running, serving our whims, and it was humbling to think how hard it seemed to read by candlelight and how much we rely on technology for every aspect of our lives.

If you didn't participate in Earth Hour this year I urge you to do so next year. It's a simple and symbolic way to focus on saving energy and the mounting energy crisis.

iPhone 3.0 Supports Both Local AND Exchange Calendars and Contacts

NickMoline — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 05:47:27 +0000

When Exchange support was added in the iPhone 2.0 software last summer, turning on Exhange Syncing for Contacts or Calendars was an exclusive action. Once you turned on Exchange Calendars you could no longer sync your calendars on your iPhone with your computer directly. It appears that in the iPhone 3.0 that this is no longer the case. I upgraded to the beta of 3.0 last night and when I attempted to setup Google Syncing again with my calendars, I got the screen on the right.

Previously, doing this action would prompt me that all existing calendars on the iPhone would be deleted, now it asks what to do with the calendars already on the iPhone with an option to keep them intact. This indicates that Apple is planning on removing the limitation of supporting either Exchange OR synced content but not both.

Unfortunately iTunes seems to not know what to do with this yet, and if I don't delete the synced calendars, iTunes is not able to do anything with them.

Also unfortunate is that the iPhone will still only support 1 exchange account, an attempt to add a second Exchange Account brings up the familiar "Only one Exchange ActiveSync account can be configured." message. While most business users will only have one Exchange account to sign into, Google's recent move into adding ActiveSync support to Google Calendar and Google Contacts means that at least some of those business users with business accounts on their company Exchange servers may want to setup their personal Google Calendar and Contacts as well, and they'll be out of luck.

This is still good news, however, for anyone who needs their corporate calendars and contacts but has their own calendars and contacts on their computer as well that they would like to sync. Kudos to Apple for this non-touted but useful feature.

Twitter Tip: A Better @replies List in TweetDeck

NickMoline — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 10:13:53 +0000

Both Twitter and TweetDeck (as well as most other Twitter Clients) give you an easy way to get a list of responses people sent you. On Twitter itself, this is the @Replies tab off of your home page. TweetDeck gives you a Replies column by default, and if you delete it, you can get it back by clicking on the replies button on the top of the screen. TweetDeck's replies button uses the replies twitter feed feature from the Twitter API to work, so it returns the exact same list that you get on the home page.

I've found however, that I often want to track everything that is said to or about me, even if they are not technically @replies. Because of this I've ditched the replies column in my TweetDeck and instead have created my own @replies list of sorts using the Search feature in TweetDeck which uses the Twitter Search API. To do this yourself follow the simple instructions after the break.

Click on the Search icon in TweetDeck
When you receive the prompt on the right to enter in what you are searching for, enter in a search where you put in all of the possibilities that someone could find a tweet about you separated by OR and end it with -from:YourTwitterName

The -from:YourTwitterName will filter out messages that come from you, this is important especially if you write a lot of tweets and don't want to dominate the feed of tweets that are supposed to be ABOUT you rather then BY you.

In My Search Box, I've entered in the following phrase:

NickMoline OR "Nick Moline" OR "Nicholas Moline" OR Nick.pro -from:NickMoline

In this Case NickMoline is of course my Twitter Name so I search for any tweet that includes that exact twitter name, but filter out messages that came from me, but I also search for "Nick Moline", "Nicholas Moline" and "Nick.Pro" (this site) to find any other possible mentions of me. I was surprised to find out that there were a number of posts on twitter that mention me that were not specifically @replied to me.

This tip isn't exclusive to TweetDeck either, that's just how I use it, you could also plug that search in at search.twitter.com directly, and then get an Atom feed of the results that you can subscribe to in Google Reader or any other Feed Reader application.

Keeping in Step 2 - iPhone, Mac, and Google Calendar Syncing, now Better, and cheaper.

NickMoline — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 10:36:04 +0000

Back in August, I posted a how-to on keeping your iPhone (or iPhone 3G) and Mac in sync with Google Calendar all the time over the air, it basically required using both Mobile Me and Spanning Sync with an Always On Mac to make sure your iPhone was kept in constant sync with both your Mac and Google Calendar.

At the time, it was the only solution available to make this possible, now however, Google has made it all so much easier, and cut out all of the cost, in fact, I'm sure Apple is not too pleased about how Google has made it possible to have two way over-the-air syncing with iPhones for free, thus making their $99/year Mobile Me Service all but unnecessary to most people.

Without further ado, here is how to keep your Mac (which no longer needs to stay online 24/7), your iPhone, and Google Calendar all in sync for Free.

A few weeks ago now (and while I haven't blogged about it yet, I've actually used this new feature since day 1), Google setup an ActiveSync server (oh the irony of Google using the Microsoft Exchange protocol) so you can now setup your iPhone to have Push syncing with Google Calendar and Google Contacts (no mail yet, hopefully soon). You can find the instructions on how to setup your iPhone or iPod Touch for Google Calendar and/or Contact Syncing here.

If you have more then one calendar, Google will let you select up to 5 calendars to sync two-way with your iPhone/iPod, you can find instructions on how to select which calendars to sync here.

On your Mac you have a 3 choices on how you can keep iCal in sync with Google Calendar.

If you don't need to be able to change your calendar from iCal, simply use the iCal Public Feed Export link from Google Calendar, you use the iCal "Subscribe" feature to subscribe to the calendar's feed in iCal, and you can see everything posted on iCal.
A better method is to use Google Calendar's new CalDav Support, which will give you two-way syncing between iCal and Google Calendar, you can find instructions and a simple-to-use tool here.
You can still use Spanning Sync to sync your Calendars and Contacts with your Mac as well, at $20 a year it's a lot cheaper then Mobile Me, and it removes some of the quirks with using CalDav (like strange sync slowness issues that appear randomly from time to time) by syncing in the background on a schedule. Also by using Spanning Sync, your calendars from iCal's perspective are completely native, rather then remote, which makes them work a bit cleaner, of course, the problem with Spanning Sync is the delay, events you edit in iCal may take a little bit before they show up on Google Calendar or your iPhone.

The first couple options will work even if you don't have a Mac, you can use the iCal Public Feed Export link in any iCalendar compatible scheduling program, and CalDav is also supported in some other scheduling programs (such as Mozilla SunBird).

Google Chrome Extensions Coming Out by May!

NickMoline — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 06:31:37 +0000

That's right, I said it, and so far I'm the only one who has. Google has announced that extensions are coming to Google Chrome but have been mum on when. However I saw something today, that indicates the timetable may be short. Google officially opened up registration for Google I/O 2009, their third annual (first one was just called Google Developer Day) Developer's Conference.

Like last year, it will take place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Along with the open pre-registration, they've also posted a list of Sessions (subject to change). High up on the list is a session entitled "Developing extensions for Google Chrome" which contains the following description:

Learn how Google Chrome makes it easy to write extensions using the web technologies you already know. This talk will cover the basics of the extension system (distribution/packaging, installation, updates), as well as the different APIs to enhance with the browser.

I'd say this is a safe bet that if Extensions are not released BEFORE Google I/O, then they will be released as a new feature AT Google I/O. Extensions are coming, but what about Mac Support?

UPDATE FROM GOOGLE I/O: While the session went through as planned, it turns out my theory was wrong, they simply aren't available to announce support for extensions yet, although it is coming soon, and they are really well implemented in beta.

UPDATE 2 (June 3rd): The Session video is now up on youtube, I've embedded it below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g03bcb70kFQ

Is the book better than the movie?

NickMoline — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 07:32:39 +0000

It is no secret that I'm a fan of the Chronicles of Narnia series of books and movies, and as a loyal fan, I follow news related to Narnia, and one of my favorite news sources for Narnia related news is NarniaFans.com. I don't normally bother to post Narnia related news here, because I feel that I would never be able to do the justice that a dedicated site such as NarniaFans can do, however today my Google Reader showed me an article relating to Narnia that caught my attention for more reasons then The Lion.

In New Zealand, the New Zealand Book Council's agency (Colenso BBDO) in Auckland, New Zealand, has come up with a rather ingenious way to try and get more young people to read. When people in New Zealand rent Prince Caspian on DVD from video rental stores in Auckland and the surrounding areas, they see the DVD on the left, and on the right a number of pages, in fact, they see the first 2 chapters of Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis, with a title page that contains the question "Is the book better than the movie?"

I felt like posting about this story here because I love anything that encourages young people to read. When I was growing up, the Chronicles of Narnia were some of my personal favorite books to read, and I read them over and over again, today sadly a lot of young people who go to see these movies (which are fantastic), don't even realize that these wonderful books exist. By putting the first couple of chapters of a book in with the DVD Rental, perhaps children who enjoy the movie will decide to read the accompanying beginning of the book, and when they get hooked, will head to their local library to grab the rest of it.

This could obviously work for series other then Narnia, imagine if the Harry Potter DVDs included the first two chapters of their accompanying books. I know by chapter 2 of Philosopher's Stone, I was hooked on J.K. Rowling's style.

And why limit it to the DVD release, have movie theaters hand out pamphlets of the first chapter of Inkheart after children go to see that imaginative tale this month.

I applaud the New Zealand Book Council for trying out this imaginative campaign to bring more young people to literature. It is my belief that with more children reading books, we will have a much brighter tomorrow.

Upgrades and hard work

NickMoline — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:16:40 +0000

I recently migrated nick.pro and other sites from regulus over to a new server named Atlas, it's much more powerful, but there were some hiccups in the transfer that I'm slowly having to iron out.

I also just upgraded Wordpress to the new 2.7, and I must say, I'm not a big fan of the all grey interface, but I'm liking some of the new features, for example the QuickPress block on the Dashboard that let me write this post without having to leave the dashboard at all.

I've been working a lot of extra hours as of late in order to put new things live on Justia, and it's had a few negative side effects. Last Wednesday night I was up all night working on things for Justia and then only got an hour and a half of sleep before having to get up Thursday for another day. Unfortunately that hour and a half was obviously not enough, because I fell asleep in the shower and crumbled to the floor of the bathtub, bashing my knee against the metal soap dish, and then on the floor of the tub hard before jolting myself awake.

The doctor said I mildly dislocated my patella and sprained one of the ligaments that connects the bones down there. All throughout the past weekend up until today I've had to walk with a cane to keep the pressure off my knee.

Last night I had another all-niter of work, but fortunately didn't injure myself again, tonight it's 2:20 a.m. as I write this and I'm about to go to bed, so there's a little rest for the weary, but it's worth it. Tonight I pushed some significant improvements to a Justia site, which I might blog about later.

Mashup Camp 7 Wrapup

NickMoline — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:35:51 +0000

As I Posted about last week, I attended Mashup Camp at the Computer History Museum this week. It has been a packed couple of days. I mentioned before I was not really considering entering the Speedgeeking Contest that occurs at each Mashup Camp. Last Spring's Mashup Camp I was a bit depressed to come in last place, but this contest was different, this time they had one top prize (A MacBook Pro) awarded by attendee voting, but then the individual providers sponsoring the event also had their own contests of who had the best mashup using their service.

Even charged with that information, I still felt like I didn't want to enter the competition, not really because of the agony of defeat, but because of the work that would be involved to do a mashup. However, when I heard about the Wet Paint Injected API, I knew I could in a relatively short period of time, write an awesome mashup using this service, and so I started considering it on Monday evening, a few hours later, I resolved myself and knew I had to give it a shot.

Mashup Camp was fun, especially the Speedgeeking and the Keynote from Tim O'Reilly, but the highest point of all for me was when the representatives from WetPaint announced in the closing reception that my mashup had won the Wet Paint Best Mashup Contest!

I'm so excited about this, that I'm going to cut this blog post short and go celebrate. Thank you to Wet Paint for both putting up an incredible Wiki Injection API for adding wiki content to pages (rather then adding pages to wikis), and for choosing my project for the Win, and thank you to the organizers of Mashup Camp for organizing a great Unconference.

The Organizers of Mashup Camp have announced another event at the Computer History Museum in January called Cloud Connect, and I've already registered for that one, so if you come, I'll see you there.

UPDATE 2008-12-03: I just noticed the WetPaint team's Blog Post wrapping up their experiences at MashupCamp and wanted to thank them for the prize (which arrived Today via FedEx), and for the card which is now pinned to the wall of my Cubicle. Check out their tales of upgrades to First Class at the end of their post, which I presume is on Virgin America, due to the mention of Massage Chairs.

Mashup Camp, Next Week

NickMoline — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 08:27:20 +0000

Next Week, I will be attending parts of Mashup Camp at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA (across the street from Justia Headquarters).

Last spring, I went to Mashup Camp with my coworker Dan, and competed in their SpeedGeeking Best Mashup Contest. Dan did rather well, scoring 4th place with his iPhoneLocator Facebook App (although he's rather disappointed as only the first 3 places won prizes), and I unfortunately came in last place. I haven't decided if I'm going to compete again or not, but I can guarantee you if I do, I refuse to get last place again.

This years event looks like it will be fun however, including a Keynote by Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, which, among other things the company does, is my favorite publisher of Technology books.

I'm way behind blogging about this, as Dan blogged about it back in August

Lupus Awareness Month - October

NickMoline — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 01:23:25 +0000

Throughout the year there are a number of "Awareness Months" for various diseases and disorders, and while I sympathize with people with these disorders, and have a tendency to donate to their various goals, most awareness months have little personal effect on me. October however is different, in that I have a personal reason to support Lupus Awareness Month

I have not posted here in my blog about this before, but most of you who know me personally are aware that my Wife has battled with the horrible auto-immune disease known as Lupus. When she was 12, it nearly killed her, and I would never have known the woman who is the Love of my Life.

Lupus is an auto-immune disease, which in layman's terms is like the opposite of AIDS, instead of having no immune system, people like my wife have an over-active immune system. Their immune system is so vigilant in it's destruction of things that it determines is a "foreign contaminant", that it gets confused, and starts attacking tissues in the body as well. The end result is that the white blood cells literally destroy the body from the inside out.

There is no cure for Lupus, and it kills, and funds for research are desperately needed in the search for a cure. So please, check out The Lupus Foundation of America or the Alliance for Lupus Research and learn how you can make a difference in the research of this deadly disease.

If you want to know more about Lupus, I recommend you check out the Living with Lupus Blog, written by my wife, Barbara Moline, or visit lupus.org or lupusresearch.org

iPhone 2.1 Software - So far so good

NickMoline — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 07:47:09 +0000

So I upgraded to the 2.1 software this morning on my iPhone. There aren't any new features, but the array of fixes that Apple promises with the new update are much needed, if it turns out to work.

Increased Call Stability
Better Battery Life
Faster Backups
Faster interface

I'm reserving overall judgment, but so far it seems to be working just like Apple said it would.

I turned backup back on and the backup part of iTunes sync was done in about 5 seconds, as opposed to the HOUR or more that I've experienced before.
Since getting everything synced the way I want it, I've had it unplugged for several hours with both 3G and Wi-Fi on, as well as periodic checking of email, and my battery gauge still shows full.
The opening and closing of applications, particularly the contact list on the Phone app seems much snappier.

I'll let you know later on if it really has made an impact on the few negatives that were remaining on the iPhone 3G, but in the mean time, how about some news from the other side of the fence. Microsoft has released their second Seinfeld & Bill Gates commercial, and while it's not going to make me switch back to Windoze, I have to admit, it made me chuckle a little bit.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBWPf1BWtkw[/youtube]

For the sake of completion, here's the first video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIjNJZpRtj8[/youtube]

Amazon Kindle Reader for the iPhone

NickMoline — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 05:52:11 +0000

I wish I was posting this as a follow up to an announcement, but actually it's a suggestion to Amazon on how they can make more money, sell more Kindle books, and make more people happy.

For those of you who don't already know, the Amazon Kindle is an ebook reader that uses E-Ink technology to display content on a screen. What's cook about e-ink is that once it has rendered the screen's contents, it takes no power to keep the content on the screen. The result is that battery life of the kindle is measured in "page turns" instead of hours. The Kindle is also cool because it has WhisperNet, provided by Sprint, which lets you have books you purchase from Amazon's kindle store be sent straight to the Kindle, without the need to plug the kindle into your computer. The Kindle also gets a special email address where you can email documents to this address and have them appear on your Kindle for a nominal fee for reading. All in all, it's a fantastic product, it only has one little problem, the price. The Kindle is $349 (previously $399), available only from Amazon, which is still a bit steep for an up-front cost before you start buying books from the Kindle store to put on it.

Amazon, I know you want to sell Kindles, but your bread and butter will always be the books themselves. My suggestion is that you write an iPhone app that can read the Kindle book format and will validate like a Kindle to your own DRM. You could sell this app in Apple's app store to make even more money, I'm thinking something along the lines of $20 to $40. This way people with an iPod Touch or iPhone (which is quite a lot of people, including yours truely) can start buying Kindle books without a Kindle, and get the enjoyment of having instant access to literature the way only the elite Kindle owners do. The iPhone already has access to the internet, so it could support all of the functionality of Whispernet without any difficulty from you the developer. The iPod Touch has WiFi, so even it can download books directly when it's on a hotspot.

Amazon can even take this one step further. Amazon already partners with Apple's iTunes Music Store as a place to purchase content from it's own Audible.com, once someone has purchased your iPhone app, partner with iTunes again and have people able to shop for books right through the iTunes music store, making it even easier for iPhone owners to purchase your Kindle books.

What I think Amazon may find surprising if they did this, is that it probably would bolster sails of the Kindle devices itself, not only the Kindle books.

See I'm a bit leery of buying a Kindle, and buying Kindle books, knowing that those books are locked to the Kindle. If I could start buying those books now, and reading them on another device, I'd probably later buy a Kindle knowing it's a better platform for reading them on.

It's also not exactly outside of Amazon's business model to offer their digital products to other platforms either. In March, 2007, I blogged about Amazon and TiVo teaming up to make Amazon Unbox Videos (now known as Amazon Video on Demand) available on TiVo boxes. I immediately started buying Unbox videos when I never had before. Incidentally, I'd love it if Amazon Video-on-demand Videos were playable on the iPhone as well, and I'd probably buy a lot more videos from Amazon if they did, but I think that might be a bit of wishful thinking.

So come on Amazon, release an iPhone app that can read Kindle documents and you'll have even more of my money then you do now, and I'd bet a whole lot of other people's money as well.

Google Chrome will probably support Firefox Extensions! - UPDATED

NickMoline — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 06:17:33 +0000

Well I feel like an idiot, as the commenter below pointed out, the link I mentioned was a bookmark itself, not a "get bookmark plugins" link, but it was showing up in my list of bookmarks, which means that, as the commenter said, this bookmark had been imported from Firefox, and was not actually an indication that Google Chrome was intending to support Firefox Extensions.

The truth of the matter is I was so surprised to find the link, that I didn't think about logical reasons why that link might have been there. I spun up a fresh copy of Windows on VMWare after the commenter posted, and did an installation of Google Chrome where Firefox had never existed. The link I mentioned below did not exist, which means the commenter was right, it did indeed come from an import of Firefox bookmarks. I'm big enough to admit that I'm wrong.

For archival purposes, my original, incorrect, blog post is after the break. My review of the things I like about Chrome still stands, although my foolish thought that Chrome will support Firefox extensions does not.

A lot of people are complaining that Firefox Extensions do not work in Google Chrome, and why would they, they are Firefox extensions, not Google Chrome extensions. The Firefox Extensions are not built to be compatible with Webkit, which Google Chrome is based on.

But what a lot of people seem to be missing is that on the new tab page/home page screen there's a link that reads Get Bookmark Add-ons. When you click this link you are taken... to the Firefox Add-on site to find Bookmark Firefox Extensions. This seems to me to indicate that Google is planning on supporting Firefox plugins, why else would they link there.

Google Chrome is nice, it has some of the features I've long liked in Safari (like dragging a tab out of a window to keep work flow better) and a great UI. I'm also fond of the syntax hilighting in the address bar that shows you different parts of the URL, and the integrated searching is fast and easy to use. I'm also intrigued by the concept of separating each tab into it's own little process world. It makes sense in some ways, but I'm always leery of having lots of processes running.

I'm fully ok with the fact that Chrome doesn't yet have extensions, I expect they are coming real soon down the pipe, my only gripe is that Chrome is WebKit based, but it's not yet available for Mac! Come on Google, Mac Users are notorious WebKit fanatics, let us play on our turf.