Glen's Weblog

Google Chrome OS

2009-11-19T12:03:00.001-08:00

We've been thinking about and working on Google Chrome OS for a very long time. Today we announced the open-sourcing of the project and related documentation. Here is a concept video showing the latest thinking of the UI team:

Photos from Egypt

2009-10-04T17:24:00.000-07:00

We went to Egypt, here are the photos.

New Chrome 3.0 Beta

2009-08-05T08:34:00.000-07:00

While everyone is having great fun with the glen-head that someone added in an excellent ploy to motivate me to actually do some real close graphics, it's worth pointing out that there's a new Chrome beta, that, amongst more meaningful contributions from people with less amusing noggins, adds support for themes.

In which I describe the New Tab Page to you

2009-06-18T12:24:00.000-07:00

I was cajoled into making the following video:

Couch to 10K

2009-06-13T20:32:00.001-07:00

For as long as I can remember, I've been rubbish at sustained running - in primary school I could barely do the 400m, and ended up walking for anything longer, usually earning "do another lap" as punishment from my PE teachers. Even in my early 20s, when I would occasionally ride 80km on my mountain bike, I couldn't even run a couple of blocks to catch a train - my biking ability came from my ability to sprint and coast, sprint and coast (my hill climbing ability was non-existent, and I could only do longer rides on flat terrain). I could outsprint most people, but could be defeated by the couchiest potato over any distance.

(23andme genetic testing eventually confirmed what I had suspected - I had both sprinter's genes).

Four weeks ago, I decided enough was enough - I had been riding 12 miles to and from work each day, but my ability to run was as bad as it ever was, so, inspired by Lauren, and because Palo Alto has little else to do, I decided to give running (jogging) a serious go. Today I made it to 10km (6.2mi) - we had only meant to go 5km, but after various parts of my stomach stopped hurting (as it they do like clockwork at 2mi, lasting until 4mi), we just kept going. Here's the graph of the past four weeks of progress:

A side benefit has been that my riding speed has also improved as a result; mostly because running has highlighted all the different pain barriers that exist when doing sustained exercise.

It's going to hurt tomorrow. In fact, it hurts right now. As usual, health-oriented people are liars - when I quit smoking, nothing tasted or smelled better and I didn't feel more aerobic; and now, when I run, I feel great for approximately four seconds, and then I feel like poo.

ChatGraph - Realtimeish twitter topic monitor

2009-01-25T14:13:00.000-08:00

I often use Twitter search to see what people are saying about various subjects, but got annoyed at having to hit refresh all the time to see newly updated tweets. I also wanted to display the messages using a time graph, as I had in my referrer logs. So after a few fun hours of JavaScript and a few interesting minutes of Google App Engine, I am happy to release ChatGraph; it allows you to monitor what people are saying about something, and get a quick overview of how frequently they're talking about it.

Google Chrome talk at BayCHI

2008-11-22T00:26:00.000-08:00

I will be giving a talk at BayCHI about Designing Google Chrome in the evening of December 9. Hope you can make it!

The Google Chrome/Chromium Photoshop File

2008-09-15T16:37:00.001-07:00

I just posted the Photoshop file used in the creation of Google Chrome's imagery to the Visual Design section of the Chromium documentation. It contains all the layers, smart objects and slices you should need (though some showing, hiding and shifting of layers will be necessary to slice all the images correctly).

Have fun, and if you spot some daftness in my use of Photoshop, let me know.

TabsLock for Google Chrome

2008-09-04T12:59:00.000-07:00

I open and close browser tabs all day long; frequently I find myself in a state where I'm using some client software (Visual Studio or Photoshop) and out of habit, I press Ctrl + T to get myself a new tab to do something else. This context-dependence annoys me - having to think about switching or launching applications in order to start new web navigation/search tasks is like cognitive acne.

So, in my spare time on a recent weekend, I created TabsLock - a utility to let you use your Capslock key to launch or create a new Google Chrome tab from anywhere, so you don't have to think about whether Chrome is running or what application has focus. Consider it a global Ctrl + T replacement.

Hope you like it.

Google Chrome

2008-09-02T13:50:00.001-07:00

Dearest Friends,

Thank you for putting up with so many seasons of silence, and so much hand-waving about what I actually do at Google. I'm now super pleased to be able to tell you all that I work on the very-recently announced Google Chrome as its designer and as a front-end engineer, where I frequently have to suffer through implementing my own designs. You may also read a little bit about what I work on in the comic we made, the designers amongst you may wish to read some stuff I wrote about our design philosophy, and finally you can see my ugly mug in our explanatory video

More later, maybe - we're pretty busy right now.

xox,
Glen

Exodusurus

2008-03-01T14:52:00.001-08:00

I am back in Melbourne visiting friends and family, and we worked out that future trips may not be quite as successful. In a couple of months, the distribution of my high school / uni friends will be:

England: 1
Denmark: 1
Denmark + Motorbiking across that continent: 1
Bangladesh: 1
America: 2
Mozambique: 1
Korea: 1
Melbourne: 2
Darwin: 1

It's interesting to ponder who will not return.

Why It's Good to Share Items

2008-02-26T21:41:00.000-08:00

The following has happened more than once:

andras: "That Wired article you shared was a good read."
[5 minutes]
gmurphy: "Yes, that was a good article, thanks for filtering it for me."
andras: "Weren't you the one that shared it?"
gmurphy: "I did, but I didn't bother reading it until you told me it was good."

Everyone wins! Although after reading this, people will likely put less stock into the things I share, decreasing the chance that they'll read them, subsequently decreasing the chance they they'll tell me whether I should bother looking at the full thing. Complicated.

(Even now, the lies continue - I'm still only 1/3rd of the way into the article. I guess this all goes to show that the quality of things has become so predictable that opinion can easily be timeshifted into something more useful).

Two Kindle Notes - Converting PDF and USB Charging

2007-11-21T17:26:00.000-08:00

While I may write something more about how awesome I'm finding the Kindle to be, here are two quick notes:

1. You can use Mobipocket Reader to convert files of different types (including PDF and RSS feeds) and send them to your Kindle - this allows you to use your Kindle like a regular eBook reader. If Amazon had included something like this, I think there would be a lot less complaining about Amazon owning the experience. The daft thing is, Amazon owns Mobipocket.

2. While the charging light goes on when a USB cable is plugged in, it doesn't appear to actually charge the Kindle - in a few short hours of testing, the battery meter continued to go down normally (and the charging light doesn't go on when the Kindle is off). The Kindle's DC port takes 5V 2A (compared to USB's 5V 200-500ma), so it's possible that a USB > DC tip could work.

Kindle NowNow

2007-11-20T17:39:00.000-08:00

So I got myself a Kindle (given that I only read books once, the negatives don't really bother me, and the browser lets you read blogs without paying). One of the first things I did was ask the built in 'NowNow' service about whether the Kindle would support PDF, and got back the following highly-bitchy answer:

"Not directly, you need to convert the files

Unfortunately, none of us answering your questions has ever seen or used a Kindle. We're not Kindle customer service representatives and we don't have any special information about how to use one or any of its features. NowNow never even bothered to tell us that we'd be answering questions from Kindle users. So unfortunately, I don't think you're going to find much help here with your problem. Your best bet is to try to contact Amazon's customer service (which is not us) and maybe someone there will know more about it:

[...]

Sorry I can't help. I checked through the user guide and I saw nothing about disabling the buttons. I tried, but I'm sorry they haven't given us a way to answer this type of question.

Good luck!!"

(This is not to pick on NowNow - the rest of the answers provided were great, and pointed me in the direction of a PDF to .mobi converter).

Apple Wireless Keyboard and PCs

2007-10-05T18:22:00.000-07:00

So I love the new Apple Wireless Keyboard, however, you should be aware that it's a pretty crappy PC keyboard - as the fn key doesn't work (at least not in Vista or XP), you don't have access to pgup, pgdown, insert and (most importantly) forward-delete, which makes deleting files pretty hard.

You can use SharpKeys to rebind some existing keys, but it's not a perfect solution.

I bought the wireless keyboard as I wanted to reduce the distance between my mouse and my keyboard - ideally I'd like the new wired Apple Keyboard (which I also own) but without the numpad area.

Unfortunately for you

2007-08-08T18:40:00.001-07:00

Despite currently being the top result in searches for his horribly-misspelled name, I am not the person all you inbound searchers are looking for.

Blogger needs a "this really doesn't need to appear in my feed" button.

Lumus Optical Update

2007-08-02T13:36:00.000-07:00

TFOT has a hands-on look (with video) at the Lumus Optical glasses, which promise low-profile see-through AR. This is the first new information on the Lumus HMD since their website surfaced sometime last year.

[Posting because I've only so-far seen this article in appear in my keyword alerts]

The iPhone Halo Effect

2007-07-12T18:47:00.000-07:00

Despite its pretty limited featureset, I love my iPhone - it is typical Apple - do a very small range of things, but do them really well .. so well that people actually use the feature and think you invented it. After realizing this, drooling over OmniGroup apps, reading about font-smoothing choices, and after setting Vista back to Classic mode, I began to again look at OSX as a platform choice. So with Parallels and Nicholas' subtle evangelism pushing me over the edge, for the third time I'm giving the whole Apple thing another go with a new MacBook.

Maybe I'll be more accepting of the OS because I'll attribute failures to Apple "not focusing on it" rather than "being stupid" as I had before. I'm also not writing much code anymore, so my use should be pretty different to the previous attempts.

It's time for ranting, regardless - I still don't like the window management as I use apps with large numbers of palettes (Photoshop). In MS' world, an application controls a big window with an ugly grey background that contains all smaller windows and palettes/panels - this neatly separates different applications, and lets you define regions of the screen to be dedicated to a single application, which works well with large monitors. Apple's approach is like having the same thing but being stuck with a maximized transparent main window, making your windows all kind of blend together in confusing ways (especially since palettes of unfocused applications are hidden, meaning that a refocus can cause windows all over the screen to appear and disappear.

I'm also getting bitten by the different focus models - In MS' world, application focus doesn't really matter if you're a heavy mouse user, since clicks always 'carry though' to the application, even if it isn't in focus, in Apple's world, your first click on an unfocused application only focuses it - this forces you to keep track of what application is in focus, since a click you do to focus an app may end up doing something if the app is actually in focus, or vice versa. It doesn't help that the visual distinction between focused and unfocused windows is even more subtle than Vista's.

Lauren gave me a week before I give up, though I think that was wishful thinking since 'someone' has a G4 Powerbook that is suffering from a distinct case of "I wish I was Glen's nice fast MacBook that will have no owner when he gives up on it".

iPhone

2007-06-30T23:34:00.000-07:00

I was prepared to hate it - the lack of fringe-essential features had me in purchase-decision oscillations all night, but after lining up from 10am, spending all day baking in the California sun and finally being blasted out into the media frenzy outside of the Palo Alto Apple store, I can say that I really do like this phone.

The crowd of media and onlookers outside the Palo Alto Apple store (Steve Jobs is just out of frame on the left, he was surrounded by young children, like some kind of crazy angel)

It's not as powerful as WinMo, and it's a hideously limited platform (being forced to use iTunes sucks, the lack of dial-up networking still makes me cry and not being able to select/cut/copy/paste is infuriating), but it's still a happily compelling experience. For example, I didn't expect to pay any attention to the YouTube features, but then ended up spending most of today watching bizarrely entertaining videos of pets and ninjas.

Bring on the software updates and fixes, and for the hardware, I'll be first in line for iPhone 2.

Font Smoothing Technologies

2007-06-13T09:32:00.000-07:00

On the heels of the discovery that Safari for PC uses OSX-style font-smoothing, Spolsky has the most concise writeup of the various font-smoothing techs and why users of one system get used to it and end up hating the other system.

It will be interesting to see if this affects SafariPC adoption at all.

Uncaffeinated - The Long Run

2007-05-25T08:54:00.000-07:00

Two months ago, I posted about how my experiment in giving up caffeine wasn't producing results. Now, after about four months without daily caffeine, it's time to revise that opinion and to consider the experiment a success.

After two or three months of caffeine-recovery-induced sleeping ten hours a night, I now sleep about seven and a half hours a weeknight and about nine on weekends which is about what I was doing before I stopped the caffeine. Falling asleep is much easier, and I rarely have the same hideous insomnia that I used to. I also now eat toast and beans (black) or toast with avocado and smoked salmon for breakfast, which seems to do all the things they say a good breakfast should, despite my years of skepticism. I'm a lot more productive at work, and can focus far more on single tasks than I used to be able to. Unfortunately, like being happy and not depressed, I think being well-rested makes me a little less crazy-creative in favor of being more methodological :\

Like my pretend environmentalism through not driving because I can't be bothered getting a California drivers' license, I think what helped most with the schedule changes was laziness - I had started riding my beloved bike to work, but then told myself that if I got up early, I wouldn't have to ride (using traffic as an excuse). Because of this, I now leave home around two to three hours earlier - today I got to work at 7:15am, and it's great.

I've put on a little weight in the months since I said goodbye to caffeine, but I think that also has a lot to do with the union of eating Google food and eating dinner with Lauren (previously I had stopped eating anything substantial for dinner). I figure if I get back on Traineo I should be able to trim that off relatively quickly - a decent set of scales, traineo's graphing and knowing that someone was watching was enough to let me drop 12 pounds in a few months last year.

Like when I quit smoking, I still allow myself the occasional caffeinated drink, usually coffee with Lauren at Caffe del Doge; as mentioned previously, I'm so bad at noticing correlations between what I do and how I feel that I never really get physiologically addicted to anything, so I'm not worried about relapse (and part of the reason I gave up was so that I could get the effect when I needed it).

Two-Thirds

2007-05-21T10:37:00.000-07:00

I've just finished reading The Tipping Point, Blink and Freakonomics, books that form such a tight PopSci triad that an amazon search for the title of either of the first two returns all three in the top three results, and I also finally got around to watching Bowling for Columbine. While I didn't really spend much time on these (they're all pretty light, and can be consumed in a week), I feel that like Guns, Germs and Steel and The Corporation before them, they all should've finished about two-thirds of the way in.

These otherwise-highly-recommended books and films all reach a climax (that is, they get to the fricking point) about halfway through and then peter out with ever-more-boring examples and views of the data that are so detailed that you are left feeling dirty after having just been exposed to the blinding light of the authors' raw "but I spent so long working on this bit that I just *have* to include it" cries and screams.

This problem is exacerbated in the first three books, which finish about two-thirds of the way through the printed pages to make way for lengthy authors' afterwords (stupid second-editions!), so you're reading along thinking that you're just in a lull and about to get good in the remaining giant wedge of paper, and all of a sudden you realize that you're ten pages into supplementary material and that the fun got up and left hours ago.

It's all rather like watching The Matrix Trilogy.

Carbonite Saves My Balls, or: Battle of the Ugly Software

2007-05-02T13:36:00.000-07:00

I've been using Carbonite for a while, and just recently it paid for itself. After all my Photoshop CS3 hassles, I finally gave in and reformatted and reinstalled, making sure to copy all my important stuff to a local networked drive .. or so I thought. You see, I'm rather absent minded, and when I went to copy my stuff over, I deleted what was there first .. .. and then got distracted and read a book instead (damn you, Malcom Gladwell, you popsci cad!). Of course, I forgot that I'd forgotten all this, and then went ahead and formatted my drive and reinstalled Vista.

Carbonite's here-are-your-balls-back process (AKA 'restoration') is remarkably easy, though it's also disgustingly slow (on a 6mbit line its only restored 6GB out of 40 in the past 27 hours), and the client's horrible UI hasn't made things better - there's no way to re-prioritize the restoration once its begun, and it sucks having to wait for 35GB of photos to restore before it gives me back my oh-so-important documents.

So while this is a validation of the whole online backup deal, it's actually pushing me further towards Carbonite's competitor Mozy, which has a web interface to your files, a properly-designed client, and no bandwidth caps .. although its website looks like it was built using a stock template with cheap iStockPhoto images. Blech.

PS Because it's so Taiwanese-hardware-manufacturer-client-software-style ugly, there's no screenshots of the client available on Carbonite's website, so here's what you're missing out on:

Excanvas Update RC1

2007-05-01T15:10:00.000-07:00

If you use excanvas, there's an update in the pipeline that rolls up the past year of changes and fixes. Get the details on the google-excanvas group.

Where I Have Been

2007-04-28T17:20:00.000-07:00

Google MyMaps view of the places I have lived, worked and studied.