Sunday, January 25, 2009

Repost from my other blog, but I think it fits in better here.

Google is a strange phenomena. They have lots of services that one can't find by following links off their own website; one has to find out about them. This is perhaps due to most Google products being almost perpetually in beta, but still, it's an odd promotion strategy. They have some fantastic stuff, but I find it unfortunate that they've moved away from providing services that work on older, slower machines and slow connections; both Gmail and Google Documents complain when I try to run them on my parents 30 K.B./S connection, although, in fairness, Gmail does provide solutions, in the form of making older, less demanding versions of the web page available, and a simple H.T.M.L. page solution.

Still. what I liked about their strategy from the beginning was that it opened up the 'net in a new way to a whole new constituency, much as Opera does. Lots of people have older computers, and lots of areas don't have broadband; web 2.0, with it's heavy dependence on Java, Flash and soon doubtless Silverlight, is a slow and frustrating place. One of the features about Opera that I loved when I was working on a Windows 95 machine was the turn off images button!

However, I found a partial solution when I was last back in Ireland; use the mobile web in your computer browser. It has limitations, but it's a whole lot faster; Yahoo, Facebook and Opera all have mobile pages, and lots of media organisations too. Although they lack features available of the regular web pages, they're a whole lot smaller, and feature no demanding plug-ins. No (fluff)friends on Facebook, but you can read your messages and not require blood pressure medication.

So, come on all of you technologically handicapped, join me in the third world of the internet, the mobile web. Population seven million and rising.

Until the iPhone kills it :)
That's strange, my carefully embedded hyperlinks didn't work.

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Cool Iris.

For those using the Firefox browser, there's a great extension called CoolIris (used to be PicLens). Basically it's a button in the top right corner that puts all of the pictures on site which are enabled for it on a giant, movable wall, which one can zoom in and out of. It seems to work with all blogger sites. It seems to automatically follow the hyperlink embedded in the 'photo to the larger version, where such exists. One can display the 'photo in three stages, the last being full screen; and there are little previews available at the bottom if one desires.

It's great for checking out the pictures on a site with-out having to click backwards and forwards all of the time, although one does lose context. I just like it, it's cool.