Several things!
Other great Gmail things not seen in this image:
One of my deepest pleasures when I have free time and an aimless spirit is to travel the world using a Dutch utility called google image ripper (Flickr is fun, too, but it doesn't have the links to blogs and article sources where the photos ran). Recent events piqued my interest in Sana'a, Yemen...what's it like there? Turns out, the old city is gorgeous almost beyond compare:
My Yemen "travel" led to a curiosity about Cairo, for some reason, and I found this amazing image, which has only been altered to make up for an overexposed sky, in order to make it more like the naked eye saw (always a challenge with skies and foregrounds at dusk and dawn):
...and the same photographer wowed me also with this photo of a European robin:
However, despite the pleasures of the morning, my absolute favoritest find using google image ripper is the work of Christopher Herwig who has traveled to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Takikistan, China, and West Africa (Liberia in particular), taking the most amazing photographs, including this one:
Three things I love: Jeff Koons, iGoogle, and the Twitter Election Buzz Map from the Google Election 08 Gallery: iGoogle rocks, I have 5 tabs and counting. iGoogle artist themes rock, I use a different one for each tab. Jeff Koons rocks, he just does, and the election map is absolutely mesmerizing and grassroots crazy in terms of information sharing: Thanks to the map, a friend of mine is now following live micro-blogging of a campaign event in Michigan. Oh yeah, and how about a shout-out for Google Image Ripper? It only pertains to this post because I used it for the Jeff Koons link, but if we're talking about things I love...which reminds me, there's a craigslist ripper or two out there, I hear, to rip the images from posts to the front page so you don't have to click through....awesome!
I like that Web browsers are becoming more able to intuit what the users want to see(WSJ). Chrome opens a new tab with thumbnails of recently or frequently visited pages to click-through to if you'd like*; in IE8 tabs are grouped and groups can be closed with a single click; IE8 has a menu of options accessible when text is hi-lit (such as posting it to a blog, emailing it, mapping it or searching it); Chrome has an Omnibox handling both search and URLs (Finally! Firefox kinda does, since it accepts search terms in the URL bar, so why not codify it? Simplify, that's Google.)
Chrome, which treats each tab as a separate browser, is more immune to crashing, but I never had a problem with Firefox crashing since it restored effectively, with all my junk just as it was.
I'm a little sad that Chrome might be likely to take more users from Firefox (an old friend of mine) than IE (which, as a Mac user, I only see when I am testing Web designs in that browser).
Chrome may lure even more users from Firefox, which has grabbed more than 10 percent of the browser market with the help of an advertising and search alliance with Google. The ad partnership was recently extended through 2011.
Because Chrome and Google both are built on similar "open-source" models that share computer coding with outside developers to foster innovation, the products are likely to appeal to similar subsets of Web surfers looking for alternatives to Internet Explorer.
"If there is a casualty in the browser wars, it's likely to be Mozilla's Firefox," the Info-Tech Research Group predicted Tuesday.
Funny to me: WSJ's Mossberg noted:
While IE8’s address box and search box remain separate, each also offers rapid suggestions; and both are organized better than Chrome’s. One downside: For this to work in Windows XP, you must first install Microsoft’s desktop search product.
I'm currently having to reinstall layer after layer of software (.NET Framework with SP1, Visual Studio 2008 with SP1, Silverlight 2 and its tools and whatnot, and then Expression Blend which is the software I actually use to build interactive Web applications and pages.
The last time I did all this installation it pretty much took 2 days. I'm on day 2 of this and keeping my fingers crossed I am nearing completion. I had to reinstall it all because I ran out of space on the laptop I was given, which had half the hard drive taken up with a partition belonging to someone else, long departed. To delete the debris, I had to do a wipe and reinstall Vista and then all the programs, etc. etc. Time Machine, anyone?!
When I bought a new Apple laptop, my entire universe went sweetly onto the new machine, just as I had left it on the old machine, from a sartup prompt, in much less than an hour.
— Abigail
* BTW, WTF is with the "Welcome to tabbed browsing" page IE7 serves up when you open a new tab?! How does that help!? Does Microsoft think people have never seen a tab before?
A friend of mine piqued my interest with this post on Twitter:
So I investigate and I too might want to check this out via Parallels! I mean, after all, they are publicizing via a comic book. It's half as cute as the ones Aaron & I used to do for JDL, but still. A good idea is a good idea.
— A
This post is for my niece who was so jealous I got to go to the Google cafeteria in Fremont (Seattle). My friend who took me has told me tales of the chef-created amazing food at the Mountain View HQ, and now I've found an encyclopedic chronicle of many delicious repasts enjoyed, around the clock, at Google, by a certain Brett L. (He even carefully labels some shots.)
I had nothing so fancy out here in the provinces.
– Abigail
Oh yeah — and this Brett character seems to have some of the same photo impulses I have!
I really try to enjoy life visually, empirically, and intellectually
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