Today Google announced Chrome, a new browser designed from the ground up for speed, usability and standards compliant. Chrome is based on the popular WebKit render engine. WebKit is most well known for powering Safari, Apple's default web browser in Mac OSX.

Google outlined some key areas that they wanted their browser to address. First of all load time and render speed. The modern web, sometimes referred to as "Web 2.0" is centered around bringing the desktop experience to the browser. Eliminating "white page flash" as actions are performed between the browser and the server. To facilitate this a set of technologies called Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) were formed. The key to Ajax is javascript. The problem with this is javascript can be very ... Read More »

For the past couple of days my iPhone has had issues connecting to iTunes to sync. Today I did a soft rest hoping the issue was maybe a stuck service or process on the iPhone. I was greeted by the silver Apple logo, I waited and I waited and I waited but it never went away. Several resets and nothing was able to clear the stuck boot screen. I finally conceded to doing a hard reset. I hate doing this mainly because it takes so long. 20 minutes later my iPhone was as pure as the driven snow and I was faced with the iTunes activation screen asking if I wanted to restore from a backup or add a new phone. I looked at the list of backups and they're were 13 of them all named "iPhone" no meta data, no info, no date! It had preselected one so I decided to try that one. After 10 minutes of waiting iTunes tells me it is corrupt. I decided to try another one same result. For nearly 2 hours I try and I keep getting the same result. iTunes contains 13 corrupted backups! Shouldn't iTunes have disposed wi ... Read More »

With the multitude of tip calculators on the iPhone App Store, I decided to throw my hat in the ring and fill a void. Most Americans are ignorant to British tipping, this app will help. To use it just start the app. The answer is already processed and displayed. In order to compete with other tip calculators I have added a non functional scroll mechanism for entering your bill. Don't worry you can't mess it up!

It is bad enough that the people of Birmingham and the state of Alabama have to hear about the crazy antics of Larry Langford but can we please keep it in the family. We don't need articles in the NY Times like this that make us look like a bunch of crazy people that are out of touch with reality. Larry if you want to do what's best for Birmingham take a cue from Mayor Kincade, don't do anything and just sit out your term. This is really getting out of hand.

New York Times Article

All I have wanted since the iPhone app store came out is a way to calculate fuel costs and savings on a Gulfstream V. Now I can!

Gulfstream Tanker

With all of the coverage given to the big winners at the Olympics it is very easy to forget for every first place winner there is someone who came in dead last. This site is dedicated to the losers.

http://www.mcwetboy.net/dfl/

  I've been an iTools AKA .Mac AKA MobileMe user since the beginning and I really only use it to keep my Macs in sync and every year I begrudgingly hand over my $99 but thanks to the poor planning of the MobileMe launch team it looks like I may not have to pay anymore. This makes 90 days of free service that Apple has sent out and MobileMe is still broken for some people. I feel bad for the people that are still having problems with MobileMe but you're going to have to live with it a little longer, I'm shooting for a YEAR of free service.

Everyone hates Captcha, those meaningless letters and numbers you have to type to do just about anything on the Internet but what if solving a captcha helped a greater good? Luis von Ahn at Carnegie Mellon University has devised a way to create captchas from digitized books. By solving the captcha you help make the text searchable and ... Read More »

I love note taking applications. For years I have been a huge fan of Microsoft's OneNote (arguably one of Microsoft's best applications). I have always  wanted a good straight forward note taking app for the Mac. I have found various applications that address specific needs such as Scrivener for writers but no general note taking app that I really liked until Evernote.

Evernote is a simple application that allows you to take notes, create task lists as well as capture audio and images (more on this later) then synchronize this with Evernote's server. The sync for me is the killer feature. This allows you to use Evernote notes on multiple co ... Read More »