Punch the keys

And finally, I see the new blogger interface for my account. I was wondering about why it was taking so much time to get onto the new interface. If I remember correct, blogger had started to move members to the new platform a couple of months ago. It was even more surprising since I was seeing almost daily changes on the Gmail and the Google+ interfaces. Almost started to think that blogger had forgotten all about me. Well, not a very regular blogger, but then who doesn't like a new toy to play with ;) Anyways, the new interface takes along the minimalistic approach of Google. I liked what I see. Of course I have not seen most of the features. But then I get the feeling that I am going to be liking it. I hope we get similar features on the mobile blogger app on android too.

A couple of weeks back while I was travelling in Netherlands, I noticed that the telephone numbers in my mail were showing up as links on the gmail browser. On clicking them it opened up the Google Chat window with the phone number ready to dial. The phone number is converted to <a href="tel:%2B91%20422%206612345" value="+914226612345" target="_blank">+91 422 6612345</a> The mailto is already a standard feature. Wonder if "tel:" would also get introduced into mainstream. Sample signature shown here This was a nice integration and would be great in the chrome OS. The charges, at first glance at least, are cheaper than Skype. Have to test it out and see if the service is at par with that of Skype. Interestingly this is applicable only in countries where the Google call feature is active. The numbers were showing up as normal text here in India.

The day before I noticed an application named " ON smarter address book " showing up in my notifications as finished installing. I have no clue how this application got installed on my mobile. This was the first time I was seeing this app in the market place. Not sure if my tinkering with the android caused this, but I was very puzzled. Surely, the tinkering my 5 yr old daughter does on my phone would not have done the install?!! I had read about google using the "kill switch"  on some applications but is it possible to install any remotely? Yes, but that was only possible if someone used my online google account and installed some application on my mobile. This was getting weirder by the minute. On top of this, I realized that a couple of applications, mainly free trial kids games, were missing from my phone. Ok. that would surely have been the kill switch. But there was no way of finding out. I can probably understand Google's decision to quickly remove any ...

Today I happened to notice a "Call Phone" option in the browser version of google chat. I was under the impression that the call option was available only in US and not in India. Even now am not sure if Google has rolled out this feature in India or if some bug caused it to appear on my screen. I am on a slow bandwidth and had to do a lot of browser refresh to get the gmail to load. Need to check this out once I am back on a proper internet connection.   Update: Ah! Just as I thought, it was a glitch. As soon as I went into the option for add credit, it told me..

One of the most sort after items while looking at a new OS or a new computing device is the boot up speed. The faster you are able to get the machine up and running, the better. The new OS, Chrome OS, being developed by Google is especially keen on being the fastest to start up. I mean thats one of the most talked about items on their videos or posts.  The mantra being, get as quickly online as possible !  The demo they showed already had the machine up in 7 seconds and ready to login. Where as a "normal" system may take from 20 seconds upwards to boot up. I say normal, because the more you use a system, chances are, the slower the machine boots. The fastest boot times are probably the times where your system has just been formated clean and a fresh installation of the OS done. There may be tweaking options to keep the system from slowing down, but then again I am talking about the general case here. A couple of weeks back, I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on my home desktop and wa...

Yesterday I was trying out Google wave after letting it sit idle for some time and tried to blog from the wave interface. If you would have seen the wave demo video, it shows a cool integration of the wave with the blog. The product managers who were demoing the product coolly added some photos into the wave the created added a few friends from their contacts and viola it was shared with those friends. Continuing the demo, the wanted to publish the content onto a blog and just added the appropriate robot onto the screen and again Viola! the content got published to the blog. So I too did the same, but no magic happened for me. The wave is still there on my interface.. have a look here.... Expecting the content to publish, I of course, wrote accordingly. So would this be a blog in a blog??!! Some of the other stuff on the google wave is simply amazing. But it will need more time and lot more members to make it a success.

Well well. there is no linux version for Google Chrome! So much for the Windows killer comments!!! These are some of the things that I find pretty Hypocritical, if i may use this term. On a related note: All through the internet forums or blogs you can find people bashing up Microsoft and Redmond. Tearing them apart for the alleged or otherwise (mal)practices. However, none of them make even a whimper when other groups do the same tactics that Redmond once did or continues to do. I don't agree to some of what Microsoft is doing, but lets give credit where credit is due and slime where slime is due. Lets not hold back just coz its not our favorite punching bag.