I previously posted a video of my presenting a development plan to the class about a month ago.

It isn’t as advanced as Firefox quite yet, but its strength in its leanness and speed.

1. It’s Fast
   This is what pleased me about the browser when I last used a while back, when it was just not as mature as Firefox was at the time. It loads fast, feels lightweight and is generally just very snappy. Part of the reason is because it doesn’t do live-search on the URL field (and that’s actually a really nice feature in Firefox), but the speed is important so that’s a compromise I’m willing to make for the time being.
2. Respects Favicons
   Favicons—those little icons that websites have next to the URL—are important. They’re visual cues that make navigating through multiple pages and bookmark/history lists easy. They’re also part of the personality of a website. I don’t like that the Safari bookmarks-bar doesn’t include these little icons.
3. Recently Closed Pages
   It happens to the best of us: you close that tab with a quick Command+Q, and it turns out it was the wrong one. You’d like to get that page again, but you first access that page 2 days ago, and it’s buried in the history somewhere. Great, you’ll just use the “Reopen Last Closed Window” function in Safari. Except that won’t work because that wasn’t the last closed tab and window. Camino has a “Recently Closed Pages” that gives you a convenient list.
4. Tab Overview
   Sure, Safari shows websites you frequent in a nice grid. But Camino brings Exposé to the browser with ‘Tab Overview’. Click a button (or hit a shortcut), and all your open tabs are visible. Click a thumbnail and you’re at that page right back where you were.
5. Source Syntax Coloring
   Click ‘View Source’ in Safari and you get a window with the HTML code. Which is what you wanted, but it’s all in black. Camino (like Firefox) colors the syntax so it’s really easy to browse and analyse code. Which is a great way to learn, too, if you’re into web authoring.

Safari Love

Safari’s got a few things though that are well thought-out that other browsers might consider implementing.

1. Expand Text Fields
   Safari adds a little anchor to the edge of multi-line text boxes that let you change their size. I didn’t think I’d use this very much when I first read about it—I actually thought that’s giving users one one way to ruin the design of a website—but I’ve noticed I tend to use it quite a bit. And it isn’t intrusive.
2. Context-click menu bar to go up one level
   If you context-click (Command/right-click) on the title bar of a Safari window, it reacts in much the same way Finder reacts. It shows you the directory structure of where you are, so it’s easy to move one level up. I don’t use this too much, but it is quite neat.

Firefox Awesomeness

Firefox isn’t particularly fast for me, although there’s a chance the add-ons are responsible for this. (Which is odd, because I don’t have very many of them). There’s no doubt though that it excels as a browser and is the gold standard for web designers, leading the way with its innovations, rapid development and adoption of new web formats and specifications  (If only it were snappier!).

It does certain things so well I think every browser should follow suit:

1. Live search
   Firefox’s URL bar is really also a live search tool cleverly embedded where it’s most useful yet almost impossible. Or would be it were faster. Unlike in Camino and Safari, you can type a bit of text in the URL bar and have it search not just your bookmarks, but your history as well. What’s more, results don’t have to start with the search term – they can be anywhere in the title. This approach takes the concept of ‘bookmarking’ to a whole new level. Bookmark, forget and rest happy knowing you’ll be able to find it without having to dig through lists.
2. One-Click Bookmarking
   Also related to live search is the easy single-click bookmarking. Just click the little star icon in the URL bar, and it’s bookmarked. No additional views. Click it again add to the metadata Firefox already collected.
3. Save Login Alert Box
   Both Safari and Camino ask you if you’d like your username and password to sites remembered for the next time—no?; never?; always, you say?—which saves you the hassle of having to type these in each time you’re logged out. But Firefox’s approach is especially elegant. Instead of the regular alert box/popup, it’s shows little non-intrusive little yellow bar with the same options. This way, you can see if your login worked before deciding to save it. Or you could ignore having to decide altogether.

Camino 2.0 Improvements

Camino has visibly matured in this new version. It’s implemented a number of interesting features that makes it safer and easier to use. It has now has built-in phishing and malware protection, support for Growl notification, ‘annoyance blocking’ and keychain support.

It does have its limitations, of course, one of which being its support for HTML 5 and CSS3. It’s Gecko 1.9 engine’s rendering capabilities are far from inadequate—the engine is actually a huge reason Camino is successful—but it certainly isn’t where Firefox is. Camino also does not have the equivalent of Firebug for Firefox yet (or the Web Inspector in Safari if you enable it), but chances are you if you’re developing/debugging, you have Firefox running anyway.

Opera on the Horizon

I should mention also that I haven’t looked at Opera for a while, and the newest version (Opera 10) looks exciting! I remember loving Opera’s built-in M2 mail client years ago (before Gmail implemented most of its features online) and it seems they’re continuing that tradition, with integrated an email client, a web server and a debugger among other innovations.

Get Camino

If you’re on a Mac, I definitely recommend downloading Camino 2.0 taking it for a test drive. Camino is a pleasure to use. It’s refreshing to see a very capable browser that still feels light.

I’ll be developing a sort of Twitter client I’m calling ‘Entendu’, built especially to aggregate quotes that people post on Twitter. This is the one-sentence description:

Entendu is an iPhone application that lets you find and post interesting quotes on Twitter.

The Presentation

We made our final pre-development product presentations in class yesterday. Each of us had to summarize what our application would be and our market analysis in five neat slides.

The video and slides:

Using Google’s Indic Transliteration tools, you can type in romanized Nepali and have the software convert it to devanagari characters.

There’s also a bookmarklet that lets you enable transliteration on any text box on any website:

There’s more information on how to set this up on the help page.

Example Transliterations

• मेरो नाम परिमल हो
  ‘mero nam parimal ho’
• अब त नेपालीमा पनि ब्लग पोस्टहरु लेख्न मिल्ने भयो
  ‘aba t nepalima pani blog postharu lekhna milne bhayo’
• अब तपाईंको पालो हैन त?
  ‘aba tanpaiko palo haina ta?’

It’s Smart Too

For example, it ‘naya’ becomes नया and ‘nayak’ becomes नायक; notice how the vowel mark is different for the first synonym. The tool recognizes that नया, meaning new, is a common word, so it transliterates it correctly.

Other Indic Languages

Google Transliteration Labs will also transliterate these languages for you: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

(Which also means I’ll be traveling to Australia soon; expect more blog posts about food, culture, language and technology down under!)

Here’s his video showreel, demonstrating some of the things he’s worked on and what he’s capable of:

You can also visit his website, where you’ll find a more detailed PDF portfolio and his current résumé. If you’re looking for a vfx/motion guy in the Sydney area, you know where to find one!

(Photo by bfishshadow)

The super compact I bought before my China trip, the Panasonic Lumix FX35, is an excellent travel camera: fast response, great image quality, good macro shots (important for food photography), good high ISO noise performance, easy HD video, and most of all, portable. It was tiny enough that I slipped it into my pocket and went everywhere with me. No need to baby it, carry a huge camera case. Just drop it in, forget it, and go.

The one huge compromise is control. There were times times I wished I could shoot at ISO 200 at 2′ shutter. Or try panning shots, or any other sort of composed shot where I want to control the light to artistic effect. Not possible with a super compact.

What I’m wondering now is this: is the Olympus E-P1 a perfect travel camera system?

(Photo by classix, posted on Flickr by dolmang)

I’ve been following the Micro FourThirds world for a bit, and there are some pretty interesting things that suggest that this new format is only just taking off. The DSLR world itself, especially at the most basic level, is experiencing a flux, with even big-shots Nikon (D5000) and Canon (T1i) embracing HD video, live view and retractable LCD displays that, just a few years back, we wouldn’t expect on SLR systems.

Olympus, along with its band of Four Thirds supporters, most notably Panasonic (with its Lumix cameras), has been in recent years known for pushing the limits of what a digital SLR can be. It released the smallest system with the E-420, supported the Four Thirds sytem (a different lens mount, a smaller sensor, built for digital) and introduced live view on its SLR cameras. But the most exciting development has been the introduction of the Micro Four Thirds (m4/3, µ43) system that promises to substantially reduce the size of the body.

After the Lumix G-1 (and, more recently, the GH-1), the new Olympus PEN E-P1 is the newest m4/3 body. It’s actually a logical continuation of Olympus’ old PEN series of half-frame film cameras, and was released on the 50th anniversary of the first PEN.

The new digital PEN can shoot at 12.3 megapixel maximum resolution, has RAW shooting, exposure bracketing, SD card support, mounts for standard 4/3 and OM lenses, and an all new image processing engine (that comparable, I’ve heard, to the more advanced Olympus E-30).

DPReview already has a detailed hands-on preview up, and you’ll find some sample shots on Flickr.

This camera has really spiked my interest, and I will be keeping an eye on it. I want to see how it performs in low-light with its smaller-than-usual sensor, and how people are responding to the overall experience.

Following Blogspot and WordPress.com, it seems Twitter are now in the list of websites that are inaccessible from China. The odd thing, though, is that I’ve been having trouble accessing even this website. It does load occasionally, if I’m lucky, but takes a very long time. Generally, though, I simply can’t access it.

I’m currently writing this by accessing my WordPress admin interface through a proxy service. And while writing text isn’t a problem, uploading files is.

I do have quite a few things to write about—students explaining and performing Peking Opera, a Starbucks-inspired café here using a La Pavoni machine to serve well-made coffee, more Chinese food—but unless I find a way to get around the wall, they’ll have to wait.

I leave Hefei on June 14th, spend two days in Shanghai and return to the US on June 16.

You simply have to enable the U.S. Extended keyboard instead of the standard U.S. one (assuming you are using a U.S. setup that is).

To enable it go into System Preferences then International then click on the Input Method tab. Scroll all the way down and enable the U.S. Extended keyboard set (as seen in the following image)

Once you have the U.S. Extended keyboard enabled you can use the following key strokes to do the accent marks:

• Alt+a for the first tone – ā
• Alt+e for the second tone – á
• Alt+v for the third tone – ǎ
• Alt+` for the forth tone – à
• To type ü, type Alt+u then u
• To type ü with tone marks, use the same Alt+[aev`] from above for the tone, then type v. For example, to type ǚ, type Alt+v then v – ǜ is Alt+` then v

Thanks, Rob!