Reality Equation

The Second Coming of Vegemite

Remember the new Vegemite-with-cream-cheese I was so excited about when I was in Sydney? And remember how it didn’t have a name then and Kraft was running a contest for suggestions? Well, it has a name now.

It’s called iSnack 2.0.

Weren’t excepting that, were you? Neither were Australian consumers, who were outraged at the suggestion. Vegemite, a national Australian icon (and the breakfast spread that people love to hate), reduced to the whims of the Web 2.0 crowd? And when did food items start requiring version control?

But, as it were, the product will not be called iSnack 2.0. It’ll be called Vegemite Cheesybites, after another round of polling. And although most will agree that this name is certainly more fitting than the first one was, I doubt it would have gotten as much publicity as the first name did.

The spread is actually not bad. It doesn’t quite taste like cream cheese, but it’s certainly a sweeter version of the spread.

In any case, good on’ ya Kraft.

Why I Like Camino 2.0 over Safari 4

The Camino Project recently released version 2.0 of their Mac OS X-native Gecko-licious web browser, and after having used it for a while, I think it’s a now a strong contender in the browser scene. If you’re using Safari, you might consider switching.

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.

Entendu: An iPhone App in Production

I’m taking a class called ‘Programming for the iPhone (CompSci 491P)’ this semester at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The idea is that by the end of the course, everyone in class will have a functioning iPhone application that they’ve designed and developed. And maybe even get on the Apple App Store.

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:

Deconstructing Basic Mandarin

I made a presentation today exploring interesting features of Mandarin Chinese from the point of the view of a beginning learner. This was the first in a series of language deconstruction sessions run by the ‘Language’ student group at Hampshire College, of which I’m part.

I based my presentation largely on an overview of the Mandarin I wrote earlier from Hefei, China. Unlike my talk today, though, I compare Mandarin grammar to those of French, English and Nepali in that article, which is more detailed than the presentation was.

Here’s a quick video excerpt of the talk, filmed by Ugyen Lhamo:

We couldn’t get the projector working this time around (which is why I used the chalkboard), but I was basically following this slideshow I’d prepared. It might still come in useful for other things, so I’m putting it up here:

I’m currently auditing ‘Elementary Chinese I’ at Hampshire, and will continue learning Chinese as my second second language.

My Seeds & Your Grandchildren

I love watching communitychannel’s videos on YouTube. They’re funny, well-produced, and Natalie is just an all-around awesome person. Here’s one of her older productions that I think is hilarious:

Check out her other stuff, too. They’re all fantastic!

Google Lets You Type in Nepali

Typing in Nepali was never easy. Then came Google.

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.