Time for some geekery
Seems like it's about time for a report from the geek side. I'm on vacation for a couple of days and have been enjoying the balmy just-above-freezing sunshine from the comfort of my sofa, while playing on the internet in between very productive writing sessions.
If you're on a Windows computer and you don't yet use Chrome as your main browser...well, why not? Chrome is made of win, and the only things that don't support it well are boring work-related web apps like the trouble-ticket system that haunts my days at the office.
Lately, Google has introduced Chrome extensions, and I've found two or three of them that I love.
Cooliris (apparently already an iPhone app) aggregates pictures and videos from a given location and makes them look like this (supposing that you, like me, have a fixation on smoke fractals and J2 manips):
It's a 3D wall o' pix that you can zoom around, in and out, up and down. And no next-paging, so if, sayforexample, you entered "Jensen Ackles" in the Google Images search option, there would be an endless wall of Jensen pix floating around for you to breeze through. (This is a totally random, hypothetical example which I have not spent an hour testing.)
Feedly assembles your blog and Twitter feeds into an attractive magazine-cover-like page that, let me tell you, makes keeping up with your flist and other blogs even more fun that it already is.
Feedly is well designed and intuitive. It automatically loaded my Google Reader feeds, and let me set up my LJ flist in just a few minutes.
(I just marked everything "read", so now I have to wait for you guys to post some updates so you can see how cool you all look in Feedly. I shall go to the grocery store while I wait...)
Okay, back. See how nice you all look?
Finally, there are several Notifier extensions that unobtrusively report how much you are loved how many emails, Tweets, and Waves await you.
Chrome Extensions: my new favorite toy.
If you're on a Windows computer and you don't yet use Chrome as your main browser...well, why not? Chrome is made of win, and the only things that don't support it well are boring work-related web apps like the trouble-ticket system that haunts my days at the office.
Lately, Google has introduced Chrome extensions, and I've found two or three of them that I love.
Cooliris (apparently already an iPhone app) aggregates pictures and videos from a given location and makes them look like this (supposing that you, like me, have a fixation on smoke fractals and J2 manips):
It's a 3D wall o' pix that you can zoom around, in and out, up and down. And no next-paging, so if, sayforexample, you entered "Jensen Ackles" in the Google Images search option, there would be an endless wall of Jensen pix floating around for you to breeze through. (This is a totally random, hypothetical example which I have not spent an hour testing.)
Feedly assembles your blog and Twitter feeds into an attractive magazine-cover-like page that, let me tell you, makes keeping up with your flist and other blogs even more fun that it already is.
Feedly is well designed and intuitive. It automatically loaded my Google Reader feeds, and let me set up my LJ flist in just a few minutes.
(I just marked everything "read", so now I have to wait for you guys to post some updates so you can see how cool you all look in Feedly. I shall go to the grocery store while I wait...)
Okay, back. See how nice you all look?
Finally, there are several Notifier extensions that unobtrusively report how much you are loved how many emails, Tweets, and Waves await you.
Chrome Extensions: my new favorite toy.