Google Reader is a new Google application. It’s an online feed reader. Naturally it understands RSS and Atom and probably some other formats I’m not aware of. It had a problem importing my OPML from Newsgator though. It only imported 5 of my 20 feeds. So I ended adding them one by one.

Google Reader is again a nice example of an AJAX web-application. On the left side you see a list of all new articles. On the right you see the currently selected article. You can scroll through the list of articles by pressing the ‘j’ and ‘k’ keys. Scrolling doesn’t simply mean selecting the next article. The indicator of the current article itself doesn’t move. The list scrolls smoothly below it. That really looks nice.

I don’t understand why ‘j’ is used to scroll to the next and ‘k’ to the previous article, though. For people using languages that are read from left to right - like English and German -, this totally counterintuitive.

Google Reader allows you to tag your feeds. You can then choose to read only the articles for a specific tag. A feed can have more than one tag. Tagging is quite useful. If you don’t have much time to look through all the articles you can choose to only go through the important tags.

Finally there is a possibility to change the look of Palm OS. “PalmRevolt” is the tool that enables you to do this. Naturally, I started creating a Squareness skin not long after discovering it. Creating skins for PalmRevolt is quite easy though there is no special tool with which it can be done. There are two text files and a bunch of BMP images that need editing.

One added difficulty is that Palm OS only supports 16bit colors and that the colors are displayed quite differently on the Palm screens - shifted more towards blue than on normal pc monitors. So it wasn’t possible to use the Squareness colors in their original form. It was a try and error procedure. Use a color, try it on the Palm, try to find a better shade etc.

But finally I found colors that resemble those on the pc screen quite well. And so I released it.

Despite its name Find and Run Robot is a very nice tool. Conceptually it’s the same as AppRocket, Spotlight on Mac OSX or the original Launchbar. It’s a new way of launching applications.

You bring it up with Alt+Space and start typing. The characters you’re typing appear in a text field and below the text field is a list of current matches. As soon as you see the application you want to start, you navigate to the entry either by pressing the “Cursor down” key or by typing in one of the shortcut numbers shown before each entry.

AppRocket sadly wasn’t updated since Candylabs were gulped by imeem. Find and Run Robot is faster than AppRocket, less buggy (it doesn’t contain any bugs I’m aware of) and has several nice features AppRocket doesn’t have. You can, for example, setup that uninstallers aren’t shown at all or only at the bottom of the matches list.

The tool is under active development and new features are added now and then. It’s what I expected AppRocket to become.

I finally finished reading “The Baroque Cycle” a trilogy by Neall Stephenson consisting of the three books “Quicksilver”, “Confusion” and “The System of the World”. The printed editions of those books together fill more than 2700 pages. It took me 1 1/2 years to read the books, but it was worth reading.

The story takes place in the 16th and 17th century mainly in London, Hanover and Paris, but there are also some parts in other places of the world. It’s a historical trilogy with an emphasis on the development of science in that time. You’ll meet Newton, Leibniz, Huygens and also some made up people. It also touches some other areas that were more or less strongly connected with science in that time. The development of commerce and the game with shareholders also take a big role in these books.

I enjoyed those books very much. I think they are very educative while also being quite gripping. Up to now all books by Neall Stephenson were very good reads. So I’m looking forward to his next book whatever it will be about.

Out of a whim I installed the latest nightly of the upcomming Firefox release. It’s called “Deer Park” to make sure nobody mistakes it for a stable Firefox build.

Though there are currently 78 bugs blocking this release, it feels quite stable. It never crashed, froze or what ever in the last two days. One of the main new features of this release is performance and I have to admit that it feels faster.

The other feature - the main reason for me to try out this build - is integrated SVG-support. I think this whole SVG-thing is a disaster. The standard is nice and cool, but the support for it has always been poor. There’s this ages old Adobe plugin that doesn’t work in Firefox. Now there’s integrated support in Firefox. Fine! Let’s check it on some examples. For a start we’ll take the Adobe examples. Well, none of them work. Opera also released a version of their browser with integrated SVG-support some time ago. There’s one animated example there. Well, that’s looking like shit, too. Oh, there are some examples especially created for Mozilla. Let’s try that one. At least. Nice. Works! Do those examples work under Opera? Well, no!

Cool standard, really. You have to create a special version for each browser. That’s it. That’s revolutionary. Well, I’ll probably take a look at ActionScript. Flash works on all browsers without having to produce special versions for each and will probably stay the standard for animations on the web until all kind of SVG support in all major browsers - whether integrated or through a plugin - knows how to deal with a common subset that is interesting for more than SVG nerds (Look, I can draw a line. And here’s a circle, too).

Two weeks after getting it delivered I finished reading this book.

One disappointing thing about this book is its volume. I expected it to have at least 1000 pages, but with its 607 pages it’s even shorter than “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”. Nevertheless it was a fun read and as always full of magic content.

People complain that it’s always the same: Pain at the Dursleys, Fun in the Hogwarts Express, school stress at Hogwarts. If you want to put it that flatly, nothing’s changed in this sixth installment of the Harry Potter series, though the first part - pain at the Dursleys - is really short in this one. But naturally there’s more to it than this simple never changing skeleton.

There’s also a new “Defense Against the Dark Arts”-teacher. That’s no surprise as Umbridge was kicked out at the end of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”. This time it’s an old friend though.

Well, it’s a worth read - fun and gripping as always. I wonder what the supposedly last volume will look like. I don’t think Rowling will be able to keep the skeleton that served her so well for the first six volumes. The final pages indicate very clearly that there will be a change in the story arc. This can be a chance for a great final or the total opposite. Maybe she shouldn’t have killed that one of all potential victims.

SpellBound isn’t some new word from the world of Harry Potter. SpellBound is a spell checking plugin for Firefox, that uses the OpenOffice dictionaries.

After the plugin is installed the context menu of any textfield of textarea contains a new entry “Check Spelling” which opens a small new window containing the text from the clicked component, a combobox to choose the language from and the typical controls to navigate through the errors.

While having spell checking features directly integrated with the original data entry controls would be nice, this isn’t bad and it has a practical advantage. You can edit your text in the spell checker. So when a text area on a web page is too small you can open it in SpellBound, resize the SpellBound window to your liking and edit your text in a conveniently big textarea.

The last palmOne newsletter informed me about an update for my T5. As I have confessed in some earlier post on this blog I’m a version number fetishist. So it wasn’t long before I downloaded the update and started the installation. One of the new promised features was the optimization of the filesystem.

The update took at least 1/2 of an hour. Though the installer promised to restore all my data and all my installed applications, I sadly was presented with a clean PalmOS afterwards. Unfortunately the HotSync which was meant to restore my data coughed up on some logfile from a game that I have uninstalled months ago.

So I needed another hour to reinstall eReader and all the other applications, to look up all the reg keys and type them in. And well, I didn’t notice any performance improvements. The games I have installed on the internal flash drive still take the same time to load up.

Well, that was a waste of time. That’s the punishment for always having to install the newest version of anything.

Google Earth is an extension of Google Maps. While Google Maps is a web application Google Earth is a Windows desktop application. When you start Google Earth you see the earth globe, which grows gradually and zooms in on USA. You can change your view manually by pressing the left mouse button and rotating the globe in any direction you want. As you fall towards earth you begin to see city markers “New York”, “London”, “Hamburg” … You also see that patches of the globe are colored in different shades of gray. That’s the regions where satellite pictures are available. The brighter the shade the better the quality.

That looks nice, but that’s not where it ends. Zoom in on some city in the USA, say New York. Now below the map view, you’ll find some checkboxes. One of them is “buildings”. Select this one and you’ll see how Google Earth will paint bright cuboids over most of New Yorks satellite picture. Also below the map view to the right of the cursor key pad you’ll find a tilt slider. Tilt the view till you literally stand on one of the streets of New York. Now all of those cuboids create a 3D model of New York. Some of them are smaller, some are taller. It looks really realistic - the cuboids only lack their real textures. Now you can take a walk on the Broadway, fly through New York like Spider Man or what ever.

Google Earth is a really cool toy. The satellite pictures outside the USA are a bit sparse and not as good as the ones from USA, but this will most likely change. It’s a very fascinating feeling when you fall towards earth and just with the wink of a hand change your destination.

There is a useful extension for Firefox called the Netcraft toolbar. The toolbar is normally positioned below the address bar and shows informations about the URL you are currently browsing like where the site is hosted and since when it exists. It is primarily meant to help detect phishing sites. If you for example reach some site that pretends to be paypal.com and you see that it’s located in China and exists since last Monday you can be pretty sure that it really is only a pretender.

Netcraft has also build in a ranking system for sites. This was an easy addon for them to implement, since each time your browser connects to some web-site the toolbar asks its home at Netcraft for informations about the site. So the ranking system is quite easy. The more people browse to some specific locations the more points those locations gain. Users can also report sites as phishing sites, which is shown in the risk rating portion of the toolbar.

For privacy fanatics like me, installing the Netcraft toolbar is connected with some bad feelings. After all they could create a profile out of your browsing behavior. Naturally they promise they won’t, but then, who knows. Netcraft seems to be a trustworthy company and the danger of them creating a profile for you weights less than the danger to reach a phishing site and actually believe it.

Besides I find it quite interesting to see where the sites I visit are located and to whom they belong. There’s also a handy link to a whois report for the currently viewed site.

The toolbar is highly dependent on the availability of the Netcraft site. If this is not reachable, the toolbar won’t tell you anything and will only create extra network overhead trying to connect to it. I’m using it for a month now and this only happened once at the beginning. They probably underestimated the popularity of the toolbar and used a server which was a bit too weak for its job. But now it works without problems.