Google Gears in Motion

I wonder if there's a reason why news has been so slow. Meanwhile, work for me has been getting pretty involved, and a little more fun, too. Still, I miss Austin and my friends there, and a big part of why I miss home is my girlfriend, who I really miss dearly. No good geek is complete without his girl, and yet the show must go on here! Apparently, Google pushed out a service called Google Gears that allows you to run web applications offline by storing data locally on your hard drive and then synching with the web application whenever you return online. Google Reader works with it, and so does Remember the Milk, among others, but it works because these services don't really require downloading a whole lot of data to your computer. If they did, then they'd probably be wasteful and piss off the users. It's a cool idea, and it will work in a subset of the web applications out there (including Google Docs, I'd imagine), but it's not enough quite yet to make an web-based operating system a reality. They're still not going to be able to give Microsoft a run for their money, but they are making the online experience a whole lot richer. I think that one facet of the online experience that pundits who scoff at these being threats to Microsoft are missing is that it eliminates the process of having to ship a product since you can immediately put updates out there without any cost to the user, and easily pull them back if they don't work out. In fact, Amazon tests their UI changes on a subset of their actual traffic to see how they affect shopping trends before implementing them, so that's just one small sample of the power of the web. So don't underestimate it, just don't be overzealous about it either.

We have a couple of updated details on the iPhone. Apparently, it's talk time is 8 hours, its idle lifetime is 250 hours, it can handle 24 hours of music, and it can handle 7 hours of video. That sounds pretty promising to me, I just wonder how much a battery you can't interchange will frustrate users. After all, there's always a decent percentage of cell phone batteries that go bad abnormally quickly, and I think cell phone users would be less forgiving of such an issue than an mp3 player user since a phone is a necessity of life nowadays. Oh, and things are looking good for not needing that 2 year contract agreement.

Also on the iPhone front, one blogger has a good, hacky solution to Apple's stupid 3rd party development solution of running things within Safari: add an icon that just goes to a place with favicon-accompanied bookmarks that open in Safari minus the chrome so it looks like an application rather than a webpage. It's a minimal solution, but it's better than their half-assed one.

Another item from Apple: they're probably going to be putting out the heavy hitting 20 and 24 inch iMacs by mid to late summer, which is the first upgrade for this line of computers since last fall. It's long overdue, I'm sure, and I hope it's better than just beefier processors.

Here's a one-liner: check out this list of great amateur photography tips. I live by many of these things, especially Canons being the best quality and megapixels being bullshit marketing.


How cool is that? It is being referred to as the Batpod, and is kind of like the motorcycle offspring of the Tumbler from Batman Begins. You can get a better look at it over here. There are also some delicious rumors out there. If you want to find out more about The Joker's plans, listen to this fun video. If you really want to have the movie spoiled for you though and find out who Anthony Michael Hall is playing, click here. The Joker thing, I'd say, is a fairly minor spoiler, assuming it's actually true, but the other is pretty big.

Lastly, AICN has a slew of amazing reviews for Ratatouille, and so now I have to see this movie as soon as possible. AICN never tries to stack good reviews for a film and often tries to be pessimistic, so this speaks volumes, in my opinion.

Now for some Monday Madness:

1. In your opinion, what is the perfect summer daytime temperature?
70 degrees Fahrenheit
2. What is the perfect nighttime temperature?
60 degrees Fahrenheit
3. Do you plant many flowers around your yard?
I don't have a yard, yet =P Someday though I will, and I'll have my wife decide that ;)
4. How much lawn do you have to mow? Do you enjoy mowing lawn?
Again, none. But my parents have a pretty big lawn (takes no less than an hour to mow).
5. Of the summer months, which is your favorite?
Probably May, because the break from school is most welcome then. By July, you've typically had your fill. As for me, I'm just waiting for August so I can see my girl again.
6. Do you take a long vacation each summer?
Not in a long time, though I am in Seattle right now so I'll be doing things here and there. Once again though, would be better with a certain someone, so it's not a true vacation without her.
7. Is summer your favorite season? If so, why? If not, why not?
No, winter is because I'm so used to the heat in Texas. Still, this is the best weather I think I've ever experienced on a consistent basis.