Did you finish grade school or are you just another illiterate ghetto punk?
No, I’m not talking to you. That first sentence is a comment from one reader to another on a local news site. It’s an example of “internet muscles.” You know what I’m talking about – the attitude and language of some people, when they speak to someone online in a manner quite different from how they’d act if they met that person face to face. Read more
Two months ago, we wrote about the U.S. Department of Justice’s largely unilateral seizure of domain names of commercial websites that were engaged in counterfeiting. We’ve now seen the danger of that process, with the government pulling a major “whoopsie” and mistakenly shutting down a large number of perfectly innocent sites, as the government went after child pornography sites.
Lifehacker, one of our favorite sites here at 40Tech, just got a redesign, along with the rest of the sites under the Gawker umbrella. The redesign has been a bit controversial, to say the least. Users have complained that the site is slow, hard to navigate, and clunky.
Personally, I hate the new design. Ajax and javascript can be great, but not when an entire site is built around them. I like sites to be scannable, and I want to be able to jump around quickly.
I love Lifehacker’s content, though, so I’ve been trying to find a way to make the site easier to digest. Here are three alternate ways to get Lifehacker’s content. They aren’t perfect, but I actually prefer them to visiting the main site.
Even if you don’t subscribe to the RSS feed, you can still use the feed to your advantage by navigating to the feed address, and reading the site’s content there.
You won’t see any post excerpts, but if you just want to see Lifehacker’s headlines, you can visit the mobile site in your desktop browser.
The new design does offer a way to see posts in reverse chronological order. To do so, click on the “blog view” button, which is hidden next to the date and time at the top right of the main column (see the arrow we’ve added in the image below). Scrolling in blog view doesn’t work as well as it does in a traditional blog design, but it beats scrolling through the new design. You also get blog snippets, to help you decide whether to read a full article or not.
What do you think of the Lifehacker redesign?
According to a Dutch study, our beloved Wi-Fi — the stuff that large populations of the planet now use in their homes, their workplaces, where they shop, where they drink coffee, and pretty much everywhere else they go — may be killing our trees. Or at least contributing to it. The researchers of Wageningen University say that more analysis is required to reach a solid conclusion on the matter, but so far, it looks like the particular radiation that is Wi-Fi is not at all interested in becoming a tree-hugger.
The tests were done in urban areas, where the high Wi-Fi and mobile phone network concentrations battle it out with other not-so-nice-for-trees elements such as fuel and other particle emissions. This leads to an obvious question about whether the trees’ sickness is more a result of other side-effects of urban sprawl, but the researchers feel they have a pretty good case against Wi-Fi. This is unfortunate, as Wi-Fi has become more and more a part of our daily necessities. Either way, something that is in the air in areas of major and connected human cities is causing the upper and lower layers of leaves to die, leaving behind a “lead-like shine” — and apparently inhibiting the growth of corn cobs.
This news, while not entirely proven true, may mark down one more in an ever-growing list of our human comforts and advancements that may actually be harmful to our immediate environment.
What do you think?
Study: Wi-Fi Makes Our Trees Sick [Read Write Web (via PC World)]
Okay, so hands up if you’ve heard of RockMelt.
If you are one of the people who put up your hand — stop that. This is text and I can’t see you. Know, however, that you are quite possibly more connected and in tune with the techieverse than your now shame-faced tech-writer. Somehow, for reasons unknown to all but the almighty Goog itself, my keenly developed tech senses missed this wonder entirely! But, that’s all behind me, now. I’ve seen the light, got an invite, and have been playing with the world’s latest, greatest — and Google Chrome based — social browser for several days now.
Here’s what I’ve discovered:
RockMelt does for Chrome what Flock did for Firefox, but where I found Flock a bit overwhelming in its attempt to integrate social elements into the browser, RockMelt has what feels like it might be just the right mix. One almost has to wonder why Google didn’t think to do this in the first place. If they had integrated Sidewiki and Google Buzz in with the configurable social elements that RockMelt has brought into play, making them a part of the Chrome browser (and by extension, the OS) itself, both of those tools might have seen a much stronger and longer term user base.
In any case, RockMelt, which is still in beta, has a lot of good going for it. There are still a few hiccups, as is to be expected, but even so, the social Chrome is pretty appealing. This is a good thing — it means that Netscape founder Marc Andreesen’s money has been well spent.
The primary difference between RockMelt and Chrome, aside from the fact that you have to log into Facebook to use the browser, is the left and right sidebars. Both are collapsible, about a centimetre in width and contain pretty buttons, often full of people’s faces. On the left, is the Facebook chat column, which shows you which of your Facebook friends are online, allows you to view their latest activity with a hover or a click, chat with them, send them a message, or post on their wall. You can also set up a favourites list in this column, and switch between it and the general tab with a single click.
All of this Facebooking takes place just below a miniature of your own profile picture (top left), which, when clicked, allows you to toggle your Facebook Chat availability, as well as update your social network status — including multiple Twitter accounts, if you decide to add them.
On the right edge of the page, you really get to dig in and configure RockMelt to suit both your browsing and social networking needs. Facebook and Twitter buttons give you access to both of those services, showing your feeds in real time. You can interact with items in the feeds as you would expect to be able to, liking, commenting, retweeting, etc. In Twitter, you can access all of your lists and your @messages, but I didn’t see anything for saved searches or DM’s. Also, if you have a lot of lists, you currently are not able to scroll to the ones that get cut off at the bottom of the page. The Facebook button gives access to people in both your main and custom profile lists, and your profile button right below it gives access to your notifications, photos and wall. I found the limited nature of the Facebook access — no pages, message centre, groups, or places — a bit surprising, but it will likely improve as the browser gets closer to official launch.
The right sidebar also serves two other important functions, it has a few other already integrated networks, like YouTube, and it allows you to add custom feeds so you can keep track of your favourite websites — it even makes suggestions based on the sites you visit most — and it is the home of your Chrome extensions. I like the way RockMelt handles extensions much better than the way Google does it. For one, I can decide on optimal placement of my extensions — and they will stay that way. Google’s insistence in making things rearrange themselves based on their perceptions of my usage has always driven me crazy. I also like the fact that the sidebar is collapsible, and it doesn’t shrink the size of the URL bar. Finally, If I am not using an extension that often, but don’t want to uninstall or disable it, it is simple to just remove it from the column/dock.
The main problem with RockMelt at the moment, especially if you have a lot of Facebook friends in your favourites, or a lot of extensions, is that the sidebars don’t scroll. Any more than 15 items, total, in either sidebar, and the ones furthest down can not be accessed. Also, the floating window that appears when most extension buttons are clicked is a fixed width element. This causes a problem with some extensions that are too wide for RockMelt. Hopefully these are things that will be rectified in a near-future update.
RockMelt also shares most other major features of Google Chrome, such as the new web apps area and browser synchronization. The apps are not as thoroughly integrated as they are with Chrome, being little more than just shortcuts, and browser sync is only available between other RockMelt implementations. It was a little bit annoying having to search out and re-add all of my apps and extensions, but wasn’t that difficult.
Sharing what you find while surfing in RockMelt is an extremely easy process. There is a giant button to the immediate right of the URL bar, and it allows for Facebook and Twitter sharing with ridiculous ease. I wish there were a send by email button, though, then I could drop the Shareaholic extension; free up some space. Speaking of email, there is what looks like an email button on the top right of the browser. Don’t be fooled. It is not for your email at all. It is really just a suggestion list of who to send your invites to. I find this choice on RockMelt’s part to be kind of confusing.
RockMelt is a fantastic spin on the Google Chrome browser, packing in most of Chrome’s features and all of its speed. The collapsible social features are a fantastic addition, considering you spend most of your internet time in the browser, and most people spend most browser time on a social network or two. It just makes sense, you know? There are still a few odd issues like the lack of sidebar scrolling, and the fact that, at least for me, embedded flash videos show up as blank spaces, but these issues are the sort of thing you expect in a beta test. RockMelt still has time to make things perfect, and I think it very likely that I will keep using it as it matures.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAPKPhoTqFY&feature=player_embeddedTell us what you think of RockMelt.
