google-chrome on S Anand

Software update

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 19:33:36 +0000

Time for the annual update on software I use. This time, I’ve got Wakoopa to help me with the relative usage as well. Here’s the top 100 software / web apps I’ve used recently, and how long I spent on them.

Gmail 186361 seconds
Notepad++ 130641 seconds
Google Chrome 79879 seconds
GitHub 43780 seconds
Windows Command Prompt 40967 seconds
Microsoft Excel 32578 seconds
Microsoft Word 27067 seconds
Microsoft PowerPoint 27059 seconds
Windows Explorer 20902 seconds
Google Docs 17989 seconds
Foxit Reader 17001 seconds
Microsoft Outlook 15855 seconds
Internet Explorer 15830 seconds
Google Search 15616 seconds
Skype 14423 seconds
Media Player Classic 14159 seconds
Google Groups 7061 seconds
Google Calendar 5531 seconds
Wesabe 2814 seconds
Google Analytics 2665 seconds
TeamViewer 1985 seconds
RGui 1875 seconds
LinkedIn 1528 seconds
YouTube 1400 seconds
Stack Overflow 1167 seconds
Acrobat Connect 964 seconds
Kongregate 914 seconds
HTML Help 871 seconds
PicPick 790 seconds
Zoundry Raven 684 seconds
Mockingbird 657 seconds
Twitter 655 seconds
iStockphoto 590 seconds
7-Zip 584 seconds
Buzznet 552 seconds
Inkscape 516 seconds
Bitbucket 499 seconds
Microsoft Visio 496 seconds
Paint.NET 474 seconds
IrfanView 461 seconds
Tableau Public 436 seconds
µTorrent 435 seconds
HandBrake 422 seconds
Check Point Endpoint Security 411 seconds
Windows Task Manager 385 seconds
Microsoft Project 372 seconds
IETester 347 seconds
Google Maps 340 seconds
eBay 310 seconds
Spokn 270 seconds
Firefox 269 seconds
Google Calendar Sync 259 seconds
Windows Calculator 247 seconds
PayPal 246 seconds
JsonView 220 seconds
Windows Live Writer 184 seconds
Junction Link Magic 152 seconds
WinDirStat 142 seconds
Kindle 139 seconds
XAMPP 127 seconds
Wakoopa 105 seconds
Dropbox 100 seconds
Office Help Viewer 99 seconds
PrimoPDF 94 seconds
PuTTY 84 seconds
Python 80 seconds
Flavors.me 75 seconds
Google Sites 71 seconds
Process Explorer 70 seconds
Windows Volume Control 63 seconds
Wikipedia 58 seconds
Nitro PDF Reader 57 seconds
Management Console 47 seconds
PythonWin 45 seconds
Windows Based Script Host 45 seconds
WinDiff 45 seconds
VLC Media Player 39 seconds
ClipX 35 seconds
Windows Installer 35 seconds
The Internet Movie Database 32 seconds
ImageShack 31 seconds
WordPad 25 seconds
TeraCopy 22 seconds
Skype Portable 22 seconds
Picasa Web Albums 20 seconds
Syncplicity 17 seconds
Google Reader 16 seconds
Google Talk 15 seconds
VirtualDub 12 seconds
Adobe Manager 10 seconds
FreeCall 10 seconds
Notepad 8 seconds
Codebase 5 seconds
eTrust ITM 5 seconds
Google Checkout 5 seconds
GDI++ Tray Notifier 5 seconds
ImgBurn 2 seconds
Virtual Desktop Manager 2 seconds
Tesseract201 2 seconds
TortoiseHg 0 seconds

Comments

Somnath 1 Mar 2011 4:38 pm: More time on Gmail than browsers - how are you accessing Gmail then?
S Anand 6 Mar 2011 8:51 pm: @Somnath, mostly breaking through proxies – see http://goo.gl/6wyg0 and http://goo.gl/DNtui. @Thej, no idea I’m afraid, but before I used Wakoopa, I was using https://gist.github.com/857652 which worked just fine, except that it wasn’t social and didn’t have the pretty charts. You might want to tweak that for Linux.
Thejesh GN 5 Mar 2011 5:29 pm: It doesnt run on Linux (only PC n MAC). Anything for me?
Shankar V 28 Feb 2011 3:10 am: hi Anand how do you generate this list? Wakoopa is blocked at Infy. So could not check that one out. Also, surprised to note that you are a Chrome user against FF. I have used both and my preference is still FF.
S Anand 28 Feb 2011 6:38 am: I work out of client sites – so sites aren’t blocked. Plus, it includes software from my home laptop. I shifted to Chrome a while ago, even for development, mostly because it’s faster than FF. The only thing I miss is Firebug, really.

Keyword searches as a Web command line

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:00:00 +0000

Andre’s mentions dumping Google Chrome because of lack of extension support, especially Ubiquity, and lists 15 useful Ubiquity commands.

If you haven’t seen Ubiquity, you should. It’s a great extension that transforms your browser into an Internet command prompt. It is modelled on the Enso Launcher, which is a great piece of work by itself.

I wasn’t quite prepared to let go of Chrome that easily. On Task Manager, seeing 10 Chrome processes, the largest of which takes up 60MB, is a lot more comforting, psychologically, than 1 Firefox process taking up 300MB. (I rarely hit my 1GB RAM limit, so it shouldn’t matter either way. Yet, the spendthrift in me keeps watching.)

So the question is, can I do all the items on his list without using Ubiquity?

Let’s pick the easiest. Google search. If you typed “g some words” on Ubiquity, you get the Google search results for “some words”. But you already have that. If you have Firefox, typing any words on the address bar automatically does a Google search for you. On Internet Explorer, it search live.com, but you can easily change that by installing the Google Toolbar.

But the great thing is that this can be customised. On Firefox, click on the down arrow icon next to the search box and select “Manage Search Engines…” to see a list of your search engines. Select the one you want to use, click on “Edit Keyword…” and select the keyword you want. For instance, I’ve typed “google”.

So when I type “google some words” on the address bar (not the search bar, the address bar) I get search results for “some words”. These are called keyword searches.

On Firefox, you add your own search engines, but you do that using bookmarks. Press Ctrl-Shift-B (Organize Bookmarks) and create a New Bookmark. You can type in any URL in the location field. If you type “%s” as part of the URL, that will be replaced by the search string. So for instance, using a location http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s and the keyword “wiki” will do a Wikipedia search for “Harry Potter” if you type “wiki Harry Potter” on the address bar.

It works on Internet Explorer as well, even with version 6. The easiest way is to download TweakUI. Go to Internet Explorer - Search. Click on the Create button. Type in a keyword (called Prefix) and a URL. If you type “%s” as part of the URL, that will be replaced by the search string.

On Google Chrome, get to the Options (what, no shortcut key?) and in the Basics tab, click the Manage button. Here, you can click on “Add” to add a search engine.

So that takes care of all the basic searches: Google, Amazon, IMDB, Wikipedia, etc.

Can we go further? Item 8 on the list caught my attention:

Twit. As much as I love full-featured Twitter clients like TweetDeck, nothing beats the simplicity of hitting Ctrl-Space and typing twit [message] to so_and_so, or sending a selection of text using twit this to so_and_so. At the moment, there’s no way to receive tweets or ping Twitter for new messages.

I don’t use Twitter, but I do use Identi.ca, and I would like something like this. Right now, I’m using Google Talk to update identi.ca. Two problems. I don’t like chatting, and logging on exposes me to a lot of distraction. Secondly, I’d rather not have to open an application just for this. Something in the browser would be perfect. But is it possible?

Identi.ca (and Twitter, and most micro-blogging services) let you update via e-mail. So if I could write a program that would mail identi.ca, I should be done. So I did that with a Perl script.

my $q = new CGI;
open OUT, "|/usr/sbin/sendmail -t";
print OUT join "\n",
    "From: my.authenticated.id@gmail.com",
    "To: 1234567890abcdef@identica.com",
    "Subject: \n\n",
    $q->param('q');

So if I placed this at www.s-anand.net/identica (no, I haven’t placed it there), I just need to create a keyword search with a prefix Tidentica" that points to www.s-anand.net/identica?q=%s. Then I can type “identica Here is a message that I want to post” on the address bar, and it gets posted.

Actually, if you can write your own programs, the possibilities are endless. If you’re looking for someone to host this sort of thing for free, Google’s AppEngine may be a reasonable point to start.

But the real power of this comes with Javascript. Those URLs that you saw for keyword searches? Those can be Javascript URLs. So item 9 on the list…

Word count. As a student of copywriting, I’m frequently curious about an article’s word length. Highlighting the desired text and entering word count into Ubiquity will give you just that.

… might just be possible.

It’s easy to get the selection. The following snippet gives you the current selection. (Tested in IE 5.5 - 8, Firefox 3 and Google Chrome. Should work for Opera, Safari.)

document.selection
  ? document.selection.createRange().text
  : window.getSelection
  ? window.getSelection().toString()
  : "";

To get the word count, just split by white space, and count the results:

s = document.selection
  ? document.selection.createRange().text
  : window.getSelection
  ? window.getSelection().toString()
  : "";
alert(s.split(/\s+/).length + " words");

Now, this whole thing can be made into a keyword search. Let’s call it count. If I go to the address bar and type “count it”, I want to use count the words in the selection. If I typed “count some set of words here”, I want to count the words in “some set of words here”. Here’s how to do that.

javascript: var s = "%s";
if (s == "it") {
  s = document.selection
    ? document.selection.createRange().text
    : window.getSelection
    ? window.getSelection().toString()
    : "";
}
alert(s.split(/\s+/).length + " words");

Now, put all of this in one line and add it as your keyword search. Try it!

(Note: You need to replace { curly braces } with %7B and %7D in Google Chrome. It interprets curly braces as a special command. Also, Chrome replaces spaces with a +, so the word count will always return 1 if you search for “count some set of words here”.)

You could use selections to search as well. If you wanted to Google your selection, just use:

javascript: var s = "%s";
if (s == "it") {
  s = document.selection
    ? document.selection.createRange().text
    : window.getSelection
    ? window.getSelection().toString()
    : "";
}
location.replace("http://www.google.com/search?q=" + s);

Typing “google it” will search for your selected words on Google. “google some words” will search for “some words” on Google.

I’ve configured these keyword searches on my browser to:

Share sites. Typing “share google” adds the page to Google Reader, “share delicious” posts it to del.icio.us, “share digg” diggs the page, etc.
Send mail from the address bar. Typing “mail someone@gmail.com sub:This is the subject. Rest of the message” in the address bar will send the mail out. (Of course, you need to have created a mail gateway. I’ll try and share this shortly.)
Add entries to my calendar. Typing “remind Prepare dinner at 8pm” adds a reminder to my calendar to prepare dinner at 8pm.
Highlight parts of a page. Typing “highlight it” highlights what I’ve selected on the page. Even after I remove the selection, the highlighting stays. Typing “highlight some phrase” highlights all occurrences of “some phrase” in the entire document. The colours change every time you use it on a page, so you can search for multiple words and see where how they’re distributed.
Replaces tables with charts. Typing “chart it” with a table selected replaces the table with a chart. Typing “chart it as pie” or “chart it as scatter” changes the chart type.

You could actually take any bookmarklet and convert it into a keyword search. Which means that practically anything you can do on Javascript can be convert into a command-line-like syntax on the address bar.

So there it is! You can pretty much have a web command line. I wonder if we could add UNIX-pipes-like functionality.

Google Chrome screenshots

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:00:00 +0000

I went to the Google Chrome site.

Clicking on the “Accept and Install” button…

… automatically launched the downloader in Firefox…

… and (after a fairly short while) started installing the application directly. This may be the most painless install I’ve done in a while.

I clicked on “Customise the settings”

This is what it looks like.

And that’s it! It installs, and launches in just a few seconds. First impressions: the startup and rendering are really fast.

The address bar doubles up as a search bar. Very sensible.

Several nice features: incognito mode, application shortcuts, and developer tools.

The Javascript console has Javascript autocompletion! Watch out, Firebug.

The “Use DNS pre-fetching” looks interesting. My browsing certainly seems faster. Might be faster than Opera, even.

The “Show suggestions for navigation errors” feature.

There’s a task manager…

… that shows how much memory each site uses.

But not all is good. This jQuery animation on my site leaves trails behind.

And the text box resizing is good, but feels a bit… wrong, somehow.

Plus: I can re-import history, bookmarks, etc. from Firefox at any point, so I don’t have to worry about using this as a secondary browser.

Update (8am UK, 3rd Sep): Chrome.exe isn’t installed in your “Program Files” folder. It’s in your “Documents and Settings” folder, under “Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application”. (That’s on Windows XP. Not sure about Vista.)

There’s a Themes folder, so I imagine more themes should be on their way.

There doesn’t seem to be an about:config option. But there are a whole lot of others:

about:cache
about:dns
about:histograms
about:memory
about:plugins
about:stats
about:version
about:crash
about:internets
about:network
about:blank
about:shorthang
about:hang
about:objects

I’m not entirely sure if the last two work. Based on comments at John Resig’s blog. Go through the code to see if you can find more.

Comments

Sumit Dhar 11 Sep 2008 1:47 am: Have found an interesting use for “Incognito” mode. Both my wife and I use the same laptop to access Gmail. Not wanting to use a second browser, invariably one has to logout to allow the other to access mail.

With Chrome’s Incognito mode, it uses a different directory to store the cookies. This allows two or more people to login to their Gmail accounts in different tabs.

Cheers,
D.
S Anand 12 Sep 2008 1:19 am: But do sessions persist? I thought that once you switch to incognito mode, your cookies would no longer be sent to the server, and that you would need to at least log in. So while one person can stay logged in, the other would still need to log in. Is that right?