Sweetcron & Chrome
Time for some views on a couple of little apps that have appeared recently.
First off is Sweetcron, every wanted to be able to update twitter, or flickr and have your blog updated too? If so then Sweetcron might be for you.
Sweetcron is a light weight blogging app like WordPress (but a hell of a lot lighter) which will also pull in your RSS feeds from other web apps like twitter or flickr and update your home page. The idea is it’s an Automated Lifestream pulling in all your updates to one place so you don’t have to post the same thing on flickr and then also post it to your blog.
Although things like Flickr allow you to post to your blog from flickr you always run the risk of mucking up styles and layouts of your blog as Sweetcron works off your RSS feed it can stlye the items with it’s styling and not risk pulling any odd bits off bad CSS.
WordPress has various twitter plugins, the one here pulls out a list of updates and posts it in list on the right somewhere. I’m sure there are plugins that’ll turn tweets in to a blog post but Sweetcron makes it that much easier by not even needing to upload and activate a plugin. Just drop in your RSS feed and it’ll pick up all the updates every 30 mins or as they happen.
With a bit of CSS work you can probably transform Sweetcron to look like your current blog. It misses some of the features bigger blogging tools have such WordPress but if you’re really active on flickr or tweet so much it hurts and want a corner of the Internet to call your own then apply to the public beta and download it! Or check out my testing area http://sweetcron.huntershome.co.uk
Moving on!
Chrome is Google’s effort at entering the Browser wars. Chrome is a very lightweight browser, so much so the download is 500k, it doesn’t have a title bar, or a status bar amoung other options. It’s view area is much larger than other browsers because the UI is minimul.
It is nice to see little status bars appear when loading a page, in Chrome it’s not even across the bottom but just appears in a little box in the bottom left.
Google have introduced the Javascript 8 engine which makes a big difference on Javascript heavy or AJAX sites.
A nice feature of Chrome is its own Task Manager which displays the amount of memory usage for different tabs not the entire app which is great if you’re trying to optimise a web site and cut down on memory usage its a perfect tool, and you don’t need to install an extra plugin.
It also looks to be built on the same rendering engine as Firefox hopefully meaning that when it comes to testing sites for clients that it’ll just be adding another name to the sheet and not worrying to much that it’ll be a huge overload like IE6 is.
Quick thought! Maybe we could offer Chrome to people still using IE6! It’s a small download and currently on runs on Windows
It’s built using Apple’s WebKit which means it should appear on a Mac soon and no doubt every other possible OS, maybe OS/2!
It’s nice to not to be presented with so many menu’s even with a fresh install FF, Opera and IE7 present the standard File, Edit… menu’s but how many of us really use them? Chrome does away with any un-needed fluff that we’ve come to accept from Browsers and just gives us a Browser nothing else.
So when you get the chance fire up your current browser, to download a new one: http://www.google.co.uk/chrome