Chrome and Moonlight, or how to deadlock a browser
It’s no secret that Moonlight works best on Firefox at the moment - it’s our baseline browser, after all - but we’ve had many requests to add Chrome support, and since it supports NPAPI just like all browsers out there, it should really work out of the box, requiring only some extra code to implement/hackify stuff that Chrome/WebKit doesn’t expose and that we need - basically, DOM support and some downloader tweaks.
New phone, Moonlight almost upon us and other little tidbits from the week
This week I got supremely frustrated with my phone(s). I have a very friendly Nokia 6288 which is unfortunately locked-in to Vodafone, and as some of you might know, I got a new phone number from a different operator, which means I can’t use my Nokia until I unlock it… and in this country, it’s not an easy thing to do. In the meantime, I have some unlocked phones, but they’re for emergencies only, really, when I’m travelling and just need to use a local card for a bit, not at all something that I would like to use on a regular basis. And I did try to use them, but it turns out I need a little more from a phone than what a Nokia Prism can provide… boy oh boy is that thing slow :PDoing the Wave
For the past week I’ve been doing the Google Wave dance. First impressions are, it’s a really interesting mashup of different messaging/content concepts - Wiki meets IM meets Email threading - but it’s way too cluttered. The social web evolution tells us that simpler is better, services tend to be straightforward, simple, uncluttered, fast. Google’s own web page was a hit precisely because it was simple, clean and to the point, Twitter and all related services are the same thing. Having a huge chunk of my desktop space occupied by one browser window with a bunch of stuff because that’s what it takes to be able to interact with Google Wave is way too intrusive. And of course, the fact that it can literally bring the browser to it’s knees tells me that it might be a bit too much for a web app.