Ranting Kenya

Finally I can test designs with the Safari rendering engine without need to find a mac. The Windows Safari Beta can be downloaded at http://apple.com/safari. Impressions soon to follow.

Just a quick note with my continued use of Deepfish on my Moto Q.

I’ve noticed that one feature that I haven’t seen touted anywhere is that webpages render WAY faster. In Pocket IE I’ve probably waited 30 seconds or more for a page to load. In Deepfish, I don’t think I’ve had one run longer than 10 seconds. That alone is awesome.

My only reservation so far has been the zoom interface. The box accelerates quite quickly. I’m getting the hang of it, so this issue is becoming less of one every day. It is a beta, I’m reasonably certain this will be tweaked before the final version. Perhaps they’ll allow you to adjust the rate of acceleration in the future.

Still loving Deepfish though.

I may have discovered the greatest piece of open-source software of all time yesterday. And best of all, similar programs run around 50$.

It’s called Synergy. It’s a sofware program that runs in the background of your Windows, Macintosh, Unix, or Linux machine. What it does is allows you to use one keyboard and one mouse for multiple computers. It is exactly like using a computer with multiple displays, but you have different machines. I’ve set it up at home to run on my Linux and Windows box. Yes, you can go cross platform! I plan on adding my laptop to my setup in the next couple days.

The setup I saw came from Lifehacker’s workspace contest. The guy had four monitors all next to eachother. The middle two were his Ubuntu box, the left was hit Mac Mini, and the right was running Win XP. I’ve seen other setups that included 12 displays. Your displays don’t even have to be next to each other, you can also put them above or below.

Setup was pretty easy. For Windows and I assume Mac, it’s really really simple. Ubuntu was simple too, until I realized I couldn’t log in to the machine because the service wasn’t yet running. I looked around some forums and found some instructions on editing some system files to allow the keyboard sharing before logging in. It wasn’t difficult, even for a Linux noob like myself.

Basically, if you have multiple computers on one desk, Synergy is an absolute must!

Seriously, how hilarious is the thought of Hitler playing Call of Duty 2?

See the video.

For all you smartphone users that are forced to use Pocket IE (like me), this is a product to check out. I’ve tried installing minimoz, with no luck, and I don’t want to pay for Opera’s mobile browser. So I’ve been using Pocket IE exclusively for the last year. It’s pretty… meh..

Microsoft Deepfish however is another story. For those of your all excited iPhone’s web browsing ability, you should check out Deepfish. I remember seeing the video on the web for Deepfish before the iPhone announcment. So I don’t know if Apple or Microsoft came up with the idea for the method of web browsing.

Basically, rather than needing to load the whole page, and scroll left and right, up and down, it loads the entire web page in a zoomed-out view. Seems the rendering engine is FAR superior to pocket IE’s. The pages look like they should most of the time.

In the zoomed out view, you can then move a box around the page, and that is the area that you can zoom in on. Images look good, pages basically stream to you, but you save so much time not scrolling around trying to figure out where Pocket IE put the link you needed.

I’ve only been using it for a short time, but so far I’d give it a thumbs up. I’ll post again with further impressions in the near future.