I've just been playing with Google Chrome from the Dev Channel site. After 5 minutes, I've got some things I hate.

• Title Tabs Done Wrong:
  I like the idea of integrating the tabs into the title bar, however they don't go far enough. If you just reach up there and click-and-drag, chances are you'll grab a tab, and detach it or move it in the tab order.

  When Apple lifted this same trick in the Safari 4.0 betas, it was great because if you just grabbed any tab, it acted as the title bar would and moved the window, if you clicked and held, then started dragging, it would drag/detach that tab. That's how this should work.

  I like the fact that there's very little, well, chrome in Chrome. I like minimal layouts that give me maximum space for what I'm looking at and don't interfere. Chrome could probably drop 20 pixels by pushing the tabs to the top of the window and making them behave properly.




• Tabs open behind current tab:
  This makes me nuts. When you click a link in the current tab, the new tab opens behind the current one, and not all the way to the right like I expect. Here's a use case that shows how worthless this is. If I'm on Fark, and Fark is on tab 4 of 8, and I click 3 links and 3 comment section links, they're now jumbled in as tabs 5-10, rather than 9-15. They're not where I expect them, they're where I have to hunt for them. This cannot currently be changed by the user.




• No on-the-fly Search Selection
  I like Flock because, among other things, you can drop down the search box and choose an engine on the fly. By default Chrome will let you change your default engine between Google (go figure), Yahoo and Bing!. But there is no search box in the browser. What they mean by "default engine" is "what engine is used when you type text into an empty tab URL box, or highlight and right-click text in a page". That's pretty cool, but I'd love the ability to change that engine based on the context of the search rather than through Preferences. A good case is typing in "Big Trouble in Little China", dropping down the menu to IMDB and pulling up the IMDB page. The way to do that at present is to type "Big Trouble in Little China" into the URL box, right click the URL area, click Edit Search Engines, and tell it to make IMDB the default (after setting up the IMDB search engine yourself). Then you'll have to change your default back to Google later.




• Mid Click Auto-Scrolling:
  There is none. One of my main gripes in Safari is the lack of auto-scroll. For anyone not paying attention, the idea is you click the middle mouse button, and then move the mouse up/down left/right to scroll around, no need to slavishly ZING a scroll-wheel/ball around to go up/down the page, or dive to the edge of the window and try to grab the scroll bar. Civilized, brainless, and easy on the tendons.




• Chrome is low on Chrome:
  This is a "LIKE", I'm really happy with how sparse it is. The nav-bar + tab bar + window chrome is much smaller than Firefox, and even smaller than Safari. That gives more room to me and gives me a window that is small and tight, not annoying like FF. I also like the solution to the Status Bar, which is the bar at the bottom of Firefox or Safari where it shows you the destination of a link you're hovering, or how many items of a page have loaded.

  Chrome doesn't have a status bar, but instead they have a status "ribbon", let's say, that appears to cover part of the lower left of the window when you hover something or the browser has something to say, like that.

I'm sure there will be more, I'm not sure if it will be more positive or more negative. I suspect this will be another browser I use occasionally to see if it fixes the things I gripe about, and then put back in the drawer and go back to FF or Flock until it gets better, MOAR, or whatever.

Almost exactly half my music collection contains "the". Of 15,137 tracks, 7578 have "the" in the Artist, album or track name. So I'm 19 off.

The reason this came to my attention is that I was searching my collection for The The. iTunes doesn't seem to like that search much and only hits on one "the". Quotes mean nothing to this application. Thanks again Apple.

Someday, we'll live in The Future, I swear it.

Last year I bought OmniGraffle 4 Pro, I really, really like that app, and it makes using Visio seem like self torture. Now only if the formats were open all the way around...

The thing that has held me back with OmniGraffle is the lack of stencils. Graffletopia does a great job, but I find myself using the Apple or Dell (mixed with the Sun, Netapp, etc) stencils that aren't really representative of my hardware, and I feel that it just doesn't seem that professional when I hand my boss a network or rack diagram that has all this disparate hardware that doesn't match anything we actually own. I have a lot of Visio stencils, some of which DO work in Omnigraffle using their preferred import method: Make a new drawing in Visio, drop your objects on there, save it as an xml drawing, and import that into OmniGraffle. The problem is that for a huge percentage of stencil sets, you get an error that you can't load the EMF data and get a grey rectangle or munged object.

Many people have been recommending blowing the objects way up in Visio and using a screenshot, or exporting the document from Visio as a PNG or some such. This will get you your objects, but they'll be raster images and you will lose both detail and the ability to scale them. What makes Visio and Omnigraffle (and PDFs, and Illustrator) work so well is that your objects are vector images and are scalable in all directions while maintaining quality.

To import those objects which don't convert properly, I've started using the following method, which isn't perfect, but the objects do come across, and you don't have to rasterize them.

I am using:
Visio 2002 in a Windows XP VM
Illustrator CS3
Omnigraffle 5 Pro

Go into Visio, create a document and populate it with some of the objects you want to convert. I've found that if I really load this up, it doesn't work so well. Save this document as .emf or .wmf (enhanced metafile or windows metafile). Oddly I've found that CS3 doesn't like the .ai files saved out from Visio 2002. YMMV. This would obviously be the preferred way to move files around, assuming it works.

Open the saved file in Illustrator on the Mac. You may have to ungroup/regroup your object and sub-objects. When you're ready, cut and paste your object from Illustrator into Omnigraffle using CMD-C and CMD-V. Dragging them from one app to the other didn't seem to work exactly as I would have expected.

Now, in Omnigraffle, click the gear icon in the Stencils panel and select "new stencil". This will open up a canvas that you can copy your new object into after whatever tweaking you want to do. In Omnigraffle 4, this is done with the Stencils menu instead.

There should be simpler ways to do this, but I haven't found any that produce results of the same quality with as few steps. I've found that you can use OpenOffice or NeoOffice to open the emf/wmf files, and then follow the same steps to import the objects, but it seems the NeoOffice rasterizes the files, so while it does work, you lose some detail. I'm also looking for other methods. Inkscape does a great job of opening and editing PDF documents, but doesn't seem to save in any vector format that can be loaded by Omnigraffle (mainly saves in SVG variants). Omnigraffle claims to be able to open PDFs, but I haven't had good luck with that in the Real World.

If I find an easier way to get quality stencils from Visio into Omni, I will update the page. In either case, I'll add screenshots soon enough.

I also wouldn't blindly upload any stencils you create to Graffletopia without running by them or the original stencil distributor, as that would almost certainly put you and Graffletopia both in hot legal water.

[music | Leaether Strip - What If (Beats on classic mix)]

The Amarok discussion usually comes as a result of a wider discussion/flamewar about the "little things" that bug the shit out of me a year after dropping SuSE for OSX as my home desktop. I used Linux as my desktop for about 8 years, and before that for more "traditional" server type applications. I've had a Linux desktop since Redhat 4.1, but it didn't replace Windows completely until about 1999. That gives me a different perspective on how a computer Should Just Work. My definition of that is skewed by things like uptime and standards compliance. I have no idea what the Standard Uptime is for a Windows desktop machine. My Windows desktops have always stayed up for months and months, because they do nothing except run Outlook and specialty business software that I couldn't get to work under Wine.

So from that perspective, OSX is not particularly stable. The only time I ever rebooted my linux machines was when either the power went out or I was upgrading SuSE. Aside from that, they Just Worked. I don't count things like upgrading KDE as a reboot, because it was just an X11 restart, ctrl-alt-backspace, new DE starts, no reboot. Leopard is more stable for me than Tiger was, especially in terms of returning from standby on the laptop. However in terms of applications "beachballing" and having to force-quit things, well that kind of thing rarely happened to me in SuSE. I'd probably kill Firefox every couple of weeks because something screws up or its footprint was too huge. I have to force-quit Safari every day or two (no SIMBL or other wackiness anymore until I figure out why this is).

Here's a quick list with some detail about what really bugs me, and what I really like in OSX: