Google Chrome OS will bring a lot of changes

As stated on this blog, Google will be working on an Operation System and is call Google Chrome OS. These announcement means a lot of things.

Netbook Era

Netbook will greatly benefit from this OS. In hardware's point of view netbook was created mainly for web use, while there are a lot of attempt in making existing OS to run efficiently this time it got more serious. We'll likely to have a real instant boot OS, and web application to perform like desktop application. This make netbook more fun and exciting and sooner it will have a market share bigger than desktop and laptops.

Application Development

No doubt that everybody is going for web as a platform for development. With this HTML 5 and Javascript will be greatly benefited. With Google Chrome OS, it looks like HTML 5 and Javascript will be the default or native language for development. With HTML 5 multimedia capabilities and offline storage are such a good addition that it almost makes it a complete language. We'll likely to see Javascript perform like C, and perhaps having an access on the OS API. There's a possibility new language will come out to rival against Javascript. I wonder how is Flash, Silverlight, and Java going to be supported in this OS.

Internet connection

The OS will be nothing if it has no internet access. This will make the mobile internet coverage will grow, either by wifi/wimax, 3g. I hope this opportunity that the OS will bring could make the mobile internet more affordable.

Lots of good and bad things will come, as I am excited to see how the consumer/end user benefited from this OS. I like to see how other OS maker will respond like Microsoft, Apple, Linux dist..

Django Documentation Offline Version

Django 1 is here, and Many are happy about it. And I believe many could try it out, and readily downloadable documentation could be helpful. For those who wants an offline version of Django Documentation you can download it here. I'll be updating this offline version weekly as necessarily.

Cheers!!!

Downloadable Django Documentation as of 2008.09.11

Downloadable Django Documentation as of 2009.07.04

Backup & sync your files easily with Dropbox

Dropbox is one of my favorite web applications and I must say that I can't live without it. I don't know many people using it, so a lot of people are really missing this great stuff. I've been using Dropbox for almost a year now. It has helped me a lot with my work, and have onced saved me when I accidentally deleted a folder by overwriting the new one with the old. I am doing my work simultaneously on three different computers/locations. Instead of having to save my work for each session on a USB flash disk then copying it to the other computers, dropbox will take charge to make sure my computers are all in sync. Every time I start to work, I don't need to worry if I have the latest copy on the computer I am using and on top of that I always have backups of my work to the latest minutes (depending on the size of your files).

In addition to backup and sync, you can easily recover files that you've accidentally deleted. Dropbox also keeps a history of your revisions, and helps you easily share your files with other dropbox users.

• Have to install dropbox client, which some may not like.
• Need to have internet connection to work
• Only 2GB for free account, but you earn 1 more extra GB for referrals
• One of the few backup solutions that works on WIN, MAC and Linux
• Very nice web interface

Getting into Symbian S60 development

After the announcement of Nokia 5530, it gets my attention into S60 application development since getting into mobile application development is something I wish to do. While iphone is a hot mobile platform with an impressive rate of new application being added, it's not what I consider as of now mainly because I don't have a mac.

One of the things I like about the development for S60 is that it offers a number of option for a developer to choose from. The Web Runtime (WRT) for those HTML/CSS/javascript developer, PyS60 for python , the Symbian c++ for c/c++, and of course Java and Flash developers aren't left out to. With that I can get into S60 development easily with WRT and PyS60, and a relief for me not to get into learning c++.

The WRT is really nice, just knowing html/css/javascript you can development a web application that get data from the internet and display them into the device. You can also access the device services thru the javascript api provided by the WRT like accessing the messaging, contancts, calendars and etc.. While there are things that I imagine it can't be done with WRT like storing data on the device there is the PyS60.

Another thing for me to lookout is the QT for S60, while this means I have to learn c++ which I am trying to avoid. I think it is really a nice development platform to get into.

Django on GAE

I am planning to write an web app on Google App Engine platform where I am hoping to leverage my Django knowledge. Luckily and just in time, this great article will show you how to create a web app on GAE using Django, and what makes me exciting is the author's site is an example of this tutorial, yes his site is hosted on GAE develop with django.

Playing with Google Chrome

I get pretty excited everytime I hear something new on the web browser realm. As we all know a new browser named Chrome from Google has been announce and everybody wants to take a look at it, as I did right away.

What interests me the most is to see how fast this new V8 Javascript engine is(I am not javascript expert). As I believe the performance of the javscript is very important for the future web application.

I try some sites and notice that Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Google Docs performs faster. I don't have any benchmark but you could really able to feel the performance gain with Chrome. Then I try it with VersionOne(a project planning and management tool) which I had some performance problem due to it's heavy javascript usage, but the result is VersionOne doensn't function well.

While playing with it, I like the tabs on Chrome it's the best I've ever seen it has the most complete features. The minimalist UI of Chrome is very nice and the way they implement the status bar is very unique and fell for it. Over all the Chrome is really speedy, but it uses a lot of memory, really a lot!

Though Google admits that they're not creating Chrome to conquer the browser market but to set a new trend in making a browser that's really meant for Web 2.0, I believe we'll be seeing more good things on the future browser. The seperate process for each tab and improve javascript performance is the key and Chrome will succeed on this one and eventually browsers base on Chrome will come out. Firefox 3.1 is just around the corner, we'll see also how much improvement it does in javascript performance.

Are we going to have a Browser2.0?

Preparing for Django 1 release

To all the django fans I am pretty sure that you're all excited on what is taking place in the development Django as it fastly approaches to version 1. When Django 1.0 Alpha was release I kept myself from upgrading and decided wait for the final version 1 to arrive fearing that it might break something. I did the same thing when the Alpha 2 was release, but new features are just too awesome to ingore and finally I decided to upgrade. As expected something went wrong and having no idea what's going on I quickly turn to Django IRC channel for some help. Nice rozwell tell me why (at 18:58) and present this page to me which is a list of back imcompatible changes that's going to help us prepare for Django 1.

This page is helpful and I am presenting to all isn't aware to it. Get set for Django 1!