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For as long as I can remember, I have been registering my domain names with GoDaddy. My reasoning wasn’t that they were necessarily the best registrar, but more so that they were cheap. Whenever it’s time to refresh my domains, I just look up a GoDaddy coupon code and tack on another year or two. Anyone who has been their customer before probably knows that doing any kind of transaction with them involves a shitstorm of upsells throughout every step of the process. It really isn’t hard to ignore them (and occasionally uncheck some “default” upsells), but it is annoying. Still, I never really felt motivated to switch to another registrar.
Lately, however, our ever-productive Congress has been pushing through bills that would allow the government to set up “The Great Firewall” of the United States, under the guise of stopping online piracy. These bills, known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate, have caused outrage throughout the Internet. They’ve even summoned opposition from some impressively large websites, including Google, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and many more. It was Reddit, however, that has so far made the biggest news in the fight against SOPA/PIPA, by targeting it’s supporters. As it turns out, GoDaddy is not only a large supporter of the bill, but they have had at least a small part in drafting it. There is even an exemption included in the bill for registrars such as GoDaddy. Reddit organized and promoted a mass migration away from GoDaddy in to the arms of another registrar that is anti-SOPA/PIPA. Likely the largest single benefactor of this mass exodus has been a company called Namecheap. Not only are they against the bills, but they openly publicize it on the top of their site and offer a nice coupon code (STOPsopa) to give you a discount on the transfer of new domains. (Note: Since this all started, GoDaddy has first dismissed the boycott, then backpedaled a bit on their support, and most recently they claim to oppose the bill entirely. I know bullshit when I see it.)
Based on how open they are with their opposition and how good their pricing is, Namecheap is who I chose as the new registrar for Chai Life and all of my other domains. I quickly created an account and started the ball rolling. Although I’ve only been a customer of theirs for a day now, I have already noticed two major differences between Namecheap and GoDaddy. First and foremost, the upsells were extremely mild, at worst. Do they offer features above and beyond what I was looking for? Of course they do and I would expect them to at least let me know that they are available. GoDaddy’s strategy, however, is akin to throwing shit at a fan. At times, GoDaddy even attempts to trick you in to paying for more than what you want/need by having added “features” checked by default or making them appear essential. Secondly, Namecheap’s interface is so clean and organized. Everything I’ve needed to do has been easy to find and simple to understand. GoDaddy’s domain manager is the exact opposite and their website in general is a cluserfuck of horrible design choices.
Although my tiny account will not be the straw that breaks GoDaddy’s back, I am proud to have done my part. Now it’s your turn.
Hello, this is the part where I kill you!
If you, like myself, have been a long-time Firefox user, then the following reasons I’m switching to Chrome may interest you.
- Speed
I haven’t bothered looking with any depth in to benchmarks or anything like that, but when I click that Chrome icon on my dock, it is instantly open. Firefox, however, takes several seconds to show up. Any defender of Firefox, my former self included, would brush this off as the fault of various installed plug-ins, but I’ve tracked down and installed all of the same or comparable Chrome extensions (plus one or two new ones that looked neat) and it still opens like lightning. Page loads seem faster as well, but they were still pretty fast in Firefox once it was open, so that one is a close call. - Extensions
Whether you call them plug-ins (Firefox) or extensions (Chrome), they are what makes a modern-day browser awesome. AdBlock is obviously a must-have (although I disable it on my favorite sites and/or sites that aren’t completely obnoxious about ads), but some of the other Firefox plugins that I’ve found Chrome counterparts for that are as good or better than those available for Firefox are Chrome SEO, StumbleUpon, and Ultimate Chrome Flag. A big part of what has held be back from switching to Chrome earlier was the lack or limited ability of a few of those. - Standards
Whether or not you are aware of what web standards are or how they make your web browsing experience better, they are important. Some browsers (I’m looking at you, IE) have long ignored this fact and it has hurt them in the long run. One of the very first things I do when I install a new browser or major update is run the latest Acid test. As seen below, Chrome currently ranks extremely well (Hint: 100/100 is perfect), whereas the latest version of Firefox “only” scores a 97. - PDF Support
If you, like me, view a lot of PDFs from various websites across the net, then you’d expect your web browser to natively be able to just view them inline without thinking twice. This works flawlessly in Chrome without any 3rd party extensions. In Firefox, however, you used to need a third party extension to get it to work and in the latest version that has stopped working and development on an update is all but abandoned because it would require a rewrite. Why Mozilla doesn’t just integrate this in to Firefox is beyond me, but thankfully Google felt it necessary for Chrome.
So there you have it. On both my home and work computers, Google Chrome is now the primary web browser. Between the speed with which they update it, the ever-growing selection of high quality extensions, and the features already built in, it will likely stay the default web browser on any computer I use for some time to come.
I don’t know exact numbers, but it is probably a safe assumption that the Facebook app for the iPhone is likely one of the all-time most used 3rd party apps. That being the case, why does Facebook continually expand and improve upon its web-based features, while all but completely ignoring its mobile iPhone platform? Sure, they integrated the “Places” feature pretty rapidly after it was introduced, but it has so far been a flop (Does anyone know anyone who actually checks in somewhere other than their own house using Facebook Places?). Aside from that, they’ve largely left the application completely alone except for minor bug fixes here and there. I’m not proposing anything huge here, but I’ve got some ideas for features I’d love to see integrated in to Facebook’s iPhone app.
- Liking Comments
This feature has been integrated in to Facebook for a while now. Would it really be so hard to update the app so I can swipe a comment to like/unlike it? - Properly Attaching Links & Videos
There are three main status updating options: Text, Photos, Links, Videos. Is there some reason that the latter two on that list don’t make the cut for the iPhone? Last I checked, the newer iPhones handle video quite nicely and can easily copy/paste a link from Safari in Facebook. - Tagging Friends/Pages
This is one of the changes they’ve made lately that really made sense to me. Why this handy little feature hasn’t made its way over to the iPhone is beyond me. - Ignoring Applications
Everyone’s got at least one Facebook friend who uses every quiz, game, etc, that spams their Facebook wall every single time they beat a level or take a quiz. PLEASE let me ignore whatever new annoying application they’ve found from my phone, so I don’t have to remember to look back and find it next time I’m using the web interface.
That’s it for now. Maybe whatever monkey they’ve got programming their iPhone app will see this and take note. Anything else you’d like to see that I missed? Please comment and let the world know.
Don’t worry, I forgive you if you aren’t nerdy enough to figure this out.
Mario is probably the most influential video game character of all time. So much so, that I even did my best to honor him for Halloween one year. Here’s to the last 25 years of Nintendo’s front-man and his legacy of awesome. The following video is an awesome mash-up commemorating 25 years of Mario.
The rumors were swirling that Apple would be porting the iOS to the Apple TV. Although I suppose this is still something that could happen in the future, it did not manifest for this release. Instead, they chose to just update the software a little bit and write their own programs to support Netflix streaming, YouTube, and Flickr. The addition of Netflix and YouTube are fantastic additions, but what really would have sealed the deal, at least for me, is a third-party App Store. Hulu Plus in particular would elevate the Apple TV from a novelty rental box to a potential competitor to the cable and satellite oligopolies that currently dominate your television. The possibilities don’t stop there, though. Pay channels such as HBO and Showtime could easily release an App tied to a subscriptions service. Depending on the versatility of the included remote, it could even become a gaming system. As Apple has learned from its other iOS devices, the possibilities are quite literally endless when you open up development to third-party developers.
Instead, Apple released a smaller black box that basically does the same thing it did before, but now you rent instead of buy. Coming from a company that is known for innovation, the Apple TV is a pathetic shadow of its true potential.
Not too long ago, Facebook announced the Open Graph protocol. For those of you unaware of what this is, here’s a brief description in their own words:
The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. For instance, this is used on Facebook to enable any web page to have the same functionality as a Facebook Page.
While many different technologies and schemas exist and could be combined together, there isn’t a single technology which provides enough information to richly represent any web page within the social graph. The Open Graph protocol builds on these existing technologies and gives developers one thing to implement. Developer simplicity is a key goal of the Open Graph protocol which has informed many of the technical design decisions.
Put simply, that little “like” button that you now see all over the Internet lets Facebook know what pages are more popular than others and when you search for something on Facebook, that plays a large role in to the rankings of the search results. While this is a great system for businesses to help drive more traffic to their site or promote their brand, it will, as Facebook’s open graph continues to grow, be a very bad thing for bad news.
Say, for example, that a terrible earthquake occurs and you read a terrific article about the aftermath of the earthquake and the destruction that it caused. Are you inclined to “like” the devastation of an earthquake? Probably not. Therefore, information that could potentially be critical to the recovery of the earthquake, news about where is safe, aftershocks, and who knows what else will likely never get a “like” click and will suffer in Facebook’s search rankings. See where I’m going with this? Although it is a fantastic new way to interconnect the social web, some thought clearly needs to be put in to the logistics of using a term such as “Like”. In Facebook’s credit, you can already change the button to instead say “Recommend”, but perhaps something like that should be the default, not the second option that few sites use.
All the talk over the last week on the Internets has been focusing on the new iPhone 4 or the fully-enabled iOS 4 on an iPhone 3GS, but not everyone is getting a brand new iPhone 4 or already has a 3GS. This review is for those of you, like myself, who are still saddled with the aging (yet still pretty awesome) iPhone 3G. The following review will let you know what you’ll get in the new OS, what you’ll be missing, and will hopefully help you decide if it is worth upgrading.
The Good
The very first thing I played around with when it was done updating was folders. If, like many users, you have compiled 3+ pages of apps that you use frequently enough that you are unwilling to uninstall them and clean things up, then you are probably sick to death of attempting to organize your apps. Folders are like a dream come true. Although I cannot explain why it took Apple this long to integrate a feature that dates back to the original computer operating system GUIs, this is a feature that is truly welcome. Instead of 4 pages of apps that are loosely organized and a pain to navigate through and reorganize, I have managed to condense everything in to a single page with 4 main folders.
Once I was able to move beyond the excitement of having folders (Sad, right?), I popped open the mail app. The new inbox structure is great and navigating through the app just to get to each account’s inbox has never been easier. I’ve never really been a fan of a unified inbox, but from what I understand it is hugely popular and was a very highly requested feature, so kudos to Apple for adding it in. Also, for you business users out there, you can now access more than a single exchange account, so there’s that.
For those of you that do a lot of mobile web browsing, you’ll also notice that not only is Safari faster to load initially, but there are some nice new changes. For starters, you now have a choice of the default search engine and can switch between Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Along with the option of which search provider you want to use, search recommendations have been added and are powered by whichever search engine you select as your default. Supposedly there’s also better better HTML5 support and HTML compliance is extremely high, as my phone scored a 94/100 on the Acid3 Test (Note: Firefox 3.6.4 on Mac OS X 10.6.4 only scores a 93).
Are there more things that are awesome about upgrading to iOS 4? You bet, but those are the three that really stand out.
The Bad
The bad points about upgrading your iPhone 3G to iOS 4 aren’t so much as what’s wrong with it once you’re done but what you know for a fact you’re missing and won’t ever get until you buy new hardware. Most notably, multitasking, facetime, and desktop wallpapers. I understand that do to hardware liabilities multitasking and desktop wallpapers had to be disable or they would have just about crippled the phone (at least according to Apple) and facetime simply won’t work without the front-facing camera, but it still hurts to know the awesomeness that others are experiencing which your phone shall never enjoy.
The Ugly
Speed. Sure, a few of the built-in Apps such as Safari and Mail are snappier than ever, but I’ve started noticing more and more that it just seems a bit more sluggish than it ever used to. It is by no means unusable, or even anywhere close to it, but Apple has clearly switch gears to optimizing the software for the newest hardware. Even uglier is the crashing. This really can’t be blamed on Apple because it is an issue exclusively with 3rd party apps, so my guess would be this will be less and less of a concern as the app developers update their code for improved compatibility with iOS 4.
Conclusion
Overall, it is a very solid upgrade for the iPhone 3G. The addition of folders and the improvements made in Safari and Mail are enough to make the upgrade more than worthwhile. If, however, you’re concerned about some of the issues I’ve discussed above, then maybe put it off for a month or two until Apple has released the first bug fix (presumably to be called iOS 4.0.1) and more developers have had a chance to ensure that their Apps are up to date and working properly.
In light of recent Facebook privacy policy changes, one search has been becoming more and more popular on Google.
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