Google Chrome Plugins

Google Chrome’s time has come. I love this browser because… it’s the fastest thing out there. It had a lot of glitches when it was first released. I remember Facebook wouldn’t work fine on it… and of course, i had to fix the HTML of many of the websites i maintain.

But i stil love it. It gets updated in background… and you hardly get to notice it!. As almost everything out there… it’s better when tweaked… right?. So i’d like to recommend three different plugins, available in the Chrome Web Store:

  1. AdBlock
    As weird as it may sound… popups are still annoying these days. Furthermore, websites with ads are the worst thing that could happen to you. At least while you’re surfing the web. Well, adBlock takes care of that. It just locks out popups, and disable the download of annoying banners. Try it!.
  2. Google Docs
    Wouldn’t it be great to access your google docs, without actually having to hit ‘docs.google.com’ ?. Well, Google Docs plugin allows you to access them right from a shortcut placed by the location bar.
  3. Firebug Lite
    Although it’s not a full version… it’s a lite… FireBug is one of the best plugins out there. It allows you to play, realtime, with the DOM. Just click few buttons, and you can tweak almost anything. Sorry to say this, but Firefox version of this plugin is sooo much better…

I hope this helps!

Free Mac RSS Reader

I’m not really the kind of person that recommends things. Good things stand out by themselves, and if it’s true that they’re good, they actually don’t need sponsorship.

But i feel like this app totally deserves a review. I’ve been using Google Reader for years. Somehow, i got used to its rusty interface. It’s true. A RSS reader doesn’t need to be fancy.. it should just work. But why not make it pretty?

That’s where Capuccino app comes in. It can be found in the Mac Appstore here. It’s free. The UI looks like Mail App for Lion. You get your feeds on the left column… a small column just to its right, and the actual post content to the right. Nice… right?.

Well.. hang in there. The best part of this RSS reader is that it sync’s with Google Reader. So, if you mark something as read in your macbook, it’ll get automatically reflected in your Reader account.

Why i think that this app is way better than NetNewsWire ?. Because it’s simple. It just gets to the point. Enter your credentials and read. Clean UI. Definitely Apple’s style.

Go get it!

Xcode 4.3.1

If you haven’t done so… go grab the latest release of Xcode. But beware… as soon as you download it, it’ll overwrite your current 4.3 installation. It comes without sdk’s 5.0 and below. So… as usually… i recommend you do that after your looong working journey.

Otherwise you might find yourself stuck watching the download progress bar. No… that didn’t happen to me… i swear!.

Bad thing is that Apple didn’t fix the Refactor functionality, yet. It’s getting kinda difficult to rename class names. For some reason, i keep getting an annoying popup saying that it cannot be done. There are several posts in stackoverflow saying that Dropbox might cause that… but my projects are not inside a Dropbox folder, so that option can be discarded.

If i *ever* figure out how to make it work ok, i promess… i’ll post the solution, right here!

Retina Macbook Air 15′ ???

Although Macbook Air’s screen size is about 13 inches, the resolution is about 1440×900 pixels. Which is the same resolution as the Macbook Pro 15 inches has. At least, the standard model… you can always upgrade it to HD and you’ll get a gorgeous resolution of 1680×1020.

So far so good. But… Apple seems to be planning a 15 inches version of the Air. What would it mean??. Well… if they include a Retina display, it could mean the end of the Pro lineup. The new iPad has a 9.7 inches screen, and its resolution is of 2048x1536px. So… if my math doesn’t fail, a 13 inches retina display could have a resolution as high as 2744x2058px…. while a 15 inches retina display could be 3167x2376px.

Yeah, that’s basic math. But imagine what would it look like… a 15 inches screen with that resolution!. These days, the only problem of the Airs is… the 4gb ram limit!. HD space can be also a big deal. But you can easily solve that with an external storage.

So… what will happen?. We’ll probably hear more about this in the next few months… i’ll keep you posted!.

iPad 3’s demand “has been off the chart”

Yet another post about Apple’s iPad 3…!!. If you check Apple’s online store, you’ll probably notice that the delivery time for an iPad 3 is about 3 weeks. WOOOOOOW… that’s a looot of time man!!. Usually they ship between 2-3 business days.

I guess… after all… Retina Display is a key feature. At least… it’ll definitely help to get new customers on the line.

That has an indirect benefit to iOS developers. Yeah… that means… a lot of people downloading apps. Well, the whole ecosystem benefits from it. Ain’t that cool?