Daily Archive for February 2nd, 2008

Angry Letter to Planters

Published
by
jk
on February 2, 2008
in Personal
. Comments

What the heck. I wanted some delicious peanuts, but I got this jar of crap.

So what did I do? I wrote a letter.

Hello,

Yesterday, I picked up a jar of Planters Dry Roasted Peanuts. I was appalled at how it tasted.

I’ve always been a fan of the Planters brand, and have always bought Planters when I had a hankering for some Honey Roasted Peanuts. This was the the first time I’ve tried your Dry Roasted Peanuts. I bought a store brand (Meijer’s) jar of peanuts just last week, and enjoyed them immensely. I had thought that Planters brand of Dry Roasted Peanuts would at least taste on par with the store brand: I was wrong.

What I got was a large jar of bland, tasteless peanuts. Not only bland, but it left me with this really disgusting aftertaste taste that can only be described as a manufacturing defect. Whatever it is, it isn’t a very pleasant taste that gets left in my mouth after I forcefully swallow a handful of it.

And that’s not all. I was over at a friend’s place, and seeing that they had Planters Honey Roasted Peanuts, I knew I had to have some. And even there, I tasted that same blandness in HONEY ROASTED peanuts… the ones that I enjoyed so much from the start.

Maybe it’s just this jar and my friend’s jar, but I’d like to get some kind of compensation for this. It does say “satisfaction guaranteed” on it, and this incident has definitely made me think twice about what brand of peanuts to buy.

We’ll see what happens from here.

Those that know me pretty well will know I love honey roasted peanuts. Heck, peanuts and almonds and cashews and… yeah. I like nuts.

That’s a setup, by the way. Someone bring it home.

Prism (previously WebRunner): The Future of Web Applications? Maybe.

Published
by
jk
on February 2, 2008
in Web Applications
. Comments

This post is like a month overdue. Bear with me, because it’s still relevant.

I had started to hate Firefox 2 (on the Mac) a few months back. It was getting bloated and very unstable with multiple tabs open. While I still use it for web development (Web Developer, FireBug with YSlow, Aardvark, etc…), I made the switch to Camino after a friend gave me a tour of the shortcut keys it had.

Sidenote: Yes… Opera… I’ve probably used you every time a new version came out, but for some reason, I can never stay with you. Maybe it’s because you’re so perfect, so far from the competition… :-)

Camino is definitely a lot more fast, robust, and responsive, and so it has become my browser of choice. Who knows if Opera or Safari will ever take its place… Of course, very recently, I’ve started to use the Firefox 3 Beta 2 exclusively, with Safari and Camino running in the background (another post all on its own as to why I do this).

Enter Prism (formerly known as WebRunner)

Prism Logo

To be honest, I have web apps that I have “running” constantly. In other words, I have webpages open in tabs, or access them frequently over the course of the day. I have these sites be the shortcuts on the bookmark bar in Safari. That way, I can quickly access them with command + number. Command + 1 = Gmail. Command + 2 = Google Reader. Command + 3 Facebook… so on and so forth.

I was very excited to hear about WebRunner, and went and tried it out. Now called Prism, it basically does these things:

  • Separate process: When the webapp goes down or locks up, I don’t want anything else affected. Thankfully, Firefox does have session restore, but that is beside the point. When I open many tabs and have several webapps running in a browser, things get slow and unstable after a day or two.

  • Minimal UI: A generic browser UI is not needed for webapps. If any UI is present, make it specific to the webapp I am using.

  • Basic desktop integration: Create shortcuts to start the webapp, add ability to show specialized icons in the tray or dock and ability to display notifications.

  • Platform with extensions: I don’t want to download a full browser runtime for each webapp. I do want to be able to add some custom code/features that are not directly supported in the webapp. I should be able to install one runtime and then get packages or extensions for each webapp. Think Firefox extensions or Greasemonkey scripts. These extensions should be able to tweak the SSB UI as well.

  • Open external links in real browser: If I click a link in the webapp that opens a new site, don’t change my webapp browser window. Open all external links in my default/real browser.

In summary, it’s a very streamlined (I mean streamlined) browser, meant to do one thing: serve up a web application. Currently, what’s bothering me is that I’m only able to run a single instance of Prism, and only a single web app at a time.

For now, I’m just going to have it open to Gmail all the time. This way, I can command+tab into my email client. Gone are the days of opening a browser and typing command + 1 or typing gmail.com in Quicksilver. Wee!

What’s the Point?

I hear you. What’s all of this hype for? So I get a crappier browser that does less. However, I feel like bridging that gap between the web apps, only accessible by typing out an address or clicking/shortcut keying into a browser window, and desktop apps, accessible by command + tab or running the application by double clicking on an icon (or single-click on the Dock), is going to be very important in the future. This takes a web application and gives it it’s own container (its own separate process), which makes it behave a lot more like a desktop application.

One Thing I Can’t Stand on a Mac: Lag on Print

Published
by
jk
on February 2, 2008
in Apple
. Comments

Sometimes I accidentally press cmd + p when I actually wanted to press cmd + [.

The entire computer freezes up, and I swear inside, as I sit in front of my computer for 3 seconds while the beach ball spins and aggravates my innards.

Is it just me? Does anyone else have this problem with the print dialog taking a bit longer than it should be taking?