I've been playing with Google's brand new browser, Chrome, over the past 24 hours and it's already my favorite browser.  I love it.  It's everything a browser should be, and nothing that it should not be.

Working on down my reading list from my honeymoon (what else are you going to do while you're sitting on a beach in the South Pacific...), here's one I really liked.  Made to Stick:  Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath, is more of a mental tool than a book in my opinion.  If you're like me, your brain is swarming with tons of ideas about things that would be really cool and end up on the "someday" list.  This book is all about how to convey those ideas to other people in a clear, understandable, sticky way.

The problem with new and truly revolutionary ideas has always been that no one knows how to relate to them (which is where the phrase "before its time" comes from I suppose).  Trying to describe something that a person hasn't seen before breaks their model of reality and they zone out rather than continue futily trying to figure out what you're talking about (for example, how do you explain color to a blind person?).  This book is a tool that helps you hone your ideas and relay them to people in a format that they can wrap their brains around easily and latch onto.  For someone like me--and I would assume other techy geeks everywhere--that's a pretty critical skill to have.  It can make the difference between your idea making an impact on a project or being rejected, or even getting funding for your company or going bankrupt.

I read through this book with a couple of ideas I've been cooking up for a while in my head, and it really helped me tune them and construct tangible messages around them.  I'll probably at least skim thru this book on a regular basis to make sure that I have the elevator pitches for my ideas well thought out and ready to go when it's showtime.  It also has a cool-looking cover, the duct-tape effect is nifty :)

Readability:  9/10 -  Fun book to read.

Originality:  6/10  -  Not new stuff (a lot of it has been covered before in The Tipping Point), but packaged and presented well.

Overall:  8/10 -  Definitely recommended.

I had a chance to read a few books on my honeymoon (French Polynesia--I had no idea places that picturesque actually existed, it was incredible), so I thought I'd review them since a couple were pretty good and definitely worth a read.  One that I'd recommend is The Dip by Seth Godin (he usually writes great bite-sized content), which is a nice short read but also very thought-provoking and it was giving me deja vu the entire time I was reading it.

The Dip is about difficulties in achieving goals, and what to do when you hit them, as you inevitably will.  When to quit when you hit a road bump, and when to keep on plugging along.  As I read it I repeatedly experienced deja vu as I remembered various difficulties I ran into while starting up Latigent.  There are definitely smart times to quit, and not-so-smart times to quit, and it's pretty important to know which is which.

The Dip provides some nice mental tools to help sort out which projects deserve your energy, which you need to abandon, and which need to be refocused.  For people like me who seem to juggle hundreds of balls at any one time, that's a pretty critical thing to get right, because inevitably SOMEthing falls through the cracks.  At only 96 pages it's a quick read, and I'll probably pull it out to re-read it from time to time just to make sure I'm looking at the big picture and spending my time and energy wisely.

I love my Xbox 360.  The games are great, the online marketplace is well thought out and very well stocked with corny arcade games, demos, and they're now offering high-def video rentals now as well (but, $6, are you kidding me?  Come on Microsoft, be a little competitive here, you could eat Netflix for lunch!)  In short, this is the best product Microsoft has put out in a long time--Sony is going to have to work some magic to compete with it let alone dominate it.

Unfortunately, I rarely have time to play the games.  What I truly love about this piece of hardware is the fact that I can stream media from my computer to it over my home wireless network, and use my high-def TV and stereo system to view/listen to my media instead of my computer.  I have all of my MP3's on an external hard drive attached to my desktop, and I can stream them to the XBox over my wireless network.  It's got a fairly decent interface for browsing the audio library, and the included remote works well for controlling the interface.

Usually, you use a Windows Media Center PC (if you're one of the 10 people who own one) or the free Windows Media Connect (if you're not) to feed the XBox 360 media from your desktop or laptop.  However, I just discovered this free product called TVersity which you can use instead, and it just kicks ass.  It's a media streamer on steroids.  By using it instead of the MS Media Connect I can stream DivX movies (downloaded from BitTorrent), video streams directly from the Net, audio streams directly from the Net, and even Flickr photo feeds directly from the Net.  Directly streaming meaning the files are never even downloaded to my hard drive, they're just encoded by TVersity and handed off to the XBox over the wireless network.  How cool is that?

This is truly the way of the future, I can't imagine going to back to physical discs again.  If you have an XBox 360 and want visit tomorrowland today, there's a great tutorial on how to set up TVersity with the 360 on TweakTown.

Microsoft's CodePlex site is a customized Microsoft Team System hybrid for hosting and developing open source software projects.  After using CodePlex for a while, I have to say I'm really impressed.  Microsoft has come up with a fantastic, easy to use development environment and opened it up to the open source community.  I hadn't used their Team System product prior to this, but after using CodePlex I don't think I'd want to go back to using anything else.

CodePlex is a very feature-rich platform for development.  I love the tools they give you to work with:  a wiki, the ability to aggregate news feeds, discussion forums, issue tracking, automatic zipping of source code, planned releases, a release repository, a project member directory, and license information.  These features by themselves aren't that impressive--some of them are rather bare-bones implementations such as the project directory which is just a list of user names, and their feed support which doesn't support ATOM (as M. David Peterson recently pointed out and fixed by himself with his XML-foo.)  However, put them together in one place and you have a pretty formidable system.  Put VERY tight Visual Studio integration on top of that (still my favorite dev environment), and you can be up and running with a full-featured, easy to use development project with full documentation integration in a matter of minutes.  Compared to the new Google Code project hosting, it practically looks like a wealth of features.  I'd say Microsoft handily beat Google on this round of releases, although it probably helps that Microsoft has years of experience creating and supporting development environments to lean on.

If you use Visual Studio, the integration with CodePlex is just really sweet.  I remember the old days of trying to get SourceSafe working with Visual Studio, and even when you finally got everything configured and up and running it would just stop working at random times for no apparent reason.  SVN integration is just as bad from my personal experience.  CodePlex, however (and I would assume Team System on which the VS integration is built), just WORKS, and works well.  The issues from the CodePlex site flow into the work item list in Visual Studio and when you mark something off as complete or check in code with comments those show up in CodePlex seamlessly.  I already don't want to go back to working without it.

Right now Microsoft is accepting new projects into CodePlex on a case-by-case basis, which is definitely the way to go for a new system of this type.  If it got overloaded and went down at all it would leave a pretty bad taste in developer's mouths--when I have some code to crank out, nothing had better get in the way.  Which is one of the main reasons I'm starting to love CodePlex--it doesn't get in the way, it just works.  And it gives me all the tools I need to just work myself.

If Microsoft is smart they'll release a non-open source version of CodePlex for commercial products for small dev shops, because I for one would sign up for it TODAY.  Instant hosted development environments of this type are the way of the future.

I've been looking for a good hosted wiki product lately to document some of the projects I'm working on.  I don't really want to deal with installing and hosting it myself--not that I couldn't, I just really would rather spend an hour or two or whatever it would take, and then maintain the server.

None of the existing hossted wiki products that I'm aware of did what I needed them to do or were user-friendly enough to pick up and use.  SocialText, for example.  I wouldn't really mind paying a monthly fee for a good experience (take TypePad for my blog, for example), but when I need to consult the documentation just to learn how to create a link to another page, it kind of turns me off to the product.

So when I read in TechCrunch about Wetpaint, I decided to take it for a whirl.  That's one thing I love about Web apps:  you can try them out for a few minutes and then never touch them again if you hate them, and it doesn't clutter up your registery or hard drive or anything else (except  your email I suppose).  So I signed up for Wetpaint (which is free and ad-supported by the way) and created a couple of wikis.

Wetpaint does have it's rough edges, but overall it's the best blogging software I've seen yet.  It makes it extremely easy for anyone to open it up and start adding content, even if you've never seen it before.  The user interface is just fantastic in my opinion, this is what Web apps should aspire to be.  You pretty much know at all times what everything is on the page, and you know how to do what you're trying to do.

It does have it's drawbacks, but they're definitely not enough to keep me from using it.  The text editor is very limited (for example you can't change colors or edit the HTML directly) and you can't attach files to a page.  I can honestly say that keeping people to one color/font will probably improve the readability of many of the wikis I've seen :)  Not being able to add files to a page is a headache for a wiki about an open source development project, but I will struggle thru it so that I can use the rest of the software.  It's that good.

I posted a while back complaining about the lack of quality Web desktops despite the fact that they're multiplying like rabbits.  For a more complete list, see Mike Arrington's PageFlakes review.  On the advice of one of their employees, I've been using PageFlakes for the past few days.  Overall it's a pretty good product, but I'll be going back to Google as my homepage for the simple reason that it's fast and I have QUICK access to search as soon as I fire up my browser.  Other than that, here are my thoughts:

Pros

• Nice clean interface
• I love the ability to add custom notes to a page
• The biggest variety of widgets I've seen in an online desktop
• Flickr integration
• Del.icio.us integration (including clouds)
• OPML support
• Drag and drop widgets from one page to another
• Nice feed reading interface

Cons

• Their support crew wasn't able to tell me if my GMail password is stored in encrypted format, so I didn't feel safe even testing their GMail integration
• Javascript errors in Internet Explorer 6.0
• Didn't work at all in the Flock browser
• Some quirky CSS display issues with feeds
• Takes a long time to load (anywhere from 4 to 15 seconds by my watch)

That last one's a big deal.  I don't think this market realizes that if you're going to be somebody's home page, you have to load quickly.  This is a big gripe of mine with just about every Web desktop out there.  I want to make it my home page, but when I fire up my browser I usually have a purpose in mind, and I don't want to wait more than a second or two for the search box to pop up.  I don't care if I have to wait for everything else on the page to load, but make that search box POP.

Overall, however, I think PageFlakes is probably the most feature-complete Web desktop I've seen.  If they can fix the loading time, Javascript errors, and address my security concerns I'll probably go back and start using them on a regular basis.