The beta version of Google Chrome became available this morning, and it’s definitely worth trying out. It’s not quite good enough to pull me entirely from Firefox yet, but it definitely has enormous potential. For now I’ll be using it for casual browsing whilst staying with Firefox for work.

Our new online shopping site currently in development seems to work flawlessy… that was expected, considering Chrome is based on WebKit, but given that we’re getting very close to launch (honest!) I’m pleased to say that IE6 remains the only browser that I hate.

Simon pointed out that Chrome gives very little weight to the web page’s title. Because Chrome has a minimalistic look about it, the classic “File / Edit / View” bar and application title are nowhere to be seen. Furthermore, the tabs cut off page titles after around 20 characters, so page titles like “Gameplanet Store NZ – Buy DVDs, DVD movies, PS2, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, Wii, and PC games online.” are suddenly extremely useless for all purposes other than search engines. Interesting decision.

It’s been a really long time since I’ve worked on any web project for myself, but quite some time ago I had an idea for an online workout logging application; something you can use to keep track of your gym workouts and see how much weight you’re lifting and how your progress is going.

Last week I got a prototype of the site online at strengthfu.com; it’s not open to the public just yet, but if you want to be the first to know when sign-ups are open then please register your interest on the site.

I’ll have more news on this soon.

Who says golf is boring? Tiger Woods’ U.S. Open win this week caused measurable traffic spikes in the U.S.A., with numerous ISPs apparently initially believing the spikes to be a denial of service attack.

You can read the full story here, but here’s the summary:

Starting around 9 am Pacific and peaking at 1:30 pm yesterday, many ISPs noticed an unusual increase in traffic. At first, a few security engineers worried they were under some type of new DDoS attack. But the flood of traffic did not appear directed at any individual customer — the gigabits of anomaly traffic surged to almost all customers from multi-national banks to the bakery down the street and home DSL / Cable users. For several ISPs, traffic into their network grew by 15-25%. In one provider, inbound traffic nearly doubled.

It turns out that the U.S. Open played at Torrey Pines yesterday generated one of the larger Internet-wide flash crowds this year. Traffic dipped and peaked corresponding to Tiger’s initial
misses and subsequent spectacular comeback as millions of office bound fans tuned in to the live NBC and ESPN coverage.

Firefox 3 is out today. I urge you to download it.

Given the nature of our business, it’s a very common scenario that we will need to find information or screenshots for games. Fortunately, since game development is a very technical business, most every game has its own dedicated web site.

What is unfortunate however is the industry’s never-ending fascination with Flash-based sites. Waiting for a site to load and then not being able to cut and paste text or save screenshots to disk because the whole damn thing is rendered using Flash is not my idea of a good time.

I got a hilarious – and unprovoked – message over MSN today which pretty much sums up the situation I’m trying to describe:

/tries to grab a wallpaper image from lego indiana jones site

“You do not have enough points to buy this item. Go surf around the site and find more treasures.”

Oh ffs

Why so many site makers decide to glam up their sites at the expense of speed and usability, whilst simultaneously crippling people who are trying to use their assets to promote their game is beyond my understanding.