appDev

Is Anyone Using Chrome?

Carousel must be a plant, sent by one of the 2 Big M's (Mozilla or Microsoft). Right click on a page in Chrome, and there's either "View Frame Source" or "View Page Source", plus "Inspect Element" which gives not only source, but css and javascript for that particular element, and for the whole page.

Also, I just did a find on text inside a text area. Not only that, but Chrome lets you resize text areas so you see more of your composition at once, regardless of what the UI-challenged web site coders did.

I use Chrome as my main browser, and I love the ability to kill Flash whenver it runs amok, without affecting anything else.

How do I know Chrome is good enough for the average user? I switched my wife to it after she kept complaining how cumbersome and slow IE was. All browser-related complaints have stopped (now if only I could stop being slow and cumbersome).

Why Bing Isn't for Me

Searching the news is hard. It seems neither Google nor Microsoft/Bing get it right, at least, not in a useful fashion. They produce thousands upon thousands of results, but most of them are way off base, and they leave it to the user to sift through them. The vast majority of links are not relevant because only the text of the search query was used, without much regard for meaning or context.

A better approach is object-based search, which is something Yahoo is working on. With this method, news articles are processed and tagged with the "objects" they contain. Then when a user conducts a search, these tags (or article "meta-data") are used to find all articles that reference the object being searched on. The outcome is highly-targeted, relevant results - essentialy pre-sifted for the user.

The drawback, of course, is that these search objects need to be created first, which presumably is that Yahoo is working on. At least one other company, Llesiant Inc, has already done a fair amount of this, and has further organized their hundreds of thousands of search objects into meaningful taxonomies.

One of those sets of objects has been packaged into an iPhone app, called politicoTracker. If you need to find real-time news on any of over 6600 US politicians at the federal, state, or local levels, there is no faster way to do so than through this app.

Going forward, other apps will be created using different parts of the taxonomy, bringing advanced enterprise-level search capabilites to the iPhone.

politicoTracker.com

Search: Why Are They Trying to Fix Something That Isn't Broken?

Nobody goes past the second page of Google results, yet there are sometimes literally millions of "results" left unexplored. You don't call this broken?

Object based search is the way to go. It is the next step in the evolution of search. The benefits are highly targeted, relevant results, plus the ability to easily cross-search. The technology exists and is in use by the government and corporations. Now that power is available on the iPhone in the form of politicoTracker, the first of many apps to deliver this capability to consumers. The future is now.

How Much Profit Is Apple Making from the App Store?

Re: "[3] For $100 million, Apple would be able to staff a standalone App Store with 300 well-paid employees, "

Presumably you mean app reviewers and their managers, plus a few database admins, etc.

What's the rate of new app approvals? 5,000 a month? (my WAG). So that's what, 15 apps approved per reviewer per month, or a little over 1 per business day.

For a developer, interesting stuff.

5 Reasons to Anticipate a Sirius XM iPhone Application

This comment will be a huge success. It's ok that I have a limited vocabulary, as long as what I say is a huge success, or what I talk about is a huge success.

My thoughts are repetitive, but I think they are a huge success, and I'll tell you why:

Only a huge success like me can point out that you will still need to pay for your Sirius subscription to listen to it on your free iPhone app. So while the app will no doubt be a huge success, the reasons given are not well reasoned.

But hey, there are a huge success, no doubt!

How Microsoft Can Develop a Meaningful Presence in Online Search

It's the USER, not the numbers, that matter. This article is all about numbers taken out of context without thought as to what they represent, which apparenty is a shared sin among MS executives and just about all analysts and critics.

Case in point: M has tiny% of search, and G has big%, yet their unique visitors are not that far apart.

HELLO !!

People use Google to find things. Some of those things are on Microsoft's sites. Thus, the same people are being counted: those who found (or at least tried to find) what they were looking for at the Microsoft site by using Google.

Microsoft is the destination. Google is the map. Microsoft's sole concern should be to make sure it's on the map.

Microsoft's desire to compete in search is fundamentally flawed. There is an inherent conflict of interest, real or imaginary, in any search results Microsoft comes up with.

I don't expect a map printed by Exxon to show me Shell stations. Why on earth would I go to Microsoft as a starting point of any search?

Google is a neutral 3rd party. People will trust Google's results above Microsoft's, and there is nothing MS can do about that.

MS should not even try to be in this business. They should be expending all their "search" resources trying to increase their Google page rankings. Their mid-level managers are doing this anyway (as are ALL online content originators who care about traffic)

Actually, if they spent half of the money they've wasted on this quixotic quest on their products (improving quality, features, and lower pricing) they would strengthen their core competency and help ensure their future profitability and relevance.

I don't get Microsoft's obsession with search - it's not their business, and never will be. It seems like pure jealousy to me. If they're worried about the eventual Great Google OS, how about improving Windows instead?