A number of weeks ago, I was ecstatic when I found out about the Adsweep plugin for Google Chrome. From the homepage, it looked promising. I installed it and found that it worked pretty okay. It’d get better over time, right? Apparently not.
My biggest problem with the plugin was that there were so many false positives. When I went to do an advanced search on eBay, I found that the Adsweep plugin had removed the search box! I emailed the creator of Adsweep and was surprised that he emailed back saying he added the exception to the plugin. Woot! Impressive!
It happened again to me on another webpage so I went back to the Adsweep website, only to find the notice that the developer was discontinuing work on Adsweep. Sad day! Apparently too many people were asking for exceptions to be programmed into the plugin and not enough people were volunteering their time. I admit, I’m guilty of this. But I didn’t know–I wasn’t subscribed to the list. I’d contribute a bit of my time if there were others that could help get this going again. Any takers?
Have you ever started a document thinking “Man, tons of other people must have done this same document or something similar. I wish there was something I could use as a sample or template”? That’s exactly what I was thinking today. And then I found .docstoc. This website is a huge repository (over 3 million documents!) where tons of people share their professional documents. Anybody can view the documents for free, but if you want to download them you’ll need to create an account (which is free).
To give you a feel for what they have to offer: I was looking for a document to help me lay out Skill Capture’s financial projections. My search for “financial projection” gave me 250 resulting documents. I didn’t even bother looking at any of the documents past the first page because I found several really useful ones right at the top of the search. I downloaded the xls files and was ecstatic to find that they were full-fledged spreadsheets with formulas to calculate lots of things automatically.
I did several other searches for documents on the service and found that each of my searches had an equal abundance of quality results. This is something I’ve wanted for a long time and I’m extremely excited that I found it.
I have to say: I’ve loved Chrome from the minute I started using it. What do I like about it? Mostly the speed. Throughout the day, I have racing thoughts–things I want to look up, news I want to read, friends’ statuses I want to check. Firefox was much too slow (even though I keep my plugins to a minimum), finally opening a browser window in 5-10 seconds. Chrome on the other hand, happily gives me a window in half a second (maybe even less!).
Since Chrome came out, I’ve changed my usage to about 90% Chrome. I use Firefox every now and then for some occasional debugging. And Safari sometimes when I want to register for free stuff online but have already used Chrome and Firefox and I’m too lazy to go locate and clear the cookie.
With the somewhat recent advent of Adsweep, there are only three features that are keeping Chrome from being my 100% perfect browser:
Print Preview
I’m so cheap! Even though my printer has automatic duplexing (that means it automatically prints to both sides of the paper), I like to make sure what I print is still in my budget. I’ll even tweak the margins and zoom to make sure it’s cheap enough. Give me Print Preview so I know what I’m getting!
Smooth Scrolling
This has irritated me ever since I made the move from Internet Explorer to Firefox back in 2006. It hurts my eyes–I do tons of scrolling and it’d be a lot nicer to have the pages gently gliding across my screen rather than jumping a line at a time.
Right-click Properties
A lot of times I’ll see a graphic and think “I wonder what they named that” or “I wonder if there’s more where that came from”. In Firefox or IE, I would just right-click on the element and then “properties”. Bam! I would see what the file is named and the dimensions. Having this feature would be pretty useful on websites that don’t include a caption or don’t tell where the photo was taken.
So if any Chromium developers are reading this: please develop these features!! Then my life will be complete!