Paul Wille Consulting, Inc » Uncategorized

Google Chrome – Google’s own web browser

paul — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:29:51 +0000

Wow. Over the past 3 years I loved watching anxiously as Google made multiple strategic acquisitions (like Writely, Jot, and Tonic Systems), and was impressed with each, but not as impressed as when they tied them together into Google Docs and Google Sites. And it hasn’t stopped there…Google Gadgets that can be embedded and customized into your Google Spreadsheets give data visualization unlike anything else.

But one major weak point for Google has been out of Google’s hands, and that is the web browser. With each new launch of a Google product, there is an increasing dependency on the web browser’s JavaScript interpreter and runtime. Today’s browsers use a JavaScript engine that simply is not capable of compiling, debugging and running JavaScript code quickly. Whats more is that browsers today only allow one JavaScript “process” to run at a time. While this may be a bit on the technical side, it basically means that browsers are simply unable to run today’s web applications like Google Docs and Google Sites efficiently.

Announcing Google Chrome. A web browser built by Google, designed specifically for web applications. Targeting especially the JavaScript engine that is their achilles heel today, Google Chrome is very fast, able to run multiple requests/processes at once, and best of all, open source.

Only a few screenshots exist right now, including the following, courtesy of CNET.

Today (September 2, 2008), at 11am PDT, Google will be holding a press conference to announce Google Chrome officially, and open it for download. I’ll be providing a first review of it as soon as its available here. Stay tuned, and definitely check it out when its available.

paulwille.com is is on the move

paul — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:56:18 +0000

Well, not really. I’m just moving my blog and RSS feed to the root of paulwille.com. I only mention this in case you subscribe to the feed from this site. You can now use the following:

www.paulwille.com – takes you to my blog

feeds.feedburner.com/paulwille – RSS feed for my blog

Hope this doesn’t cause too much interruption for you, and I look forward to sharing more thoughts and ideas with you, and continuing our conversation together.

–Paul

Google Sites – why you should care about it (Part 1)

paul — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:32:31 +0000

Most people know that for the past 6 months or so, Google has slowed its releases of very cool, interesting tools, and have acquired a good number of companies (some that make sense, and some that don’t…yet). But not too many people have figured out what Google is doing with all these seemingly one-off tools. I think today though, it became very apparent.

16 months ago, Google bought a wiki company called Jotspot (if you’re unfamiliar with what a wiki is, take a look at this definition). Wikis have been appropriated in a number of ways to date (for instance, Wikipedia). And at a conceptual level, they’ve made a lot of sense – its a central place to consolidate documents and information, and allow multiple people to see it, edit it, and maintain it. There just haven’t been many good platforms for companies to easily take advantage of wikis.

Until now.

Today Google relaunched Jotspot as Google Sites (sites.google.com). Users of Google Apps for your domain are the immediate beneficiaries of Google Sites, and with a few clicks, can set it up as a service for their organization. I’ll be giving a full review of Google Sites once I have a chance to build it out a bit.

But at a fundamental level, Google has created a true collaboration platform. Now, these one-off tools are all part of a larger purpose: to create and share information in a decentralized manner.

Google Sites is intended to allow you to post and share documents, spreadsheets, videos, photos, and general information. It comes with a central file/document repository, and robust permissions and security. And, of course, every part of the wiki is searchable thanks to Google’s search algorithm.

More on this collaboration platform soon, once I can get into it and uncover the details of it. For now though, rest assured it will be easy and intutive, just like everything Google builds.

New Starwood Hotels look

httppaulwille.myopenid.com — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 18:36:52 +0000

Starwood recently launched their new Preferred Guest site. Note the usage of rich imagery as the backdrop for the whole site (in fact, refresh the page a few times, as there is different photos in the rotation). I’m a big fan of this for travel sites, as I mentioned in previous posts.

Simplified navigation options, simple calendar controls, great use of AJAX search for the destination search box too.

Nice work Starwood. Hope the rest of your brand sites are on their way to similar improvements.

HawaiianAir.com – new website

paul — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 18:11:57 +0000

Hawaiian Airlines just launched their new website about a week ago. You know, I really like it when I see a company break the mould of their online presence that all their competitors follow. The site is inviting, easy, and provides great tools that travelers need when planning their trip. Best of all, note how they do not show photos of the tail-section of an aircraft (which historically has been so prevalent on airline websites). What does a tail-section have to do with my vacation?

So many good things to point out here on HawaiianAir.com, but I’ll just point out the ones I feel are the most important:

Destination photography – novel idea folks…Delta.com did this a couple years ago. Why show a photo of a jet, which is quite possibly the worst part of your actual vacation itself?
Simplified information display and navigation throughout the whole website.
Minimized number of mouse clicks and page refreshes to interact with the interface. This is actually huge, because nothing is more frustrating than the unnecessary page refresh.
Great use of client-side/DHTML interface interactions.
Intelligent and easy-to-use calendar selector for choosing your dates. Seriously, I think airline websites have the worst calendar selectors of any site out there.
A Trip Planner section of the website (licensed from HomeAndAbroad.com).
A useful FAQ section (and FAQs integrated throughout the website).
A nearly standards-compliant website – lighter page weight, which means faster page download.
A “Whats New” page that explains all of the new features of the site

Big kudos to Hawaiian Airlines, Frog Design, and all others involved in this refresh.