Seven Steps To Mastering Your Web Browser

Seven Steps To Mastering Your Web Browser

Thing is, the stock installation of any browser is only telling you half the story; it’s perfectly serviceable right out of the box, but there is a metric poop-ton of additional functionality and efficiency available. Thankfully, nerdy goofballs like myself have, mostly through trial and error, stumbled upon a host of great ways to make your browser work better and faster.

And lots of great tips in there. I agree: bookmarklets are little miracles.

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How To: Display WebP Images On Your Mac Browser

WebP is a new image format announced by Google last week which aims at making the web faster by providing the tools to use high-quality, yet lightweight, images. While preserving quality and resolution, Google’s engineers figured out a way to compress images so to make them even smaller than usual .JPEG files. About the technical details:

WebP uses predictive coding to encode an image, the same methodology used by the VP8 video codec to compress keyframes in videos. Predictive coding uses the values in neighboring blocks of pixels to predict the values in a block, and then encodes only the difference (residual) between the actual values and the prediction. The residuals typically contain many zero values, which can be compressed much more effectively. The residuals are then transformed, quantized and entropy-coded as usual. WebP also uses variable block sizes.

Being a new file format, it’s not officially supported in browsers yet. Maybe it’ll be very soon, but right now it’s just a cool developer preview that shows what it’s possible to do with Google’s technology. Here’s how you can enable WebP in your Mac browser right now. Read more






Twitter, Curation and iPad: Meet Tweet Library

On the internet, some words are often overlooked. When something becomes “popular” or even a “trend”, the original concept is abused and misinterpreted. It happened with “interface”, it happened with “geek” and “hipster”, it’s happening with “curation”.

Curation: “The act of curating, of organizing and maintaining a collection of artworks or artifacts”

Curation #2: “The manual updating of information in a database”

With Apple’s “curated” App Store platform, geeks and casual users have started using the term “curation” in their parlance to refer to a collection of items regulated by terms and strict rules. With 250.000 applications and stories of rejections, curation suddenly became an internet-wide topic of interest for the everyday iPhone user. This is not what curation is all about. Read more


Apple Touch Panel Suppliers Expected to See Revenue Growth in Q4 2010

Ok, look: we know that the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad are doing fine among consumers. Well actually, they’re doing great - but let’s wait until October 18th (when Apple is having its Q4 earnings call) before we talk about sales and success again. We often forget (or maybe some of you just don’t know) that there’s a whole supply chain behind your beloved iOS multitouch screens; how are these guys doing amid the recession and Apple’s success in the mobile market?


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