Minimalist Geek

Google Chrome - Best Browser So Far

It has been almost six months since I last wrote about Google Chrome. In the meantime Google has launched two new products Wave and Buzz about which I will write in future posts.

So what has changed in the last six months? Chrome managed to convince me and is now my web browser of choice. Why? Easy. Chrome is fast, both to load the web browser and to render web pages. Memory consumption is reasonable. Tabs are treated as separate processes so no single tab can bring the whole browser down. In the last six months this only happened 3-5 times and I only had to kill that particular tab.

Compare this to having Firefox crash on you in a huge ball of fire bringing down with it all your open tabs. Guess that is what they mean by fire in Firefox, rather than because it is fast. It seems that judging a web browser by its name is not a bad idea at all. Take Google Chrome. Just like chrome it is polished, looks awesome, and does not rust, read slow down, with time. Well I know chrome does rust if it is not maintained properly, but you get my drift

Not to mention the awesome handling of downloads, with circular progress indicators, and a dedicated download manager page. The history page is another beauty with a detailed chronological breakdown of the pages you last visited. Tab dragging and dropping is another feature I really like and find useful. For instance, having two Chrome sessions running with multiple tabs open in each. One session is stuff related to project A the other session to project B. You accidentally open a tab for project B in session A. No worries. Just drag’n'drop it over to session B and you are done. Simple but useful.

Password management is integrated perfectly into Chrome. The only issue I had with it six months ago is that it did not manage to import the saved passwords from the SQLite database in which Firefox stores its settings. Thus, I had to enter them once to have Chrome offer to remember them. But if you have a little patience and give Chrome a try I am sure you will never look back.

Free Professional Bookmark Manager Software for Windows

BookmarkManager, FruitfulTime’s free professional bookmark manager is now available for download.

BookmarkManager is browser independent, portable (can be installed on USB pen / thumb drive), and supports bookmarking of websites, documents, files, folders, and program shortcuts. Fast search as you type and easy sharing of bookmarks with friends and colleagues through inbuilt Gmail support are two more features that complement the functionality of BookmarkManager.

The free unlicensed version of BookmarkManager is fully functional. The only limitation is that of launching 10 items per day. For power users who need to remove this restriction a license key can be purchased for only $29.99.

Best Bookmark Manager

Bookmarks are really useful to keep tabs on websites you come across while doing research, for example.

Unfortunately the bookmark management functionality of all major web browsers is below par. Add to that the fact that the bookmarks are locked in one browser on one machine and the lack of flexibility will drive you nuts.

This has been a pain point for me for quite some time now. So after searching the web far and wide for proper third party bookmark management solutions I concluded the best thing was to develop a proper bookmark manager from scratch.

How about a bookmark manager that is portable, i.e. can be used from a USB / thumb / pen drive, browser independent, does not constrain the user to use hierarchical folders but instead supports labels, has blazingly fast search, and can be accessed and bookmarks added with global hotkeys. Of course, standard features like import from all major web browsers are supported as well.

And why stop there? How many times daily do you have to double-click multiple times in Windows Explorer to open a particular folder? How many times daily do you navigate folders to open a document or project your are currently working on?

So on top of all the features I mentioned above I added support for bookmarking local files, folders, and applications on your computer for quick and easy access. Just drag and drop your frequently used files and folders to create a handy bookmark.

All of this functionality is part of the new FruitfulTime product named BookmarkManager.

You can say you first heard about FruitfulTime BookmarkManager here

Check out the FruitfulTime website tomorrow to grab your copy of BookmarkManager.

Developing in a virtual machine

My main development machine was running on top of Windows Vista since it was pre-installed. When I bought the machine, I had neither time or willingness to switch OS.

To cut a long story short, Vista was really limiting the potential of my machine since out of the box it sucked up roughly 750MB of memory. After installing my usual tools, Vista was booting to a whopping 1GB of memory. This really limited my work since I constantly need to work with virtual machines.

So after reading some interesting information about using Windows Server 2008 as a main development machine and thinking how to go about it I finally made up my mind on the following setup.

Host OS: Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition + WICD Manager since Network Manager sucks, all of this installed in a 15GB partition along with a 5GB swap partition.

Ubuntu 9.04 uses less than 250MB after booting. Then I installed Sun’s VirtualBox 3 to create my virtual development machine. Guest OS, is Windows Server 2008 standard with some small tweaks to make it more useable as a desktop OS.

Windows Server 2008 consumes roughly 300MB after booting, leaving ample space for me to work.

With this configuration I also get all of the flexibility of virtual machines, such as cloning, suspending, using the same Ubuntu host OS machine to load any virtual machine I need, and on top of all that, never have to re-install Windows or any software if something goes wrong.

All virtual machines’ files are stored and run from an external 500GB drive, which is backed up on to another 500GB external drive. This way I am not tied to any particular machine, reducing downtime if something goes wrong. All big pluses.

Free note taking software from FruitfulTime

At FruitfulTime we have just released a free version of our note taking software NoteKeeper. NoteKeeper really helps with keeping notes organized in one place, where they are easy to update and find.

For more information click on the following link: Free note taking software

Track your computer time automatically

I guess nearly everybody from time to time wonders at the end of the day where did I spend my time today? If like me you spend most of your work time on a computer the above happens more frequently than say for manual workers.

Pretty obvious I guess. If you are a construction worker for instance, you can physically see your work so you do not need anyone or anything to track your time. This is not the case for information workers who cannot measure their work so easily.

Tracking time for information workers is even more important these days due to the internet. While the internet can be credited for simplifying, speeding up, and making possible certain business processes, on the other hand it has to be heavily penalised for millions of hours wasted each year by employees on unproductive activities such as social networking, chatting and emailing jokes.

So at FruitfulTime we designed and developed FruitfulTime ProductivityMeter a software tool that tracks your computer time automatically. FruitfulTime ProductivityMeter is FREE for personal use so you can download it now to start tracking your computer time.

A new year is just around the corner so this is the perfect time to start tracking your computer time. You can only improve what you measure and so if you want to boost your productivity you first need to track and measure the time you spend on your computer activities.

In these hard economic times, being productive and making efficient use of your time can make the difference between being employed or seeking a job.

FruitfulTime TaskManager 2 Launched

As I wrote in my last blog post, I was busy working on FruitfulTime TaskManager 2.

Today I am happy to announce that after months of hard work, today we launched FruitfulTime TaskManager 2.

Time to celebrate

Go check it out and download your own free 10 day trial from here.

Installation is only 300KB, so you can download and install in less than a minute

Alive and kicking

It has been a while since my last blog post here since I was busy with some other stuff. Last month I had my degree exams and as you can imagine that was a busy month. After the exams were over I continued to work on the next version of FruitfulTime TaskManager.

FruitfulTime is a startup company developing productivity software, and I am co-founder along with my friend Gaetano. Our first product, FruitfulTime TaskManager is a simple, lightweight, yet powerful to do list management software.

Following the success we had with the first version, we continued to research ways to improve the product further and include feature requests received from our customers.

The next version of FruitfulTime TaskManager is a major release and includes many enhancements and new features which further simplify the product whilst making it more functional.

You can read more about FruitfulTime TaskManager 2 here.