Safari vs Firefox vs Chrome on Mac: Chrome Wins!
Almost a month back, I had done a comparison of javascript performance on the latest available betas of various Mac OS X browsers. Chrome edged out Safari narrowly in the Sunspider test and was a clear winner in V8. Chrome has now widened the gap and continue to lead in javascript performance. Opera has been dropped from the comparison because it was no match for the other browsers.
Fix iPhone OS 3.0 Battery Charging Problems
After updating to OS 3.0 my iPhone started exhibiting problems with battery. The battery would not charge at times, the battery drained fast and the phone ran hot. These are the steps I took to fix the problem.
3 Ways to Unlock Your iPhone
There are several ways in which you can unlock your iPhone. You can do a software unlock via the dev team software, use a proxy sim or alter the baseband chip.
Replacing the Tweetie Icon with Something More Elegant
Everything about tweetie is beautiful, well except the Dock icon. I can’t understand how the designers of such a beautifully crafted application made such a pedestrian icon. Maybe in their eyes it is really good but quite a few did not like it. (Most don’t like the idea of a dock icon for tweetie! ). [...]
The True Cost of Owning an iPhone vs Palm Pre vs Android G1
How much does it actually cost to own an iPhone?. If the retail price of iPone is closer to $600 and At&T sells it for $200, then At&T must recoup that $400 over 2 years. It also has to make a profit over and above that. Which simply means that the 2 year contract is very lucrative to AT&T. How lucrative ? Without access to AT&T’s records it will impossible to guess, but the best we can do is compare the cost of owning an iPhone to equivalent smartphones like Palm Pre and Android G1.
MacBook Pro 13″ Unibody Teardown by iFixit
The wonderful folks at iFixit has done it again. Another teardown. The Macbook 13″ unibody which was crowned “Pro” at WWDC has been taken apart. The good news is that RAM and Hard Drive are user replaceable and does not violate the warranty. The new Macbook Pro has a non replaceable battery, an SD card slot, firewire and the digital/mic port has been removed. Though apple claims that the battery is not user replaceable it mostly means that battery cannot be removed without a screwdriver.
Google Quick Search Box Guide
Google has finally released Quick Search Box(QSB) which has been in development for quite some time. The lead developer of QSB is Nicholas Jitkoff who was the developer of Quicksilver. Quicksilver was abandoned by Nicholas citing an unwieldy source code and architecture. So QSB which was written from scratch would have benefited from the experience of shortfalls in quicksilver. So what all can QSB do ? Quite a lot actually. You can control itunes, launch applications, search the web, search specific websites, search google docs,tweet!, search contacts, search safari bookmarks, search documents/downlods/desktop and Sytem Volume etc.
Why StumbleUpon’s SU.PR may not be a Super Idea
On reading the GigaOm piece about stumbleupon’s newly launched URL shortner SU.PR, I was very intrigued. Here is a service that is offering click tracking (like bit.ly) but also helps you in getting more traffic. I thought to myself that this might actually be a credible alternative to bit.ly. Though I like the functionality and statistics offered by bit.ly I consider its user interface clunky. Also in SU.PR you can schedule your tweets for maximum exposure and hence more traffic. What is there, not to like? Unfortunately su.pr repeats the mistakes of the original diggbar.
Google Chrome: Mac and Linux Dev Channel Builds Available
Google has officially released builds for Mac and Linux into the dev channel. The builds for these platforms were available for quite some time but now it has been updated to “Dev Channel” Status. The blog post announcing the release warns that the build is quite incomplete and not to download them unless you are a developer. Chrome for mac is indeed quite incomplete right now with lots of missing feature the most glaring of which are lack of flash, lack of working bookmarks bar and lack of printing. So the big question facing the Mac Chrome enthusiasts is whether you should use the Dev Channel build or stick with Chrome builds.
Mac OS X Browsers: Javascript Performance Shootout
All major browsers except IE is available on Mac and all of them except Google Chrome are nearing the release of a new version with much faster javascript engines. Since web applications are becoming increasingly javascript heavy like gmail Javascript performance is where the optimization effort of different vendors are being concentrated. So how do the browsers stack up ?