One cool feature of Chrome is that when you open a new tab it shows you a grid of your most visited sites, and because these are the sites I usually open a new tab to go to, it makes traversing the web that much quicker. This screen also shows recently bookmarked pages and your bookmarks toolbar.

Another cool feature is “Incognito” where a new window opens and nothing done in that window is recorded in your browser history. This feature is a little sketchy considering its uses.

The clean interface of Chrome is also a nice feature. The tabs are above the address bar, which is rather unusual. The lack of buttons at first seems unsettling, but you quickly realize that there was no need for a lot of the other toolbar buttons in the first place.

I don’t really notice any increases speed when browsing the Google services, which I thought was supposed to be one of the features with the fancy new javascript engine.  Also ads show up, which they didn’t used to for me (I use Firefox with extensions to block ads).

Sony Ericsson W350

Ericsson T28

The Sony Ericsson W350 is AT&T’s latest phone and it features the previously thought to be extinct downward-folding flap.  Last seen on the Ericsson T28, this was a classic design for early cellphones.  Unlike its predecessors though, the W350 cannot answer and end calls just by opening and closing the flap.  In fact, the music controls on the front of the flap actually just press through to the keypad buttons behind it.  There are no electrical connections to the flap itself and it can even be easily removed without harming the phone at all.  Sadly, it seems that this design resurrection only goes skin deep.

AVG has some pretty nifty features, for one it plugs into Firefox and Internet Explorer and displays a little symbol next to unsafe links, making sure to protect you from viruses. It also scans very quickly, I have it set to do a scan every day at noon and tell me if anything is out of the ordinary. Unlike other anti-virus programs I’ve used, it doesn’t bug me about updates every day, it just does it, that’s the way all programs should be. There’s also a Linux version, available here.

Here is a device I wish some company would try to recreate.  In many ways, this device was the zenith for Sony Clie’s and even for Palm devices in general.  As you can tell from the picture, the device was shaped like a miniature tablet PC, with a relatively spacious thumb keyboard and a 3.25″ screen that could flip and fold over it.  Therefore, it could be used in both tablet mode and mini-laptop mode.  The UX50 had both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.  The Wi-Fi alone makes it useful, even today, more than 5 years after it first came out.  A quick look on eBay reveals that used UX50’s still go for well over $100, if not $200.

The closest things to a Clie UX50 today are the Sony Mylo and Apple iPod touch.  These come close to replicating the UX50 because they both have Wi-Fi, but the Mylo is missing a touchscreen and the iPod touch is missing a physical keyboard.  Additionally, the Clie had the benefit of all the third-party applications available for the Palm platform.  The Mylo uses a proprietary Linux operating system and the iTunes App Store still has a ways to go before it can match the size of the Palm program library.

Lenovo IdeaPad U8

So what would a real modern day UX50 be like?  I imagine a 4″ mini-laptop with a convertible tablet touchscreen.  It would most likely run an Intel Atom Z series processor (codenamed Silverthorne); these chips are meant for Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) or devices even smaller than netbooks.  An example of a MID is the Lenovo IdeaPad U8, which unfortunately is only sold in Asia.  Back to my modern UX50 though: It would most likely have at least 4GB of flash storage, an expansion slot (either SD or Memory Stick), 512MB-1GB of RAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a really long battery life.  The operating system would probably be Linux (Ubuntu has a Mobile and Embedded Edition) or a stripped down version of Windows XP.

Such a device would be like a netbook, but half the size.  It the price of such a device could be kept low enough ($200-$400), then Intel just might achieve its goal of making MIDs the next frontier of mobile development.

Technology companies have dreamed of the “fourth screen” for years.  Some device that is not a PC, TV, or cellphone, but instead of replacing those devices works alongside all three of them.  Palm tried it and failed very publicly with its Foleo, and all the netbook manufacturers are try to do it now.  But maybe companies need to aim a little smaller and build a device similar to the Sony Clie UX50.  Something so portable, people would carry it with them everywhere.  I, personally, would love to have such a device.

Qumana

In the beginning, I used a desktop blog editor called Qumana.  It is available for both Mac and Windows.  However, there were some little annoyances about the way Qumana did things.  The way images were formatted, jumps were handled, or tags were done did not exactly mesh with what I wanted it to do.  I found myself using the online Wordpress editor to do most of my writing, so I decided to get rid of Qumana and look for something else.

I still have yet to find a good free desktop blog editor for Macs.  MarsEdit and ecto are pretty good, but they cost money.  I installed Windows Live Writer on my Boot Camp partition and true to what Evan said, it is the pretty much everything I am looking for in a blog editor.  Even though I can and do sometimes use Windows Live Writer through Boot Camp, I am still looking for that elusive free Mac blog editor.

There is not much else to the tools I use for the blog.  I have two AppleScripts that I created in Automator that I use quite frequently: one of them batch converts images to jpegs and the other batch resizes images to VGA.  These are rather helpful when I take screenshots or need to quickly resize an image.

Well, that is all that is really going on behind the veil here at JPT.  Sorry to say there are no monkeys working machines or robots generating posts.

So as our devoted readers might know, this blog started as a solo column on Wordpress.com run by me. This little site was known as “Tech for the Common Man” which was kind of a wordy title.  After just a few days on my own I realized the vastness of material to write about and some very large areas in which I lacked expertise, it was at this point that Luofei was brought into the equation. For a while all was good, but we wanted more. Wordpress.com was kind of restricting as to what we could and could not put on our website so we broke off and JustPlainTech.com was born.

I have come to know and love Windows Live Writer as the program I use to write and edit blog entries, sure it can’t do everything, but as far as a Microsoft product goes it’s one of the best. I put a screenshot above of this article being written, enjoy it. One of my favorite things to do in Live Writer is to write an article at night and have it release on a schedule the next day.

I’ve mentioned wordpress a few times but you may not all know what it is. To put it simply, its a skin-able, plugin-able platform that we use to run our website, it allows us to put in relatively little work and have the website look pretty professional. I’ve put a screen to the right of what it looks like when I log into the administrator portion of the site to deal with anything that needs to be done on the site.

So now you know what goes on behind the scenes of Just Plain Tech, at least on my end. Expect a part 2 of this article with Luofei’s perspective which really only varies slightly from mine, the difference being he uses different programs to post.