I visit Android Market almost everyday, but never saw this till today. Looks like Google is trying to improve the search experience with filters on the Market. It is a nice touch, but it would be really great to see some other filters like download count or star rating.

And, it’s really weird not seeing anything related to “run free”, which obviously is my search term, on the result page. Apparently, they need to tweak their search algorithm a bit too :)

Because I always delete files with shift+delete combination, there have been several occasions in the past that I needed to un-delete the files which I mistakenly made disappear. In fact, once I deleted a directory containing all my close-to-finish PhD studies – years of work has gone in a blink of an eye! Thanks to Dropbox, which is a real life saver by the way, I was able to recover them all.

You probably know that files still remain on the filesystem in a masked state, even if you think you permanently deleted them. That in my mind, I always have a recovery software installed on my computers in case of an emergency.

An old version of UFS Explorer was installed on my PC when my brother asked me to recover his photos, and it certainly was my first shot. However, it wasn’t even able to find the deleted files on the memory card. Then I thought that I might need something newer, something more modern this time and tried FileRestore Professional. Although FileRestore was able to see the deleted files on the filesystem of the card, it can only read photos in a garbled form, which was useless.

It was obvious that the photos on the card were malformed somehow and I need to find something specific for photos. Something can carve the data from the memory card and turn it into a human readable state. While searching for such tool, I stumbled upon to TestDisk & PhotoRec suite. Instead their outdated latest stable, I downloaded the v6.12-WIP (beta) version. With that, I was able to recover all digital images from the memory card in a few moments with PhotoRec, without any errors.

TestDisk & PhotoRec suite is free (open sourced, GPL v2) software. It’s Windows version is actually a Cygwin port and it runs in command-line. But, don’t let that scare you, its usage is pretty straight forward. Before wasting your money on propriety software, give TestDisk & PhotoRec suite a chance. It worked flawlessly for me, probably will work for you too ;)

Anyway, here are the problems I’m encountering with Firefox 4 so far:

• It is slow.
  I read everywhere how fast Firefox 4 is, beats this on X test, smokes that on Y etc. Unfortunately, this is not the case for me. In my experience, Firefox 4 is a memory hungry piece of junk. I don’t care how fast is its new javascript engine or how effective its fancy hardware acceleration techniques, if it needs to consume more than half of the installed memory on my system to do that. I’m getting hard time to understand how a software, which drives the system to a swapping death, can be considered “fast”?
  I know, Firefox may seem slower to me because of my old PC and the plugins I’m using, but I’m not going to accept these as excuses. If I’m able to use the latest version of Chrome (+plugins) without any problems on the same computer and was satisfied with the performance of the previous version of Firefox, it’s the Mozilla to blame, not my PC.
• It fails to render Helvetica fonts correctly.
  Although it has been a known issue in the beta releases, looks like Mozilla didn’t care to fix it in the stable. Annoying.
• F6 is not working.
  I like using keyboard shortcuts and F6 was one of my favorites. It’s function was ( and still is on other major browsers like Safari, Chrome and Opera) to highlight the address bar for input. Now it only selects the current tab. Useless and annoying.

Facebook still says that “Your download is currently being generated. You will receive an email when it’s ready”, I will inform you once i got their zip.

Update: Downloaded the zip file generated by Facebook. Unzipping it produced a directory tree containing HTML files and hotlinked stuff in separate directories. When you browse your friend list using the sidebar navigation at “index.html”, you only see your friends names, without any other information about them, no emails! Also, no email’s in the “friends.html” page code either.

Looks like nothing is over :)

Anyway, my account came with 20 invitations. Please leave a comment to this post if you are looking for an invitation. You don’t need to publish your email address at your comments body, I’ll send the invitation to the email address you filled in the comments form. Invitations will be send first come, first serve basis.

And, please don’t forget to come back and tell your first impressions about the Google Wave, I’d love to hear what yo think.

UPDATE: All gone, no invitations left, sorry. Please don’t post anymore requests!

Also, note that Google Wave’s invitation system is more like “nominating you for an invite” than “directly issuing you an invitation”. Since I “nominated” you for an invitation, it’ll take some time before you actually receive an invitation.

Here is what’s been told on my invitation Wave;

Google Wave is more fun when you have others to wave with, so please nominate people you would like to add. Keep in mind that this is a preview so it could be a bit rocky at times.

Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.

I’ll let you know if I receive more invitations. You can subscribe to my feed, or follow me on Twitter (@alikuru) for updates.

Although I hated the installer and its registering of Google Update both as a service and as a timed job, I liked the Chrome’s look since its first release. I’m a long time Firefox user and I usually spend 5 to 7 hours in front of it every day. Yesterday, I’ve decided to give it a chance and switched to Chrome and ditched the loving Firefox for a day. I did my usual browsing including some standard emailing, roaming, searching, reading my RSS subscriptions, banking and I remotely accessed to my lab PC via LogMeIn. Also, I’ve browsed our internal FTP server for updates.

Here are my thoughts after the day;

Pros:

• Overall design
  Chrome looks really sleek and, thank to overhead tabs design and hover only status bar, it gives you the maximal viewpoint. Never gets in your way while browsing, perfect.
• Fast
  It is not just feels fast, it is fast! You feel the difference especially on heavily scripted pages like AJAXified webware like Gmail, java driven banking pages and LogMeIn remote control (although remote controlling was laggy with sidebar, was ok in full screen).
• Handling of history
  Organization and accessibility of history is awesome, you can even text search in your whole history. Near perfect (see suggestions).
• Internal task manager
  Chrome has its own internal task manager, which allows you to manually kill unresponsive tabs or windows, or even just plugins! This is great since in other browsers when a tab or page stuck on a crappy javascript code or a PDF if you choose to kill the application, you lost every open page instantly. Having its own task manager may be the one of the best features of Chrome.
• Inline search has a counter
  Search as you type function also has a counter in Chrome and tells you how many instances of your search criteria are found on a page. Also Chrome highlights all matched text automatically.
• Paste and go
  Well, this is not new. Opera has it for ages, I know. Still happy to see that Chrome has it, too.
• Better pop-up blocking
  Looks like Chrome’s pop-up blocking is better than Firefox. Haven’t tested it extensively though. I’m frequently using a free web proxy to bypass great firewall of our university, and usually Firefox misses at least one of its pop-ups, which was not the case for Chrome.
• Source code viewer has line numbering and better code highlighting
  Using line numbers in source code viewer is great, makes it easier to reference a piece of code when needed. Every major text editor has this function, so why not your browser? Well done.
• Incognito mode is great for NSWF browsing :)
  Chrome has a mode called “incognito”, which can be described as “off the record browsing”. This is great for viewing NFSW stuff, you don’t have to clean your traces (history, cache, cookies etc.) after your visit; Chrome destroys everything right after you close the “incognito” window. Now, you can drop using an alternative browser as a safe house :)
• Detach tabs to create a separate windows
  Since they’ve built on the same technology (see WebKit), Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome has a lot of things in common, such as detaching a tab by dragging it from the tab bar creates a separate window for that tab. This is in my Firefox wish list for a long time, and glad to see it on Chrome.

Cons:

• Space bar checking “check box”s weird, because of “page down” action
  I usually use tab switching between input boxes while filling forms and use space bar to tick check boxes. In Chrome, when you jump to a check box with tab button, if you use space bar to mark that check box, space bar also sends you to lower sections of the page because of its primary “page down” function. Annoying.
• No deleting from recently typed URLs
  I use my recently typed URLs coming up as I type at the address bar frequently on Firefox, and I like to be able to selectively remove the addresses which I don’t want to appear on the suggestions list (hitting the delete key on the unwanted entry removes it). This is not possible on Chrome as far as I see.
• Didn’t like the highlighting of input boxes, selections
  I think using a orange colored border instead of a thin dotted border to show the which object you’re on is kinda overriding of designers choice of styling, didn’t like it.
• Can’t directly open documents and files; have to show some place to save first
  Well, I haven’t figured out how, if it is available :)
• Shift+Return triggers Google search, Ctrl+Shift+Return does nothing
  As I said earlier, I’m used to Firefox and I like its triggering of “www.google.com” after I write only “google” to the address bar and hit the Ctrl+Return, which also works in Chrome. I can also visit “www.google.net” by hitting Shift+Return, and “www.google.org” by hitting Ctrl+Shift+Return after I write “google” in Firefox, but not in Chrome. I know, they don’t have to support exactly the same keyboard shortcuts, they are different browsers, but I still expect these ones to work as other common shortcuts (such as Ctrl+T and Ctrl+W).
• Address bar suggestions are not accurate for direct IP inputs
  I sometimes use IP addresses directly to access content on the web (i.e. for accesing my webservers’ stats), and I found Chrome’s suggestions for IP address entries are less accurate than Firefox, even I have visited the IP I’m trying to access several times before I expect suggestions. It gets better if you opt out “Use a suggestion service” option at the settings, but still far from being accurate.
• No “about:config”
  Yes, Chrome has a lot of fancy “about:” pages, such as “about:memory”, “about:stats”, “about:network”, but it has no “about:config”, so no fine tuning. This is no good.
• Limited support for userscripts
  Glad to hear that it has support for userscripts, sorry to hear that the support is limited. Here is what Google System writes;

  A recent build of Chromium, the open source project behind Google Chrome, added support for user scripts. For now, the support is limited: Chromium reads the scripts from the hard-coded directory c:\scripts and it ignores the @include metadata which restricts scripts to one or more web addresses.

• Firefox still has the best full screen reading
  Chrome’s full screen mode is nice, but not nicer than Firefox. Couldn’t find a way to recall the address bar for a new entry. Have to use F11 for new address input, even opening a blank tab with Ctrl+T didn’t help.

Here are my suggestions; Chrome needs a styling for feed and FTP browsing, and I wish if they had a mouse-over drop down address bar on full screen mode. Also, maybe I’m asking too much but I wish they had a OCR text recognizing mode for the history, which will allow user to do a text search for the images at the visited web pages. Evernote has this feature for your notes containing images, I’m sure you get the idea if you are using it. And, most importantly, Chrome needs extensions. It is obvious that there is no other way for stealing Firefox users :)

As for final thoughts; Chrome is cleverly designed, feature packed and innovative in many ways. You should at least spend a day with it, and then switch back to your favorite browser.

Curious about its performance against other major browsers? Here is a recent review for further reading.