I didn’t particularly elaborate in that article about why I didn’t make the switch back then.  In fact, I open the article claiming that the experience was a mixed bag, then pretty much rave about it!  I must have been tired that day…

Then

The primary reason I didn’t switch was that I was hooked on Firefox extensions.  Well, four anyway – SyncPlaces, Flashblock, AdBlock and FEBE.

• Syncplaces will sync bookmarks using any FTP, NFS or Samba share.
• Flackblock does what it says on the tin – it replaces Flash elements on a web page with a click-able placeholder.
• AdBlock Plus needs no introduction.  As far as I know, the best advert blocker for any browser.   Go on, prove me wrong!
• FEBE is a backup and restore tool.

Now

Flash forward, 9 months later : present day.  3 of these extensions now exist on Chromium, kind of.  Here they are :

• Chromium Sync.  Technically, not an extension : this is now built into Chromium itself and all you need is a Google account.  Your bookmarks, extensions, preferences, auto fill and themes can be synced across any PC you use Chromium.  Syncplaces was, by comparison, pretty horrific to set up (and needed to be downloaded first), but it did mitigate any privacy concerns you might have about uploading your data to Google.  Personally, I use so many Google products day to day that uploading my bookmarks wasn’t a concern.  Your mileage may vary.

Chromium Sync Option

Sync Options

• Flashblock for Chromium shares its name with its Firefox compatriot, but they’re by different authors.  There may be trouble ahead!
• Similar story for AdBlock for Chromium.  Well, at least it’s not called “Adblock Plus”!  This has similar functionality to its Firefox big brother, allowing multiple subscriptions to keep the adblock relevant, and it can also be turned on/off for specific sites.  It does not, however, sport the incredible per-element blocking that made the original so powerful.

AdBlock options

So, what’s missing?  Well, FEBE, obviously.  I still can’t find an extension which will “snapshot” my Chromium install and perfectly restore it on another machine.  My Firefox browsing history goes back about 2 years, across 4 different operating systems thanks to FEBE.  However, given that Chromium Sync started off as just Bookmarks before expanding into Themes, and just recently Extensions, I suspect that it’s only a matter of time before we see History too.

Google Sync puts all your data into a special directory on Google Docs, so I imagine that anything (within reason) could be stored there in future.

Google Docs

We Fear Change

So did I make the switch?  Incredibly, given my history and love of Firefox : “Yep”.  In February, I bought my Google Nexus One phone and on that day, I suspect that I may just have sold my soul to Google.  In April, Froyo fever started pitching and in preparation, I started dabbling with Chromium again.  Finally, after May’s Google I/O conference when Froyo was announced, one feature in particular swayed me towards moving to Chromium whole scale – the cloud sync feature.  This is where you buy music on Amazon (or Google themselves this Christmas, perhaps) and you simply send your purchase to your phone, right from within the web page.  Or perhaps you’re on Google Maps getting directions, and those directions are sent as Navigate options to your phone.  Very sweet.  But initially at least, I think it requires Chromium.

Pros

• Start up hasn’t changed in 9 months – it’s still blindingly fast.
• The Javascript engine is famously fast and sites like this will prove that very effectively.  Perhaps Firefox 4 will close the gap here though.
• Extensions install instantly.  They un-install just as fast.  Their options pages are web pages, which makes for a very integrated, natural feeling.
• Chomium Sync, despite being Google-only, will rock your world if you use Chromium on more than one PC.
• The “Awesome Bar” doubles as a URL entry location and a search bar in one.  I think this used to be offered in Firefox, then reverted.  The latest rumours I’ve heard suggest that it’s heading back to one-bar for Firefox 4.
• Did I mention that start up?

Cons

• In order to take advantage of the speed of development, I’m using the daily build PPA (details below).  This means two things.  One, you’ll be prompted to update every day by your package manager.  Two, many banking websites won’t entertain you.  Here in the UK, I have one account at the RBS and they block beta builds.  Interesting actually – even a user-agent switcher doesn’t fool their website, so they must be fingerprinting another way somehow.
• In the short term, a few things will have moved around and will take getting used to.  Nothing major, but here’s an example : right clicking on a link in Firefox, “Open in New Tab” is the third option down, but in Chromium it’s the top option.  There’s a few little gotchas like this.
• Bookmark organisation isn’t quite as slick as Firefox yet.  You can’t grab tabs and create shortcuts from them – you must still use the favicon logo to the left of the URL.  If, like me, you keep multiple folders on the toolbar, you’ll find that you  can’t re-order the bookmarks inside these folder using drag-and-drop.  You have to right-click, open the organiser and do it there.  Finally, I’m not convinced by “Other Bookmarks”.  It gets cluttered very quickly and takes up valuable toolbar space if you don’t use it.
• Downloads are pretty intrusive, with a big bar appearing at the bottom of the browser whenever anything comes down the line.  You have to manually close it after each download.  I couldn’t find a way, extension or otherwise, of changing this.

Install

I use the daily builds (https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa), so in order to install, just pop these commands into a terminal

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

So, KDElibs installed, Blogilo installed and… nothing. I ran it in a terminal, and got some horrific output. It took a bit of Googling, but eventually, I found this post, whose comments reveal that LibQT4-SQL-SQLite must be installed. Total mystery why this isn’t a dependency. Everything else required certainly was.

Blogilo

So, first impressions then? I’m typing this in Blogilo now after a simple “Add Blog” wizard downloaded my meagre previous entries. I tried to make a small edit to one of those, but discovered that although the entry came down and was editable, it didn’t know what tags were applied to the post. I duly ticked the relevant tags and hit the “submit” button. The progress started… and never stopped. But it did, it seems, upload. It put my first paragraph into a bullet list, somewhat unexpectedley, but otherwise it’s fine.

But then some more serious issues arise. I’ve just tried uploading a screenshot of Blogilo in action (after using the awesome Shutter to grab the window). While gnome apps generally let me copy/paste the image from Shutter into the relevant window, in Blogilo the “paste” option remains resolutely greyed out. Perhaps some missing KDE libs, or just a total lack of communication between gnome and KDE. I’m not sure.

Worse, when I manually add the image using the add image button, it will only add at full size. If I add it at say 640×480, I generate a KIO slave error. More missing KDE dependencies, perhaps.

Finally, perhaps I’m missing it, but there’s no “Check Spelling” button. There is, however, an option to enable spell checking as you type, which I generally dislike as it generates flashing red underlines for every word as you type until it recognises what you’re actually doing. It also highlights all the stuff in the post you don’t care about because they’re product names.

I’m not giving up on Blogilo, but I doubt I’ll use it much. Perhaps if media uploading worked, I could forgive the various other quirks, but for the moment, it remains easier to type directly into the web interface of WordPress, at least for me.

1. Handbrake.  This allows you to rip your DVDs into MP4 format for viewing on any H264 compatible device, such as Sony PSP or Android phone.  The interface is very slick and easy and it will take advantage of multiple cores to speed up the process.

2.  Remmina.  This is an RDP and VNC client.  You can use it to connect to Windows terminal services (RDP) or Ubuntu (VNC) remote desktops.  It also supports Avahi which is like a local-network autodiscovery of these services.  It can also use SSH if required.  What really makes this stand out though is the beautiful interface for launching these sessions.

3. Deluge.  A superb alternative to Transmission, this superlative client can also run in a client/server mode which is supremely easy to set up.  Simply run Deluge on the server in “server” mode, then run the same package on your laptop in “client” mode, connecting to the server.  Thereafter, anything you kick off on your laptop will actually start downloading on your server.  Close your laptop and everything just keeps ticking over on your server.  Superb functionality and beautifully realised.

4. jBrout.  If you have a lot of photos and struggle to categorise them, this is the software for you.  The idea is that you create tags for your collection (people, place names, things, etc) and then you drag those tags onto the pictures.  What stands this software out from the rest is that while many other programs will then create a database to store these tags in (which you’ll lose if you re-install, sit at another PC and so on), jBrout will actually edit the photo, adding the tags into the Exif details of that photo.   Never lose your hard work again!  I’ve written more about jBrout in an earlier post.

5. Phatch.  The title is meant to be an amalgam of “Photo” and “Batch”.  Another cracking interface makes it very easy to take a folder (or multiple folders) full of pictures and apply various transformations to them.  The main use I found for this is to take ALL your photos and rename them into a folder structure which is dictated by the time you took the photo.  This way, you can see, visually, when each photo was taken.  Combined with jBrout, you’ll never struggle to find another photo again.

Very, very impressive.  The admin interface is very clean and quick, there’s an incredible choice of templates and the plug-ins are ridiculously simple.  It needs a good gallery, I suppose, but otherwise, incredible.

Let’s see how often we keep this one updated…

A lot of early focus surrounding Compiz was on the now famous (infamous?) “Cube” plug-in.  Media coverage then honed into the truly “useless” features, such as burning up closed windows, “raining” on the desktop and painting fire on the screen.  Not only does this do an injustice to the various extremely useful Compiz plug-ins, but I don’t recall any such furore surrounding the Macs introduction of such desktop effects, such as the Genie minimise effect.

Some of these effects are incredibly useful to people with disabilities, such as snapping windows or zooming the desktop.  There are too many to feature in one article without boring the audience, but here’s a few choice plug-ins that I use daily and truly enhance the Ubuntu desktop experience.  I used RecordMyDesktop to upload simple example videos to Youtube.

The Zoom Plug-In

My eyesight isn’t perfect, but it’s not bad.  And I still need to enlarge the text of certain websites, or very simply lean closer to the monitor.  At least, I did until I discovered this incredible plug-in which must surely rank amongst the most useful accessibility aid that no one knows about!

You hold down your Super key (windows or mac key, usually) and then scroll-wheel up/down to zoom in/out.  It’s smooth, intuitive and best of all, you retain complete control over the mouse and keyboard, allowing you to interfact fully with the zoomed in section of screen.

The Scale Plug-In

Obviously inspired by the Mac’s “Expose” function, the Scale add-in lets you hit a key combination to instantly view a scaled version of every open window.  Then you just mouse-over the one you want and up it comes.  As with all Compiz effects, it’s slick and it makes window management extremely intuitive.  In fact, it’s replaced Alt-TAB as my usual method of window management.  I do have one gripe with Scale -- it won’t show minimised windows (unlike its KDE counterpart).  At all.  There’s no option to change this, so if you like to minimise your windows then I’m afraid Scale might not be for you.

The “Cube” Plug-In

Yes, it’s been overdone on Youtube and elsewhere, and yes, it’s slightly gimicky and even yes, it’s not strictly required, given that you can still swap workspaces very efficiently without all those flashy, spinny cubes.  However, in terms of visualisation, nothing can beat the Cube.  Drag a window to the edge of your screen and the cube rotates to the next workspace, gradually at first to prevent error, then finally snapping into place when you keep dragging.  Again, it’s intuitive, and it’s visually stunning, which is probably why it got the most attention when Compiz first launched all those years ago (three?)

So the next time you consider disabling desktop effects in Ubuntu, spare a wee thought for my favourite plug-ins and consider giving them a chance to shine.

Often overlooked, there are a couple of things that Vista got right. Well, okay, one thing then. No, not UAC, I’m talking about the Vista snipping tool. Since I use Vista as work, I know the O/S pretty well and if I had to point out one feature that’s missing from a default Ubuntu build, it’s a decent screenshot capture utility. Of particular note is the snipping tool’s ability to capture regions by dragging, rather than simply the traditional areas of “window” or “full desktop”.

However, I came across a tool last month that not only offers similar functionality to the snipping tool, but in fact far surpasses it! It’s called “Shutter” and it’s like the poster-child for the virtues of a name change. “Gimp”, take note. I doubt many corporations or individuals would extol the delights of “GScrot”, Shutter’s old name, and the same goes for Mr Gimp.

The Shutter website is simply laid out with FAQ entires for use and, of course, plenty of screenshots. So how does it work?

Simply start up the Shutter tool and click on one of the four options : rectangular section, full desktop, window, or section of window. Having taken your screenshot, you’ll get a preview thumbnail, it’ll be copied to you clipboard and it’s automatically saved to the location of your choice using the naming convention of your choice. At this point, either close down Shutter and use the screenshot as you see fit, or leave it open for further modificaitons.

What modifications? Shutter supports a plug-in system and comes ready with about 20 transformations available.

There’s plenty of scope here for customisation. For example, the 3D plug in allows rotation on any access, at any angle. And the Polaroid plug-in allows the creation of text subtitles as well as specifying the angle of the resultant picture.

Effects can also be combined over and over. Perhaps you’d like to sepia your screenshot, blur it, then angle it with the 3D plugin. Or as in the screenshot below, you can try adding a reflection before applying the 3D effect :

Shutter also supports uploads of your screenshots to various services.  Supported services include ubuntu-pics.de (the main author is German), imageshack.us and imagebanana.com.  You can also specifiy any FTP site and credentials for custom uploads.

Version 0.80.1 is in the Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) repositories, but there’s
a deb file or a PPA on the website if you prefer to stay as up to date
as possible.  One feature in the latest version that makes it worth
grabbing is that you can now specify screenshot delays from the app’s
status bar, instead of going into the preferences dialogue.  This is handy if you need to capture menus as part of your screenshot.  The latest version also adds a feature to help you take screenshots featuring tooltips.

One feature I like about the Vista snipping tool is its immediacy.  When you click on the snipping tool, the screen immediately darkens, encouraging you specify what you want to capture.  I originally thought that this was missing from Shutter, but never fear.  Just change your Shutter shortcut to include “–selection” and you’ll get the same behaviour as the snipping tool, but keep all of Shutter’s extra features once you’ve taken the screenshot.  Best of both worlds!

Finally, you can also edit/annotate your screenshot using Shutter’s built-in image editing tool.  The latest (0.85) version of Shutter even lets you drop jpg images straight in so that you can use Shutter’s various features from that point on, without needing to take a screenshot in the first place.

Alternatives

Not much.  Compiz has a screen capture facility which is very similar to the snipping tool.  Having enabled the plug-in in compiz settings, just hold down CTRL-ALT and drag your mouse over the area you want to capture – hey presto.  However, it suffers from a bug when using Intel video cards (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/…) which renders it useless.

Of course, you can also use printscr, built into Gnome, to capture the whole desktop, or hold down ALT while doing so to capture the active window, but that won’t help if you need to capture menus, or parts of a window/desktop.  Well, actually, that’s not quite true – if you really need a quick-fix menu grab using the built-in tools, just hit ALT-F2 to bring up your run dialogue, then entergnome-panel-screenshot --delay 3 to give yourself 3 seconds to set up the shot.  But really, with software like Shutter available why bother with the built in Gnome tool?  Shutter even offers an option to replace the built-in tool with itself – just tick the option in Shutter’s preferences.

If KDE is your thing, you could try ksnapshot, but although I’ve just started playing around with Kubuntu 10.04 on my test machine, I’m still not familliar enough with KDE apps to comment on that.

Finally, while its being removed from the default install in Ubuntu 10.04, current versions of Ubuntu should all have Gimp installed, which also offers a powerful screenshot tool.  Like the rest of that program though, I find it too complicated for my needs.  Your mileage may vary, and if you use Gimp regularly, this is probably your best bet.

Conlusion

A phenomenally well thought out tool and brilliantly executed.

First off, although Picasa provdes an easy way to view tags with a quick CTRL-T, you have to manually type a tag to add it to the picture.  Handy enough if you only have a couple of hundred pictures, but I have over 5000 dating back as far as 2001.  Tagging these manually would be an exercise in frustration.  And typing mistakes would massively lower my chances of consistency: perhaps a friend would be “Firstname” in one picture, then “Nickname” in another, or “Firstname Secondname” in a third.  If I then search for only second name or nick name, I’m missing out.

Enter jBrout.  It’s French in origin, but fully translated, as is its website.  It’s name derives from the “J” in JPG, and the French verb “brouteur” which means “browser”.  So, a photo browser then.  But with awesome (really, awesome) tagging features.

Surprisingly, the tagging features aren’t immediately obvious.  When first run, jBrout simply wants a folder of images, which it will then scan for Exif information and display thumbnails for.

Unlike many such viewers/organisers, jBrout doens’t care about making a copy of your images in its own structure.  During import, it will offer to do so by renaming all your pictures to date/time format using Exif, but not only can you can easily skip this step, but even if you go ahead, all it does is rename the existing files.  Yes, this is potentially destructive if you have named your photos painstaking over the years.  But most people will just have a huge collection of IMGxxxx or DFCxxxx files and the renaming in these cases is a nice feature.

Now start tagging.  First create categories, into which you place tags.  I created “Events”, “Friends”, “Family” and “Places” categories, and later added “Things” and “Description” tags.

As you can see, you can also put categories inside categories.  But in fact, it’s only tags themselves that are applied to the picture, so the folder-like structure is purely for your own ease of use.

Once you’ve created all your tags, simply click to drag that tag onto the picture.  Simple as that!  You can pre-select multiple photos before dragging the tag over to do multiple photos simultaneously.  Or, you can ctrl-click multiple tags first, then drag the whole lot onto one picture.

When you drop a tag onto the image, it’s immediately updated on your harddisk - the tag is written into the Exif info for that JPG file.  That means that this is a one-time deal.  You’ll never have to go through the pain of re-tagging your images just because you bought a new PC, or moved to another organiser!

As long as you keep a good backup of your photos, you only have to re-import them into the organiser of your choice and all your tags will still be there.  So once you’ve tagged with jBrout, feel free to use Picasa, F-Spot, GThumb or even keep using jBrout itself!  Like magic.  jBrout can add comments to a photo too – just right and choose “Add Comment” – similarly these are saved to the photo’s Exif comment field.  Such additions are obvious from file browsers such as nautilus :

Why use jBrout after tagging everything?  Well, no, it can’t compare feature for feature to the likes of Picasa, or even F-spot.  There’s no image manipulation for example and while slick and intuitive, there are no fancy fades or smooth scrolling of images here.  But there’s still one killer feature still to come and its jBrout’s very powerful search.  It’s the only organiser I know of that can very specifically search for multiple tags in any given photo.  So, it’s incredibly easy to find all the photos of say, yourself and another person.  Or a family photo with all members in one shot.  Or in this case, all holiday shots from Menorca that are tagged as a “view” :

Try searching for that in Picasa and slightly annoyingly you’ll also get any photo in any folder with those words in it, which dilutes the results.

jBrout, as you can see from the above shot can also filter the results by portrait/landscape (assuming your EXIF orientation tag was correctly created by your camera), by timeline, or by comment search.  Very powerful.

Give it a try.

1. Incredible start up.  Really, incredible.  Click icon, start using app IMMEDIATELY.  I’m really not used to that.  Chromium will have started up in half the time it takes Firefox 3.5 to load the SECOND time on Jaunty.
2. Feels very snappy.  It seems to display as much of the page as it can before it’s got the whole lot, which helps the feeling of speed.
3. Supports your GTK theme, so it fits nicely into the overall feel of the desktop, particularly if you add (as I do) the standard menu button.
4. Chromium Experiments are a lot of fun and really showcase the difference in speed in the V8 javascript engine.
5. The speed dial that appears when you ask for a new tab is pretty sweet.  A lot like Opera, I think, although it’s been a while since I tried that.
6. The resizing is very quick, although the increments seem to be quite large.  CTRL-mousewheel is a nice standard shortcut.