There are few tools in the world that may be quite simple yet innovative. In my opinion, Etherpad is a very useful tool that can be used as the means of collaboration on a text document in a real time. The official site describes Etherpad as

The perfect way to collaborate on a text document and keep everyone literally on the same page.

Like popular micro-blogging platform Twitter, Etherpad is also quite simple but innovative. I am wondering where was this tool before. People talk about various online collaboration tools like Google Docs, Zoho and so on. But non of them are as simple as Etherpad.

After creating new pad by clicking “Create New Pad” invite other uses either by sending the link of the pad through IM or email and start to collaborate as never before. One can also chat in the same document.

I really like this simple yet powerful concept of Etherpad. Isn’t this a great tool?

I have been using Chrome for sometime and I am quite liking this browser (not as compared to Firefox). I frequently use Google Reader to view blogs and news stuffs. I have also subscribed to Yahoo! Business News Feed. But when I browse items from that feed particular window of Chrome crashes with the error message Yahoo! Application State Plug-in has crashed. I was quite amazed. I was curious to find out what was going wrong. After digging through the source code, I was able to find the cause.

Whenever I was logged into Yahoo!, the plug-in get activated. The purpose of this plugin is to tell Yahoo! pages whether you have Yahoo! Messenger installed, which versions you have, and wether you are currently logged in. Only yahoo.com is supposed to have access to this information, to ensure this the plugin tests document.domain property of the page that loaded it. (It can be manipulated using Opera and Firefox. See here)

But when I destroyed my Yahoo! session by logging out, the problem just gone.

The problem may be that whenever one is logged in, the plugin gets activated and Yahoo! have not created condition in their code for Chrome. But Chrome and Safari uses the same open source rendering engine called WebKit so it should not have occured. Since I have no knowledge of that plugin’s source code so, I am not in the state of confirming. Lets hope Yahoo! solved this issue quickly.

Update:

I guess this issue has been solved. I am not experiencing browser crash when opening Yahoo! News in Chrome.

Microsoft still thinks that their web products should be accessible to only Windows users mostly only on Internet Explorer. I am talking about Microsoft’s one of the few popular web products, Hotmail. As we know that Hotmail has two versions as with most of the web based email clients like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail i.e. one is Ajax based and other based on simple HTML. Ajax based email clients are more popular as compared to non-Ajax based. Microsoft has not offered full version of the Hotmail in the following scenarios from my usage experience:

• When you are running Linux (I have tested on Ubuntu Hardy Heron) or other non-Microsoft operating systems (I have not tested on Mac)
• When you are running Google Chrome and Apple Safari

I think both of the above mentioned scenarios are feasible for running any Ajax based email clients independent of any operating systems. This is what makes web based applications different and cool from those old desktop based apps. I just want Microsoft to create web products keeping in mind that they are independent of operating system and browsers. Both Google Chrome and Apple Safari are based on Apple WebKit rendering framework and most of the popular web based Ajax email clients do support both these browsers. So, why not Microsoft? This may be also one of the reason that Microsoft is still far behind the world of web innovation as compared to Yahoo! and Google and also start-ups like Facebook and LinkedIn.

Hotmail running on Mozilla Firefox 3.03 (Ubuntu Hardy Heron)

Hotmail running on Mozilla Firefox 3.03 (Windows Vista) - Full version of Hotmail

Hotmail running on Google Chrome (Windows Vista)

Hotmail running on Apple Safari (Windows Vista)

Recommendation: Wake up Microsoft!!!

Finally I have upgraded by blog to WordPress 2.6.2. You can download it here.

Ubuntu Tweak is the must have tool for any ubuntu users. The new version is 0.3.4 and it has helped me quite a lot to tweak Ubuntu Hardy settings easily. So Ubuntu users and lovers go and grab this magnificient tool and make most out of your Ubuntu.

Happy Tweaking!