I just read about Googles plan for online storage here. But the question is, how useful would this be?

Don’t get me wrong, Google has some great services such as Gmail and Google Docs. But the problem with the GDrive is nothing Google can control: Download/Upload Speeds.

With time bandwidth speeds have been getting a lot better. But I don’t think we are close to being able to have a majority of our storage online. Imagine going back to the days of slow read/write speeds on a CD drive. That is what would happen if we moved to a model like this. Imagine trying to upload all your images, movies, docs, and backup info. Now most in the US are lucky to have an upstream of 1mbps. At that rate for every 24hrs of uploading you would be able to upload almost 9GB of data. Now if you want to upload your 250GB drive of data to start syncing to, it would take 28 days of non stop uploading just to get setup.

Now maybe I am being a little bit pessimistic, but I feel unless our speeds can increase by at least ten times this will not be viable.

Tell me what you think.

I just published a new version of software for the Medical Passport. This version (v1.3.0) has a number of new features.

• Easy Saving - The sofware no longer requires you to click a button to save your information. This helps prevent losing your information beacuase you forget to press the save button.
• Prefered Medical Facility - In your personal information you can have a preferred medical facility. This shows up in the summary.
• Dentist - Under the physicians there is now a place to add a dentist.
• Charting - This is much improved and pulls in more information for doctors to easily start and finish a chart.

There are other small bugs that were fixed plus small other enhancements that have been taken care of, but this software is turning out to be a great asset to doctors and patients alike.

After downloading and installing chrome, here are my first thoughts.

1. Its fast, but when many tabs are open with flash it slows down a lot.

2. Its simple design turns me off. Don’t get me wrong I love simple design, but when I feel like more functionality is lost it crosses the line. I’m used to Firefox with custom add-ons such as firebug and such. I have the feeling that more browsing tools are being taken away.

3. I have the feeling in the back of my mind that Google is using the browser to monitor browsing habits just like many think is happening with Analytics. This may not be true, but one has to wonder if rankings may depend on how often a site is visited using Chrome. I’m not saying this is how they will rank sites in the future, but could be a factor.

Those were my first thoughts on the beta of Chrome. It has potential using the webkit engine if it was more customizable and I didn’t feel like half of my browsing experience was taken away.

Just released! I just finished developing a new version of the Medical Passport. This new version adds charting to the Passport formally called Electronic Medical Record. So in short, if you are away from home, and something happens, a new doctor can create a chart that is stored on your medical drive. Then when you get back to your doctor, he/she can see exactly what another doctor has done or given you. I am continuing to develop for Essential Medical and there are some new and exciting things coming up that should be a great asset for the medical community. See the features of the EMR HERE

After looking over the videos and information on the Adobe site the other day, a few things popped uot at me as great features in the new Dreamweaver CS3. Just to list my favorites here:

1. Spry ajax - This looks very cool. Instead of extensive hand coding JavaScript for very simple ajax functionality, this allows you to create almost a node/child-node ajax function with just selecting an XML file and setting the data source of a field. This looks easy to do and quick. I can already think of a few things I am going to try it out on.

2. Pre-Built CSS Layouts - Dreamweaver CS3 comes with an array of CSS templates. Not completed templates with text or anything, just CSS shells to start with. This should save a lot of time when starting pages.

3. WYSIWYG and W3C? Dreamweaver 8 use the Internet Explorer 6 plug-in for its design view, this was not the most standards compliant and created sloppy/bloated HTML. Now it is based on standards set by W3C. This should make browser compatibility much easier to deal with.

4. Integration with Photoshop - When Adobe acquired Macromedia; this was the first thing that popped into my head. I love Photoshop far better than Fireworks for image editing. More filters, better tools, just a better product. Fireworks has its uses for buttons and such, but to have Dreamweaver integrated with both will be very nice.

There it is, some of the things I am looking forward to when I get a copy of Dreamweaver CS3. I hope to get it at the beginning of May. Then I will make sure and post a review for everyone to see if it has lived up to the hype.

After Adobe bought Macromedia there were a few questions out there. A few I had (as well of a few other designers and developers), were:

1. What would Adobe do with Fireworks?

2. How would future versions of Dreamweaver work with other image editors, especially Photoshop?

3. Would Adobe try to keep GoLive as a web editing tool? More importantly would they try to re-vamp Dreamweaver to keep the name and go for more of the GoLive interface? Or get rid of GoLive altogether?

I am still not sure of the first two questions, but for the latter I found the answer today looking around the Adobe site. If you look at the Products page you will notice there is not a CS3 version of GoLive. One, I guess, is left to assume it is going away.

I welcome this news as people got sucked in to going to GoLive and some sites are made exclusively with GoLive. Now I suspect people to start the requests to change their sites over to Dreamweaver. Also with searching around the Adobe site I looked at some of the new features with Dreamweaver CS3 and they look like they are on the ball. The WYSIWYG will be based on standards from the W3C and not based on IE6. Also CSS Advisor and the Spry ajax and widgets look like great tools. I look forward to developing with the new tools.

Just found the Yahoo Live Badge. I don’t have too much to say about this except, who in their right mind would put something like this on a public professional site. It looks cheap, and I don’t think visitors to your site need to know how many back links you have. Wonder how many developer hours were used in building and testing a worthless tool like this?