Google Chrome talk at BayCHI

I will be giving a talk at BayCHI about Designing Google Chrome in the evening of December 9. Hope you can make it!

The Google Chrome/Chromium Photoshop File

I just posted the Photoshop file used in the creation of Google Chrome's imagery to the Visual Design section of the Chromium documentation. It contains all the layers, smart objects and slices you should need (though some showing, hiding and shifting of layers will be necessary to slice all the images correctly).

Have fun, and if you spot some daftness in my use of Photoshop, let me know.

TabsLock for Google Chrome

I open and close browser tabs all day long; frequently I find myself in a state where I'm using some client software (Visual Studio or Photoshop) and out of habit, I press Ctrl + T to get myself a new tab to do something else. This context-dependence annoys me - having to think about switching or launching applications in order to start new web navigation/search tasks is like cognitive acne.

So, in my spare time on a recent weekend, I created TabsLock - a utility to let you use your Capslock key to launch or create a new Google Chrome tab from anywhere, so you don't have to think about whether Chrome is running or what application has focus. Consider it a global Ctrl + T replacement.

Hope you like it.

Google Chrome

Dearest Friends,

Thank you for putting up with so many seasons of silence, and so much hand-waving about what I actually do at Google. I'm now super pleased to be able to tell you all that I work on the very-recently announced Google Chrome as its designer and as a front-end engineer, where I frequently have to suffer through implementing my own designs. You may also read a little bit about what I work on in the comic we made, the designers amongst you may wish to read some stuff I wrote about our design philosophy, and finally you can see my ugly mug in our explanatory video

More later, maybe - we're pretty busy right now.

xox,
Glen

Exodusurus

I am back in Melbourne visiting friends and family, and we worked out that future trips may not be quite as successful. In a couple of months, the distribution of my high school / uni friends will be:

• England: 1
• Denmark: 1
• Denmark + Motorbiking across that continent: 1
• Bangladesh: 1
• America: 2
• Mozambique: 1
• Korea: 1
• Melbourne: 2
• Darwin: 1

It's interesting to ponder who will not return.

Why It's Good to Share Items

The following has happened more than once:

andras: "That Wired article you shared was a good read."
[5 minutes]
gmurphy: "Yes, that was a good article, thanks for filtering it for me."
andras: "Weren't you the one that shared it?"
gmurphy: "I did, but I didn't bother reading it until you told me it was good."

Everyone wins! Although after reading this, people will likely put less stock into the things I share, decreasing the chance that they'll read them, subsequently decreasing the chance they they'll tell me whether I should bother looking at the full thing. Complicated.

(Even now, the lies continue - I'm still only 1/3rd of the way into the article. I guess this all goes to show that the quality of things has become so predictable that opinion can easily be timeshifted into something more useful).