Tag: Technical

Google Cloud Print – Is this Google’s best kept secret?

Printing to your iPhone or iPad
Yesterday I was in the TrustIV office and I registered to attend a Microsoft Partner event in Manchester. At the end of the process I was advised to print a copy of the ticket to take with me so that I could be given access on the day of the event.

I had registered using Google Chrome browser but because I rebuilt my laptop last week I didn’t have a default printer. Perhaps this is what drew my attention to a printer that I didn’t remember configuring.

Chrome screenshot

As well as this, I noticed a link to my iPad. I have installed Google Chrome on each of these devices but until now I hadn’t noticed that this gave printer support.

I printed my ticket to the iPhone and within a few seconds I was a pop-up on my iPhone to say that a document was ready to view. Clicking on the link opened Google Chrome where I could view a copy of my document…… or so I thought.

iPhone screenshot - document ready

 

When Chrome opened I saw a warning message saying that I had to sign in and enable the print-to-phone feature to see my documents.

iPhone screenshot - Print-to-phone jobs are available: please sign in and enable this feature to get data

 

I wasn’t sure how to do this initially but then I found that if I opened  “Settings” -> Basics, then clicked on my Google account name, I was able to enable the “Chrome to Mobile” setting which meant that I could view my printed documents.

 

So far so good, but a little experimentation showed me even more features.

Printing from your iPhone/iPad
By modifying settings in Chrome it is possible to allow iPhones or iPads to print to your PC or laptop printer. [Other devices are available – Ed]

  • Open Chrome settings (using your mouse to click the “three horizontal lines” icon or typing chrome://settings/ in the address bar.
  • Click “Show advanced settings…”
  • Scroll down to “Google Cloud Print”
  • Click “Manage Print Settings”

This opens a page where you can grant different Google accounts access to your laptop or PC printers. Once you do this it is possible to print directly to your shared printers from within your iPhone applications.

This is such a useful feature, I can’t believe that I hadn’t heard of it until now.

Vivit interview at HP Discover, Frankfurt

On Thursday 6th December at HP Discover in Frankfurt, Jason Kennedy, Martijn Stuiver and I were asked to discuss how Vivit is changing from a primarily US-centric, practitioner-focused user community to one which helps support our members as the IT world changes around them.

The interview covers the changing demographics of the Vivit user community, how we plan to alter our content to suit our membership, our development of new social media channels, the growth of our membership as well as the development of new special interest groups such as “Cloud Builders” and “Security” alongside our existing special interest groups.

Vivit interview at HP Discover, Frankfurt
Vivit interview at HP Discover, Frankfurt

For more information and to join the Vivit community (it’s free by the way), go to
http://www.vivit-worldwide.org

Bristol Pound – a great concept but a flawed web launch

I was drawn to the Bristol Pound project by a tweet that I spotted at lunchtime today.

The concept is simple:

  • Launch a local currency to help support the local economy in Bristol.
  • Encourage people to support local businesses.
  • Boost local spending power and lock money into the Bristol economy.

This all sounds great, but I just went to their website at  https://bristolpound.org  and the page took more than 3 minutes to download. Now I’m not blessed with the world’s fastest Internet connection in the office, but that’s a lot longer than most people are prepared to wait.

I was reminded of a couple of StrangeLoop infographics:

The first one describes web user’s boredom thresholds and shows that people abandon slow sites quickly, many never return and even worse, they tell their friends about their bad experience. This can be very damaging for a brand that puts so much effort into their day 1 launch.

User boredom thresholds - infographic

The second infographic documents the increasing size of pages over time. I know that we all use high speed internet connections nowadays, but if a lot of people start to hit your site, you’re going to run out of bandwidth to serve the requests pretty quickly.

I think that the Bristol Pound website is suffering from “page bloat” and here’s why…

Using a Firefox browser with an empty cache and Firebug, I connected to http://bristolpound.org and saw that it took almost 3 minutes for the page to download completely. The page looks great and is graphically rich, but it doesn’t perform well for those first-time visitors hitting the site today.

The image below which is taken from the HAR (HTTP archive) file that I created shows a single image taking 2.33 (139 seconds) minutes to download. The large/slow image is called FINAL_Launch_POSTER_copy.jpg , and it is advertising tonight’s launch party for the Bristol Pound.

The main problem with this image is that somebody has uploaded the full size image to the website and rescaled it using HTML. The original image size is 3,508 x 4,966 pixels which is huge, but it is displayed at only 338 x 495 pixels. Serving a scaled-down image could save 1.8MB of bandwidth for each page request (a 99% size reduction). This would reduce the download time for this component from about 139 seconds to less than 2 seconds. This alone would significantly improve user’s first impressions of the site.

This screenshot shows the “offending image” highlighted in red.

There are other improvements that could be made, but to improve performance for now, I’d simply resize the image in an image editor (MSPAINT would do) and then keep my fingers crossed…..