Pod1 Blog

Team Pod1 at W-W-W-Westfield...

Aspinal of London (www.aspinaloflondon.com)

UNIQLO (www.uniqlo.co.uk)

MYLA (www.myla.com)

Links of London (www.linksoflondon.com)

Kurt Geiger (www.kurtgeiger.com)

Jane Norman (www.janenorman.com)

and many, many more….x

Pod1 New York has a new neighbor – a pet store. Clearly, this isn’t your typical pet store.

So who’s the “owner” of the Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill at 89 West 7th Avenue?

This funky Flash based microsite is the latest little gem from Pod1’s creative team. Designed to showcase the Barcelo Raval, a spectacular hotel situated in the heart of the iconic “La Rambla del Rava” of Barcelona.

The Barcelo Raval hotel has lately become a point of reference to tourists for its oval structure with avant-garde interior design. The microsite provides the user with a 360 view of the bedrooms by day and night, and a wonderful 360 view of the city. It also offers an interactive map of the city highlighting the top tourist attractions and suggested itineraries.

The Barcelo Raval hotel is the latest addition to the worldwide company. In the UK their hotels are best known for their enchanting and historical qualities and for providing top rated customer services.

Follow this link to experience first hand what the new microsite has to offer: www.barcelo-raval.com

Google Chrome Browser issues, pros and cons

Has the shine come off Google Chrome?

After all the millions of downloads have finished and the dust has finally settled down, the time has now come to evaluate if the new baby in Google’s family was really worth the wait?

Bearing in mind that Chrome has been released as a beta version, we have listed following pros and cons of the browser:

PROS

1. Google Chrome is fast. Several benchmark tests were carried out using SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, and all stated that Chrome performs better than all major competitors including the latest Firefox and Internet Explorer.
2. Chrome is new and cool and it’s “made in Google”.
3. The look is original and modern. Chrome is “devised for the needs of today’s web applications and today’s users”.
4. Google made sure that Chrome has some facilities and tools for developers. The browser has a very impressive ‘Inspect Element’ tool and also ‘View source code’ facility gives user the option to see the highlighted fragment of code and view the style sheet properties behind it.
5. Using the address bar as a search box was not an extremely inventive idea from Google, but since there is no tool bar with a search box in it, it is a useful tool.
6. Chrome keeps a record of previously / most visited websites and suggests opening them when the user opens a new browser tab.

CONS

1. The look of the browser is very basic. Some people might like it, but some people might look for some more features or skins.
2. Toolbars and Plugins are missing so, as it stands, chrome does give users the Internet browsing experience, but nothing else. Google hasn’t even given users the option to install their own Google Toolbar.
3. There are several functional imperfections in Chrome. One of them is the lack of ’send / email the link’ option. This is a feature available in all competitor browsers and has become the industry standard which Google has refused to comply with.
4. Chrome hasn’t got a full screen option either. It does seem like Google tried to create something in between the full screen mode and fully functional mode. An issue with that is the fact that there are plenty of users who like to have all browser’s options available instantly. On the other hand, users who switch to a full screen mode tend to seek the full website experience and do not want anything else on the screen.
5. The fact that the browser’s window is always in a middle state between the full screen mode and the fully functional mode means that Chrome runs out of space for the page title. This is why Google decided to place the page title inside the tab. The problem is that most websites out there have page titles which longer then the space provided by Google. As a result, the user will not see what the page is all about until the tab is not hovered over.
6. Another rather annoying experience is caused by Chrome when the user tries to minimize several open applications including Chrome. The browser’s ‘minimize’ button is not aligned with the corresponding Windows’ ‘minimize’ button so instead of minimizing the window, user will just restore it down.
7. Unlike the competition Google Chrome does not allow you to export your bookmarks or your settings (cookies, passwords etc.) to external files, which could cause the user problems.
8. Chrome is not available for Linux and Mac yet. This is strange for open source software but Google claims they are still developing those versions.
9. Google hasn’t released Chrome browser for mobile platforms. Nevertheless, it is possible that the whole exercise with Chrome’s Beta version is just a trial for the mobile browser which could be used in Google Android mobile phone launching later this year.
10. Chrome doesn’t allow you to recover lost files by default. As the latest browser out there, we would expect this feature to be built in. When the operating system crashes or the user accidentally turns the browser off, Chrome doesn’t give an option to save / restore the last session.

There are many aspects of Chrome’s performance issues that could be easily repaired or improved. As a matter of fact, Google has already repaired the buffer overrun vulnerabilities that could have let a remote attacker execute arbitrary software on a Chrome user’s computer. They have also fixed the bug where typing “about:%” in the address bar could crash the computer and more fixes from Google included: a JavaScript problem with Facebook; a problem suggesting search terms while using various websites; and some data-transfer issues with the Safe Browsing mode. At this point you would ask yourself: why there is so much fixing involved? And you would be right thinking this way as, for a company which invested £31 million in Mozilla – the non profit organisation behind the Firefox, they could have done just a little bit better.