e-wot?

A few weeks ago I went to the Chinese New Year annual Yu Sheng Lo Hei at the Straits Knowledge office in Singapore. I saw a big pile of freshly printed books, and in a quiet moment, I picked one up. It was ‘KM Approaches Methods & Tools – A Guidebook’. It looked great, so I bought one.

Since then I’ve dipped into it and I must say that it’s the best compendium of KM tools I’ve seen. The tips for facilitation are particularly useful. So here’s the pdf version for download. But really, you should buy it. It works better in book-form. It’s on my desk at work and is great to dip into. Patrick, Edgar and Wai Kong have done an excellent job in making the book, so it’s worth buying, really. Get it here.

First the pros.

Wow, it’s fast! Damn fast. Faster than any other browser I’ve used. Woo!

I love the fact that they’ve put the tabs in the title bar. Title bars are a waste of screen real estate, I reckon. Good move Google!

Simple UI.

Installation was a speedy breeze on my home PC. Really fast and all my Firefox bookmarks and search engines were imported really quickly. Did I say how quick this was? I did? Well I’ll say it again. It was a very quick installation.

Drag a tab and create a new window. Add more tabs to that window. Wow! Very cool.

Now the cons

I can’t easily swap/select different search engines. I’m addicted to this function in Firefox. Can’t live without it in fact. In Firefox I can search one query across 10 search engines in under 5 seconds (I timed myself). Chrome won’t let me do this. Sad, but it won’t. Here’s a post explaining more. 

I cannot search my bookmarks. Crap. I’m so used to this in Firefox that it’s another thing I can’t live without. Seriously a pity.  One day, when I only use Delicious (or some other online bookmarking service), this might be ok. Until then, it’s not.

Sadly both of those cons are app killers for me. In every other way, it’s a nice piece of work. Can’t wait for it to come out of beta. Hopefully then they’ll have fixed it for me. =)