Well for the two loyal readers this blog actually has, they'll know I got in to the premiere viewing of the final installment of the Harry Potter series. I've been a huge fan of the books since I first read them in 2001 and frankly most of the movies tended to disappoint. But that's normal with adaptations - you lose out on the subtleties, additional plotlines and in the case of Harry Potter, I feel we lost the inherent sarcasm that he spews oh so easily in the books.

That said, my overall verdict for the final installment is: satisfied.

As expected, there were a few changes, but I was definitely happy to see a lot of dialogue was imported straight off the books and the intensity was just as captivating. I'm not much of a review writer, but I am very much of a bullet-pointer and therefore, I give you - the bullet-pointed review. Enjoy!

• I was constantly amused that wand translated to 'baguette' in the French subtitles.
• Knowing that Flitwick and Griphook are played by the same person enforced on me that they looked like brothers. TO be fair, he carried out the role real well.
• Bellatrix. Gosh. She does such a good job really, does Helena Carter. Even as Hermoine she's rather convincing. The character is one of those love to hate
• McGonagal was brilliant. I'm really glad they included the Locomotor spell, with a nice little quip. I wasn't thrilled they left out her threat to Slughorn to have Slytherin choose an allegiance. The line "we duel to kill" in the book always gave me goosebumps.
• Aberforth was awesome. Loved his character and it was unfortunate he had limited screen time but he had the tone and attitude correct, unlike Gambon's Albus has been.
• "The boy who lived, come to die." Brilliant. That entire sequence was perfect. 
• Seconds after I thought to myself, where in Merlin's Beard is Hagrid, he showed up on screen.
• The Battle of Hogwarts lives up to expectation. The scenes, intensity, darkness and the fact that we got to see (again) a lot of the characters in small roles was great. I did miss John Cleese though.
• Caveat (and a little bit of a spoiler). I've spoken to a couple who felt that they handled it well but I was not entirely thrilled with the last 15-20 minutes. It wasn't bad, I just felt it could have been better, although I will say that outside of that, the movie surpassed my expectations. However, for me the end scenes were about the conversations Harry and Voldemort have. I missed that.

Finally, I leave you with some thoughts from people sitting around me before the start of the premiere:

• "I cried at the end of the book wonder what's going to happen in this movie!"
• And my favorite: "If I haven't seen part 1 is that okay?"

Originally posted at the Shufflegazine Blog

The awesome people at Seesmic finally got around to launching their iPhone application last week.

I’ve been a fan of Seesmic from rather early days. To me, they edged out TweetDeck as the Desktop Twitter client to have at the time, having launched support for multiple accounts and integrating Facebook support before anyone else did. Since then I’ve moved on to Seesmic Web (I’d recommend it any day considering it doesn’t use Adobe AIR. But I digress…)

I’ll leave the app comparison for another day, but I think Seesmic’s iPhone app’s first rendition is quite good overall.

The first thing that struck me about the app was the seemingly blazing response time, both in terms of loading new information and response using the touchscreen. By this I mean that a lot of apps I use (I’m not talking just Twitter apps) are effectively hung until their update/reload is complete – this does not seem to be the case here. While I wait for the latest tweets to be updated, I can still navigate around the app freely.

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Originally posted at the Shufflegazine Blog

I’ve been using Google Chrome as my default browser for some time. What amazed me from the start was the sleek interface. Getting rid of the extra menu bars was, in my opinion, one of the smartest design moves on a browser. The extra screen space was phenomenal, yes every little pixel of it. There were others, such as one single box (affectionately called the omni-box) for address and search (and admin options), but it was the overall interface and screen space that really caught my eye. Speed is also something I’ve enjoyed with Chrome. I honestly can’t really tell the difference between how fast a page loads against, say, Firefox, but the speed with which Chrome as an application operates – from starting up to opening tabs – is definitely an improvement over other browsers.

Chrome, for those who don’t know it, is based on an open source project called Chromium. As part of the Chromium project, Google has made the browser available on Linux and Mac platforms in line with the Chrome releases, as a developer edition. Ofcourse this meant that while its stability was not guaranteed, test versions of the browser have been available for some time. Last week, Google finally announced the release of the beta version of Chrome for the Mac. This finally puts Chrome into contention against Safari and Firefox on the Mac. In addition, Google has unveiled a larger and constantly growing extensions gallery, to rival Firefox extensions.

The question is then, can Chrome do what it did on the PC – move into the top 3 browsers in a year? Users are already raving about its speed, but stability is something that has to be proven over time. In addition, it seems that extensions are not yet available for the Mac, something Google will have to fix soon if they want to really sway hardcore Firefox users.

One thing’s for certain, IE is nowhere in the picture.