This is my first review of a Facebook App…

If you are a Facebook user, you’ve probably have heard of this game whether you play it or not. You’ve seen it when others have reached another level or when they have found some animal on their farm.

Background: Farmville is a game where you create a virtual farm. On the farm you have to plant or host animals to make money. The things that you plant will need to be harvested dependent on the times stated in the market. Growing times range from a couple hours to 4 day or more. You get experience points and cash for almost everything you do in Farmville.

So what intrigued me to participate in the game? The game is very simple to understand with its simple UI. If you have played other games by Zynga, then the layout is pretty similar. I have always been a fan of simulation games. In this game you simply plant, harvest, and plow. Very simple to understand.

I also enjoy the special holiday items that have incorporated in the game. For example, for Halloween they had limited edition gifts and items you could buy from the store. Of course many of the things you could buy from the store costs a lot of money.

Gifting is something that many people do religiously in the game. However, I don’t always find time to send a gift everyday. You can only send a certain amount a day and can only send one gift to a certain person each day.

Is there anything I don’t like about the game? Yes, sort of. I cannot stand it when the game has some sort of connectivity issues. However Farmville does not have as many connectivity issues as any of the Playfish games. I do understand that sometimes servers go down, but Zynga offers no protection to the crops when servers go down. For example lets say I planted raspberries, which take 2 hours to grow. I have to harvest them within 2 hours after the 2 hours then have grown. However, what is something happened to the network and I can’t get into the game for another 3 hours later. All my crops have withered away costing me games money and points.

I also am not thrilled with the cost of some of the items in the market. Most of them require Farm Cash (there is no clear way of making cash). You can however add cash via Paypal and your cell phone. I find that pretty useless. I see many items in the market have a high price that requires Farmville Cash not coins. I think they should completely get rid of the Farmville Cash and use just coins which you CAN make.

I encourage everyone to check out this game.

I was very excited to learn that Google finally released their own browser for the Mac a couple of weeks ago. I always used Google Chrome when I was a Windows User. Since moving to the Mac, I became a real fan-boy of Safari. I liked the fastness of it.

So I downloaded Google Chrome:

After I downloaded and installed the browser (which was very fast), I was disgusted by the dullness of it. It was the Mac-link interface with the silver/grey color window. However, they made it look horrible on their browser. I was really hoping for the nice and cool looking that you see on the windows version of the browser.

After I forced myself to get accustomed (somewhat) to the ugliness of it, I started to browse around with it. It was the fastest browser I have ever used. Fast than Safari, Opera, and certainly faster than Firefox on my computer. It certainly got a very big workout with all the tabs I had open, 30 of them to be exact. Even with that many tabs open it kept going smoothly.

More on stability:

Speaking of stability, I had chrome running 24/7 for about three days before it started to crash and break. All I needed to do was close out of the browser and restart. Now I have been running the browser straight for about 2 weeks without any crashes. One feature I have liked since the version on Windows was that you can just close the tab that has crashed so you don’t have to close out of the browser and start over. If you ever find yourself having to close out of all your tabs, there is a great feature to find out what you closed last.

Earlier in this post, I was complaining about the look of the browser. But wa-la, I found a button to change the theme of the browser (Chrome>Preferences>Personal Stuff). This button brings you to a Google web-page. You can find a theme that you like and place it on the browser. Spent about 15 minutes trying out all the cool looking themes that they have. I went with a dark-blue theme for now. I chose it because I thought it would be the easiest of the eyes for me.

I have not found out anything about the extension that Google is supposed to let onto the browser. However, I am not so excited about them because I think extensions make the browser more bloated and slow.

Have you tried Chrome? What do you think? Let me know in the comments.