beta @ amanzi

I haven’t been able to dedicate as much time to this blog as I would have liked to over the last few months. I considered abandoning it completely but this site still attracts a reasonable amount of visitors so I’m trying another option – asking for help…

If you’d like to publish a review of a new/beta software product or web service on this blog, please get in touch with me and we can talk details. The reviews need to be in-depth, with screenshots, and should give the reader a good idea of whether it’s worth their time checking it out or not.

I’ll pay a minimum of $10 for a good review that gets posted and possibly more based on the number of page views that it gets. Payment can be sorted out through PayPal or something like Amazon vouchers.

Contact me by email: stuart at amanzi dot co dot nz

Now that the Home Server team have announced Beta 2 of Windows Home Server, I think it’s safe for me to reveal that I’ve been beta testing this product under strict NDA and I’ve been very impressed with it so far.

I won’t go into too many details yet as I’m not sure how much can be revealed, but all of the publicly accessible information has proven to be true and Windows Home server is truly a great product that most homes would benefit from.

More details soon, in the meantime check out the official site. (SUBSCRIBE to stay up to date.)

The Read/Write Web blog is reporting that Mozilla are updating the Firefox Addons site shortly. I haven’t seen the changes live yet, so I can’t comment on what they look like but I do hope they fix the search functionality. I’ll update this post when I see the changes, but most searches for extensions turn up dubious results:

• Search for “mouse gestures” – 1st is Easy Gestures, 2nd is Tab Catalog, 3rd is Mouse Gestures.
• Search for “del.icio.us” – 1st is Groowe Search Toolbar, 2nd is del.icio.us Bookmarks.
• Search for “web developer” – 1st is Web Developer, but search for “Web Developer toolbar” and the Web Developer extension doesn’t even show up in the results!

Richard Simm, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, has just announced that they are changing the name of their web-based email system from Windows Live Mail to Windows Live Hotmail. I have stopped using my MSN Hotmail Windows Live Mail Windows Live Hotmail account so this doesn’t really bother me that much, but it’s interesting to watch the situation develop and read people’s reactions to the news. From the comments on the blog Spaces site, there’s no clear-cut winner emerging as to which name is the favourite, but the common message is that everyone is confused about the naming and just want it simpler. I’m surprised they haven’t put a “2007″ on to the end of the name yet, and then perhaps “Professional” for the additional paid features – Windows Live Hotmail 2007 Professional Edition. This reminds me of the video parody that was leaked from Microsoft showing how the iPod and packaging would look if designed by the Microsoft marketing department – you would think they would have learned by now.

The LiveSide blog writes:

Windows Live Mail? No? How about Windows Live Hotmail….?

Ok, so this whole Windows Live rebranding thing has been pretty messy at times, services renamed, sometimes many times (Live Maps anyone?) and today sees this trend continue. So first off we had Hotmail, then Kahuna (this was the codename), then Windows Live Mail, and now, according to Richard Sim on the Live [Hot]mail team blog it is going to be known as Windows Live Hotmail.

Dare Obasanjo writes:

I’m glad to see that a lot of the unwise decisions around branding that originally infested Windows Live are beginning to fade. First Windows Live Local switched to Windows Live Maps. Now Windows Live Mail is Windows Live Hotmail, which builds on a brand that is about a decade old instead of throwing it away.

What we need now is a campaign to rename Windows Live Mail desktop to something less unwieldy which also respects our brand with lots of mindshare. Perhaps Windows Live Outlook Express?

And Brandon LeBlanc from MSTechToday writes:

While I’ve grown extremely tired of these ongoing brand changes within Windows Live that further adds to its branding confusion as a whole – I think this branding change for Windows Live Mail to Windows Live Hotmail is a smart move and I am glad Microsoft has chosen to do this.

I just picked this up on the TechNet Blogs feed that I subscribe to but unfortunately my Czechoslovakian skills are severely lacking. Anyway, from what I can see, there’s a third beta of my favourite desktop blogging editor, Windows Live Writer, coming soon. I say coming soon, because there’s no mention of it on the Live Writer blog yet. From the one screenshot provided, it looks like they’ve improved the wizard to subscribe to blogs, but that’s all I know so far. Any Czech speakers out there willing to translate??

Yahoo are showing off their next version of Yahoo! Messenger which has been written from the ground up to take advantage of the graphical capabilities of Windows Vista.

You can read more and watch the video here: http://messenger.yahoo.com/windowsvista.php

Microsoft have now released a new website containing details on the additional software that can be download to Windows Vista Ultimate owners. Known as Ultimate Extras, these are meant to give some substance to the additional $100-$200 that users pay for the benefit of owning Windows Vista Ultimate. There are now three new Ultimate Extras available and these will start showing up in Windows Vista from January 30th. I don’t think these are very exciting at all, and if I was a paying Vista Ultimate customer, I would be a bit peeved, but judge for yourself.

1. Hold ‘Em Poker Game – A typical poker game that looks adequate but doesn’t have any visual representation of other opponents. Betting is all done with play-money chips and the difficulty can be changed as well as the table colour.
2. BitLocker and EFS Enhancements – This Ultimate Extra provides two additional tools to make managing the security features of Windows Vista easier. This sounds like a scam to me – you shouldn’t need to pay for additional tools to help you manage the security features of your Windows Vista installation!
3. Windows DreamScene – This is a nifty app which will no doubt become more of an annoyance very quickly. This turns your Windows desktop into a full video player that allows you to view your favourite video clips directly on your desktop that replaces your wallpaper. This harnesses the power of the 3D Windows Desktop Manager which means that it doesn’t need to hog your CPU, but I can’t see how this would be entertaining for more than just a few minutes.

Update:

Brandon LeBlanc at MSTechToday seems to share my lack of enthusiam for the first bunch of Ultimate Extras:

The current set of Windows Vista Ultimate Extras, which are now being talked about on Microsof’ts BRAND NEW Winows Vista Ultimate Extras website, aren’t impressive enough in my opinion. I think Windows DreamScene is quite impressive but it will take more than that to get consumers to dish out the cash to want to go to the highest SKU possible for Vista. Just my opinion here though.

Other Microsoft blogs mentioning the new Ultimate Extras:

• http://blogs.technet.com/aralves/archive/2007/01/08/vista-windows-vista-ulitmate-blog.aspx

The most exciting product announced during Bill Gates’s keynote presentation today at CES was Microsoft’s new server product for home users called Windows Home Server. This is not just a server product rebranded for home users, Microsoft have really created an innovated product which aims to solve all of the storage problems that home users have.

The storage capabilities of Windows Home Server (WHS) have been designed so that any average computer user can administer the system. There are no drive letters to worry about as all connected storage is aggregated into one large storage pool. All the home user has to do, is to add additional storage when needed and run a simple wizard to import the storage into the pool. Data is automatically distributed across all storage devices and redundant copies of files are also stored across all the storage devices. These devices can be 500GB hard drives or 60GB USB drives, it doesn’t matter they all belong to the pool. This also means that the storage is as expandable as your hardware allows – even up to Petabytes! If you want to remove a device from the storage pool, another wizard steps you through the required steps. No knowledge of RAID or related technologies is needed, and all management is done through a simple web interface.

WHS can also be configured to maintain backups of all computers in the household using new image-based backup technologies. Single instance storage (SIS) is configured so that only one copy of each file is needed to be stored in the storage pool, drastically reducing the amount of space required. Backups can be configured to run automatically and will work on Windows XP and Windows Vista computers.

Microsoft have also implemented a feature that will allow WHS users to access their server over the internet using a new Windows Live service. This means that users can upload photos to their home servers from anywhere in the world, and you can easily access files that you left at home before leaving on your travels.

The home servers are designed from the ground up to be both reliable and easy to use. WHS is designed as a headless unit which means that it can be connected to your network without needing a monitor, keyboard or mouse. I’m not too sure how well this will work as all Microsoft products I have encountered require an operator to be sitting in front of the console at some point – for example, how do you configure the network address for the unit so that it connects to your network?

Overall, this is an exciting product – but you’ll have to wait a bit longer before getting your hands on it. A limited beta program will begin shortly with the final version being released in the second half of 2007. Keep checking back here as we will aim to bring you some more details as soon as we can.

Paul Thurrott has the best information so far here.

Other interesting links here:

• Microsoft blogger, Charlie Kindel, has been working on WHS for 3 years now.
• Channel 10 coverage here.
• Official Microsoft site – www.stopdigitalamnesia.com

Other Microsoft blogs mentioning Windows Home Server:

• Official Windows Home Server blog here
• Just announced the secret Windows Home Server
• Windows Home Server – Its Announced
• Windows Home Server Announcement
• Windows Home Server is announced

We’ve just moved all of the amanzi sites to a new hosting package on Media Temple’s Grid Server. This will give us way more power and bandwidth so that we can handle the increased traffic we’ve been getting recently.

Let us know in the comments if you notice anything not acting as it should be.

A new beta version of Google’s toolbar for the Firefox browser has brought integration of Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets service to your desktop. What this means is that you can double-click on an Excel or Word document and have it open directly in your Google Docs site. In my brief testing the service was far from perfect, and didn’t really work at all actually. I could only open documents that had already been uploaded and even then only after I had re-entered my password. Also, any online changes made to the documents are not reflected in the local copy of that document. But it’s still interesting to see the potential this has for the future.

These are the options as displayed in the toolbar settings:

The error message received when attempting to open a document that hadn’t previously been uploaded:

Once you’ve set the options above, the relevant icons change in Windows Explorer to look like this: