beta @ amanzi

OK – so this may be getting a bit boring… but I have heaps of different invites available to give out to interested people. I have the following:

• 100 Google Gmail invites (I thought this was already open to the public, but I could be wrong.)
• 5 0 Windows Live Mail invites – these could be hot property…
• 10 5 Windows Live Messenger invites – these also seem to be popular.

As usual, if you want an invite leave me a comment on this post and make sure you use the correct email address in the email field. Don’t worry – your address won’t be displayed publicly or shared with anyone, it’s just so that I can send the invites to the right people. And if you’re leaving a comment – feel free to let us know what operating systems you currently run and what your favourite is.

UPDATE 1: To get a Windows Live Mail invite, you need to already have a Hotmail address – I won’t be able to send you the invite unless I can send it to your Hotmail address. So make sure you enter this address in the email field of the comments form.

UPDATE 2: The Windows Live Mail invites are now gone, but there’s still a few Messenger invites – and still the 100 Gmail invites.

UPDATE 3: There are still a couple of Messenger invites to go and still lots of Gmail invites – everyone who has requested one below should have received them by now, let me know if you haven’t.

I have finally got my hands on the February CTP of Windows Vista – also known as build 5308. I’ve had a quick play with it and am very impressed so far. It’s a massive product – way too much to feature in a couple of blog posts – so I’ll be focusing on individual components of the operating system and writing up reviews that way.

Paul Thurrot has already written up a three part series on Vista so I won’t repeat too much about what he’s said. Instead I’ll focus on a couple of the new components such as Windows Mail, Windows Calendar, Windows DVD Maker, and the general GUI and it’s usability.

Stay tuned… (Oh, and I highly recommend that you subscribe to this blog so that you’ll get updates as soon as they happen. Right click here and add this to your favourite aggregator.)

Links:

• Paul Thurrot’s WinSuperSite

I’ve mentioned before that I liked the service from coComment which provide a way to keep track of all of the comments that you make on other people’s blog posts. I liked the service so much it made me want to comment on people’s blogs which is great for the blogosphere.

I recently saw an article on the TechCrunch site previewing another service that aims to aggregate your comments into one central location, but I didn’t bother with it at first – thinking it was just a rip-off of cocomment.com. Well, I was wrong to ignore it, because co.mments is a really cool service that provides similar features as cocomment.com as well as all the features that coComment forgot to implement.

The biggest problem with coComment is that the site would only track your comments – you wouldn’t know if any other comments had been made on the post, so you wouldn’t know when to check back for responses. Also, it would only track your comments if you remembered to click the bookmarklet. co.mments does things a bit differently – for starters, you don’t have to make a comment on a post to track it. This is a great idea if you want to keep tabs on a conversation without actually joining in. Then you can follow the entire post with comments from the co.mments site. Also, you can add a link to each post on your blog to allow users to add the post to their own co.mments profile. You can see these links in action on this blog now!

co.mments also have another cool feature which is like a ‘river of news’ on the front page. As people add posts to co.mments they are displayed on the front page and you’re given the opportunity to add them to your own tracking pages. There are also, obviously, lots of options for RSS feeds – you can track your own posts as well as everyone else’s.

Overall, this is a great service and I can highly recommend that you try it out yourself.

Links:

• coComment – cocomment.com
• co.mments – co.mments.com
• TechCrunch’s review on co.mments here
• TechCrunch’s review on coComment here, andhere

In my hasty mini-review of Firefox 2.0 Alpha 1 (also know as Bon Echo) I didn’t get around to opening up multiple tabs in the browser window. If I had, I would have found another new “feature” of Bon Echo – each tab has it’s own close button. My earlier concern now seems more plausible that the Places window seems to have been inspired from Internet Explorer 7’s new bookmarks window. Now, the tab close button also seems to be taken directly from IE7 which implements the same thing.

I don’t like this at all, but I recall reading that the IE team put the close button on each tab based on tester feedback so I’d be interested to hear why people prefer the inline close button. I personally prefer the close button to appear in one fixed place so that I can close consecutive tabs without needing to move my mouse to each tab. A typical scenario where this is useful for me is when I visit a web page that has a lot of interesting links – I’ll middle-click each link and let them load in their own tab. Then I’ll switch to the last tab opened and glance over the page to see if it’s interesting – if it’s not, it’s a breeze to close the tab and switch to the next tab. I can quickly close a whole bunch of tabs easily this way.

Another note… although I don’t like the inline close button, at least IE7 implements it better – you can’t close a tab that doesn’t have focus. This prevents you from accidentally closing a tab that you don’t have active yet. In Bon Echo, you can click a close button on an inactive tab and it will instantly close. As this is pre-beta software, I’m sure this won’t be the final behaviour of how this works but it should be noted anyway.

Please leave comments on whether you prefer the separate close button or the inline close button, perhaps I’m missing something obvious here…

Netvibes has been my favourite home page for a while now, and they keep rolling out great, new features. The latest is integration with box.net’s online storage service. You can sign up in one step from the Netvibes desktop and you get 1GB storage for free.

I haven’t bothered with the whole “online storage” fad before, but now I can see a real use for the service. This is cool in so many ways – I’ll always have my files available from my Netvibes desktop no matter where I am, and I don’t have to sign into another site to access them.

Well done Netvibes on this great new feature!

UPDATE! And well done for securing seed financing (as reported on the TechCrunch site) – hopefully this will help you to keep rolling out the new features regularly.

PROBLEM SOLVED!! I had a problem with this module on my Netvibes desktop – the module would just sit there with a “Loading” message. A suggestion was made by Jekyll in the comments section of the Netvibes blog that the module doesn’t work if you have special characters in your password. I changed my password on the box.net site and now the module works perfectly.

In part 1 of my Windows OneCare Live review, I looked at the initial installation of the software and the anti-virus protection. This part of the review will go through the backup/restore features – I’ll leave the performance tune-up review until part 3.

Let’s look at the backup first – Windows has always been lacking an easy to use backup tool and OneCare hopes to change this. The tool is extremely easy to use and intuitive but does lack a very key feature that will hinder any attempts for a quick and easy restore!

(more…)

I just wanted to clarify a couple of things about my last post about Firefox 2.0 Alpha 1:

• The Mozilla hasn’t yet announced this yet, and there is probably a good reason too.
• This is ALPHA software! Do not install it on your main computer unless you know what the implications are with installing ALPHA software.
• Don’t install this software thinking that it will be more stable than Firefox 1.5 – this is ALPHA software and is likely to contain more bugs than the current version and has features that aren’t yet fully implemented.
• If you have any questions about memory usage in Firefox, read this post before jumping to conclusions: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=354828

This post is partly in response to a post that Mike Arrington made on his TechCrunch website. I’m a big fan of his site and it was also an inspiration to start up this blog, but his comments were thoughtless and without foundation – very disappointing indeed.

The news just out today is that the first Alpha version of Mozilla’s Firefox has been released, although it hasn’t yet been officially anounced. I’ve downloaded and installed this latest version and as to be expected, there aren’t any major changes yet from the current version.

Installation is the same as usual, with the nice addition of the code name of the new version: “Bon Echo.”

First time the program runs there is nothing new, you are prompted to import your Internet Explorer settings, which all works as expected. If you’re interested, the first screenshot below shows the warning message that you’re prompted with from Windows OneCare Live which I covered in this article.

At first glance, there is nothing different between this new version and the current 1.5 version. I had a close look through the options dialogue which appears to not have changed yet either. The only new thing that can be seen is the small icon on the bookmarks toolbar – highlighted by the red circle below. Clicking this button brings up the new “Places” window:

Interestingly, this new Places window strikes a remarkable similarity to the new Favorites Center in Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2. Both display bookmarks, subscriptions/feeds and history within an easy to manage window. The most useful feature of this would be searching through your favourites and history, which is a feature that Firefox implements while IE7 leaves you to click through until you find what you’re looking for.

My only concern with this new feature is that it seems to be a bit of a copy-cat act from IE7. Obviously this is a really early alpha version and I’m sure the final release is going to change a LOT from now, but hopefully Firefox can make this their own – already the search feature is an indication of this.

I hunted around for some new features and came across the following button in the customize toolbar dialogue. I added it to the default toolbar and found out that it’s a quick and easy way to add a new bookmark.

This interface doesn’t actually do anything yet – it’s just an indicator of things to come. I’d like to see some tagging added to this interface too, and then perhaps this could be extended to interact with services like del.icio.us or other online bookmarking services.

So in summary, there’s not much to see here yet, but no doubt millions of other beta-geeks will download this over the next few days. I’ll keep tracking this over the months to come and I look forward to some great innovations with the bookmarks management! I wouldn’t recommending this on your main computer as the features aren’t even near to complete – rather wait for the Mozilla announcement and then make up your mind then. For the curious though, here’s the link:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/tinderbox-builds/pacifica-mozilla1.8/

I feel like I’ve been fairly negative towards Microsoft recently, so on a more positive note – I’m very impressed with the screenshots that have been released of the new Office 2007 interface. You can read Jensen Harris’s post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/03/09/547281.aspx

I’ve been reading Jensen’s blog for the last few months and have been following the progress of the Office 2007 development. The new Office suite looks very exciting and the interface looks set to revolutionise how we use Office applications in the future.

The biggest change is obviously the contextual tabs along the top of the window. This is known as the Ribbon internally at Microsoft, but no doubt when the product is released they’ll drop the cool name and replace it with something boring like, “Horizontal Function Bar.” The tabs present a series of common tasks, and selecting a task like Format, Write, or Insert presents you with all of the most commonly used tasks on the ribbon.

There are many other noticable improvements to the interface – there is now better use of the status bar, and there is a new MiniBar which provides the most common formatting options in a small, semi-transparent floating toolbar.

I highly recommend reading through the archives of Jensen’s blog, he’s got lots of screenshots of the new features as well as videos showing the workflow of some of the new functions.

This isn’t really beta software, or maybe it is who knows – but I thought I’d share my views on the UMPC devices that have been revealed by Microsoft, Intel and others. These are the devices that Microsoft over-hyped through it’s viral Project Origami marketing campaign.

In brief:

• They are expensive – in the region of $600 – $1000 (USD)
• They are too big to fit in your pocket
• They are too small to replace your laptop
• The battery life is between two and three hours (probably less with processor hungry tasks like watching videos or listening to music
• They are ugly!

They run Windows XP Tablet PC edition with a pretty wrapper that lets you access all of the applications by using your finger on the touch screen. I don’t have much experience with Tablet PCs, but I’m assuming they have to go through the same start up and shut down process as Windows XP? (correct me if I’m wrong please.) So does that mean that you have to wait 2 minutes for it to boot up before using it?

I think you can probably tell by this that I’m not impressed – this is just another example of poor design and poor marketing. I’ll be interested to see how these devices do in the market place.