Tag Archives: news

Reviews

Three interesting downloads from Microsoft

Microsoft’s out to kick butt lately, and with these three downloads, it’s taking on three companies at once: Apple, Adobe and Intuit. Try them out, and judge how well Microsoftie’s doing in the fights:

  1. Windows Media Player 11: organized pretty much like iTunes, but with a leaner installer — iTunes weighs in at over 35 MB for the installer, and WMP11 is a featherweight at 24.5 MB.
  2. Microsoft Expression Web Designer (Beta): Dreamweaver, you bloated piece of software, here comes MS to kick you into shape! If you’re sick of 100% CPU overhead when synchronizing your sites with Dreamweaver, like I am, then give the Web Designer a go. You might find it tastes a bit like Equal, not sugar, but hey, anything to whip Adobe into shape, right? Oh, and the kicker: it opens .dwt files. Yup, you heard me right…
  3. Microsoft Office Accounting 2007 (Beta): Quickbooks, shake in your boots! This piece of software will let 1-person or small businesses do most of the things they could do in Quickbooks, and, they’ll be able to do them knowing an enterprise-level database is storing their data, not some Quickbooks proprietary format db. Yes, Office Account 2007 installs SQL Server 2005 Express. A reboot is needed as well after the install (b/c of SQL Server). Yes, it imports data from Quickbooks, and from MS Money.
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Reviews

Motorola's new, cheap cellphone

Motorola's new MotofoneMotorola’s just come up with a very nice and thin cellphone that’s just that: a cellphone. It’s called the Motofone, and has no other features — no music player, no digital camera, no fancy gadgets, games, etc. It’s just a cellphone, and it looks really cool!

It’s getting billed as the “dumb phone” by folks in the media, but I think it’s a really smart choice on the part of Motorola. I for one have been asking for just such a device for over a year. They’re targeting this phone for developing countries, but I say bring it to the States, too! I’ve been waiting for it for some time, get it over here! And make it even smaller and “dumber” if possible. I’m sick of bulky devices. I just want a phone, credit-card thin if possible. That would make me very happy!

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Reviews

My favorite blogs and feeds

I’ve wanted to publish a list of my favorite blogs and feeds for some time, so here goes… These are blogs/feeds I read either daily, or at least once a week, and they’re listed in alphabetical order. Some of them are from established news sources, and some are personal blogs. They’re a snapshot of my current feed subscriptions in Google Reader. If you ask how I keep up with them, it’s pretty simple, and only requires about 30-45 minutes a day — pretty much the same amount of time it would take to read a newspaper. Thankfully, some of them aren’t high volume feeds, or I’d be in trouble…

You’re welcome to check them out, of course, and do subscribe to them yourselves if you like them.

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Reviews

Google Groups gets a makeover

After Google launched the new Reader, I couldn’t help thinking they might just give Groups a re-design as well. My hunch was correct. Brett Lider announced a couple of days ago on the Official Google Blog that a new version of Groups is currently in Beta. It looks a little nicer, but beyond that, no extra functionality was included. Oh yes, there was. There’s now a drop-down menu at the top (Ajaxified) which displays the groups I’m subscribed to without needing to visit a separate page.

The new Google Groups

Beyond that, I think the old version of Groups made better use of the space on the page. When I log into the Groups Beta, my groups get grouped in a right-hand column, and since I’m subscribed to more than 10, the page ends up stretching down with lots of white space in the main column and the groups squished in the right column. It just doesn’t look good.

Overall, I think they’re going in the right direction with the new version of Groups, but it still needs work, particularly in the page layout. I just don’t think enough time was devoted to thinking through the functional areas of the Groups, and how they need to be arranged on the page.

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Reviews

Google Reader changes for the better

I used Google Reader several times yesterday, as I’ve been doing for the past several months, keeping track of the feeds I like to read. Then I read this entry on the Google Blog, telling us that they’ve just launched a new version of the Reader. When did that happen? Wow, that was quick! They launched a brand new version in just a few hours, propagating the change across all their servers.

The new version is much better than the previous one — which worked great, don’t get me wrong — but was not as polished and easy to use. The major changes in this version are obvious: all of the feeds are listed nicely in the left column, and if new items are available, the feed title is bolded and the new items are counted in parentheses. The text formatting for the feed items is also much nicer.

Another cool feature is the Share option, which lets you mark feed items for sharing, and puts them onto a separate page, all your own, with a feed that people can subcribe to. That’s cool! So I don’t have to Star the items that I use, then copy and paste the OPML onto my blog. Now I can just manipulate the feed and display it as I want, wherever I want. But I see that the option to share my starred or tagged items has disappeared. Where did it go? Is it gone for good? (If it has, that’s a bummer, and I’d like it back.)

Finally, I see that the Email feature has been placed next to the Add star and Share options, and the “Blog This!” option has been taken away. If you’re not familiar with it, it would let you blog about a feed item right in your Blogger account. But people didn’t bother to edit the entries, instead choosing the leave the form fields pre-filled with a quote from the post. They’d hit the Publish button, instantly turning their blog into a splog. I can see why Google did away with this.

All in all, a good, solid upgrade. I’m looking forward to using the new Google Reader on a daily basis from now on.

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