Tech for Lunch!

Yesterday, I looked at the new Internet Explorer 8, Beta 1 and mostly discussed the internal behavior and rendering capabilities. Today, I wanted to show you what some of the new features are in more detail. There are quite a few improvements, but many of them are “Features” that should have been there a long time ago or were already implemented in other browsers such as firefox. Let’s start with the two most important ones: Webslices and Activities.

Activities add a contextual (usually a right-click) access to an external service, based on what page you are on or the selected text. Typically, these services will allow you to LOOK-UP information, such as a map, news on that subject or a dictionary definition, or SEND information to a blog, email or facebook profile etc. take a look at the screenshot I made in which I highlighted a postal code and got the map for it. You can move around in that pop-up map just like any other map. Notice the domain name(netfix.ca) is in bold in the address bar. That is also a new security feature to allow users to quickly identify which domain they are on to protect against phishing, typos and misguiding URLs.

Webslices are done by website developers who will make a portion (or a slice) of a page available to users. Users can subscribe to that slice and get updates regularly from wherever they are on the internet. When you subscribe to a slice, it gets added at the top of your IE8 window and turns bold when an update is available. You could use webslices to get weather, ebay auctions, news feeds, facebook friends statuses, stumbleupon buzz etc.. Basically anything that gets updated so you don’t have to navigate to that page everytime you want to see what’s going on. I think webslices will be like sidebar gadgets for Windows Vista and we will see slices for just about anything eventually. That’s probably one of the reasons why IE8 beta 1 is for “developers” ;-) Notice in this screenshot that the domain is also in bold in the address bar.

So this covers the two main new features of IE8, but another one that is worth mentioning for those of us who had to wait for it, is the developer tools. You can now debug HTML, JScript and CSS directly in the browser. Tools like these have been a part of firefox for quite some time, but hey.. better late than never! Most of the other improvements are for stability and speed. Rendering of HTML and CSS as well as JScript should now be a bit faster with IE8 and more improvements are set to be released with the next betas. We’ll just have to wait and see what the community’s feedback will be and what Microsoft will do about it.

When I heard that Microsoft had released Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for programmers and designers, I knew it was pointless to resist the temptation. I always like to see new products and what new features they have come up with. Internet Explorer has always been a somewhat controversial browser because it did not respect the community’s standards for development and rendering of CSS and other common tags found on today’s web pages. Version 8, however, is supposed to be much better at these things and allow developers to use the same code without any modifications to work for Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer(along with many other browsers).

Previous versions of Internet Explorer, were using more “proprietary” code and rendering methods which forced developers to use some code variations (sometimes known as hacks) to allow their pages to appear correctly on IE6 and IE7. The problem with CSS rendering was, of course, much more defined in IE6 because CSS was not as widely used when IE6 was developed and shipped. Internet Explorer 7 has much better CSS rendering for standard pages, but most certainly did not respect the community’s standards. This has been discussed extensively in the past and you can find results or even test this for yourself using the Acid2 tests.

Here comes Internet Explorer 8. This time Microsoft say they listened and designed this version to be compliant with the community and allow a better development and user experience. The layout is pretty much the same as it was with IE7. Same look and behavior overall, and this version passes the Acid2 test, which is a pretty big deal for a Microsoft product. I gave IE8 a quick test and it seems to work pretty well, but this is only a beta release, so bugs are to be expected and they did show up too. I had a couple pages that did not look right at all.

There are many new features in this version and I will cover them in the next post because it would be too long for a single post. The ones worth mentionning are certainly the “activities” and “webslices”. Activities add a contextual menu to the text you highlight and allow you to, for example, select an address and see a map of that location directly on the page you are browsing in a pop-up window. Webslices allow you to add a “slice” or a part of a page to a favorites bar at the top and keep an eye on it for any changes. The example I saw was for an eBay auction, so anytime a bid gets added, the page notifies you and you can see only that part of the page as a pop-up rather than having to navigate back to that page.

I will cover the new features, with screenshots, in the next post ;-)

I figured that since I was on a streak of writing about online applications, I might as well cover one of the most popular ones in recent news. Mint.com offers online banking and money management services to it’s users, and all of it for free. Only US banks and services are included at the moment.

Eliminate the need to manage multiple Web sites to get a comprehensive view of your personal finances. Mint.com connects securely with more than 5,000 US financial institutions. By adding your bank, credit card and investment accounts to Mint.com, you get a complete perspective of your finances in one, easy to use location. Planning your personal budget just got a lot easier.

You can use this service to manage every account you have in a single place, including your Paypal and E-Trade along with regular bankin, mortgage, loans, or investment accounts. Mint makes money by providing various offers to their users to help them save money, invest better and manage their finances better. They get compensation from the banks and companies who provide the offers.

As I have said before, Online Applications are a very interesting way to go and Mint is one of those applications that just stands out for it’s ease of use, great presentation (all done in javascript, by the way) and it’s free.

Those who know me already find me extremely annoying for it, but I have been saying for quite some time that the future of software is definitely in web-based applications. Many different variations on the terms have been used such as Software-as-a-Service(SaaS), web-based, or even subscription-based applications. The trend is easy to notice and more and more users are leaving standard software to move to the web.

Microsoft has announced that they will be expanding their online services to integrate many new products in a beta phase. New online services being tested include Exchange Server and Office SharePoint Server software handling tasks such as email, schedule calendars and online conferencing. Of course, you need to go to the beta web site to register and get a chance to try the products before they go live. Microsoft has targeted the second half of this year to make the products available to the public.

The Office suite has always been a foundation in Microsoft’s revenue and they are being careful not to break that income stream too fast. Google, Oracle and quite a few others have started offering online services which are slowly eating away at the market share so Microsoft is not taking any chances. Bill Gates mentioned that users should expect to see this kind of choice and flexibility in all of Microsoft’s products in the future.

There are some problems to this approach for the moment such as slow or unreliable internet connections or the unwillingness to change. Security is sometimes a concern as well because all your information keeps going back and forth on the internet. Naturally, none of these problems are really any more important than the ones users currently face with standard desktop applications. There is always a way to get to your valuable information if someone really wants it ;-)

The bottom line is that software on the web will be more and more a reality for everyone and this will most definitely be something I will keep and eye on to cover again in the future as it develops.

it’s no secret that I like to try out new software and I love to review new web sites and applications. Xobni is no exception to that statement. If you are an Outlook user, then you must surely have heard of this little plugin that can completely change your user experience with your e-mail.

“Xobni Insight is an add-on for Microsoft Outlook that offers effortless email management and provides instant access to the most important information in your email.

After a quick install, you’ll see the new Xobni toolbar appear in Outlook - and suddenly your Outlook productivity will burst to life with blazing fast email search, automatic phone number discovery, threaded conversations, and more.”

This little plugin application truly is a gem when it works properly and can significantly improve the usability of the Outlook client but I know of a couple of people who have had many problems with it as well. We have to keep in mind that Xobni is still in Beta testing and many of the problems should get worked out before the product goes into a final release. Even more so, if Microsoft actually get their hands on it. It seems there was an offer that was refused from the company previously, but the discussions have started over again.

Perhaps Xobni will simply get assimilated into the Microsoft machine and become a standard part of Outlook.. or maybe Microsoft will take the opportunity to turn this product into a social networking tool to increase their already very long reach.

When Microsoft released Windows Vista, everyone expected to upgrade and be happy about it. But moving from one operating system to another is never an easy task and many users have held back to see how it would go before trying it for themselves. This may have proven to be a good idea, but mostly for businesses and users who tend to get out of the ordinary with their computing habits. Most users who simply use their computer for standard stuff like surfing the web, reading emails and a few office applications, will have very little or no problems at all migrating and using the operating system.

Gamers and Businesses are the ones with the most problems, as it was expected. Gamers always need specific drivers, versions of DirectX, and businesses always have some weird legacy applications or badly coded applications that require ridiculous rights on the machine to work properly.

The problem is that Windows Vista is getting closer and closer to being the only choice when you purchase a new system and less drivers are being developed for Windows XP on new systems. What this means is that after a certain point, we won’t be able to buy a system and rebuild it with Windows XP if we want to, simply because there will be no drivers to support them anymore.

Luckily, a lot of the problems and kinks that were in the original releases of Windows Vista have been or are being worked out and with the coming of Service Pack 1, Microsoft has announced significant price cuts for the operating system. Windows Vista Ultimate, the most expensive edition, and, naturally, the one that contains all the bells & whistles, will go down to 319$us from it’s original 399$us. All the other flavors will also go down accordingly and the upgrades as well.

So, if you are planning on going to Windows Vista without buying a new system, you may want to wait for that Service Pack release. Windows XP is slated to be removed from availability in June 2008.

Google is very well known as a search engine, but avid fans also know that there is a lot more to Google than searching. One of the most interesting trends in the past year or so is certainly the migration of desktop applications to online versions of the same applications. Google released their web version of the familiar Office suite, including a word processor and spreadsheet, but completely web-based, meaning that it never needs to be installed on your computer. Everything runs in your web browser.

The most recent release in this series, is the the new Google Sites. Seen as a clear competitor to Microsoft’s Sharepoint, Google Sites offers its users a team website publishing service. You can create an intranet portal, team project management page, calendar, share all kinds of documents to name only a few. A”team” does not need to be for work; it could be a school, a classroom or anything that represents a group of people needing to share some common information and communicate through a central location.

Every other Google service, such as Youtube, searching and calendars, is integrated as well so you can use any previous information you entered and can add relevant content more quickly and easily.

The great advantage of a service like this one over a product like Sharepoint is the ease of use and installation. No need for dedicated hardware and no need for a system administrator to manage everything. The users have complete control over what is displayed in your portal and no HTML or coding is required. You can use permissions to determine who has access to what and maintain a certain control.

Depending on the type of solution or portal you need, this may be quite an excellent way to go.

I have had the opportunity to try restoring a machine image on completely different hardware recently and I thought this could be very useful to many of you out there. Here is the situation: My client has a few servers and one of those is a Windows Small Business Server that was running on a pretty old machine. They wanted to move everything from that machine to a brand new server that they purchased.

Because they are running a Windows Server 2003 for small business edition, that machine has all the domain/active directory information. The biggest problem with migrating this type of installation is that two small business servers cannot co-exist in the same domain. Of course, there are many ways to do this:

• Use Microsoft’s method and install a second server, then migrate everything manually. This method is limited to 7 days because after that, unless the new server is promoted and the old one demoted, somethings will stop working. You may end up with a new domain name in this case as well.
• Use SBSmigration.com’s packages for migration. This is probably the best way to go according to the community, but I have not tried it yet. It seems to be the method to provide the best migration experience to the users with no down-time.
• Use some kind of imaging software that will allow you to recover to different hardware. This is a great option if you can manage the down-time for the imaging portion because everything is maintained as it was: same machineID, same domain name, same configuration, everything.

In my case, I chose to go with the imaging because of time restrictions for the migration and because of the fact that they needed to maintain everything in it’s place for some legacy applications. I used Acronis True Image Enterprise Server 9.1 with Universal Restore to migrate their server. I was very happily surprised that the process was so smooth, even with the VERY different hardware I had to move to/from. Different CPU, different brand motherboards, chipsets, video cards, Raid controllers, everything!

You take the source image as you normally would with any other system. Then, when comes time to restore, you must have the Acronis Universal Restore option installed(or licensed on a bootable CD) and begin the process just like any other restore. But once Acronis sees that you are restoring to different hardware, it will simply ask you for the path to the necessary drivers for that new hardware.

In my case the restore went according to plan and the only snag was a Blue Screen on the first boot, and that one was due to different sizes in memory and swap files. This is definitely an option to consider when you need to move an operating system from one machine to the other, if you want to save some time.

This is perhaps more of interest for the developers out there, but it can be a very nice thing to know about if you are looking for a framework to build a new application. Version 2 was already fairly mature, but this new version removes many bugs and kinks to make for an excellent development platform.

“Adobe Flex is a highly productive, free open source framework for building and maintaining expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems.”

So what this means in english is that you can build an application with Flex, which generates a Flash output. Flash always looks the same from one platform to the other, so you only need to build your application once, no need to re-code or port. The great difference between simply using Flash to build your application is that Flex already contains all the standard “Windows-like” controls we are all used to. Your application, which will run in any browser that supports Flash, can contain windows, data grids, buttons, input boxes, sliders, color pickers, etc… You can take a look at many of the available components here.

Adobe Flex Builder 3 comes in two versions: Standard and Professional. The standard edition includes many new features such as the integrated CSS styling, improved skinning and generates smaller SWF files than before. The professional edition adds the memory and performance profilers and other components like charting and the advanced datagrid.

The Adobe website is the best place to start looking into this product and you can see many sample applications to better understand the possibilities and power of this development platform. There are already a number of big players using Flex on the web and you will be able to see a growing list of these applications on the adobe website.

Adobe Air has also become available during the same launch event. Flex applications can run on any platform whether it’s Windows, Mac or Unix, but still require a Flash capable browser. This is where Adobe Air comes in. With the very same code that you created in Flex, Adobe Air can convert that application to run as a standard desktop application. Your application will not need a browser to run and will have it’s very own window. This extends the reach and usability of applications because they can be taken offline, on the road to keep working. You may need to change a few things to make sure your data gets synchronized when the application comes back online, but that’s a small price to pay to have your application available at startup with all the other ones. Your users would not need to go online to use your application anymore!

The Adobe Flex SDK is free to download and use so you could build complete applications for free, but it’s just so much easier with the Builder!

Most children will be introduced to a computer before age 3 which can be a very good thing. Many games offer important developmental skills such as listening, sequencing, visual memory and more! Some games encourage children to learn colours, shapes, counting, differences, letters, numbers, music/songs, patterns and sequences, phonics and vocabulary. Obviously the help of an adult is required. These types of games are available both in French and English. I have 3 girls under the age of 4 and they very much enjoy playing on the computer, whether it be to color or learn.

Here are a few of my favorites:

• Jump Ahead Preschool
• Kea Coloring Book (which is free)
• Caillou: Four Seasons of Fun
• The “Lapin Malin” series
• And there are many more out there worth checking out.

Try them out with your children and let me know what you think and if you see an improvment with your child’s development. It will certainly give you an opportunity to sit down with your kids and have fun playing on the computer at the same time.