Three of my favourite software apps launched new or upgraded versions recently. Only one definite hit in this group, unfortunately. WindowBlinds 5.0. The latest version of the add-on for Windows XP that lets you completely change the look-and-feel of your Windows is just great. The major improvements I can see in this version over the […]
Category: Software
A standard symbol for RSS?
One of the topics Shel and I discussed with Rick Klau of FeedBurner during our FIR podcast interview with him on Tuesday was about the challenges of helping ‘normal’ people understand what RSS is. The acronym itself and the little orange icons with ‘RSS’ or ‘XML’ you see everywhere really are not helpful to the […]
Yahoo! hammered by users over poor successor to Konfabulator
In my post on Monday about software hits and misses, I gave the new Yahoo! Widget Engine 3.0 a definite ‘miss’ verdict for the moment as this version for Windows really doesn’t appear to be worthy of unleasing on an unsuspecting public as this growing comment thread in the support forum clearly indicates. When I […]
Getting back up to speed with TypePad
A welcome sight for every TypePad customer – you can access the TypePad service again and you can update your blog to reflect accurate content. (Quick jump: I’ve included some tips below on how to republish your blog and how to make a backup of its post content.) If you didn’t visit this blog at […]
Organizing for the New Year
Housekeeping’s on my mind today. After enjoying Christmas in the UK with family, and being almost wholly switched off from the blogosphere for the best part of a week, I’m finding it quite refreshing to sit in front of my desktop PC today and think not about blogging but about hardware, software and sorting out […]
Twiddling thumbs
Waiting for chkdsk to complete its diagnostics including a free space hard drive scan on a Windows XP computer is like watching paint dry. And about as thrilling. Continuing my housekeeping mode from yesterday, I’m now spending too much time this morning trying to nail down an irritating little issue that seems to revolve around […]
The rigmarole of Norton Internet Security
Notwithstanding the Dell Hell saga of last year, I love my Dell Dimension XPS Gen 5 which I bought in August. From a hardware point of view, it works perfectly. No issues whatsoever, so I’m a more than satisfied Dell customer. I wish I could say the same about some of the software running on […]
Who do you pay attention to for advice on Windows vulnerability?
When news about the latest Windows vulnerability gets talked about in the news all over the place, you tend to pay close attention. If you haven’t been doing that, here’s what this latest issue is all about, involving a Trojan called Exploit-WMF which is spread via some instant messaging software and email. It’s actually hard […]
Skype 2.0 out of beta
Lots of interesting news about Skype and some of the things they’re announcing at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. (Heads up for visiting the CES website: loud Flash intro page.) More interesting news – version 2.0 of Skype software for Windows is coming out of beta today and will be available […]
More choices with offline blog editors
I use an offline editor to write nearly all my blog posts. This means I’m not dependent on a network connection nor the vagaries of the internet between my PC and the hosting service (TypePad for this blog), or even my own server where I have my WordPress blog. Plus, I always have the original […]
Filling the market gap for offline blog editors
Some readers of this blog have left some great comments to my post last week about offline blog editors. In that post, I talked about ecto for Windows, BlogJet and Qumana as examples of popular editors for Windows (and for the Mac, in some cases) which enable you to write your blog posts offline, on […]
WordPerfect, Office 12 and a trip down software memory lane
CNET News: Corel on Tuesday announced an updated version of WordPerfect Office, its rival to Microsoft’s dominant Office suite. This news item triggered some synapses to take a short trip down software memory lane, so here goes. I’ve been using Microsoft Word for over twelve years now, from version 6 when it was called ‘Word […]
FeedDemon 2 beta is out
If you use the FeedDemon RSS reader for Windows, you should definitely take a look at the first beta of the forthcoming version 2. As a long-time FD user and currently on the 1.6 beta (version 2 will repalce 1.6), I’ve installed it. Wow! Definitely worth having. More later. See developer Nick Bradbury’s post for […]
Discovering Windows Live
Light blogging until the weekend as I’ll be in London tonight for the first UK preview of Microsoft’s Windows Live. Windows Live is a set of personal internet services and software designed to bring together in one place all of the relationships, information and interests people care about most, with more safety and security features […]
Microsoft’s Windows Live power play
Participating in the first UK preview of Windows Live in London last Thursday evening was a worthwhile experience. This event was the first public (ie, to a private group) UK presentation of and discussion about the collection of new internet-based services from Microsoft that are currently in beta testing. I’ve not yet directly experienced any […]
Podcasting choices: Audacity or Adobe Audition?
When I started podcasting, I used the free cross-platform audio editor Audacity as my application of choice for recording and editing audio. This is a common route that many people go when they start out podcasting. Audacity is very good and easy to use. Good enough, in fact, for many people to stick with it. […]
SAP enters SaaS market
Yesterday, the German enterprise software vendor SAP announced it is entering the hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) market with the expansion of its mySAP CRM offering to include a hosted option. The first service SAP will offer as a subscription is its sales-on-demand solution, with pricing from $75/user a month, and with hosting services from IBM. In […]
Good time to back up your TypePad blog
If you’re a TypePad customer, be aware that the hosted blog service will be in maintenance mode this weekend. From a note on the Six Apart Status blog last night: We have a scheduled maintenance window on Saturday evening from 11:00 PM through Sunday morning at approximately 4:00 AM to upgrade our database server. Upgrading […]
The Firefox upgrade and plugins dance
Mozilla released an update to the Firefox browser earlier this month which, the release notes say, provides improved stability, improved support for Mac OS X, fixes for several memory leaks and several security enhancements among other things. Notwithstanding the security fixes, I’m not upgrading to this latest version 1.5.0.1 yet. The reason? If I do, […]
QumanaXP public beta launched
For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying out the closed beta versions of QumanaXP, an offline blog editing tool that is available in versions for Windows and Mac platforms. While I’ve not been using it for every post I’ve been writing to my blogs – I’ve been mixing and matching between ecto for Windows, […]