I tried the new version of the Flock web browser and so far I’m liking this Flock Browser. It’s like Motorola Blurr for your browser. Since it is based on the Chromium Browser, which is the open source branch of Google’s Chrome browser, it supports Chrome’s features including Google Gears, Themes and Chrome Extensions.  It also imports your bookmarks from other browsers on install to sync with your Flock account.

Speaking of the flock account, it allows you to save your login credentials to social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter.  This means on subsequent installations your login data and bookmarks are saved with your account so logging into Flock logs you into everything.  After you login you are presented with a sidebar of your status feeds.  You can click the reply button to reply in the form that network uses.  For example, replying to twitter gives you options to @reply, retweet or direct message.  On facebook it’s comment, like, poke or message.  There is also a nifty “Post” button that supports multiple twitter accounts so you can post directly to facebook or a twitter account from the sidebar.  It also lets you select which network(s) you’re posting to, so your update could be sent to one, many or all of your accounts at once.  The sidebar also lets you customize the feed to decide what gets displayed or filter it to show only updates from the selected social network.

This is a nice niche browser for the social networking scene.  Grab the 3.0 beta from http://beta.flock.com or the 2.6 browser from http://www.flock.com

Now I just wanna know when the thumb drive version is coming out.

Internet Explorer 8 is on the horizon and just as with Firefox 3, the browser doesn’t look ground-breaking.  A closer look, however, exposes lots of neat new features from Microsoft, along with a nice addition that has been a part of Firefox for a while.  Follow the screenshots below to learn more about this next generation browser.

Related tabs are color coded, for easy sorting.

Web Slices are another new feature.  They allow websites to create dynamic feeds for IE8.  They are like RSS widgets to the user.

Internet explorer 8 adds a feature called “Accelerators”.  Highlight a section of the page and a blue anchor appears.  Click that anchor to get a popup menu of accelerators, which are actions to perform using that text, such as posting a blog, or mapping an address.  More accelerators can be added from the web to add functionality.

In this example, highlighting the word Internet, and using the Encarta accelerator, brings up a definition of the Internet.

The add-on manager in IE8 allows you to enable or disable troublesome plugins, toolbars and extensions.  It also allows you to manage accelerators, search providers, and settings for InPrivate (which will be discussed shortly).  There is also a link to find more add-ons at the IE8 gallery.

IE8 adds an integrated website checker called SmartScreen.  It checks websites against a blacklist of known malicious websites and blocks them, also allowing you to report a suspicious site.

An icon next to the address bar enables the compatability view, which loads pages as they would be loaded in older browsers for compatability. 

The handy feed discovery menu finds feeds on a page, and gives you a way to view them in one place and gives you one click access to the RSS feed, for subscription.

The Internet Explorer Gallery will be the place to go to find ad ons, accelerators, search providers and web slices.  This allows for easy customization of the browser from one location.

InPrivate allows you to browse the internet without leaving any tracks.  In this mode, IE doesn’t store files in the cache, doesn’t keep cookies, or add to the history.  Simply put, IE covers your tracks while you’re in a session.

Another important new features include, a menu option to go directly to the Delete Browsing History dialog.  The new dialog allows you to clear your cache, delete browsing history, remove cookies, etc, without having to dig through the Internet options dialog.

A nice Firefox feature has finally arrived in IE with the Reopen Last Browsing Session dialog, which allows allows you to restore the last tabs you were working on when you closed IE.  I wish this would work automatically, or be presented as a prompt, like it does in Firefox, but it is nice to know the option is there.  A nice wrinkle Microsoft added is that when bad code on a website, on in an add-on crashes your browser, the offending tab will be closed, and all others restored upon restarting IE8.  In my test, the results were mixed.  A tab crashed the browser, it restarted with IE frozen and unresponsive, and I had to kill IE from the task manager.  When I restarted the browser, the offending tab was gone, and my others remained open.  Interestingly enough, the tab seemed to crash the browser because of a site being coded for IE7 not being able to handle a beta.  As with any beta, the buggy behavior will probably be ironed out by the release. 

Overall, while not as groundbreaking as say, the jump from IE3 to IE4, there were plenty of nice features added, including some that should have been a part of Internet Explorer from a while.  My main complaint is that I wish Microsoft would release interim updates of its browser over time instead of waiting and releasing new browsers to coincide with new operating systems.  This would allow Web Developers to keep sites tailored to new IE features, instead of having to adopt them every few years when a new OS is released.

Written by: Hilton T. Young

    

Windows Live mesh appears to be a solid move into the cloud based computing market by Microsoft.  I will give a quick intro using screenshots.  A quick overview.  Windows Live Mesh (www.mesh.com) allows you to collaborate by sharing files from your personal computers over the Internet.  It then lets you add users who can access files.  You can also share data from folders on different PCs, which get added to your mesh.  A bonus feature is that the Remote Desktop Connection is a part of your desktop and allows you to remotely control your computers after Live Mesh is installed on them.  The only thing I am missing is document editing features.  If you could somehow use Google Apps on your mesh, this would be a killer app.  As it stands though, I carry a thumb drive with maintenance software as well as the free OpenOffice.org software on it, so even if I’m on a PC with no office suite on it, as long as it runs Windows I am able to do word processing.  Also missing in the interim are drag and drop capability, and MacOS and Mobile support.

HERE ARE THE SCREENSHOTS!!!

    The nicest surprise was the fact that Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) is enabled on Mesh.  Because RDC requires the computer you are using to be on the local network and have a password on the user account you are logging into, it wasn’t as useful as it could have been.  In the Windows environment, most users aren’t using passwords and thus can’t connect via RDC, and the error message won’t really point the average user to the reason they can’t connect.  Gotta love seeing Vista inside of XP though.
  
    The notifier is installed on each computer you want in your mesh and it is added to your list of devices.  You use your list of devices to connect remotely and control a PC (by clicking the Connect to device link.

    Your Live Desktop shows as a Vista skinned window in your browser, complete with drag and drop and resizing.  Your files are shown in an explorer like window as they are synced.  The Live Desktop comes with 5 GB of file storage so while it won’t hold an mp3 or podcast collection, it will hold your documents and photos.  The only disappointment I saw was that there wasn’t a built in document editor, or photo thumbnails (as with the large icon option in Vista).  Another thing is that Mesh relies on Active X controls so you’re limited to Internet Explorer.  If you use Firefox because your Internet Explorer has fallen victom to viruses, you are out of luck.  One neat feature is that if you install Silverlight (Microsoft’s answer to flash), you are given the option of using the Media view, which is an embedded Windows Media Player for playing video files. 

The Mesh notifier which is installed in your system tray gives you a Instant Messenger-like news feed of files that have been synchronized or deleted.

    The Mesh folder view allows you to add Twitter-like messages to a feed for your shared folder.  This would be a good device to use to notify your users that you have updated a document, or removed a share.

    Mesh lets you assign users to folders and give those users permissions.  This way you can determine who sees files and who can edit them.
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   This is the interface for adding and editing users to a share.  You add them by sending an invitation to users with Live accounts.  You can chose to give them logical roles of Owner (can read, modify and write to documents), Reader (can read documents) and Contributer (can read and add their own documents, but not modify other’s documents).  Who would have thought that Hotmail account from the 90s would be a part of the future in 2008.

    Unfortunately, this is a preview, and features like the ability to drag files from your computer to your Mesh desktop aren’t available yet.

    Overall, Mesh looks promising as Microsoft tries to shift from local computing to cloud computing.  It takes your file sharing from your local LAN and makes it available worldwide for free, using a free Windows Live account.  Microsoft is supposed to be making a shift towards online services (see Microsoft Equipt).  I can see this service as a supplement to their other online services, and the eventual online adaptation of Office.  I would also like to see some kind of media sharing/streaming included, which would be similar to how Orb allows you to share your media over the internet, although the Orb really stresses a computer.  In the end this is a solid preview of the direction Ray Ozzie has Microsoft headed in.  I would also like to see how Microsoft plans on integrating its live services.  I’m not a Mac person, but I guess that it would be similar to the direction .mac is headed in.  I can see signing onto Windows Live search and having your targeted ad banner link you to a new song by your favorite artist.  You would look to a sidebar and see how many new emails you have, today’s events on your calendar, new files added to your mesh, your virus definition status, online IM users, and new stories on your RSS subscriptions.

    My only real concern is user security.  If you’re using a Windows Live account to subscribe to all of these services and put your personal data online, you’d better have a strong password to protect yourself from hacking.  You’d also have to really watch out for the first person who tries to spoof Windows Live to get you to give them your username and password through phishing.

   
    Windows Vista gets just as many harsh reviews as Windows ME did in the past.  The sad thing is that this bad reputation may not be deserved.  Vista does a solid job of introducing security to a Windows world that is such a target for security attacks that its amazing Windows XP has remained as safe as it has.  In my opinion, Windows Vista helps prevent attacks by making the user have to actively work to make their computer LESS secure, whereas previous versions of Windows left holes open and made the user have to work to make their computer MORE secure. 
   
 
  I compare Vista to previous versions of Windows by using the visual of a home.  In previous versions of Windows, all the doors and windows were open when you moved in, and you could leave them that way, making it more convenient to feel a cool breeze from a window, or go outside to get the paper and walk back in.  With Vista, everyone has gotten used to this convenience, but now that they have a Vista home, which comes with all the doors and windows closed by default, they get aggrivated at having to open a door or window everytime they want to use it.  This, built in protection is called UAC, which pops of asking the user to confirm that they want to allow potentially unsafe activities to happen.

    UAC is a necessary evil since by default, most users want to have full access to all of their PCs capabilities, which equates to running in superuser or administrator mode all the time.  This is a very unsafe because it means that anyone who gains access to your system, whether physically or by hacking in remotely, also has full access to your system.  Operating Systems like Linux and Unix, avoid this by the safe process of having users log in with limited access, and allowing them to temporarily log in as an administrator on the fly to do things that require full access.  Windows users have been used to having full access all the time, so the obvious thing to do would be to allow them to keep their access, but try to prevent them from compromising the safety of their computers.  This is where UAC comes in.  It may be an inconvenience, but the bigger inconvenience would be having Windows work in limited user mode, as Linux and Unix do.  That would mean forcing users that are used to their computers booting up and logging in to have to login at bootup and then again anytime any advanced task (such as installing new software) is performed.  For those who feel the prompts of UAC are unnecessary, they can be turned off in the control panel, although this would defeat the purpose of UAC, thus reverting to a lesser security level that is more like that of Windows XP.

    Another problem with Vista is that it’s driver and software support was weak to start.  This meant in some cases, manufacturers made the problem worse by making new hardware, but not providing windows support, or not supporting products that were out long before Vista was.  This isn’t really a Microsoft problem, but to the average user, it may appear to be one.  My own first upgrade to Vista was thwarted by the fact that Nvidia decided to only provide Vista support for its newer video cards.  This meant that although Vista worked, any advanced 3D graphics, such as Vista’s aero interface or 3D games didn’t.  In this case, the manufacturer dropped the ball.  With all the time that elapsed while Microsoft was developing and testing Vista, they failed to write drivers because they were basically too lazy to worry about their older products and the numerous people who were still using them.  This laziness also provided them the benefit of forcing users to buy their newer products (or downgrade to XP as I did).

      If you then still have software that doesn’t work with Vista, but you have to have it, virtualization software can allow you to run an older version of windows from within Windows, and thus run its software in Vista.  Microsoft even offers its virtualization software, Microsoft Virtual PC for free (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx ). 

    For those who are not satisfied with buying a new computer to run Vista, I would suggest Linux, or waiting for the next version of windows, which is reportedly due out in the next year or so if you trust Microsoft release dates. 

       The bad rap that Vista has isn’t really anything that hasn’t happened before with Microsoft.  In the late 90s, everyone got used to Windows 98 second edition, and it was a rock in its time.  Windows Me came out with more issues than a Maury Povich show guest, and noone was satisfied, although Me was the way to stay with the Windows 98 style OS and avoid upgrading to the NT based OS in Windows 2000.  Windows 2000 was the next version of Windows, and was rock solid and based on the technology in Windows NT4.  It had its own driver and software compatibility issues because it was new, and thus, there was some of the same outcry from users that wanted to keep Window 98 and didn’t want to move to Windows 2000.  Windows 2000 was released in early 2000, followed by XP in 2001.  XP was really just a more mature Windows 2000, made more fun to look at and user friendly, but with the extra driver and software support of having a year of Windows 2000 experience.


    Similarly, the next version of Windows should be out in about a year and fix a lot of the concerns with Vista.  The big difference was that between Windows 98 and Windows XP there were only a few years for users to get entrenched in using the OS, and with 95, 98, Me, 2000, and XP coming in such rapid succession, users were used to upgrading to the next best thing.  That total of six years produced 5 consumer operating systems and the corporate based Windows NT4.  In the 6 years between XP and Vista, there was no consumer operating system released.  This allowed users to both get entrenched in Windows XP, and expect a lot from Windows Vista.  Users had been used to Microsofts major upgrades being just that, major upgrades.  They had also expected Vista to be near perfect since decent operating systems had been released in only a couple of years previously.  This is where Microsoft dropped the ball.  They wasted too much time working on Vista and trying to revolutionize the OS with ideas that had to be scrapped such as Windows FS (file system), when they should have spent a lot more time polishing the OS and working with hardware and software vendors on their Vista support.  They had the same 6 years to get hardware and software certified and ready to support Vista, but they work hard enough. 

    So what is the verdict?  Vista isn’t as bad as people think.  Just like people had to learn the changes that XP instituted, there is a learning curve with Vista.  There are just so many new features that Vista has that XP needed (such as built in automatic defragmenting, and the search/run field on the start menu which is tied into the desktop indexing), that the positives outweight the negatives in my opinion.  The next version of Windows should have us all forget about XP.  It may be better to learn Vista and get prepared for the future, than ride the XP ship into oblivion.


Article written by H. Young