For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report - A bi-weekly podcast for professional communicators from Neville Hobson, ABC, and Shel Holtz, ABC.
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Hugh Hewitt: Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World
Roger D'Aprix: Communicating for Change: Connecting the Workplace with the Marketplace
Regis McKenna: Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers
Robert Slater: Microsoft Rebooted: How Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer Reinvented Their Company
Beta 2 of FeedDemon 2, the RSS aggregator for Windows, was released this week. If you've been testing FD's development versions since release 1.5, this latest beta is worth getting.
I've just installed it and the first thing I notice is how much faster the application seems to be overall compared to beta 1. The release notes outline a long list of additions, changes and fixes since that first beta.
Sweet.
John Peddie's TechWatch: [...] Over 600 million PCs shipped in the last 3 years, and are still in service. These are the ones that are most logical to upgrade with the new Vista operating system. However, because of the low graphics performance of integrated graphics chips found in most of the PCs, they would not be able to take advantage of the richness and benefits of Vista's new Aero Glass GUI and the graphics-based operating system would be unusable on most of them.
I for one will definitely upgrade to Windows Vista when it appears later this year (I'm in the current beta programme).
Peddie's article, though, raises a key question - what if your computer just doesn't have the muscle for taking advanatge of some of Vista's advanced features, such as the gorgeous new interface known as Aero which offers spectacular visual effects such as glass-like interface elements that you can see through?
Well, short of upgrading or buying a new system, you can get close to the look-and-feel of much of Vista with Windows XP if you skin the operating system using a tool like WindowBlinds version 5 (the latest version).
There's a great community of developers who create imaginative WindowBlinds skins you can freely download from places like Wincustomize and DeviantART. Already there are quite a few that give you some of the elements of Vista's Aero, eg, the glassy look to the black taskbar icons, the red highlight when you hover your mouse over the X you click on to close a programme, real-time shadows, transparency, pleasing-on-the-eye typefaces, etc.
My current WindowBlinds skin config is Vista XP White by Grafdude, one of the best Vista-like skins around.
While you'll never get the exact Vista Aero look-and-feel with anything less than Vista itself, this is not a bad workaround to consider.
(Link to Peddie's article via Tech Memeorandum)
[Technorati: windows vista, vista aero, windowblinds]
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, my long-time offline editor, and RocketPost which I'm also trying out - QumanaXP is very impressive.
The latest beta 3.0.0-b1 reflects some serious development work over previous betas - they do listen to the testers - and shows a strong commitment by Qumana to produce a reliable tool for blogging that will stand up well against the competition.
One thing I'm very pleased (and relieved) to see is that a major issue with posting to TypePad blogs has been resolved with this latest beta. Until now, if you posted to your TypePad blog, any category you'd set in your post would not carry through to final publish. This for me was a complete show-stopper for QumanaXP. From my email conversations with the developers, it appeared that this was a TypePad issue, not a QumanaXP one. Either was, they've fixed it.
I also tried QumanaXP with my WordPress blog - works perfectly including with categories.
Today QumanaXP goes into public beta, meaning anyone can download the beta and take it for a spin. It will be formally launched at the Northern Voice 2006 community-based blogging and personal publishing conference taking place today and tomorrow in Vancouver, Canada.
But don't wait - download the beta now! Try it for yourself. You might also want to take a look at the contest Qumana has launched as part of their incentivizing bloggers to use their tool ;)
I'll be posting more detailed commentary about QumanaXP soon.
Powered by Qumana
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, some essential plugins (aka extensions) will stop working.
Every couple of days, Firefox pops up a dialog (the image you see here) reminding me that the new version is available. Every time it does, I click on the 'later' button as the dialog tells me some plugins won't work. Clicking on 'show list' displays them - googlebar 0.9.15.07, SpellBound 0.7.3 and Mozilla Spellcheck Libraries 1.0.1.0 (the latter two in particular being essential to have, and have working).
There may be others but these are the ones on my system that Firefox says won't work if I upgrade.
This situation is always a pain as it occurs with each Firefox update. If a plugin doesn't work, this is Firefox's advice in known issues:
If you find that your favorite Extension or Theme has not been updated to be compatible with this release of Firefox, write the author and encourage them to update it.
Right. So in the meantime, I'd have to do without their functionality.
This post isn't really the rant it might seem to be. It's just that I wish this dance between Mozilla and the developers of plugins would get more in sync.
So I'll wait until the popup doesn't tell me about things that won't work.
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 database server will enable us to further scale our operations and deliver stronger, more reliable performance.
Those times are equivalent to 8:00am to 1:00pm Central European Time (GMT +1) tomorrow Sunday. And here's the most important news for customers:
Weblogs will be accessible to your readers during this time, however you will not be able to publish posts, leave comments or receive TrackBacks.
In other words, people can visit your blog but you'll not be able to do any publishing, editing, comment/trackback approvals or otherwise interact with your blog, only visit it.
There's more.
Further service maintenance will take place this coming Tuesday. From a post in the Everything TypePad news blog:
[...] As of 9:00 am PST on Tuesday, February 7th, We will no longer be accepting weblog traffic on IP addresses 66.151.149.10 (old IP) or 216.129.107.21 (temporary IP used during data center move)
The vast majority of our customers and readers of their blogs will not be impacted by this change.
There are a small number of customers (less than 100, based on our analysis) who are currently using the Domain Mapping feature on TypePad and have hardcoded their domain to either of these IP. As of 9:00 am on Tuesday, their weblogs will be inaccessible at their mapped domain name. Viewers of these domain mapped weblogs will be presented with information explaining this service change and steps necessary to remap their domains.
In preparation for this event, we have emailed these customers on nearly a weekly basis, informing them about this change, and encouraging them to modify their settings at their domain registrar.
With such things going on, now is a good time to back up your blog. Do it today if you can, before the maintenance starts. Here's how:
Backup your blog
A couple of things to note.
I've just backed up this blog; the default filename the backup has is post.htm. If you get a similar name, you'll need to do at least one thing - change the file extension to .txt as it's not an HTML file, just plain text. Then you'll likely want to give the file a more meaningful name.
Related Nevon posts:
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 a Business Week article yesterday discussing SAP's move, market researcher IDC estimates that, while on-demand sales made up only about 6 percent of the roughly $9 billion CRM market last year, that percentage could rise to as much as 25 percent in five years. A commentary by Line56 also yesterday says SAP's announcement illustrates a convergence of interests and models as the 1990s best-of-breed concept fades further into the distance.
DestinationCRM.com's report on the CRM market leaders in 2005 says a recent AMR Research report indicated that 47 percent of large enterprises, or companies with more than $1 billion in revenue, were going to look at the hosted model as part of their "going forward CRM strategy." If there is a single one-to-watch on-demand provider, destinationCRM says, it's Salesforce.com.
One to watch right now clearly is SAP. The obvious new-customer target for SAP would be Saleforce.com (whose CRM SaaS pricing starts at $65/user a month). That's not quite how Business Week sees it, though:
[...] While SAP's battle with Salesforce.com is lively, its most ferocious competition is with Oracle, the No. 2 corporate applications company. With the completion of its $5.58 billion takeover of Siebel Systems on Feb. 1, Oracle overtook SAP to become the leading traditional CRM software supplier.
Oracle already has both traditional and on-demand CRM products, as does Siebel. Now, with the combination, it expects to make headway against SAP in both spheres. That's partly because the uncertainty about Siebel's future has been resolved and customers are feeling more comfortable about buying its software again. Juergen Rottler, executive vice-president of Oracle On Demand, says Oracle will be much more aggressive about pushing on-demand services than SAP. "We believe that on-demand is the future of our business," he says.
Ones to watch.
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. Not just for podcasts, either - it’s good enough to be one’s primary audio editor. And a new version was announced last month with some fixes and new features.
The main negative I had with Audacity, though, was that I found the learning curve quite steep on understanding precisely how to use many of the program’s features. There are some good online tutorials and documentation, though. It is free after all.
This lack of easy-to-understand help was one of the main reasons why I decided to purchase Adobe Audition 1.5 for Windows earlier last month. Having used the free 30-day trial, I knew this was the one for me. The help is excellent, making it relatively easy to understand some of the things you can do with audio that can be difficult to grasp if audio editing isn’t something you routinely do as part of your job or profession. Audition also lets you do things with audio files that either you can’t in Audacity or I never was able to figure out how.
For instance, with Audition you can easily set the exact bit rate and sampling rate of an MP3 file when you come to export your audio to that format. So let’s say I’ve recorded audio as a high-quality stereo WAV file, or mixed a number of individual audio files which have different bit and sampling rates (a common activity with my podcast), I can set those rates precisely to, say, 64Kbps and 44.1Khz respectively and export the content to a mono MP3 - typically what you’d want for a vocal podcast. This gives you a good balance between good-quality audio reproduction and file compression.
Today I saw that a new version, Adobe Audition 2.0, is now available. Version 2 has some very interesting new features including a built-in compressor.
If ease of use, powerful features and lots of help are what you need, then this could be worth the rather hefty price tag - over €400 from Adobe’s European online store. Quite a price jump from 1.5 which I recall was less than €300 (I didn’t pay anywhere near that, though, for 1.5 as I bought my copy via the Amazon.co.uk Marketplace). At about €150, the upgrade price to 2.0 from 1.5 is less eye-watering.
Adobe also offers this new version on a free 30-day trial. You get the fully-functional package to try for this time. Once your time’s up, it just won’t run any more.
Trying it out is definitely worth doing if you want to see for yourself whether Audition is right for you.
You can learn more about audio recording software for podcasting in Todd Cochrane’s excellent book, Podcasting: The Do It Yourself Guide (I reviewed the book last July).
[Edit] Speaking of Todd, he upgraded to Audition 2.0 and doesn't think much of it at all. My cue to stick with 1.5, I think.
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 of the constituent parts of Windows Live (I'm on the beta sign-up waiting lists) other than pop in now and again to the website portal and play a bit with the Ajax-based customization features where you can add and subtract content that will appear in your personalized page.
Here's a screenshot so you can get an idea:
As I mentioned in conversation at the event, I've not been that impressed with it. Ok, it is a beta, but it's not been anything that has really held my attention or interest other than to note that it's in development and will likely be a big consumer offering once it moves into the more polished and getting-to-final development stages. Still pay attention to what's happening with it, in other words.
What I learned last Thursday is that this view is pretty narrow and barely scratches the surface of what Windows Live is actually all about.
So what is Windows Live? Briefly, it comprises these layered services:
You can read the Microsoft press release from last November for the formal description of Windows Live, and there's a pretty good review by Paul Thurrott that goes into some detail about it all and links to an interesting analysis of the evolution of MSN into Windows Live.
So last Thursday's event in London was worthwhile in providing everyone there (some 30 people plus MSN and the PR agency) with a better focus on the overall offering and where it's at in its development cycle.
That's not the half of it, though.
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 across their PC, devices and the web. While it has clear benefits from an individual consumer's point of view, I'm especially interested in learning more about those benefits from the business point of view.
More later. Meanwhile, if you want to learn a little about Windows Live, here are some places where you can:
[Technorati: windows live]
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 details.
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 6 for Windows' to differentiate it from the DOS version. I beta-tested Word for Windows 95 and have moved with the various versions in the ensuing years to today's 2003 version as part of the latest Microsoft Office suite. Beta tested that, too, prior to release. (Good history of Word on Wikipedia, if that interests you.)
Before Word, I was a devoted user of Ami Pro, originally published by Samna and then by Lotus when they acquired Samna (and Lotus was subsequently acquired by IBM). Terrific application. But it didn't move with the times among other things. Before that, it was WordPerfect, specifically version 5.1 for DOS which was arguably the dominant word processor (that description sounds quaint today, doesn't it?) in the late 80s and early 90s. At least, that's what every company I knew was using.
Prior to WordPerfect, I was a WordStar diehard from waaaay back in the days of CP/M. That's another story, though. There's a great history of WordStar on Wikipedia.
Tucked away in my attic are boxes of museum-grade software from the early and pioneerings days of the IBM PC (remember the phrase 'IBM-compatible computer'?), which takes in just about all the 1980s especially the early part of that decade.
Continue reading "WordPerfect, Office 12 and a trip down software memory lane" »
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 your own computer.
I'm now looking closely at Anconia RocketPost, a suggestion from Netanel Jacobsson.
On just a first quick look after install, I am impressed with this tool. It's the closest I've seen yet to a solution to what I believe is a yawning gap in the market for a robust and reliable blog editing application for Windows that's easy to use yet with powerful features. A sort of Microsoft Word for blogs. Could this be the one?
RocketPost offers a 30-day free trial which I'm on. Then it's $100 for the license for the professional version (there are three versions including a free one).
I'm writing this post with this app. Very easy and intuitive to use.More later once I've played a bit with RocketPost.
[Edit] Hmm. It didn't publish without my going into TypePad directly and publishing it. The post was in the list of posts and shown as published, but it hadn't been. I'll hold judgment on the reason as I suspect it's more to do with Typepad - the server response back to RocketPost from posting took a very long time (4+ minutes) and logging in to my account simply took ages.
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 content on my local PC - peace-of-mind insurance if you can't connect to your blog host for some reason (or, nightmare scenario, a problem on the remote server means you lose your stuff and you didn't do a backup yourself).
But offline editors aren't perfect. In my experience during the past 18 months or so, one of the problems with those for Windows PCs is that they tend to be somewhat flaky. Crashes, peculiar behaviours, even puzzling interface glitches at times.
I use ecto for Windows as well as BlogJet, both of which you pay for (they do have free trial periods) and both of which are not bad in their different ways. Yet if you take a look at the numerous technical and usability issues continually raised in the support forums for both products, it's hardly surprising if you have less than full confidence in either of them.
Still, my editor-of-choice remains ecto for Windows, currently on version 1.8.8 and with a new version 2 in the works for release soon. BlogJet released a new version last month, currently 1.6.1.55. (I reviewed both of these tools in September 2004. A lot has changed with both apps since then, and I plan a new review sometime after the new version of ecto for Windows is released.)
One other editor for Windows which I've never really used to any extent is the free Qumana, currently on version 2.0.2.96. I tried it mid last year at Tris Hussey's urging but fell back to ecto, which I'm most comfortable with (ie, I know its quirks)
Now, though, there's a new cross-platform (Mac/PC) version of Qumana in preparation, planned for launch early next month. I'm trying out the by-invitation beta of it, the latest build of which I've just installed. My first acid test - writing this post with that beta.
What do I think? Well, I'll likely be posting the odd commentary as I play with it in the coming weeks, mostly focusing on usability.
On first use, it looks promising.
Powered by Qumana
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 for download from Skype's site at 13:00 Eastern time (18:00 GMT), according to an overnight email from Skype's PR agency SparkPR.
I tried an early 2.0 beta last month and didn't like it at all. But I've been running the latest beta build for the past few days and it is just great, no negative issues with it.
So I for one will be grabbing the gold when it's available later today.
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 to tell what to do with so much conflicting and downright wrong advice being bandied about.
Microsoft's advice yesterday is to wait until an official patch comes out on 10 January:
[...] Although the issue is serious and malicious attacks are being attempted, we have found that the scope of the attacks is not widespread. AV companies have also indicated that attacks are being effectively mitigated through up-to-date signatures.
On the other hand, some experts advise using an unofficial patch to combat this latest Windows vulnerability rather than wait a week for Microsoft's fix.
If you decide not to use the unofficial patch and instead wait for Microsoft, at least make make sure all your antivirus and antispyware signatures are up to date. And take extra care with your IM sessions.
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 it, especially Norton Internet Security 2006 (NIS) for Windows.
I've been a user of Symantec's Norton product line for at least six years (and from long before that, when Peter Norton first rolled out Norton Utilities for DOS in the early 80s). So Norton is a brand I like, respect and am willing to lay out hard cash for.
Yet NIS drives me nuts.
Continue reading "The rigmarole of Norton Internet Security" »
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 Norton Internet Security (cathartic rantlet on my MT blog).
So rather than just twiddle my thumbs while I wait, let's have a quick look around the PR blogosphere to see what's going on at the moment:
Looks like a real hornet's nest has been stirred over PR measurement. This stems from a post by Katie Paine where she expounds on her new PR Value Ratio measurement concept. My podcasting co-host Shel Holtz supports Katie's theme (we discussed it in show #98 of our bi-weekly podcast), and takes John Wagner to task on his dissenting views about PR measurement. John weighs in with a robust defence.
This is a terrific topic for some trenchant debate. No doubt we'll see the conversation continuing (maybe I'll contribute a eurocent or two's worth of opinion once I've absorbed the full conversation flow: sounds like a promising thought for post New Year's Eve partying tomorrow, depending on the Alka-Seltzer XS quotient).
Next, Alaska Airlines and their growing PR crisis if commentaries in the blogosphere are any indicator. This is about the blogger who was on the flight a few days ago which suffered cabin decompression. (Shel and I discussed this, too, in show #98.) Very interesting comments in one of Jeremy Hermanns' (the blogger concerned) posts - 125 at the last count.
How will this play out for Alaska Airlines who clearly have not grabbed any communication initiative here? At the very least, lots of bloggers won't be flying with that airline in future. Watch this space.
Ah, chkdsk has now finished its 45-minute diagnostic. Jeez! At least it gives the hard drive a clean bill of health. And in case you're wondering how I can be writing this post when the desktop PC's undergoing a disk check, I'm using my laptop ;)
So, back to housekeeping and nailing down Norton.
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 a few things.
So with clients on holiday and little work pressure for another week or so, I'm focused on spending some quality time on re-organizing my computing environment as well as playing around with some cool toys I picked up while in the UK.
First up, putting in place a better file backup system than I currently have. I bought a new external hard drive, a Western Digital Essential External USB2 Hard Drive, 160 gigs capacity (but will that really be enough?). My first purchase of a WD hard drive: I've always bought Maxtor until now. Mind you, I'm still keeping it in the family.
Already installed - literally, just plug it in - and the first full system backup done with Norton Ghost.
Ghost isn't the software I'll use for regular file backups, though. A great review in PC World magazine took me to SimpleTech and their StorageSync product which fits the bill nicely for easily backing up documents, images, podcasts, video, etc. I'll also be able to access the WD drive from other PCs on my network.
Which takes me to my next housekeeping task - sorting out my home network.
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 all yesterday, you won't have noticed the lack of latest content nor that the blog was offline for much of the day as a consequence of the complete outage of TypePad service for about 18 hours. As I have a WordPress blog in addition to this one on TypePad, I was able to post during Friday, including further commentary about this matter here. (Take a look at the comments in both of those posts.)
From a quick scan around this morning on what bloggers are saying and what some mainstream media are saying about yesterday's service outage, it's pretty clear that Six Apart have quite a job on their hands now to rebuild some credibility as to the ongoing reliability - perhaps even its viability - of the TypePad service.
In the meantime, I'm sure one question on every TypePad customer's mind will be - did I lose any of my stuff during this loss of service?
According to Six Apart, no. I'd agree with that view purely from what I'm seeing on this blog. Everything is there and now up to date (but see below). If you have a blog with lots of photos - a photo album, for instance, or a moblog like mine - you'll likely encounter lots of blanks where you expect to see your photos.
Don't panic, though - all the data is still there, according to Six Apart. While they will be working during the weekend to get everyone's blogs up-to-date, you can do this yourself by republishing your entire blog again, as follows:
Republish your blog
I did precisely that for this blog and for my moblog (although the moblog didn't update all the pics - blank ones sport the legend "Image being restored this weekend"- so that will wait for Six Apart to complete their updating).
Next, do your own backup of the content of your blog. Here's how:
Backup your blog
What you'll have a is a plain-text file saved to your computer that contains all the text content of your blog, including all comments and trackbacks. What the file doesn't have is any image from your blog. But you have the originals on your PC, right?
Now, back to normal blogging!
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 posted on Monday, that thread had two pages of comments. It's up to five pages now where users are bitterly complaining about so many issues with this successor app to the really great Konfabulator product.
What's interesting is how many of the comments include highly negative opinions about Yahoo! and the perceived damaging affect its purchase of Pixoria, the original developer of Konfabulator, is having on application development. Undoubtedly there are some trolls in there commenting but, nevertheless, here you have lots of Konfabulator users - many of them passionate about that product - who are connecting the problems with this new version with Yahoo's take-over of the original developer.
I doubt there's any connection at all. But it's perception we're talking about here. This perception/connection situation prompted an embattled Ed Voas, the member of the original Konfabulator team in charge of the Windows version, to make this exasperated comment in response to one poster -
Why is this all about Yahoo!? Yahoo's purchase of K is not what caused your upgrade issues. We have always moved older Widgets to an Older Widgets folder when we are moving in the newer ones. That said, it was NOT supposed to move ALL of your Widgets out. I definitely apologize that this is happening, because it's just plain wrong. I was told that Update was working properly. I guess it was not, and it's not something I'm happy about either.
It looks like there are some major disconnects somewhere within Yahoo! application development. It also looks as though they are finalizing a quick fix: from a reply by Ed to another poster -
[...] In any case, I believe I have this fixed now and the fix will be in 3.0.1.
I wonder how many people will treat even the fresh installer with some caution in light of what's happened this week. I for one will get it when it's available but, before installing it, I'll be seeing what's being said in the forum. Meanwhile, I'm comfortably staying with Konfabulator 2.1.1 which works just great.
If I were Yahoo!, I'd be getting that 3.0.1 fix out there asap. There doesn't appear to be any meaningful commentary about this in any blogs - it's all just within the support forum. I'd be surprised if that remains the case if the issues aren't resolved quickly. I'd also be posting some kind of explanation on the website of what happened, with an apology. I'd say the apology will go a very long way indeed in smoothing some very ruffled feathers, and helping keep the situation to no more than that: ruffled feathers but still broadly happy customers.
If I were Yahoo!, I'd be taking a look at the The Social Customer Manifesto if I hadn't already done that.
As I write this post, that fix version 3.0.1 is not yet available for download.
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 average person in helping him or her understand what this RSS thing is. Even if you read a definition such as the Wikipedia entry, most people would still be completely non-plussed.
As we discussed in our conversation, we should be telling the RSS story that focuses on 'subscribing' not on weird acronyms, and talking about this technology in terms that benefit the user, in ways that people can understand.
Now we could have one step towards a standard visual clue as to what RSS means with news yesterday that Internet Explorer 7, due next year, will include the same RSS icon as Firefox uses. This is it:
From a post in the Microsoft Team RSS Blog yesterday:
[...] We’ll be using the icon in the IE7 command bar whenever a page has a feed associated with it, and we’ll also use it in other places in the browser whenever we need a visual to represent RSS and feeds. Look for more details on the look and feel of IE7 when we post the public pre-release build next year.
Collaboration and agreement between Microsoft and Mozilla. A small but significant step.
Now it needs everyone out there who has a website or blog and who offers an RSS feed to also adopt this new icon and thus help make it become a standard. I'll do my bit as soon as I see it there on Microsoft's Presspass RSS subscriptions page. Why wait? It's there now.
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 previous version 4.6 are even better integration with the OS than before plus some really nice enhancements to how you customize it. Version 5 is ready to run with Windows Vista when that appears later next year (and it should work with the current beta).
WindowBlinds 5 now offers some of the cool new appearance features that will be in the next version of Windows, things like per-pixel alpha blended support for title bars, borders and controls. This means you can have glassy titlebars and borders, smooth edges, and just spectacular-looking desktops. With WB5 installed, you can then download some very imaginative desktop themes from Wincustomize.com, which you can customize too.
See the full tech-inclined explanation here for details of what this program can do for you.
Firefox 1.5 for Windows. While the latest upgrade to the web browser offers some nice new features - great one: drag-and-drop re-ordering of open tabs - and behind-the-scenes fixes, installing it a few weeks ago has resulted in some of my indispensable Firefox extensions no longer working.
Number one: Spellbound 0.7.3, the spell checker that I find essential for spell-checking what I write in blog post comments and any other web form. The extension itself is ok but it won't run because none of the Mozilla 0.9.1.0 dictionary libraries it requires in order to work are compatible with Firefox 1.5, which disabled my already-installed libraries. Manually re-installing Spellbound and then installing those libs again makes no difference - it still won't work.
But, I have discovered a really cool extension that solves my constant issue when doing the FIR podcast of quickly trying to find a tab I want from 20 or so open tabs.
TabSidebar 1.0b4 is really neat as it displays thumbnails of all your open tabs in a vertical sidebar. No more peering at multiple tab titles to figure out which is the one you want to quickly jump to.
Yahoo! Widget Engine 3.0. Announced yesterday, this is the latest incarnation of the outstanding Konfabulator cross-platform widget app about which I've written before. Developer Pixoria was acquired by Yahoo in July who has re-packaged Konfabulator as Yahoo! Widgets and made it available for free (previously you paid about $20).
So I was pretty excited to learn about version 3.0. I still am but I am not going to install it yet. First hurdle - actually getting the right Windows installer was not an easy task. I managed to do that eventually but reading the many posts of pain and anguish in the forum leads me to conclude - stick with Konfabulator 2.1.1 and wait for the bugfix Yahoo! Widget Engine 3.01 (or even 3.1). Pity.
"Yahoo! Widget Engine" doesn't really trip off the tongue as beautifully as "Konfabulator" does, don't you think?
Perhaps I should have titled this post "Too many software misses."
Do you have any? Hits, preferably?
Yesterday was a rare day, a day during which I enjoyed playing around with a gadget purely for the sake of it. Getting to know it a bit, trying things out on it to see how it works. Generally, just having a great deal of fun with it.
The gadget is the Nokia N70 smartphone you see pictured here which I got last weekend as part of the package when I upgraded my mobile phone contract with Vodafone to take advantage of the new services now available with UMTS networks like Vodafone's, part of next-generation 3G mobile communications technology.
What this means is that I can do things with this phone that I'd have needed a computer to do until now. So the phone's a computer, not just a phone. More on that in a minute.
For a product review of the N70, you'd do no better than reading this excellent review by Jørgen Sundgot writing in InfoSync World in October. Check out the great photos with that review, too.
If you do want to see the formal tech specs, this Nokia document has them.
So I'm not going to talk (much) about the technical aspects of this smartphone - Jørgen and Nokia between them do that pretty well - but rather focus on what you can do with a phone like this that goes far beyond making and receiving calls.
Let's take a look at how the N70 matches up with the mobile device wishlist I posted last February. Here's what I said -
[...] What I'd like is a mobile device that, at minimum, has all these attributes:
And, all in a package no bigger than an iPod Mini.
I installed the new Skype 2.0 beta for Windows the other day - and uninstalled it yesterday.
Lots to like about it, especially the video calling capability which worked faultlessly when I tried it with a Philips Toucam webcam. Overall, this new Skype version has a rather bright program interface for my taste plus pathetic new ringtones (Skype, please fix those in the release version!), but it's a highly-impressive new offering.
The trouble is, Skype voicemail doesn't work properly for me with this version. If someone calls me and leaves a voicemail, they'll get my greeting but no beep to indicate when they need to start speaking. Not only that, I don't get any notification of any pending voicemails, as I learned when I uninstalled this version and installed again the latest release version 1.4.0.84 - six voicemails waiting since mid last week which I didn't know were there.
It is beta, don't forget, and Skype does offer it with a clear caveat:
Try it out but remember, it’s just a beta. (Some of you might prefer to wait for the shiny final version.)
I'm all for being at the bleeding edge with new software, but I just can't afford to have this voicemail situation. So I'll pass on the beta and wait for the shiny final version.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg has a review of his overall good experience with Skype 2.0 beta (I guess he doesn't have the Skype voicemail service). His review also includes highly favourable comments on the Linksys CIT200 Skype phone; also see this comprehensive review by Tom Keating. I definitely want one of these!
Audacity, the open-source cross-platform sound editor beloved of podcasters, has released an upgrade to its current version and a beta of a new version:
Audacity 1.2.4 is a new stable version of Audacity, the free audio editor. It includes a couple of bug fixes and minor improvements and is recommended for all users. Audacity 1.3.0 is a beta release that contains hundreds of new features, but this version is unfinished and unstable, and is recommended primarily for advanced users. You can install both Audacity 1.2 and 1.3 simultaneously.
For details of the changes see the 1.2.4 release notes. Beta 1.3 is worth a look (see features list) if you want to be at the bleeding edge.
I've used Audacity during the past year for sound recording. Recently, I purchased Adobe Audition 1.5 for Windows which offers significant advanced audio recording and management capabilities as well as comprehensive help and support which you don't get with Audacity.
Nevertheless, if you're thinking about podcasting, Audacity is a great tool to start out with - especially if you're running Mac OS X or Linux - and it's completely free.
CNET News: A major U.K. retail store and three of the largest PC vendors worldwide still have no plans to sell the version of Microsoft Windows that does not contain its media player, five months after the version was released. Microsoft started offering Windows XP N, a version of Windows without a bundled media player, in June of this year to comply with last year's antitrust ruling by the European Commission.
Slashdot reports that Windows XP N is a sales flop. Hardly surprising, and surely indicates that most people who use Windows really couldn't care less about what the politicians and vocal critics in the mainstream media say and do regarding a PC operating system.
Dell is one of the PC vendors mentioned in CNET's story. When I bought a new Dell computer in August, it came with Dell's OEM version of Windows XP Pro which included Windows Media Player.
I don't actually use Media Player, preferring Winamp and iTunes for playing and managing music. If Windows XP N minus Media Player had a cost advantage, then it might be different. But it doesn't:
[...] Earlier this year, PC World--the U.K.'s largest computer store chain--said that it would not stock XP N since the full version of Windows XP was the same price, thereby offering a better value to its customers. A PC World representative said Thursday that this situation hasn't changed and there had been "no demand" for XP N, as far as she was aware.
So do I care about this news and the EC ruling? Not at all. Which, I suspect, reflects what many other Windows users think.
Mainstream music publisher Sony BMG is getting hammered left, right and center as fall-out continues over Sony's rootkit debacle.
The rootkit in question was a spyware-like application encoded onto certain copy-protected music CDs that Sony sold in the US and which did some "ET phone home" type of activities from your computer without you knowing if you played one of those CDs on your PC. It also introduced significant security risks on that PC.
There is actually quite a bit more to it than that - Mark Russinovich has a detailed explanation of what a rootkit is and what this particular one was all about.
In the end, Sony BMG capitulated in the face of a rising groundswell of vocal and highly-critical comment on their behaviour - including from many bloggers - and they issued a fix for the rootkit and recalled the affected CDs.
But it's getting worse for Sony BMG.
Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a class action lawsuit against the music publisher, "demanding that the company repair the damage done by the First4Internet XCP and SunnComm MediaMax software it included on over 24 million music CDs." There's even been a call for a boycott of Sony products.
Sony has clearly mis-handled this crisis. They originally denied that the rootkit posed any kind of threat, even arrogantly claiming in a radio interview, "Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
So much for this company caring about its customers and their concerns.
Whatever backpedalling Sony BMG is now doing, it is customers' perceptions of the company that is the damaging issue. This could turn out to be a bit like the Dell Hell story in the sense that whenever you see a Sony-branded product, you might think twice about buying it, asking yourself, "Do I now trust any product from this company?"
There are bigger issues at stake here, too, regarding digital rights management in the music industry as a whole, as this BBC feature explains.
In any event, the communicators at Sony BMG have quite a job on their hands.
As a long-time user of the Skype internet phone service, I read with more than passing interest about SkypeKiller, an application that's designed to remove the Skype software from your computer.
Not just uninstall it as you would on a Windows PC with the Add/remove programs applet. No, this eradicates Skype completely, either from a single PC or from a network of PCs.
Why would you want to do that? you may ask. Well, according to the Skypekiller website, Skype presents major risks to organizations through "uncontrollable bandwidth usage, uncertainty as to confidentiality, potential security flaws, productivity issues, etc." Not sure what "etc" means as they don't explain that one.
How misleading! If you're in a business and have been thinking about a VoIP service like Skype, don't get an attack of FUD through reading about this offering.
Instead, read the detailed information about Skype, security and other issues about Skype in the workplace in the Skype security resource center. Also, Michael Gough's Five Reasons NOT to Block Skype on SkypeJournal, in which he says:
[...] Each company is different and should set a policy, evaluate the advantages, support, risks and costs to decide how, if at all, to apply a communication tool like Skype. [...] If you properly secure your clients and infrastructure with "defense in depth," the risk of using Skype is far less than using Microsoft Windows or laptops without encryption.
Setting a policy on usage - as with new-media communication tools like blogs, that makes sense in any organization.
And if you have an interest in VoIP security, there's a great podcast you can subscribe to - Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast from Dan York (a regular content contributor to FIR: The Hobson & Holtz Report podcast that I co-host). Blue Box is worth listenting to.
For the past couple of days, I've been playing with Flock, the new web browser. Not so much for its capabilities as a browser - and it is pretty good at that - but more its capability as a blog editing tool.
Even though it is still in development (nice warning when you download the installer: "If you have made it this far, chances are that you are aware of the risks associated with software that is nestled somewhere between the alpha and beta states"), it is very polished overall. As a browser, it certainly stands up against Firefox and Opera, not to mention Internet Explorer.
But I'm most impressed with using it to create and publish blog posts. Very easy indeed - easy to set up with your blog account and very easy to use with its clear WYSIWIG editor.
So far, I've successfully created and published posts to three different blogs - NevOn 2.0, my soon-to-be new blog home (running on WordPress 1.5.2), NevOn 2.0 Experimental (Movable Type 3.2) and this blog on TypePad. I'm writing this post with Flock.
It's not perfect at the moment by any means (eg, odd line breaks when posting to the WordPress blog) and I wouldn't use it as a replacement for ecto for Windows, my current and preferred offline editing tool.
But it's certainly worth serious consideration as a blog editing tool.
I've not yet discovered half of its potential (dragging and dropping web content, connecting with Flickr, etc) but I will get to that soon enough.
technorati tags: flock
[EDIT] Editing this from within TypePad. Main thing Flock missed was including the categories - I can select them from the list in Flock but they weren't included when Flock published the post. I'm sure the developers will fix that one. Also some odd line spacing between paragraphs. Again, fixable I'm sure.
I haven't yet absorbed all the information about Microsoft's introduction of Windows Live and Microsoft Office Live yesterday, although I have read the press release plus scanned a few tech-focused articles this morning via Memeorandum.
A good (ie, easiest for me to understand) news report I read was this one from Dan Farber at ZDNet:
[...] Bill Gates said that every five years Microsoft looks at its strategy and makes big bets – 1990 was Windows, the Web in 1995 and Web Services .Net in 2000. The next big bet, Gates said, is delivering a new type of software experience, called "live software." It's about connecting users at the center, with relationships with people, data people care about, applications and all devices coming together to do things for you, Gates said. It's a way to think through the user experience, a fusion of software and services, with capabilities across the Internet, enabled by the broadband, wireless, low cost storage, a multitude of devices, the march of Moore's Law. Sounds like a bit of Web 2.0 mixed with Microsoft's live naming theme – Live Meeting, XBox Live. Services = Software, in a broad way, from hosted services like email and CRM to MSN and mapping mash-ups.
Web 2.0 - just what I had been thinking, especially in looking at the photo above. Yes, Web 2.0. That could make sense.
The photo, incidentally, is one of a series taken by Niall Kennedy who has a great Flickr set of yesterday's Microsoft event.
In the last couple of editions of FIR: The Hobson & Holtz Report podcast, we've been going on about Waxmail, a very cool new tool for creating and sending voice email messages.
There are other
