Internet Explorer

01 Feb

Thumbs Up – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 15 Nov

Welcome to the Thumbs Up Edition of my review of the week in tech.

Each week I’m picking out the things that I liked the most that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

This week in Thumbs Up is all about handy Windows apps, plus some interesting statistics about social media in the enterprise:

If you haven’t heard of Windows SkyDrive, it’s basically a free online storage solution provided by Microsoft which gives you 25gb to store whatever you want on the internet so that you can access from anyway.  It’s not really pushed at the moment which is why not many people know about it, but that will certainly change once Office 2010 is released, as it is heavily focused on extending the Office experience beyond the desktop allowing people to create and save MS Office documents online using online browsing versions and store them in their SkyDrive using the Office Live plugin.  Personally, I’ve found it really handy and I use it alot.  What this application does (which was NOT created by Microsoft, by the way) is install your SkyDrive as another hard drive on your computer in the Explorer shell, so that you can simply copy and paste to it like any other hard drive – the online difference of course is that you are storing your stuff on Microsoft’s servers.  This is really great for backing up all of your critical information so that if your machine breaks down or is stolen, you can simply replace it and remap your SkyDrive to the machine using this application and voila – you have all your information back.  Highly recommended.

  • Very interesting – Palo Alto Networks: Twitter Usage Soars in the Enterprise http://bit.ly/TBJt1

There is another article of similar theme that I tweeted as well this week, which you can read here – http://bit.ly/1P8llM – which also touches on how social networking usage is exploding in the business and enterprise workplaces.  The reason why?  It is a far more effective way of engaging your audience and getting your message across.  I am willing to bet my left kidney that Google will shell out somewhere in the vacinity of $2 billion to buy out Twitter and position it as it’s newest advertising medium, considering that many businesses are telling the same story as we are – Google Adwords is a WASTE OF MONEY.  Our company stopped using it earlier in the year and we now exclusively advertise our products and services through Twitter (and Facebook to a lesser extent) and the result has been a 700% increase in sales leads.  True story.  We are so happy with the results that we will never use Google Adwords ever again – which by the way supplies Google with 97% of their $16 billion a year in revenue.  You do the math – Google will have to radically adjust their business model or risk becoming irrelevant and having their revenue dry up big time.

  • Good article – Stop Paying for Windows Security; Microsoft’s Security Tools Are Good Enough [Opinion] http://bit.ly/19flzZ

I’ve blogged about Microsoft Security Essentials before – if you haven’t yet heard of this program, it’s Microsoft’s version of a free anti-virus program – and since it’s release I have been surprised about the amount of articles likes these that are getting published which are complementary to Microsoft for this being a great release.  What I would add to the fact that it is a good enough security program is the fact that it DOESN”T ANNOY YOU.  I’ve been running it myself ever since it was released and not once ever has the program prompted me to interact with it in any way.  At first I was a little worried that perhaps the virus definitions weren’t up to date so on the odd occasion I opened it up to check – I was wrong, the program is updating itself almost daily and it isn’t doing anything annoying on the screen to indicate that it’s working in the background.  In my opinion, that is the ultimate security program, as I often forget that it is there.  I have been going through the process of uninstalling AVG and other virus programs on the computers that I come across and have been installing this instead, it truly is a nice, solid release and I’d recommend it to anybody.  If you’d like to try it yourself, you can download it for free at http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials.

Photoshopping has pretty much become a verb now, on par with Googling a search of Tweeting a message and yet Photoshop is an extremely expensive piece of software that only business professionals can afford.  This application – Paint.NET – which has been around for a while, is a FREE program that gives you all the basics of image editing and some advanced options too.  I’ve been recommending this to people who are uploading graphics to their website and want to do some basic image manipulation themselves and this program will do it all for them for the nice price of nothing. I’d recommend this to anybody – it’s a Windows only release, but let’s face it, the majority of Mac users probably have Windows installed as well, or will need to install it soon.  Grab this and enjoy (and check out the article for more tips on how to use the program).

It surprises a fair few people that I talk to when I tell them that I’m a dedicated Internet Explorer user, but truth be told, Firefox is a great browser but still has a ways to go. Do you ever wonder why Google invested a whole pile of money into building their own browser even though they pony up the majority of the funds that Mozilla uses to operate whilst building free products like Firefox? It’s because sometimes in situations like these where the browser is such an important tool, it’s beneficial that it is being designed and built by people who spend all day working in computer security for a wide range of software products, not just one.  This article goes on to detail how Firefox is the most vulnerable browser to hack attempts and general exploits, even above Internet Explorer.  Something else that most people don’t know about Firefox is that it is a memory hog.  I’ve often looked at people’s computers who have Firefox open and 3 or four tabs open and Firefox is using around 180 – 200mb of RAM from the machine just to do that.  It’s pretty ridiculous.  My general advice is to stick with the browser that comes with the computer – IE on Windows or Safari on a Mac, as they are both acutely fine tuned for their respective environments.  What about Google Chrome you might say?  Well, you can always use that browser if you don’t mind the fact that it is butt ugly.

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HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

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21 Dec

Thumbs Up – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 18 Oct

Welcome to the Thumbs Up Edition of my review of the week in tech – each week I’m picking out the things that I liked the most that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

I missed out on doing this weekly review on time as it was all hands on deck in Making Life Ezy putting the final touches on HireEzy 2.1 before release that week.  We’re all done now and everything is back to normal.

This week in Thumbs Up is all about handy apps.  There were a few things written about that blew my mind and I’m sure will blow your mind too, as detailed below:

  • Wow, very cool and handy app – Dropresize Monitors Folders, Automatically Resizes Photos [Downloads] http://tinyurl.com/ylzkz73

I’m a big fan of apps that supply a simple convenience and are simple to use, as detailed in previous blog posts.  This application is a brillant idea for handling photos online – digital cameras are so deep in resolution now that they are regularly creating pictures that are 2 – 4mb is size, which is great and all, but can present a problem when you go to do a mass upload of digital photos to places like Facebook or even into our very own HireEzy app for uploading pictures of Hire Items to your online store.  Once you install this application, you can nominate a folder in your computer (Windows only) as your photo upload folder and then all you do is copy and paste whichever photos you are going to work with into that folder and the application auto resizes all the photos you paste in there and voila! They are resized to a web-quality standard and ready for uploading.  This will speed up the uploading of your photos significantly to online services and you won’t need to worry about photo quality – places like Facebook will only resize your photos to a similar quality on their end anyway so you may as well save yourself the pains of sitting through the unnecessary uploading time.

I’ve blogged and tweeted (I’m a trendy online socialite) previously about Augmented Reality (AR) and whilst admittedly this video would mainly appeal to nerds, I tweeted it just to really reinforce to regular users what can be possible with this new technology.  Don’t know what Augmented Reality is?  The concept is looking into a camera and seeing non-reality elements overlayed ontop of the real things that the camera sees.  Currently, AR apps are doing things like showing the name of a building on your screen when you look at it with your camera, but these first versions are cheating by using GPS positioning to know where you are – this software demo actually processed WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING AT, recognises it and shows you the appropriate content.  Some examples of AR in realtime are using your phone to look at a menu in French and having your app overlay the French words with English words so that you can read it as you are looking at it, in addition to things like looking at the Statue of Liberty with your app showing you the times that day that give you the best shot of it without a shadow cast on it’s face, etc as apposed to how it looks at that moment.  Truely amazing stuff, it blows my mind.  We all need faster internet connections to make this stuff happen but hey, it’ll happen eventually.

  • Wicked! – VistaSwitcher is an Absolutely Awesome Alt-Tab Replacement [Screenshot Tour] http://bit.ly/HpCWY

Don’t be fooled by the name, it works on Windows 7 as well and it is awesome.  Currently, when you ALT-TAB through open windows you only see an icon and the name of the app open, or if you’ve got the Aero Glass feature of Windows turned on you see a tiny little screenshot of the open window that you can tab through – this app gives you a fullscreen menu showing the list of open apps down the right hand side whilst giving you a HUGE screenshot of the open app as it currently appears.  Very handy and highly recommended.

This is really the new way to work now – people are afraid of updating their computers because it’s hard to learn where all the new things are, or programs that work in an older operating system don’t work in a new one, or even worse they are people switching to Mac who have a whole pile of programs that only work in Windows.  Virtualisation allows you to run an operating system within an operating system – for example, I currently use Windows 7 as my main operating system but I also virtualise Windows XP and switch between them (I also have a Linux version called Ubuntu which isn’t relevant here, but this proves the power of what I can do) – this allows me to have both Internet Explorer 7 (in XP) and Internet Explorer 8 (in Win7) for testing web apps across common browsers whilst also testing our own software in how it behaves in each environment.  The most common use of virtualisation nowadays is running Windows from inside of Mac OSX so that people can jump into Windows if they need to whilst using a Mac and not miss out on being able to do whatever they want.  This article details a bunch of FREE virtualisation applications that allow you to do this – I myself use a paid version of VMWare for what I do but these do a comparable job – and I figured that people would particularly find this interesting if upgrading to Windows 7 and want to use Windows XP and are (unlucky) like me who can’t use Microsoft‘s built in Windows XP Mode feature in Windows 7 because they don’t have the right kind of CPU to support it (which sucks).

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28 Sep

Review of Best and Worst Techo Twitter Posts week ending 26 Sep

Welcome to my review of the week in tech – each week I’m picking out the things that I liked the most that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read.  If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

I found myself tweeting a significant amount this week – there was a Game Show in Tokyo where a lot of companies were showing off a lot of cool upcoming gadgets.  In addition to that, it seems that all the tech titans were stabbing each other in the throat to take advantage of a high news week – Google for example were announcing a new feature each day of the week, some of which were pretty bad actually (as I’ve outlined below).  Microsoft on the other hand were the reoccuring theme in the majority of my good posts this week, who would have thought?  Our friends in Redmond are actually bringing out a lot of cool stuff over the next 12 months and there well be plenty more to talk about as they keep making announcements (and other things “leak” to the press, yeah right – rumours are the new advertising).

THE GOOD

I installed this little app on my netbook last night and I was really impressed.  Whilst I mostly focus on suggesting apps that are productivity related, I found that this really did give a nice, glossed and polished touch to Windows XP – considering my main workstation is a Windows 7 machine this was welcomed eye candy for my little guy.  There are different choices for what icons and themes you want to change in XP and you can even change the welcome screen to something more glossy looking to, and I’m glad I put it on.

  • The evidence keeps mounting, you can’t ignore social media – Social Networking Use Triples from Only a Year Ago http://bit.ly/oynUF

We continually communitcate via our company Twitter account @makinglifeezy and this blog the importance of social media as the new most important advertising platform for your business.  This article is just some of the supporting evidence you’ll continue to find on the net regarding the rapidly growing community in the social media space and the amazing opportunities social networking provides for your business as a way to comminicate to your potential and existing customers like never before.

  • WOW! This is a fantastic idea – TechTracker Scans Your Computer for Outdated Software [Downloads] http://bit.ly/6wvcx #Lifehacker

Frankly, I’m surprised that someone hasn’t thought to do this earlier.  One of the biggest problems in computer security is that people just don’t keep their software up-to-date even as vulnerabilities and the like are discovered in these older editions.  It’s understandable that people don’t have the time to be scouring the web looking to see if their software has been updated, and now they don’t have to.  I ran this on my own computer and it found updates for software that I had forgotten I had even installed let alone a few programs that I didn’t think would have been updated.  Really handy tool.

  • Good read, the best about WordPress I’ve seen – The Beginner’s Guide to Tricking Out Your WordPress Blog [WordPress] http://bit.ly/TNH9Z

We here at Making Life Ezy are VERY big fans of WordPress (this blog is a WordPress blog, in fact), so much so that we recommend to all of our HireEzy.com customers to create their own WordPress blogs as a pivital part of good Seach Engine Optimisation techniques and for creating link backs to their own website content.  This article really dumbed down the concept of setting one up, summarised the really awesome themes there are out there and recommended some of the really good plugins.  I found it really useful even though we’ve already set up our blog.  Of course, HireEzy.com customers can get a WordPress blog set up for them by our technicians for free as part of our web optimisation pack we sell with HireEzy.

  • Highly recommended plugin for #IE, I like it! – Printee Enables Selective Printing in Internet Explorer [Downloads] http://bit.ly/s8QNK

This plugin addresses one of the major problems with the web browser, being that people like to print web pages and they find that the text is split up over multiple pages in an unreadable format.  This plugin addresses this problem by smartly reading the text on the page and creating a printer friendly version of it before sending off the print request to your printer.  Voila, your printing out text all nice and formatted for simple reading off of paper.  Best of all, this plugin is free!

  • OH MAN!! This might just be the most amazing handheld gadget I’ve seen – Announcing the Microsoft Newton [Digital Daily] http://bit.ly/6E4kB

Being a tech person I can’t help but add a gadget to this list, but this device is seriously awesome. There is a video you can view which demonstrates the potential of the device – basically the Microsoft Newton/Courier (there seems to be different codenames used for this device at this stage) is a dual screen device held like a notebook and has iPhone like multi-touch capabilities for treating the device like a real notepad, complete with realistic writing recognition (having come a long way since the original Palm Pilot-style handwriting input) and with instant integration with your calendar, mail and tasks to become the ultimate companion.  I see this device and I imagine the possibilities afforded to software developers and their customers – we LOVE the idea of putting customer’s information immediately in their hands when they want it.  I’ll be watching the evolution of this project with great interest.

THE BAD

  • Shocker! Power Twitter can protect you from this though – Video Demonstrates the Danger of Shortened URLs [Security] http://bit.ly/31b3qA

URL shortening services have become a really handy tool but this demonstration video makes a good point – URL shortening services don’t show to you what website you are being redirected to.  The article basically says that you should only open a shortened URL from a person that you trust, as you can potentially be tricked into going to a malicious website (a technique referred to as “phishing”).  Of course, there are ways around this – firstly, if you are a Windows user, Internet Explorer 8 has excellent anti-phishing technology built into it so even if you opened one of these webpages, IE would warn you that you are going to an untrusted website in the first place and help you beat a problem before it happens.  Also, if you are a Twitter user (this is where a lot of people are being targeted), consider using Power Twitter which scans your Twitter posts for shortened URL’s and auto converts them into their long addresses when showing you your posts on screen so you can see where the link will really take you – this is a really good idea and predictibly other Twitter clients (and perhaps Twitter themselves) will follow suit and offer the same solution as this problem continues to happen.

  • ‘Nuff said right there #FAIL – Gmail More and More Like Late ’90s-Era Hotmail Every Day [Digital Daily] http://bit.ly/cnbmG

You know, I’m really not a fan of Gmail AT ALL.  What I really resent is the fact that Google indexes your mail, trawling your messages for the things that you talk about to people to optimise their targeted advertising and this alone disgusts me and leads me to NEVER recommend its use to anyone.  What this article delves into descibing though is the recent failures of Gmail’s servers, leading to downtime and people not being able to get into their mail.  The comparison to Hotmail from the late ’90s stems from the fact that it took Microsoft three years to figure out how to convert Hotmail’s servers to a Windows NT based platform (it was Unix based at time of purchase back in 1997) and there was a lot of downtime from the service as Microsoft tried and failed multiple times to make the conversion.  Of course, they figured it out eventually and Hotmail continues to be the market leader in web based email – plus you keep your privacy in the meantime.

  • ROFL! It’s open warfare now – Microsoft blasts Google over Chrome Frame plug-in http://bit.ly/tBeub

At first, when I read about this being released I reacted enthusiastically to the idea – old versions of Internet Explorer are slow, a security risk (read: bugs/vulnerabilities) and lack in offering the goodies afforded to people with updated browsers such as fast AJAX rendering for truly software-like browsing experiences, for example.  The problem here is that Google are beginning to try and exclude IE users from their web solutions – the upcoming Google Wave will stop you in your tracks and recommend you use anything other than IE, or install this Chrome Frame plugin for IE before continuing and this is appalling.  Furthermore, There is a new tag that web developers can include in their site which makes IE use the Google Chrome Frame plugin to render their website if a user has the plugin installed – what’s next?  Will Google start punishing websites in their search rankings who don’t have this tag in their website to force people to use Google’s plugin for IE?  Google are already well known for doctoring their search results to spruke their other own online offerings over others in the search results.  If Google did this, secretly or intentionally, I would image there would be an anti-trust suit from the US government for sure.  We really need greater competition in the search market.  Personally, I use Microsoft Bing for this exact reason.

You know, Google just want you to throw all information via them to continue to grow their database of information, as I’ve touched on earlier.  What I don’t like about this tool, whilst a good idea, is the fact that a website administrator has no control over what comments are being attached to their website.  I mean, if you have a website trying to project a positive image of your products and people are posting malicious messages about your company and its services, this can totally ruin your online image.  There might be companies that deserve it, but there will be plenty more that don’t.  Most frighteningly, your competitor could comment against your site that you’re crap and they (fakely) experienced bad service/offerings from you.  What then?  You can’t even program anything into your website to block its use against your site so you’re stuck with praying for the mercy of the internet’s community.  Yeah right.  All the tech websites are bagging this idea and it’s likely that no one will use this service and it will die a deservedly painful death over at Google HQ.

  • ROFL! RT @alleyinsider: Google Can’t Handle iPhone Demand For Push Gmail $GOOG $AAPL by @fromedome http://bit.ly/ZnhUY

I’ve already touched on the failures of Google’s GMail service but this article touches on the fact that Google are trying desperately to pitch their mail service to corpratations and launched this tool to trick Outlook and mobile devices that can sync with Microsoft Exchange to make them thing that you are adding an Exchange account for instant email notification (known as “push services”), when really it’s a GMail account.  This would be particularly handy for iPhone users.  What happened after launch was a whole bunch of people tried to use the feature and GMail went tits up and no one could download their mail.  Just another example of why GMail has no place in the workplace and why you shouldn’t use it at all anyways.

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