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 I found a couple of fantastic little handy apps and some surprising news about the uptake of Windows 7.  Check it out below:

• Why couldn’t someone release this years ago – XP Quick Fix Plus Repairs Common Windows XP Errors http://bit.ly/38Hhtd

Well… I don’t think I need to remind anyone that XP has had its fair share of problems.  This program launches into an interface which details 40 of the biggest problems in XP whilst providing an interface to click a button to plug that problem.  Unbelievably amazing app.  I would recommend you grab this app and run it on your XP installation and I would also recommend that Microsoft hunt down the developer of this software, write them a blank check to buy the whole company and submit this software over Windows Update.

• This is pretty handy – Cache My Work Restores Your Workspace After a Restart [Downloads] http://bit.ly/2Ffdyv

I have this happen to me all the time – I get into work in the morning and Windows rebooted through the night to install automatic updates, therefore everything that was open on my desktop had been automatically closed.  Trust me, this freaks me out everytime it happens as I usually have about 10 – 15 scripts open on my desktop at any one time that I am working on and it’s annoying to have to retrace my steps and figure out what I was working on at the end of the day yesterday instead of just having it all there still open like it is supposed to be.  This application attempts to address this issue by keeping a log of everything that is open on the desktop – if you have to suddenly reboot, this program will reopen all of your applications for you when Windows starts up and in some cases can even reopen the files you were working with inside your applications.  It’s not perfect, but it’s heaps better than nothing.  I installed this and I love it.

• This is a great tip – Adding Flip 3D to Windows 7′s Taskbar http://tinyurl.com/ybb85pn #Channel10

So, if you follow the instuctions here you can essentially make a little tool that replicates the Windows Key + TAB functionality, but I tell you what – despite the Windows Key being on 104 keyboards ever since the release of Windows 95, there are an alarmingly frustrating amount of people out there that have absolutely no idea what the Windows Key is.  So, when a core piece of functionality for cycling through windows open on your desktop involves telling people to “use the Windows key”, it is extremely easier to just set this icon up on their task bar.  Trust me, it is.  And you know what?  I actually like it – once launched, you can just hit the TAB key to cycle between windows, instead of having to keep holding the Windows key whilst tabbing to keep the Flip 3D feature open.  Check out the article this is worth doing for your Windows 7 machine.

• Interesting statistics – Windows 7 Market Share Climbing Fast http://tinyurl.com/ydlm8mt #Channel10

So much for Apple‘s new ads saying that everyone was excited around the Windows 7 launch because it was time to upgrade to a Mac.  All it took was for Windows 7 to be on the market for two weeks, and already the global marketshare for Windows 7 machines across the world is bigger than Mac OSX Snow Leopard, which has been on the market for three months.  As of the time of writing, 3.27% of all computers in the WORLD have Windows 7 on it.  Pretty amazing statistic.  Another under the radar piece of info in this article is the fact that the global marketshare for Windows overall was almost 93%, which is a lot better than it used to be earlier in the year when I heard that it had dropped just under 90%.  It seems that there aren’t as many Macs in the world as everyone thought there was – Apple still have their work cut out for them, no wonder they are spending half a billion dollars are year on advertising.

• Geek alert! – Coke Zero Has Zero Calories And Sugar, But Is High In Spy Cameras http://bit.ly/2uIK8h

You’ve gotta love spy cams built into everyday objects – they are mega handy.  This artcle demonstrates a Coke can with a camera inside and a USC cable attached so you can use it as an instant web cam for spying on your house / office whilst you are not there.  Interested?  Me too.  Check out the link.

About Us

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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• Windows 7 already bigger than Snow Leopard and Linux combined (downloadsquad.com)
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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.

• Man, this the future – Devs Hack iPhone API for True Augmented Reality http://tinyurl.com/yz5p94a

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.

• Great article – How To: Virtualise Any OS For Free http://bit.ly/otyRu

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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The Vista Conundrum

As we continue to add HireEzy customers at a rapid pace, our sales team continues to be amazed at how many people are still terrified by all of the bad press that surrounds Windows Vista and continues to this day. The most common questions asked revolve around whether their business is at a disadvantage by using Windows Vista and whether it will in turn hurt the performance of our software in comparison to using Windows XP instead. These are valid questions and below is my unbiased opinion of Windows Vista as a whole and details regarding how HireEzy deals with Vista “problems” and keeps your business running smoothly no matter what your computer network is made up of.

We understand your concern, but you’ll be alright

First of all, it goes without saying that Windows Vista will go down in history as one of the biggest disasters in Microsoft‘s product catalogue due to negative response from the public and if anything is the classic case study of the power of social media due to the amount of Twitter and blog posts put out thereslamming the product, greatly contributing to the reputation handed to the product as a slow, untrustworthy, annoying and ignorable operating system. I personally believe that Windows Vista was the final nail in the coffin to the development career of Bill Gates and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the backlash towards Vista played a big part in him deciding to leave his post as Chief Software Architect. Microsoft have learned the hard way that people abhor change and are tired of fighting with their computers.

So the question asks, is it a bad operating system? Well, the short answer is that the initial release was but the two consequent service packs released for it have actually made it a really good product. Like Apple‘s transition from Mac OS9 to OSX, a total rewrite of the underlying code of Windows was necessary to take the evolution of the computer to the next level with the introduction of new processor and hard drive technologies and the evolution of the “business computer network”, and like Mac OS this has just been something that couldn’t be done painlessly despite the efforts of all involved. It is often forgotten after six years of being in the market that the first release of Mac OSX was an absolute joke. There was no support for it, old Mac apps often didn’t work on it and you couldn’t even burn DVD’s with it at first – it was so bad that Macs were initially sold with both OS9 and OSX installed and users could switch inbetween operating systems depending on which one they wanted to have to bother with. With the time to refine the product, OSX is now a very tight, polished and respected product that has gotten better with time and you would in no way be a fool to place your trust in it.

The same is true with Vista and this is the best possible way to give you an idea of how Vista can be a dependable operating system if kept up to date. Next month, Microsoft will release Windows 7 which is the next iteration of the same concept and our feedback of it, similar to that found everywhere on the Internet, is extremely positive. We are so confident in Windows 7 that we will officially support usage of HireEzy on Windows 7 from the moment it launches.

With HireEzy, we’ve got your covered

To those of you using Vista and are looking at HireEzy, we have great features in place which will keep you confident in smooth function of your business irrespective of the amount of faith you have in Vista. Firstly, our core technology allows us to “broadcast” your database across your local network which means that you can install HireEzy on a computer elsewhere in your network and operate the software from your Vista machine without ever storing any data on it, helping you prevent data loss due to Vista’s millitant and sometimes inconsistant security policies for local data storage. Secondly, we build platform independantly which means that you can have a mix of Macs and PCs in your network all using the exact same copy of HireEzy in any way you see fit. So, if you have lost faith in Windows so much that you’re unsure of putting your data on it, you may want to try investing in Mac computer as that central database holder in the configuration I mentioned previously whilst using cheaper Vista machines as the dumb terminals that view and work with your data. Thirdly, if you are going to store HireEzy on your Vista machine, we have extensive experience in making sure HireEzy will be unaffected by the radical changes introduced with the way it works and as a complementary service we install your software for you after purchase to give you the peace of mind that you’ll be just fine. Further to that point, with HireEzy 2.1 we have introduced new backup utilities that allow you to auto backup your HireEzy database wherever you like, including devices like thumb drives, DVD RAM and external hard drives, plus for a monthly fee you can optionally use our new online backup service which will sync your HireEzy data with our secure servers over the Internet.

To summorise, we understand that Vista is a concerning product to work with, a lot of the flack that the product has copped is unjustified or simply no longer relevant but nonetheless we have taken the steps necessary to ensure that with HireEzy your information is secure and instantly accessible to you no matter how Vista is used or deployed in your computer network.

I encourage you to contact us if you have any further questions or queries regarding HireEzy on Windows Vista or for any technical deployment questions that you may have, we’re only too happy to discuss it with you!

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