So I installed IE8 and checked out a few sites.  Plenty of sites look a bit strange, but possibly most surprising is that the windows update site doesn’t work:

But but 8 is later than 5 isn’t it?????

Microsoft has released the first public beta of IE8.  The release was announced at the keynote of Mix in Las Vegas (which apparently is full of cool stuff).

Grab the beta now & check out the noise about it on TechMeme.

Update: Ha! Check out the latest article on the IEBlog:

Although we said that IE8 Beta 1 passes the ACID2 test, some of you may be seeing results like the image above; we thought we should explain what’s going on. IE8 passes the official ACID2 test hosted on http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html. (Note, this seems to be a popular destination at the moment. You may have trouble reaching the site.)There are also a number of copies of this test around the net. One popular copy that I’ve seen of late is http://acid2.acidtests.org/

People didn’t wait long to start fact checking them!

Update 2: Note, you may need to install this hotfix if you haven’t already: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c1ac48ad-f4f9-4b4b-9cb5-460593b052cc&displaylang=en

Office Live Workspaces is now in public beta for anyone with a Live account.  The concept is very much the same as Google Docs, it gives you a space to store & share Office documents online. Unlike Google Docs, you can’t edit documents online, you still require a copy of Office.

From the Workspaces page you can download a little plugin app that will allow Office to talk to Live Workspaces.  The cool thing about this is that you can save documents to Workspaces directly from the Office Application. Fortunately you don’t need a copy of Office2007: Office XP SP3 and up will allow you to open and save documents to & from Workspaces. There are some limitations for the earlier versions of Office around Outlook Contact lists. 

What it does do:

1. Open an office document online in read-only mode
2. Create documents in Word, Excel & PowerPoint and save directly to Workspaces, or open a document from Workspaces for editing.
3. Create Event, Contact and Task lists in Workspaces and sync it with Outlook (in Outlook 2007 you can modify the lists in Outlook and have those changes reflected online, in earlier versions it’s read only). These can be edited online inside Workspaces too.
4. Create ‘Lists’, which are essentially static spreadsheets without the functions.  These can be exported to Excel (using the Sharepoint connector).
5. Create ‘Notes’.  Essentially text files with a WYSIWYG editor online.
6. You can upload pdf documents and view them in read-only online. Sort of.  It renders the whole document as an image, so you can’t select the text.  Also the fonts aren’t all right, and the colours go a bit strange.  Example:  this is the top of my latest telco bill in normal pdf & then what it looks like in Live Workspaces:
   
7. You can upload pretty much any sort of document and it will try and render it for viewing (text, images, etc).
8. Uploads are asynchronous. You can keep doing other things inside Workspaces while it is uploading the document you selected to add.
9. File versioning & comments.  Every time you save a document to a Workspace a note is attached to the file in the Activity panel showing who saved it and when.
10. Sharing.  You can share documents, you can share Workspaces and you can share screens (using SharedView).  You can choose to share with read or write access, and people don’t even have to be logged into Windows Live to view the shared documents.

(more…)

Yes I did, and so now I’m the proud owner of Firefly – all 14 episodes of it.

In honour of this momentous occasion I’d like to direct everyone to read this excellent summary of the Serenity movie.  And here’s to hoping Universal get a clue and release a second movie.

I know that this has been posted a bunch of other places, but the nostalgia here is cool

From Scoble’s flickr

While I’m on the topic of FeedDemon, Nick Bradbury posted a couple of days ago about how to localise the language of FeedDemon.  It’s fully customisable using the language xml files in the [FeedDemon Install Folder]/Data/lang/ folder.  So in view of that I put together a modification of the default American English language file that changes the spelling of words like ‘colour’ and ’synchronised’ from the American to the Australian (or British) spelling.

If you want to use it grab it from here.  If you’re viewing that page in FeedDemon it will install it automatically.  If not, just copy the file to the folder above & restart FeedDemon.