Category Archives: General

Mozilla Firefox 3 beta 4 available

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Mozilla has released the 4th beta of the upcoming Firefox 3 browser.  Check out the review of the new beta by Mozilla Links.  Updates in this release:

  • Improvements to the user interface: better search support in the Download Manager, ability to zoom entire page or just the text, continuing look and feel improvements on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
  • Richer personalization through: location bar that uses an algorithm based on site visit recency and frequency (called “frecency”) to provide better matches against your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, as well as an adaptive learning algorithm which tunes itself to your browsing habits.
  • Improved platform features such as: support for HTML5’s window.postMessage and window.messageEvent, JavaScript 1.8 improvements, and offline data storage for web applications.
  • Performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization resulted in significant gains over previous releases in the popular SunSpider test from Apple, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run much faster, and continued improvements to memory usage drastically reduce the amount of memory consumed over long web browsing sessions.

There’s a link to the download site at the bottom of this page.

It has also been announced that there will be a 5th beta release, with the code freeze on the 18th of March, which means the beta should be available around March 31st. Or they may release it on 1st April just to screw with everyone :)

Google adds site search underneath site links

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imageI hadn’t noticed this before, but Google has added a site search box underneath the site links in their results.  

Not sure what criteria they’re using to generate this, because it doesn’t work for every site.  The SMH gets it, but Drive doesn’t.  It seems to be based on sites that are listed on Google News and their size.  That’s a total guess just based on the couple of dozen of searches I’ve checked out.

Not sure how I missed this seeing as it was posted on the official blog site.  The official word on what sites it will show up for is:

This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users

Not sure what that means in real terms, but as I said, I’ve only seen it show up for sites that exist in Google News.  That may simply be coincidental though, as people are often searching those sites too.

Update: Strike my theory. The search box shows up for gimp.org & ubuntu.org & they’re not in Google News.  I guess it’s just down to the pigeons then.

Internet Explorer 8 public beta available

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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

Microsoft launches Office Live Workspaces

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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:
    imageimage
  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.

Continue reading →

Australian English FeedDemon language file

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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.

FeedDemon + Instapaper = Firehose filter

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One of the pitfalls of being an information junkie, and especially a habitual RSS subscriber is the inevitable firehose effect, and the fact that I just don’t have enough time when I start in the morning to read through everything that’s in my unread items in FeedDemon, let alone reddit, and any number of other items I find during the day.  FeedDemon has a very nice ‘clippings’ tool that can store items for looking at later, but it’s only good for inside FeedDemon.  I can click and drag an item from FireFox into FeedDemon’s clip folder, but it’s a pain.

Marco Arment of Tumblr has built a site called Instapaper.  It has to be the simplest bookmarking site I’ve ever seen.  No tags, no design fluff, you don’t even have to enter a password to register if you don’t want to.

For an explanation of what it is, this is what Marco said:

Here’s the basic premise:

  • You come across substantial news or blog articles that you want to read, but don’t have time at the moment.
  • You need something to read while sitting on a bus, waiting in a line, or bored in front of a computer.

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Drive.com.au and CarsGuide.com.au in a distribution agreement

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Starting today Drive.com.au will be the sales team for CarsGuide.  This is a distribution deal meaning that dealerships will now be able to have a single point of contact for both sites. This isn’t a merger in any sense, both Drive & CarsGuide will continue to operate as separate sites in a competitive environment, with their own editorial, marketing and technical teams.

What it does mean is that both sites will grow as dealers will now be listed on both sites. From the press release this morning:

"This initiative presents significant commercial benefits to new and used vehicle dealers, allowing them to reach potential buyers more easily across two national platforms," Jack Matthews, CEO, Fairfax Digital said. "The personalised account service and expanded offerings resulting from this agreement will streamline the marketing process for dealers."

"We are committed to providing quality leads to dealers from online car buyers across Australia. This agreement reflects our ongoing commitment to increase our customers’ operational efficiencies," he said.

Under this agreement Dealers will benefit by advertising their vehicles with the two largest media organisations in Australia. The combined reach of both platforms coupled with the experience and knowledge of the advertising needs of the motoring industry ensure an offering of immense value to Dealerships nationally.

Furthermore, Dealers will have one Account Manager dedicated to managing all online vehicle listings with both Drive.com.au and Carsguide.com.au.

I’m pretty sure this is an unprecedented move in the online classifieds space in Australia. It’s not just that Drive & CarsGuide are competitors in the online automotive space, but the parent companies – Fairfax & News Ltd. are the two major media competitors in Australia, and traditionally don’t co-operate.  It will be interesting to see how this develops over time.

You can see a video of the announcement here.

(Disclosure: I work for Drive.com.au.  I generally don’t post about work, but this is public news anyway.)