stuart test blog

Just noticed that Thunderbird 1.5 Beta 1 has also been released so I’ve downloaded and installed it and will give it a good testing over the next couple of weeks. First impressions:

• Offline support has been removed from the installation options, this is now part of the standard build
• Product version shows up as Thunderbird 1.4 after installation – this must be an internal product version.
• Options dialog is the same as the new Firefox beta 1, with the category icons at the top of the box.
• New feature – Spell as you type. Works very well, leaves a faint, dotted, red line beneath incorrectly spelled words – right-clicking the word presents the choices of new words.
• While testing the new spelling feature, I downloaded the English (New Zealand) dictionary which comes in the form of an XPI extension. Interestingly, after installing the extension using the Extensions dialog box, Thunderbird didn’t need to be restarted for it to take effect. I wonder if Firefox works like this too..?
• New feature – Email scams. “Thunderbird can analyze messages for possible email scams by looking for common techniques used to deceive you.” I guess this is also know as anti-phishing…
• New feature – Anti-virus. “Thunderbird can make it easy for anti-virus software to analyze incoming mail messages for viruses before they are stored locally.” This sounds like an interesting new feature, not sure how it would work though?

Wow – some excellent new features in there and that was only after 10 minutes of poking around!

I’ve been using the new beta 1 version of Firefox 1.5 since it came out and so far I’m impressed. It’s extremely stable for a beta 1 product, and although you don’t notice any significant changes at first, there’s definitely been a whole heap of changes made under the hood.

The first thing you notice when you install beta 1 is that you will probably get told that your existing plugins aren’t compatible with the new Firefox. I was running All-in-one Gestures and the official Google Toolbar, and neither were compatible. Once installed I headed straight for the Options to see what has changed there – and this is the first big sign of the new version as shown here:

The actual options are all very similar to the previous version, but they are now laid out with the categories at the top. A new feature is the “Clear Private Data” locate under the tools menu. Clicking on this option opens the following box which is fairly self-explanatory:

Another new feature which I definitely like, is the new error pages for display on 404 errors and the like. This takes away the annoying pop-up boxes that show up in the previous version.

Not sure what my favourite new feature is yet, but another cool feature which I love is the ability to drag and drop tabs so that you can change the order of them. I often have ten to twenty tabs open at a time and it really helps to be able to move them around. So far, I’m really enjoying the new beta 1 and I haven’t found anything wrong with yet – I definitely recommend downloading and testing it today!

While I was looking at all the iPod news I downloaded the latest version of iTunes to see what all the hype was about. I’ve used it in the past but never really liked it that much – I just assumed that you would only use it to sync to your iPod. Version 5 of iTunes is actually very good I have been enjoying using it and have been digging up tracks that I haven’t played for ages because of it’s ease of use. But the feature that I found the most useful – is the ability to share your music library between computers on the same network. With my two laptops and two desktop computers, I often need to access tracks stored on the network and have never found a good way to do this. I’m not sure if this is a new feature in iTunes or not, but it makes it well worth the download for this feature alone.

I’m still using Windows Media Player which is far better than iTunes at organising your music library – it’s much easier to edit tags and to download album art. But iTunes beats WMP hands-down at playing music – the visualisations are much smoother and colourful, and it’s much easier to browse music in the library. Hopefully I’ll get my iPod Nano soon which I’ll be able to sync with iTunes too.

I still haven’t bought an MP3 player – I haven’t yet found that perfect player which balances size, features, capacity, and performance. That’s all changed now with the release of the iPod Nano! This device looks incredible – thinner than a pencil and only slightly longer than an iPod Shuffle, it has a beautiful colour screen and the device comes in standard iPod white as well as a sleek looking black. Maximum capacity is only 4GB but what do you expect from an MP3 player this small? The only issue I have with it at the moment is the price… The price listed on the US Apple website is $249.00 with free shipping – this converts to just over $350 NZD which I think is quite reasonable and definitely within my budget. On the NZ Apple website however, the price is $419.00 + $20 shipping bringing it to a total of $439 – almost $90 more expensive! Unfortunately the US site won’t ship internationally so I guess I’ll have to wait and see if the price will change at all over the next month or so.

I had heard of Konfabulator in the past as being an Apple app that displayed widgets on your screen, and, being a Windows man and not usually a fan of having junk cluttering my desktop, didn’t pay much notice to it. So when I heard that Yahoo had bought the company and then released the software for free, I thought: “Good on ya Yahoo…” but didn’t think anything more about it. Until… a couple of the guys at work where talking about the Windows version and all the cool widgets you can download…

So I hastily found their site and downloaded the latest version and installed it on my new notebook. The installer works as expected and then launches a few recommened widgets on the screen, like the wireless link monitor (good for my home wireless network), CPU load & memory monitor, an analog clock, and a search tool.

It’s now been two days and I can’t see my Windows Vista wallpaper for all the widgets that are scattered across the desktop! I don’t know how long I’ll keep using them – I’ve tried similar products before (although not as cool looking) and I usually get bored of them after a while. They don’t use up much CPU time but each one uses between two and four MB’s RAM – good thing I’ve just purchased an additional gig of RAM for my notebook…

I haven’t managed to get my hands on a copy of it but it’s good to hear that the beta has finally been released. From what I’ve read so far about it, this release doesn’t contain too many of the cool features that we’ll see in the final release – it seems to be more directed towards developers for application compatibilty testing.

Being the geek I am, I’ve already downloaded the Windows Vista wallpaper which you can download from bink.nu here: http://bink.nu/Article4571.bink. As mentioned on the site it does look quite cool with the Royale Theme.

I’ve been using Plaxo for a while now to manage my contacts, and apart from some of the quirks (like repeatedly spamming all your contacts with updates requests) I really like the service. My biggest complaint has been that it doesn’t support Thunderbird which I use at home with my IMAP accounts.

Well that has just changed with the release of Plaxo for Thunderbird (Beta) – first noticed on Mark Jen’s blog. I’ve already tested it and it does work well although not perfectly. The Plaxo toolbar which shows up in Thunderbird after installation is not customisable which means that the icons can’t be downsized to small icons which looks a bit odd with the theme I’m using (see below), but that apart it seems OK for a first release.

You can download it here: http://www.plaxo.com/downloads/tbird.

Haven’t seen this on any of the tech blogs that I read so I don’t know if I’m the first to notice it, but there is a big change coming up with the imminent release of Exchange 2003 SP2. The maximum database size will be increased to a whopping 75GB.

This is huge news for any small business currently getting towards their 16GB limit – just hold out a bit longer for SP2 and there will be no need to purchase Exchange Enterprise Edition. There are also several other new features that are worth checking out at the link below. Good on ya Microsoft…

Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 is Coming!

Google have been revolutionising online maps recently with their satellite technology which you can view online at maps.google.com. They have also released an extremely cool application called Google Earth, which is a free download and allows you to dynamically view satellite photos of the earth to extremely close-up zooms – you can download it here: earth.google.com.

If that wasn’t good enough, they have now also released an online service called Google Moon (moon.google.com) and this is well worth checking out – especially as it lets you zoom really close in to the surface of the moon to see what it really looks like.

Mozilla have released Firefox 1.0.6 and Thunderbird 1.0.6 which are both security and bug-fix releases. They have also announced that the 1.1 release of Firefox has been delayed by several months and will become Firefox 1.5 when released.

Download here:

• Firefox 1.0.6 – (Release Notes)
• Thunderbird 1.0.6 – (Release Notes)