Computers & Technology

(beta)

Get yours today, by visiting Apple's website, slash safari. Neat.

Now if only Safari had mouse gestures, per site preferences, tab and link previews, and textbox expansion, it'd be perfect.

I have discovered a new feature of Safari 3.0 (beta) for Windows that is pleasant to have. You can resize any multi-line text input field by dragging the diagonal lines in the bottom right corner of the text field. Simply drag and resize. An elegant solution to an annoying problem.

This reminds me of a similar feature in OmniWeb 5 (for Macintosh only) which opens a new sheet (Mac OS X modal windows) which one can resize at will. One can even import text documents or clippings.

OmniWeb also has a lot of the features that I previously mentioned would make it (in my eyes) perfect, except for mouse gestures.

Opera's zooming is also nice, as are its keyboard shortcuts. However I have found myself browsing fine without those capabilities.

So I continue to try Safari 3 (beta) for Windows (Vista, Business Edition). While I was reading comments on Slashdot (comparing Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer), it occurred to me to compare how Safari searches and how Firefox searches.

Firefox searches are awesome, because by simply pressing '/' you can start searching as you type.

So pressing '/' in Safari does nothing (or nothing that I notice anyway). So I decide to search like I search on Safari for Macintosh, by pressing Command+F, which I imagine on Windows would be Control-F. A search bar appears at the top of the page with a search box where you can type what you are trying to find. It finds results a few milliseconds after you stop typing, and greys out the page while highlighting in orange the text that it finds. Interesting.





I guess this is a bit of a preview of what browsing the web on the iPhone is going to be like.

Earlier today we got a demo of the presentation (projection) and teleconferencing capabilities recently installed in the conference room. This will enable us to communicate with colleagues in other buildings as though they were in the same room.

Not quite telepresence, but close.

So during the meeting, LD asked if it was possible to videoconference with a desktop computer (the videoconferencing is IP-based, not the more common ISDN); we did not know the answer, but at the end of the meeting, we started experimenting, and after not too long a time we succeeded in videoconferencing between the station in the conference room and the Intel iMac on my desktop.

I downloaded and installed a program called XMeeting (a SourceForge project). After some configuration and playing around, we were connected! Below is a screenshot of the software at work.

Enlarge

Windows Vista has many cool new things. A new program allows you to easily take snapshots of the screen. Straight from the "Things Macintosh Was Able to Do A Decade Ago" files.

It's called Snipping Tool, and it lives in the Accessories folder. (Start-> All Programs-> Accessories- yeah, remember that folder?). It allows you to take full-screen snapshots (the entire screen is captured), selectable rectagular area snapshots (the cursor becomes a crosshairs which allows you to select a rectangular area), specific windows (captures a specific window by moving the mouse on top of the window you want captured), or "free-form" snapshots (the cursor becomes a pair of scissors with which you can freely cut away as you please).

It's pretty neat. Here are some screenshots I captured in my Vista computer.

I've been watching Joost [ http://www.joost.com/ ].  I signed up a few months ago to receive the beta, then one day they sent an email to me inviting me to download their beta invite-only software and start watching Internet TV.  So I installed it on my Windows computer (they didn't have a Mac version of the software yet) and started watching.  At the time they really didn't have a lot of interesting programs available; they had "strong man" competition shows, world records, cartoons, etc. (which by the way, they still have).  And no ads.  They say they intend for the service to be free of charge, but advertising supported.  So i put it away for a few weeks, because the software didn't work with my new Windows Vista installation, and there was not version for the Intel Macintosh either.  Eventually I got another email advising me of an update to the software, so I decided to give it a nother chance, and voila! it works in both Windows Vista and Mac OS X Tiger for Intel Macs.  So i'm now not only watching programs on it, but showing people and even inviting people I know to try the beta.  i only have five invites, but they're going fast.  They may give me more invites if I use them all up.

For now, it still seems interesting; there are enough programs that I kinda want to watch, even as it's not premium TV.  Still though, it's pretty cool concept, new concept, and certainly has room to grow and mature and improve, etc.  I've been watching videos.. Green Day's Jesus of Suburbia right now.

"I don't feel any shame, I won't apologize, when there ain't nowhere you can go, running away from pain when you've been victimized, tales from another broken home."

Microsoft has developed a program called Windows Live Writer which allows you to post entries to weblogs.  It supports blogs services from Microsoft's Live Spaces, Google's Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, TypePad, WordPress, Radio Userland, dasBlog, etc.  And so far it seems to work pretty well.

It even allows me to post to my NYU Blogs! (Movable Type)  Awesome!

(check out the watermarking effect on the image - courtesy of Windows Live Writer (beta).

Another beta in the Windows Live suite from Microsoft, SharedView (beta) is a program that allows you to share a view of any program with others over a network.  It allows you to share any currently open program with people using other computers.

Before you can share a program, it is necessary to start a session;  you can invite others by email, IM, or phone to your session, or you can start a session without inviting others and invite them later. 

Once you have started a session, SharedView displays a menu bar accross the top of your screen that allows you to control your session. From this menu you can select which program you would like to share; you can also see a list of all session participants; add a handout document.

You can prepare handouts.  You can also decide who has control of the shared window, so that you can allow a colleague to control the mouse in your application.

You can try it out by downloading the beta at Microsoft's live.com web site.

Drag and drop text. Awesome.

I just stumbled upon StumbleUpon.

Actually that's not true. I had seen it a while, when my primary web browser was Firefox.

Now that Safari exists in Windows, I'm pretty much exclusively on Safari.  Except of course for all the websites and business applications that are designed to work only with Internet Explorer in Windows.

I must say though, if this StumbleUpon thing only works with a toolbar, then already I know I will not use it.  I hate toolbars. Especially third-party ones.

Quoted from SPSS 13.0 for Mac OS X | System Requirements

SPSS 16.0 is due for release in the second half of 2007. Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux desktop platforms will be supported. The Mac version will be a Universal Binary and compatible with Power PC and Intel-based Mac hardware.

So it seems like SPSS is finally getting with the program. The Macintosh version is being updated so that it will run on Intel processor-based Macintosh computers. They will also be releasing a version for Linux; that's kind of interesting.

In my dreams, there is a free simple to use / simple to support desktop environment that is Linux based, on which students, faculty, staff and administrators can get their work done. But this is a topic for a different post.

Mariner Software makes a program called MacJournal, which can be used to create, edit and manage journals and journal entries. And blogs, too, which can be a kind of a journal.

What's cool it's that it can post to popular online blog services, such as LiveJournal, Movable Type (the technology behind NYU Blogs), Blogger, WordPress, "and more". However, it can also be simply a journal that you keep on your computer. In fact, that is how their software was started (back in the days of Mac OS 8). You can store and manage your journal on your computer; it sounds like it might not be that interesting, to keep a journal offline, but trust me, for people who keep journals, it is a very good program. I used to use it a few versions ago.

Plus it has a "full-screen mode", which allows you to focus on your writing, without any of the distractions in other writing programs. The program does cost US$13, but it is totally worth the price if one is a journaler. Visit their website to see for yourself.

They also make a version of the same software that works on Windows (WinJournal).

More than 300 new features of Apple's latest operating system, are described at http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html.

• monitor system activity with DTrace - w0o7!


• all the calendar features - autopick, availability, resources, caldav, offline


• self-tuning tcp


• parental controls with dynamic web filters


• sandboxing, library randomization and multiple user certificates


• live partition resizing with disk utility


• tabs in terminal


• ODF and XML document format support in TextEdit- yes, this means both openOffice and Office 2007- yes!


• appleScript, ruby and python bridges for cocoa frameworks/apps


• objective-c 2.0 -woohoo!

Aborting an installation often prompts a new dialog window to be displayed, that reads "This program might not have installed correctly" and gives you three options: Reinstall using recommended settings, This program installed correctly, or Cancel.

I understand the good intentions of this dialog and the programming behind it, but it seems like it's poorly implemented.  If during an installation of a program I decide to abort the installation without completing the installation, I should not see this dialog.  Of course, how would the software know that the software was aborted because of my choice or because the software really did not "install correctly"?  Well, that gets to the point of this dialog:  that is what the dialog claims it is doing by being displayed, it knows that the installation didn't complete successfully so it offers me to reinstall or tell it that it installed correctly.

It is not clear that the cancel button may mean, "I aborted this installation, everything is OK".

generic meaningless errors like this one:

Are another reason Microsoft Outlook sucks.

although on second thought, the culprit this time might be Google's calendar sync which "cannot connect to" Outlook.

Something happened.  We will do something about it and let you know.

Sun Microsystems just announced a new release of their StarOffice productivity suite, and they have changed the way they license the software for people in the education community.

From Sun's web page at http://www.sun.com/software/staroffice/faqs.jsp :

What are the pricing changes to StarOffice 9 Software?
A:
There are four key changes:
Subscription pricing added as an option, subscriptions include license, support and indemnification.
Education pricing is no longer free.

This makes me sad.

If you have the Chrome web browser installed (by Google, see google.com/chrome), try typing this into the address/search bar:

about:memory


and press ENTER, you will get a page displaying browser memory information..

"About memory | Measuring memory usage in a multi-process browser."

It gives you a "summary of memory used by currently active browsers". So if you have Firefox and Internet Explorer (and Opera and Safari) open at the time you type that command, it shows you memory information for those browsers as well. And it details how much memory is being used by the different tabs.

Lookie here: