Microsoft

19 Feb

Thumbs Up – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 8 Nov

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.

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.

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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01 Feb

Thumbs Up – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 15 Nov

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 is all about handy Windows apps, plus some interesting statistics about social media in the enterprise:

If you haven’t heard of Windows SkyDrive, it’s basically a free online storage solution provided by Microsoft which gives you 25gb to store whatever you want on the internet so that you can access from anyway.  It’s not really pushed at the moment which is why not many people know about it, but that will certainly change once Office 2010 is released, as it is heavily focused on extending the Office experience beyond the desktop allowing people to create and save MS Office documents online using online browsing versions and store them in their SkyDrive using the Office Live plugin.  Personally, I’ve found it really handy and I use it alot.  What this application does (which was NOT created by Microsoft, by the way) is install your SkyDrive as another hard drive on your computer in the Explorer shell, so that you can simply copy and paste to it like any other hard drive – the online difference of course is that you are storing your stuff on Microsoft’s servers.  This is really great for backing up all of your critical information so that if your machine breaks down or is stolen, you can simply replace it and remap your SkyDrive to the machine using this application and voila – you have all your information back.  Highly recommended.

  • Very interesting – Palo Alto Networks: Twitter Usage Soars in the Enterprise http://bit.ly/TBJt1

There is another article of similar theme that I tweeted as well this week, which you can read here – http://bit.ly/1P8llM – which also touches on how social networking usage is exploding in the business and enterprise workplaces.  The reason why?  It is a far more effective way of engaging your audience and getting your message across.  I am willing to bet my left kidney that Google will shell out somewhere in the vacinity of $2 billion to buy out Twitter and position it as it’s newest advertising medium, considering that many businesses are telling the same story as we are – Google Adwords is a WASTE OF MONEY.  Our company stopped using it earlier in the year and we now exclusively advertise our products and services through Twitter (and Facebook to a lesser extent) and the result has been a 700% increase in sales leads.  True story.  We are so happy with the results that we will never use Google Adwords ever again – which by the way supplies Google with 97% of their $16 billion a year in revenue.  You do the math – Google will have to radically adjust their business model or risk becoming irrelevant and having their revenue dry up big time.

  • Good article – Stop Paying for Windows Security; Microsoft’s Security Tools Are Good Enough [Opinion] http://bit.ly/19flzZ

I’ve blogged about Microsoft Security Essentials before – if you haven’t yet heard of this program, it’s Microsoft’s version of a free anti-virus program – and since it’s release I have been surprised about the amount of articles likes these that are getting published which are complementary to Microsoft for this being a great release.  What I would add to the fact that it is a good enough security program is the fact that it DOESN”T ANNOY YOU.  I’ve been running it myself ever since it was released and not once ever has the program prompted me to interact with it in any way.  At first I was a little worried that perhaps the virus definitions weren’t up to date so on the odd occasion I opened it up to check – I was wrong, the program is updating itself almost daily and it isn’t doing anything annoying on the screen to indicate that it’s working in the background.  In my opinion, that is the ultimate security program, as I often forget that it is there.  I have been going through the process of uninstalling AVG and other virus programs on the computers that I come across and have been installing this instead, it truly is a nice, solid release and I’d recommend it to anybody.  If you’d like to try it yourself, you can download it for free at http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials.

Photoshopping has pretty much become a verb now, on par with Googling a search of Tweeting a message and yet Photoshop is an extremely expensive piece of software that only business professionals can afford.  This application – Paint.NET – which has been around for a while, is a FREE program that gives you all the basics of image editing and some advanced options too.  I’ve been recommending this to people who are uploading graphics to their website and want to do some basic image manipulation themselves and this program will do it all for them for the nice price of nothing. I’d recommend this to anybody – it’s a Windows only release, but let’s face it, the majority of Mac users probably have Windows installed as well, or will need to install it soon.  Grab this and enjoy (and check out the article for more tips on how to use the program).

It surprises a fair few people that I talk to when I tell them that I’m a dedicated Internet Explorer user, but truth be told, Firefox is a great browser but still has a ways to go. Do you ever wonder why Google invested a whole pile of money into building their own browser even though they pony up the majority of the funds that Mozilla uses to operate whilst building free products like Firefox? It’s because sometimes in situations like these where the browser is such an important tool, it’s beneficial that it is being designed and built by people who spend all day working in computer security for a wide range of software products, not just one.  This article goes on to detail how Firefox is the most vulnerable browser to hack attempts and general exploits, even above Internet Explorer.  Something else that most people don’t know about Firefox is that it is a memory hog.  I’ve often looked at people’s computers who have Firefox open and 3 or four tabs open and Firefox is using around 180 – 200mb of RAM from the machine just to do that.  It’s pretty ridiculous.  My general advice is to stick with the browser that comes with the computer – IE on Windows or Safari on a Mac, as they are both acutely fine tuned for their respective environments.  What about Google Chrome you might say?  Well, you can always use that browser if you don’t mind the fact that it is butt ugly.

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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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21 Dec

Thumbs Up – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 18 Oct

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.

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.

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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04 Dec

Thumbs Down – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 25 Oct

Welcome to the Tumbs Down Edition of my review of the week in tech – each week I’m picking out the things that I thought were a stupid idea, a bad thing to happen or just payed out on a tech company deservedly 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 Down I actually didn’t find much that surpised me – I mean, there was Apply trying to bag out Windows on the week of the Win7 launch, but that was hardly surprising at all.  There was some news of more Australian Government sensorship ideas, as detailed below, and a great article about how Microsoft actually one upped Google with an announcement they made for their Bing search engine.  Check it out.

This article does a good job of picking out the hypocrisy in Apple’s never-ending bashing of Windows – the fact that Windows 7 is a solid product and works really well.  It’s disappointing that Apple can’t market their products on it’s own merits – they have a fantastic operating system, sexy looking computers that are rock solid and a very VERY devoted fanbase that grows leaps and bounds by the day.  What this article picks up on is the fact that if Apple really did have good products, they wouldn’t have to resort to bashing the competition if their own stuff truly were worthy of customer attention and I totally agree – especially when their product manager is saying stuff in the press like “At the end of the day, it’s still Windows.” So what? A product with problems has been fixed up and that’s a good thing.  It’s the same deal as Mac OS – I’ve mentioned in this space before that the older versions of Mac OS were horribly backward and couldn’t even multi task of all things (which the iPhone still can’t do either).  So should we not use Mac OSX because the older versions were terrible?  Of course not.  OSX is a brilliant operating system and so is Windows 7.  Apple got a free ride of Windows defectors over the past three years with frustrated PC users and they deserved to have their market share increase from about 3% to about 9-10% – now all bets are off and it’s an even fight, the two companies need to bring their A-game now and compete on features.  It’ll be exciting for the end users.

This is a really bold move by the Aussie Government but I have to say I actaully like the idea.  It’s something that needs to happen considering that the iPhone/iPod Touch is a gaming platform and the Australian Government has their own classifications for console and computer games.  There is an uproar in Australia that there is no 18+ classification for gaming which causes excessively violent games to be refused classification (and therefore sale) in Australia and I happen to like this idea because it keeps all the brutal American stuff out of our country (and the subsequent axe-murderers and school gunman they produce).  Apple have built an over-arching approval process for applications which lacks transparency and there are a lot of developers that have been writing about how they think it’s unfair – at the end of the day, it’s up to Governments to police content, not companies, so handing off this process to the government in Australia is a lot fairer – Apple won’t like losing their total control over their eco-system for iTunes, but.. well.. tough.

  • True, makes good points – Well, What Do You Know: Google Is Actually Nervous About Microsoft Bing http://bit.ly/b8KMp

Competition benefits consumers and finally Google has a legit competitor – so much so that they actually got showed up by Microsoft when they announced their content partnership with Twitter and the first beta of Bing’s Twitter search app which you can find here.  As a knee-jerk response from Google a few hours later produced news that they were going to do the same thing (sort of) and that their toold would be available in a few months.  Not to be outdone, Microsoft announce later that day that they are also integrating Facebook into their search engine.  Google had nothing to say to that – Microsoft owns a small chunk of Facebook and would never allow Google to get access to it (and neither would Facebook themselves).  This article makes good points in how Google’s “me too” response to Microsoft’s news of innovation was real proof that there is definately chinks in their armour and a reminder that you have to always compete to stay the best.  just ask MySpace all about that.

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02 Nov

Thumbs Up – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 1 Nov

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 myself noticing a whole bunch of really handy and useful applications being announced and written about.  I’ve highlighted my favourites of the week below:

  • Great tip about Screencasting – From the Tips Box: Windows 7 Screencasting, Quicksilver, and Recipes [From The Tips Box] http://bit.ly/z47ef

This article has a whole bunch of tips in it but it was the first one in the list that I was really interested in (the rest were boring) – Windows 7 has a Screencaster feature in it so that you can record exactly what is happening on the desktop as a movie.  This is fantastic for getting help with support and we’ve been recommending it to all of our customers – simply hit record and play out a situation that you experiencing so that you can show the video of the problem to an extremely appreciative support technician.  All you need to do is open up the Run window (Window Key + R) and type “PSC” and hit enter.  Voila – you have it open and can hit record to start tracking what is happening on your computer.  Kudos to Microsoft for including this feature in Windows natively.

This is an idea that I was just talking about last when when I was talking about the possibilities of Augmented Reality – This iPhone app lets you use the iPhone camera to hover over something written in a foreign language and it’ll show you what that means in English written over top in what the camera sees – super handy when travelling overseas or when your computer manual is only written in Korean.  I was slightly disappointed that Japanese wasn’t supported at this stage (I’ve been learning it lately) and it’s a tad inconvenient that you have to download each language supported seperately, but once you’re set up you’re setup and it’s extremely convenient.  They are charging people $1 a language – $1 to buy the app and then you buy all the languages you want support for.  They say that more languages will be supported soon and Asian languages are the obvious ones missing from it but it’s got ALL the European languages covered which is pretty good.  Highly recommended.

This is a pretty exciting development – There are a number of applications available that allow you to run Windows on a Mac but this one is my favourite – Not only can you install Windows 7 as a program within Mac OSX and get full support for the aero interface and enjoy all the fun things that comes with Windows 7, but you can actually install programs within Windows 7 and then run them outside of Windows – so much so that you can attach them to the dock at the bottom of OSX and it runs like it is a native application. This effectively allows you to be a Mac user and then run any Windows program just like a Mac program and it’ll work every time.  This is quite exciting and I’ll be looking to create this exact setup for myself when I upgrade a little later in the year (I hear the new Macs are lemons and have problems that need to be fixed – see this week’s Thumbs Down article for more details).

  • Good on ‘em for doing this – Microsoft’s Official USB/DVD Download Tool Helps you Upgrade Netbooks to Windows 7 http://bit.ly/Ozh1M

This is great – people who own netbooks will know that there is no DVD drive in it, so if you want to upgrade Windows you don’t have a disk drive to put the installation CD in – fortunately, Microsoft have released a free tool which allows you to move the Windows 7 installer onto a thumb drive and you can use that to upgrade Windows to 7.  I have two netbooks at home and am doing that this week – Windows XP is too crappy and freezes a lot to not want to upgrade to a stable operating system.

  • FANTASTIC idea Microsoft should copy it (like everything else) – Aerofoil Keeps Your Laptop’s Battery Alive http://bit.ly/1maRls

Windows 7 already has a whole bunch of stuff built into it which helps preserve battery life in laptops significantly, and using this application will better your battery life even further.  The concept here is that Aero Glass, which is the Windows feature which animates your windows shrinking down and up and go 3D when ALT-Tabbing and all that jazz, is quite the battery sucker so this program will automatically turn Aero Glass off when you unplug the power charger to your laptop and only run it on battery.  You don’t have to do anything at all, this program will just auotmatically switch that Windows feature on and off as needed when you plug the power in and out.  Simple, easy and a brilliant idea.  If you have Windows 7 then you will definately want to install this program – check out the link for download details – OH and did I mention the program is FREE??  Very cool.

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28 Sep

Review of Best and Worst Techo Twitter Posts week ending 26 Sep

Welcome to 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 found myself tweeting a significant amount this week – there was a Game Show in Tokyo where a lot of companies were showing off a lot of cool upcoming gadgets.  In addition to that, it seems that all the tech titans were stabbing each other in the throat to take advantage of a high news week – Google for example were announcing a new feature each day of the week, some of which were pretty bad actually (as I’ve outlined below).  Microsoft on the other hand were the reoccuring theme in the majority of my good posts this week, who would have thought?  Our friends in Redmond are actually bringing out a lot of cool stuff over the next 12 months and there well be plenty more to talk about as they keep making announcements (and other things “leak” to the press, yeah right – rumours are the new advertising).

THE GOOD

I installed this little app on my netbook last night and I was really impressed.  Whilst I mostly focus on suggesting apps that are productivity related, I found that this really did give a nice, glossed and polished touch to Windows XP – considering my main workstation is a Windows 7 machine this was welcomed eye candy for my little guy.  There are different choices for what icons and themes you want to change in XP and you can even change the welcome screen to something more glossy looking to, and I’m glad I put it on.

  • The evidence keeps mounting, you can’t ignore social media – Social Networking Use Triples from Only a Year Ago http://bit.ly/oynUF

We continually communitcate via our company Twitter account @makinglifeezy and this blog the importance of social media as the new most important advertising platform for your business.  This article is just some of the supporting evidence you’ll continue to find on the net regarding the rapidly growing community in the social media space and the amazing opportunities social networking provides for your business as a way to comminicate to your potential and existing customers like never before.

  • WOW! This is a fantastic idea – TechTracker Scans Your Computer for Outdated Software [Downloads] http://bit.ly/6wvcx #Lifehacker

Frankly, I’m surprised that someone hasn’t thought to do this earlier.  One of the biggest problems in computer security is that people just don’t keep their software up-to-date even as vulnerabilities and the like are discovered in these older editions.  It’s understandable that people don’t have the time to be scouring the web looking to see if their software has been updated, and now they don’t have to.  I ran this on my own computer and it found updates for software that I had forgotten I had even installed let alone a few programs that I didn’t think would have been updated.  Really handy tool.

  • Good read, the best about WordPress I’ve seen – The Beginner’s Guide to Tricking Out Your WordPress Blog [WordPress] http://bit.ly/TNH9Z

We here at Making Life Ezy are VERY big fans of WordPress (this blog is a WordPress blog, in fact), so much so that we recommend to all of our HireEzy.com customers to create their own WordPress blogs as a pivital part of good Seach Engine Optimisation techniques and for creating link backs to their own website content.  This article really dumbed down the concept of setting one up, summarised the really awesome themes there are out there and recommended some of the really good plugins.  I found it really useful even though we’ve already set up our blog.  Of course, HireEzy.com customers can get a WordPress blog set up for them by our technicians for free as part of our web optimisation pack we sell with HireEzy.

  • Highly recommended plugin for #IE, I like it! – Printee Enables Selective Printing in Internet Explorer [Downloads] http://bit.ly/s8QNK

This plugin addresses one of the major problems with the web browser, being that people like to print web pages and they find that the text is split up over multiple pages in an unreadable format.  This plugin addresses this problem by smartly reading the text on the page and creating a printer friendly version of it before sending off the print request to your printer.  Voila, your printing out text all nice and formatted for simple reading off of paper.  Best of all, this plugin is free!

  • OH MAN!! This might just be the most amazing handheld gadget I’ve seen – Announcing the Microsoft Newton [Digital Daily] http://bit.ly/6E4kB

Being a tech person I can’t help but add a gadget to this list, but this device is seriously awesome. There is a video you can view which demonstrates the potential of the device – basically the Microsoft Newton/Courier (there seems to be different codenames used for this device at this stage) is a dual screen device held like a notebook and has iPhone like multi-touch capabilities for treating the device like a real notepad, complete with realistic writing recognition (having come a long way since the original Palm Pilot-style handwriting input) and with instant integration with your calendar, mail and tasks to become the ultimate companion.  I see this device and I imagine the possibilities afforded to software developers and their customers – we LOVE the idea of putting customer’s information immediately in their hands when they want it.  I’ll be watching the evolution of this project with great interest.

THE BAD

  • Shocker! Power Twitter can protect you from this though – Video Demonstrates the Danger of Shortened URLs [Security] http://bit.ly/31b3qA

URL shortening services have become a really handy tool but this demonstration video makes a good point – URL shortening services don’t show to you what website you are being redirected to.  The article basically says that you should only open a shortened URL from a person that you trust, as you can potentially be tricked into going to a malicious website (a technique referred to as “phishing”).  Of course, there are ways around this – firstly, if you are a Windows user, Internet Explorer 8 has excellent anti-phishing technology built into it so even if you opened one of these webpages, IE would warn you that you are going to an untrusted website in the first place and help you beat a problem before it happens.  Also, if you are a Twitter user (this is where a lot of people are being targeted), consider using Power Twitter which scans your Twitter posts for shortened URL’s and auto converts them into their long addresses when showing you your posts on screen so you can see where the link will really take you – this is a really good idea and predictibly other Twitter clients (and perhaps Twitter themselves) will follow suit and offer the same solution as this problem continues to happen.

  • ‘Nuff said right there #FAIL – Gmail More and More Like Late ’90s-Era Hotmail Every Day [Digital Daily] http://bit.ly/cnbmG

You know, I’m really not a fan of Gmail AT ALL.  What I really resent is the fact that Google indexes your mail, trawling your messages for the things that you talk about to people to optimise their targeted advertising and this alone disgusts me and leads me to NEVER recommend its use to anyone.  What this article delves into descibing though is the recent failures of Gmail’s servers, leading to downtime and people not being able to get into their mail.  The comparison to Hotmail from the late ’90s stems from the fact that it took Microsoft three years to figure out how to convert Hotmail’s servers to a Windows NT based platform (it was Unix based at time of purchase back in 1997) and there was a lot of downtime from the service as Microsoft tried and failed multiple times to make the conversion.  Of course, they figured it out eventually and Hotmail continues to be the market leader in web based email – plus you keep your privacy in the meantime.

  • ROFL! It’s open warfare now – Microsoft blasts Google over Chrome Frame plug-in http://bit.ly/tBeub

At first, when I read about this being released I reacted enthusiastically to the idea – old versions of Internet Explorer are slow, a security risk (read: bugs/vulnerabilities) and lack in offering the goodies afforded to people with updated browsers such as fast AJAX rendering for truly software-like browsing experiences, for example.  The problem here is that Google are beginning to try and exclude IE users from their web solutions – the upcoming Google Wave will stop you in your tracks and recommend you use anything other than IE, or install this Chrome Frame plugin for IE before continuing and this is appalling.  Furthermore, There is a new tag that web developers can include in their site which makes IE use the Google Chrome Frame plugin to render their website if a user has the plugin installed – what’s next?  Will Google start punishing websites in their search rankings who don’t have this tag in their website to force people to use Google’s plugin for IE?  Google are already well known for doctoring their search results to spruke their other own online offerings over others in the search results.  If Google did this, secretly or intentionally, I would image there would be an anti-trust suit from the US government for sure.  We really need greater competition in the search market.  Personally, I use Microsoft Bing for this exact reason.

You know, Google just want you to throw all information via them to continue to grow their database of information, as I’ve touched on earlier.  What I don’t like about this tool, whilst a good idea, is the fact that a website administrator has no control over what comments are being attached to their website.  I mean, if you have a website trying to project a positive image of your products and people are posting malicious messages about your company and its services, this can totally ruin your online image.  There might be companies that deserve it, but there will be plenty more that don’t.  Most frighteningly, your competitor could comment against your site that you’re crap and they (fakely) experienced bad service/offerings from you.  What then?  You can’t even program anything into your website to block its use against your site so you’re stuck with praying for the mercy of the internet’s community.  Yeah right.  All the tech websites are bagging this idea and it’s likely that no one will use this service and it will die a deservedly painful death over at Google HQ.

  • ROFL! RT @alleyinsider: Google Can’t Handle iPhone Demand For Push Gmail $GOOG $AAPL by @fromedome http://bit.ly/ZnhUY

I’ve already touched on the failures of Google’s GMail service but this article touches on the fact that Google are trying desperately to pitch their mail service to corpratations and launched this tool to trick Outlook and mobile devices that can sync with Microsoft Exchange to make them thing that you are adding an Exchange account for instant email notification (known as “push services”), when really it’s a GMail account.  This would be particularly handy for iPhone users.  What happened after launch was a whole bunch of people tried to use the feature and GMail went tits up and no one could download their mail.  Just another example of why GMail has no place in the workplace and why you shouldn’t use it at all anyways.

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22 Sep

Windows Vista? Am I at a disadvantage?

Windows Vista wallpaper (by Microsoft)
Image by Stijn Vogels via Flickr

 

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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09 Sep

Meet Our CTO Aaron Holesgrove

Hi, my name is Aaron Holesgrove and I’m the CTO of Making Life Ezy and Ezysoft.Aaron thumbnail

Many of our clients ask our advice on a range of technology matters, from operating systems to even iPhone applications.

Therefore as part of the growth and popularity of this blog (due to the fantastic work of our marketing team) and our software, HireEzy, I’ve decided to contribute to this blog from a technology perspective.   Specifically focusing my thoughts and experience on using technology as the driving force behind the success of your hire or rental business.

Technology Brand Agnostic

In this first post, I thought I would give you all a chance to first learn more about myself, my general thoughts about the IT landscape and to give you a bit of perspective on the kind of things we’re working in on as a team as we continue to innovate in cutting edge software development as well as versatile and powerful online services and solutions.

The first thing I’m often asked when introducing myself as a member of the IT community is of course “so are you a Mac guy or a PC guy?” to which I reply that I’m neither. I believe that to have a true appreciation of the field of IT is to have an objective view of it, otherwise stubbornness will simply lead to you to miss out on things that would otherwise be really fun to be involved with and be a part of. This is particularly true for Making Life Ezy, as we are a platform neutral company working with both Microsoft and Apple database technologies to deliver our technical solutions, whilst using predominantly Adobe development tools and online service tools from Google, Yahoo and Amazon, amongst others.

Unbiased Technology Opinions

With that I mind, I hope that in reading my tips and general advice here that you find them to be similarly unbiased and impartial to any technical platform and simply concentrated on providing the best answer and/or solution to a problem or task. More than ever, diversity in the marketplace is leading to a lot of uncertainty in trying to decide what solution best suits each business and I get asked a lot by our customers about general things such as “is Windows Vista really as bad as everyone says it is?” and “so what do you think about Macs? Is it worth ditching my PC?”. These are fair questions and in my first couple of posts I will be looking to delve into these sorts of topics and many more in great depth to guide you in the right direction and spare you any emotional despair and personal resentment toward the IT companies that have provided us with a lot of our cheers and tears over the past decade or more in the process.

Latest Technology Updates

I am an RSS feed addict and I often spend my nights at home scouring all my favourite IT publications on the web for information about anything and everything. I can argue the merits of any technical platform with the best of them and I enjoy being asked questions that are as broad as “so what do you think will be popular in the next 5 years”, or “who do you think will ultimately have the best mobile phone platform?”. There are so many different things that are truly becoming exciting in IT right now, such as the rise of social media as a marketing platform, the true portability of content with the rapid innovation of the mobile phone as a computer alternative and emerging platforms such as cloud computing and even the continued evolution of development platforms and the sorts of opportunities they provide to both us and our customers.

A lot of these different things are not only technologies that I’m interested in and read about all the time but are areas that we as a company have a lot of fingers in a lot of pies and part of my role in our company is to be the one who can educate the rest of our team on these emerging opportunities and what they mean for us and could mean for our customers, so I look forward to using my blog posts to also help you learn about the sorts of things we’re building that can truly help you in your day to day business activities with case studies of customers who are working with us in our Beta Gold program to develop new systems and services as they evolve.

Feedback or Questions

If you have any questions or queries about areas of IT that you’ve perhaps never understood or would like greater clarity on then by all means I encourage you to write to me with your thoughts and I’ll blog about them here as they arise. I look forward to engaging in greater discussion with you all.

My Background

11 years technical experience in web development technologies and platforms.

Experience includes projects for The Seven Network (formerly i7), Optus Direct, The Movie Network, UKTV, TV1 and The Main Event Wizard Home Loans, I-Max Theatres.

Specialises in the emerging market in Web 2.0 and their application to business problems.

Aaron Holesgrove
Email: aaron@ezysoft.com.au
Twitter: @aholesgrove

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