BlogMap

I've just added the BlogMap (powered by feedmap.net) to the side panel, and apparently there are 31 bloggers near me - who'd have thought it.. :)

IE7 Standards Support

After my previous post on the IE7 beta I've seen this post on the IE Blog discussing standards support in IE7.

This is very good news, as it looks like they aim to fix all the known bugs with IE6 and add a number of improvements, such as CSS selector support!

Now I'm just hoping for an improved JavaScript debugger... :)

Windows Vista and IE7 betas

Microsoft released the first betas of Windows Vista and IE 7 on Wednesday.

I'm not that interested about the Vista beta as it's still a year from release (Although there is a good review here), however I have been waiting for the IE7 beta.

Unfortunately, unlike initially promised, the beta has not been released to the public, but instead it is only available to MSDN subscribers.

However, judging by some initial reviews (cnet, zdnet, flexbeta) we're not missing much!

Although it does add some needed improvements, like tabbed browsing and RSS support, the UI looks very strange to me (Why on earth is the menu bar below the tabs???), there are apparently some stability issues, and there have been no improvements to standards support!

On the positive side, it adds a new phishing filter to try and detect phishing websites and report them to the user, which seems a great idea (if it works), and the printing support has been improved with 'fit to page' rendering to automatically resize the content so that it fits on the paper properly.

I guess this is a beta, so it can't be treated as a finished product, but it's a bit disappointing that after all the build up this beta isn't more impressive. I'll just have to wait and see what the final version is like when it is released later this year.

In the mean time, I recommend people switch to using Maxthon, which is a great browser that provides tab support, mouse gestures, and a whole host of features!

Escape from YesterWorld

I think Microsoft's Marketing department must have way to much time/money on their hands, judging by the recently released site, Escape from YesterWorld.

The aim of the site is to plug the new betas of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005, but there is some "geek programmer" sense of humour in there to make it worth looking at! :-)

Another simple yet addictive game

A Joystiq post recently mentioned Planarity, a simple but addictive flash game created by a CS student.

The aim of the game is to simply move all the nodes so that there are no crossed lines. Sounds a bit strange, but its actually quite addictive!!

Also, as mentioned in the Joystiq comments, there are quite a few good web games at eBaum's World. For example Escape, Sparks, the Crimson Room, and their Sonic game!

There's quite a lot of free games available out there! :)

Virtual Earth Beta

I talked about Microsoft's Virtual Earth a while ago when it was first announced, but today they launched the beta version of the site at http://virtualearth.msn.com/.

As expected, it only covers the USA in detail at the moment but these are my initial impressions:

Good Points

• You can use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out
• Using the compass allows for continuous scrolling.
• Search results refresh and update as you scroll around the map.
• Road details can be overlaid over the aerial photos.
• Double click to centre and zoom
• Can show multiple search results at once
• Bigger map than Google Maps
• Nice transparency effects on the overlays

Bad Points

• When you zoom out a bit the maps aren't as clear as Google's
• You cant do directions - selecting the 'drive to' or 'drive from' links just opens up the old msn maps
• Seems a bit harder to find locations, ie some searches that worked on Google don't work as well, but this may just be me.
• No UK data!

Overall I think its a very good start, and if they add in direction support and UK data it may beat Google Maps, but we'll just have to wait and see.

They are also plugging a locator feature that uses WiFi to accurately show your current location on the map. I have no idea how this works, or whether it is just a US only service as I don't have WiFi, but using the fallback IP address method just shows me England which isn't much help!

On a related note, Google Maps have recently added a hybrid mode, which overlays road data on top of the satellite images. This is similar to Virtual Earth's aerial photos with Labels, although I think I prefer VE's approach as it is a bit more subtle.

Fold n Drop - A new UI interaction method

This site proposes quite a neat way of dragging objects between overlapping windows, by folding the unwanted windows out of the way.

They also provide a simple Java demo to show how it would work!

I think this is a pretty good idea, and makes it much easier than the current approach of move your mouse down to the taskbar, hover over the required window for a few seconds, then move the mouse back up!

Who knows, maybe they'll be able to add this into Vista! (Nope, still think the name sounds strange!)

Edit: That site appears to be down for some reason, but if you have Windows XP, this page provides a program you can run to use this approach in your standard OS environment.
It's not polished enough to use permanently yet, but provides a good demonstration of the idea!

It's Longhorn no more

Microsoft today announced the official name for the next version of Windows, which has so far been known by the codename Longhorn.

The new name is.....







wait for it...
















errr yea..... Interesting name!!!

I don't really think it sounds very good personally, but maybe it will grow on me :)

So the Moon is made of cheese after all!

To celebrate the anniversary of the first manned Moon landing ( July 20, 1969), Google have released Google Moon.

This is a Google Maps variant showing the surface of the Moon, and the locations of the landings, but if you zoom in real close our long held myth is proved true! :)

You have gotta hand it to Google - They've got a good sense of humour, and I'm sure this will generate a lot of good PR for them!

Technology in a crisis

So it was a pretty bad day on Thursday with the London bombings,

but I think its interesting to see how technology was used during the crisis.

For example everyone turns to online news sources to try and get immediate information on what's going on, and this shows in the stats. For example the BBC are reporting that at the peak they were serving 1.7 gigabits of data and receiving 40000 page request every second!!!
That a massive amount of data and on the whole the site coped pretty well - there were a few times when I couldn't get through but not much!

I'm sure there was an increase in the streaming connections as well. We were streaming BBC news 24 live and after some issues getting connected the video was suprisingly good quality!

Another interesting fact is that Technorati were reporting over a thousand blog posts about the incident within an hour of it happening!!

Also the mobile networks were put under immense strain to cope with the number of calls requested.

All of these things show how technology helps people keep in touch and find out what's going on in times of crisis. It also shows that its not quite good enough yet - calls didn't get through, pages didn't come in etc. - but it sure does help.

Google Earth

So the Google mapping people have been pretty busy lately, and released a beta of Google Earth a week or so a go.

This seems to combine the Google Maps stuff with the Keyhole application they bought a while a go.

Unlike Google Maps this is a downloaded application (windows only I think), however I recommend everybody tries it out - you will be impressed. The ability to zoom into places all over the world is very neat.
This application seems to have more data than the web system, and even goes as far as to have 3D building models for a lot of US cities!


There is no doubt that this is a very cool application and you'll spend hours just looking at different places, but you have to wonder what you will use it for long-term!

• If you want road maps or driving directions, then Google Maps is a lot clearer.
• If you're out and about and what to look stuff up it will be hard as you need to install the application - I cant see web cafes letting you do that, and there's no way it will run on a phone, unlike Goggle Maps.
• The local search information is also provided by the web application, and so again this isn't a reason to continue to use GE.

I think it will be interesting to see how Google develop GE, and how they plan to keep people using it and how they are gonna make money from it!

EPIC 2014

In the year 2014 the New York Times has gone offline.

The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned.

What happened to the news?

And what is EPIC?

EPIC 2014

This is well worth watching, even though it is quite scary how real it could turn out to be!