Mmm, I think I should just promote this place to be my new office:
If you might wonder what I’m doing: I’m over at my parents in France this week and thanks to France Telecom I’m able to do my work just like I would at the office. I must say, I like it!
Just got myself a Picooz! A what? A tiny RC helicopter which, I think, is very funny to play around with during the holidays. Check this:
Now you want one too don’t you?
I’ll let you know if this tiny gadget is as much fun as it seems to be.
Great new tool developed at MIT:
This thesis proposal has a detailed explanation.
Via ajaxian, I read about a new working draft from the W3C: Widgets 1.0.
Everyone and their mother have created their own widget specifications, and now as a developer you need to make choices. Do you want it to work on Dashboard? Vista? Google? MSN? Yahoo!?
This draft is similar to the opera widgets implementation, but it also has info from Apple’s Dashboard, and the auto discovery support was based on the work in Atom Autodiscovery.
This standard will live and die by the support that it gets. Now is the time to give feedback, and see where this train goes.
Nice idea: grab all wikipedia articles which are enriched with geo-coordinates and make the information accessible within Google Earth. That’s exactly what Stefan Kühn has done!
The KMZ-file can be downloaded from his website and you can easily import that in Google Earth. Now you can fly over your favourite holiday destination and immediatly read the corresponding wikipedia articles.
I like it:
As announced earlier this month, Microsoft was ready to release a final version of Internet Explorer 7. Well, they’ve kept their word. It is available for download since a couple of days ago.
I’ve just installed it, not a real difference with Release Candidate 2 but I just wanted to try it out. First of all, I think Microsoft did a pretty good job. I’ve been using the new browser all day and nothing strange happened. I like the tabbed browsing (that’s why I always use firefox) although I’m not a big fan of the user interface. For instance, why did they put a close button on each tab? Now I have to search for the right button every time I want to close a single tab. Just leave the close button where it belongs, in the top right corner.
Today it became clear that MS really did a good analysis of the success factors of Firefox. Look what they have launched: the IE7 extension site. Microsoft calls it add-ons, but by the first look it is exactly the same as the extensions that made firefox a popular browser. Microsoft seems to have missed one tiny aspect though: the community! Oke, you are able to leave a comment about an add-on but that’s as far as it goes. No open-source character, you even have to pay for quite a lot of add-ons. Missed opportunity. Too bad.
Matt Cutts wrote a short review on Firefox 2.0, sounds like a better option than IE7 to me.
Update: wow, they do have a community! It features newsgroup discussions and popular downloads! I rest my case.
It often surprises me how much excitement a pagerank update still causes. The start of an update is always directly followed by an enormous amount of blog and forum posts. Not to speak about the number of people who are immediatly stress-testing the online Pagerank tools. So, I think it is about time to clear some things up. To start with, Google has changed quite a bit in the last couple of years:
Just found a new gadget which is directly on top of my wishlist! Eventually a keyboard that will look nice in your living room: Logitech’s diNovo Edge.
It uses Bluetooth, which gives you extended range over RF keyboards, so controlling a media center PC from your couch should not be a problem. Logitech also integrated a touchpad so a mouse isn’t necessary anymore. The new keyboard uses recharchable batteries which automatically charge when you put it on the charching stand. Perfect.
I do have one problem: the price. The diNovo Edge will be available next month for approximately 200 dollars. Hopefully Santa is in a good mood this year…
Engadget has a hands-on review online.
Exalead has just launched a new version of their search engine on www.exalead.com.
I was one of the lucky who was given the opportunity to test the beta version of this release and I am quite impressed. I think they did a great job on the user interface and untill now I’m pretty satisfied with the quality of the search results as well. So, maybe exalead will offer some serious competition for Google.
The improvements basically come down to:
- entirely redesigned user-interface (I personally like the approach to advanced search)
- bigger index (growing to 8 billion pages)
- ability to personalize the homepage
Another feature of exalead that isn’t completely new but what does distinguish them from other search engines like Google and Yahoo is the possibility to choose between three views for the resultpage:
1. text only
2. text and thumbnails (like ask’s binoculars)
3. text, thumbnails and extra info (directory and RSS information)
People who like to use advanced search options should definitively check out Exalead’s advanced features. Proximity search, phonetic search and logical expressions are just a few. I must admit that most users won’t take advantage of these features but it’s very powerful for those who do.
I think Exalead has the potential to become a bigger player in the international search market. Should Google fear them? Time will tell.
Microsoft recently announced that IE7 will be released this month. Although I’m a firefox user, I must say that I am very happy to hear this. I like to build webapps in some spare hours and there are times when IE6 really pisses me off annoys me.
I’ve already done some testing with IE7 RC1 and luckily enough the frustating selectbox-bug is solved, eventually. I must say that I’m not totally convinced that we won’t find new issues but untill now it is working fine.
Microsoft really had a close look at firefox and I think they are definitively following the right path now, a quick list of new features in IE7:
- tabbed browsing (where have we seen that before)
- integrated RSS feedreader (ehh, ^^)
- Improved printing, your content will fit on the printed page now (why did that take them 7 versions)
- Support for opensearch, this will make it easy for you to change the default search provider. Good plan (honoustly).
If you’re interested, grab the latest IE7 release here.