Norton Smartphone Security for Android: First Photos
Exclusive first photos of Symantec's Smartphone Security for Android, taken at Symantec's headquarters. Story here.
Firefox Mobile - first look
Image by Dekuwa via Flickr
The application was easy to install and worked fairly smoothly - you can choose between the phone's built-in browser and Firefox. On starting Firefox there's not a hugely obvious difference between it and the phone's own browser, although Firefox looks a little better.
It's possible to swipe across the screen to get tabs (on one side) and page options (on the other). We couldn't figure out how to zoom into the text on a page - the standard double-tap didn't seem to work - but internet searching suggested we just weren't double-tapping hard enough.
Firefox Mobile allows for add-ons in the same way as its full-size sibling - you can download these from the internet, and although so far there aren't very many, they look quite useful. There's even an ad-blocker.
The password manager is particularly useful, and something that's lacking from most mobile browsers. The Awesome Bar from the standard version of Firefox has also made its way over - this allows users to search their bookmarks, history and more just by typing in what appears to be the standard address bar.
It's a shame the application is limited to two Nokia phones and a handful of others at the moment, but expect that to change soon.
Are tweets simple? Think again
There’s a lot more going on inside your tweets on Twitter than the simple 140 characters of the message as this example shows.
That paranoid amongst you may notice that there is quite a lot of information about authors included such as location if you have this feature enabled.
Thanks to ReadWriteWeb for the link.
Task Coach keeps you on track
Staying organised is as much about knowing has been done as well as what’s coming next. To this end I’ve been using Chandler to organise work that needed to be done and Klok to track how much time was spent on them.
As good as both of these programs are, it was becoming a little unwieldy to update both with essentially the same information. The other problem with Klok was that the reporting wasn’t really good enough. It was becoming clear that exporting to Excel is very important. Both seemed to be
Enter TaskCoach, an open source task manager. It has all of the important abilities I look for.
- Tasks can be nested, I’ve used three levels. Collapsing tasks helps prevent the panic that sets in when there are too many tasks visible
- Tasks can be repeated and there are plenty of different options for this. Some of my jobs are daily, weekly, fortnightly and monthly.
- The amount of time spent of tasks can be tracked. This is listed as Effort, which had me guessing for a while but it works well, which is to say that it only needs one click.
- The amount of time spent of different tasks can be exported to Excel or as an iCal file.
There’s also a portable version that can be run from a USB key or from a Dropbox folder. Versions for Linux, Mac and iPhone can be found on the Task Coach website.
Wide screens and Ribbons
Dave Ziffer left a comment in my post asking ‘Do you like the Ribbon?’ with a link to a piece he wrote about it called The Computer Industry’s Usability Catastrophe. There’s some good stuff there, so I thought I’d create a new post rather than leave a comment.
In many ways I agree with Dave that the combination of widescreen notebooks and the Ribbon is not a good one. Vertical space on screen is now more valuable than ever and there’s no way to move the Ribbon. At least Toolbars in Office 2003 could be docked on the side of the screen or left floating as shown on the right.
I also miss the ability to customise the Ribbon as I have my own toolbar in Word 2003 with only the tools I need that fits comfortably on one line. That will be partially fixed in Office 2010 as some customisation will be possible in that version.
Having said that, I think that some of the Ribbon criticisms are a little harsh. The Ribbon can be hidden with a quick double click on one of the tabs and it then acts much like the old menus. And all the old keyboard shortcuts still work although there’s no visual feedback until the command is completed. For more information see the Microsoft Office Keyboard shortcuts in the 2007 Office system training page.
Moving from Lotus Notes to Outlook? Use a Nokia mobile
I’ve written before about how good Nokia PC Suite is at connecting mobiles to Windows is but I’ve found a new use for it. Moving contacts and other information from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook.
For all the attractions of Outlook, the big problem was moving all my information from one to another. It’s not a small job and accuracy is important. Sadly there didn’t seem to be any utilities for this with prices within my budget. Creating a text file with the information and then matching the field names didn’t really seem a good use of my time either.
The quick and cheap (assuming you have access to a Nokia phone of some description) solution is to synchronise Notes with the phone and then change the Nokia PC Suite settings to use Outlook instead. Synchronise the phone again and hey presto! All the information is now in Outlook.
It gets even better given the fact that PC Suite works surprisingly well with Bluetooth, so there’s no need to buy a propriety cable.
Microsoft Wireless Mouse 2000
The fashion for squeezing as many buttons as possible onto mice has thankfully come to an end. The Microsoft Wireless Mouse 2000 concentrates instead on working as reliably as possible, whatever the surface, with a technology called Bluetrack.
The Wireless Mouse 2000 is certainly responsive on a variety of surfaces that we tried around the office, including the back of a laptop bag, a likely surface when on the move.
A wireless dongle is included and can be attached to the mouse for going on the move but this doesn't automatically turn the mouse off like the Wireless Notebook Mouse 7000. Instead there is a switch on the bottom of the mouse to turn the mouse off. Power is provided by 2 AA batteries
The instructions are very simple: insert batteries, plug in dongle and download mouse software from Microsoft. The software isn't essential for the mouse to work but the Microsoft does add some useful extras.
As mentioned earlier there is a basic compliment of buttons: left, right and a wheel. The wheel can be tilted left and right for sideways scrolling once Intellipoint has been installed.
The Microsoft Wireless Mouse 2000 costs £30, which is very reasonable for a good quality wireless mouse.
Fixing problems without System Restore
System Restore is helpful, but can be switched off to save hard disk space. That doesn’t seem like a good idea anymore when something goes wrong with the computer, which happened to me this morning.
The computer seemed to be working but none of the web browsers would start properly. Internet Explorer, Firefox (ordinary and portable) and Opera appeared in Task Manager but not on the Desktop.
System Restore seemed like the best solution but I then realised that I’d turned it off.
Thankfully there is an alternative that was not disabled along with System Restore. Restart the computer and press F5 or F8 to show the Windows Advanced Options Menu. Press the up key until ‘Last Known Good Configuration (your most recent settings that worked)’ is highlighted and press Enter.
In my case, Windows loaded without any further messages and all the browsers were working again.
Because I don’t know exactly what went wrong I can’t say when this would work or not, but it’s certainly worth a go if there are problems with Windows that System Restore can’t fix.
Book review: 62 projects to make with a dead computer
When a computer reaches the inevitable end of its life, one alternative to the tip is to reuse bits and pieces. Only some bits can go in a new computer (I keep a 12 year old CDROM drive out of nostalgia) so ‘62 Projects to make with a dead computer’ offers plenty of alternatives.
It’s written by Randy Sarafan from the Instructables website and is well illustrated throughout with a 16 page collection of photos in the middle.
The first part of the book describes all the different components that are found inside computers along with some helpful advice on soldering and using a multimeter.
This is followed by the part of the book that EVERYONE should read, safety warnings. There are quite a few dangers associated with this book: electrical shocks, poisonous dust and imploding CRT monitor tubes. In fairness they don’t apply to every project in the book but while the book is good for a casual read, there is no place for being casual if you attempt any of the projects.
There’s no denying this is a good read, but I’m not sure if I’d want to actually make any of the projects, not least because none of my old gadgets are anything like as clean as those in the book.
It was much cheaper than I was expecting so at £10 would make an ideal Easter present for anyone you think has far too many old gadgets in their life.
Title: 62 Projects to make with a dead computer
Author: Randy Sarafan
Publisher: Workman Publishing
Price: £10
ISBN: 978-0-7611-5243-9
More info at http://deadcomputerbook.com/
Time to leave
All good things come to an end, so it’s time to move on from Windows 7RC1. This test version of Windows was freely available (I’ve got it on a notebook) but was limited. You’ve probably noticed that it shutdowns automatically every two hours.
That might be manageable but after 1 June it will show a wallpaper saying that Windows is not genuine and, crucially, not install any updates. The Windows Blog recommends a clean install of a full version of Windows 7. But whatever OS you plan to install on the computer, a proper backup and reinstall is better done sooner than later.
More information over on the Windows Blog.
