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Pictures: Microsoft's Office Web Apps
The technical preview of Microsoft's Office Web Applications shows that the applications still have a long way to go before being finished - go here for our First Look article.
Word currently only supports viewing of documents, as shown in this screenshot, but the content looks exactly as it would appear if you opened it in the full version of Word.
PowerPoint also shows presentation slides exactly as you would see them in the full PowerPoint client, and you can click to start a slideshow in a new full-screen browser Window. Page transitions are painfully slow unless you have Microsoft's Silverlight runtime installed on your computer.
The most complete of the Office Web Applications is Excel, shown here with an existing spreadsheet open for editing containing a table and an embedded chart. The application has a polished look that make it more closely resemble a full client application than many web-based applications achieve.
Skyfire mobile browser gets point release
Skyfire has released an update to its ground-breaking mobile browser which lets smartphone users see web pages as they would appear on a PC, including multimedia content such as Flash and Quicktime.
Essentially a bugfix release, Skyfire 1.1 has been tweaked to improve page load times and features updated plug-ins for Flash, Silverlight and QuickTime content. It adds support for WML, the markup language used in older WAP pages.
Skyfire also said it has improved scrolling and zooming on the Symbian version of the browser, and fixed an issue whereby the Windows Mobile version would sometimes quit on startup.
Using Skyfire on my Windows Mobile 6 handset, I found little visible difference in the new version. However, pages did seem to load slightly faster over a 3G network connection, with the checkerboard background pattern showing less often when I scrolled to a part of the page that was not in the browser cache.
Embedded videos on sites such as V3.co.uk and the BBC's news site also seemed to display more smoothly. In fact, it still amazes me with just how good the video playback is with Skyfire.
To set against that, Skyfire does seem to burn through the battery life on my handset when it is in use, and this is one thing that the new update hasn't addressed.
I also fired a quick email to Skyfire asking them for any news on the promised BlackBerry version of the browser - no reply so far.
Google Squared gives all the wrong answers
Generally people search to find the right answers or to deepen their knowledge on a subject. Not on Google Squared.
People using the new search tool should be prepared to be misinformed. Google should be prepared for a few complaints.
Google Squared was launched on Thursday with the product's manager, Alex Komoroske, admitting the technology "is by no means perfect", which some testing the tool would say is an understatement. So far the technology looks like it will cause users more trouble than its worth.
Google Squared is designed to allow users to research a subject without visiting many different web sites. Search results are delivered in a table, which users can then compare side by side.
However, so far the tool has pronounced both Prince William and Prince Charles dead.
A search for 'UK national papers' lists the Guardian as a tabloid while the Times maintains its status as a broadsheet. The Express is apparently a mix of student books, audio tapes and CDs. The Metro is a movie.
A search for 'Social Network' lists the MySpace owner as Facebook Will Win for Now while Facebook is owned by mario. Luckily Google knows that it owns YouTube and the tool correctly lists Flickr as Yahoo's.
A search for Good Camera Phones prices the Motorola Razr V3 at a bargain price of $3.45.
Hands on: Microsoft Bing versus Google search
Microsoft's latest search innovation has been switched on in the UK today and I've been having a play around with Bing to see if it does what is promised.
When it finally unveiled Bing last week - code-named Kumo - Microsoft described the online application as a "decision engine", rather than search engine, which has been developed to help users "make faster, more informed decisions". The search tool will initially focus on four key vertical areas, according to Microsoft: shopping online, travel arrangements, medical information and a local business search.
I tested each of these four areas, all set to only look at pages from the UK.
I ran a search for 'flights to crete' to test the travel component and found the results were very similar to those returned by Google. I liked the information boxes that popped up alongside the Bing results to give extra detail on each of the sites being linked to.
However, Google scored an extra point in the sponsored links section, where its top three results were Thomas Cook, EasyJet and Flydeals, all sites I'm familiar with. Bing's top three sponsored links were for Flydeals, Directline Holidays and an aggregator site called iReviewed, which includes links to lots of other travel web sites, surely a service Bing is supposed to be offering anyway? EasyJet doesn't appear anywhere on the first page of results, even though it's one of the most competitive airlines for direct flights between London and Crete.
To test the medical information section, I ran a search for 'root canal' as it's an area close to my heart at present as unfortunately I have to go for dental treatment soon.
Again I found the Bing pop-up information boxes really helpful, giving a much better idea of what the site will contain rather than having to click through to each search result. But Google had a better mix of results overall.
Bing's results were a series of standard web site links, with Cosmetic Dentistry Guide as the top result, and the top sponsored link was a dental and healthcare insurance provider. On Google, the top result was the British Dental Health Foundation, while the top sponsored link was for an emergency dentist, again just edging Microsoft on the relevance and usefulness of the results. And the fourth result on the Google front page was for root canal images, with four pictures helpfully displaying exactly what treatment involves, not for the squeamish like me but a useful feature of search results.
Carrying on the dental theme, I ran a search for 'dentist e11' to test out the local business search feature. In this category, Google beat Microsoft hands down. Clicking the link at the top of the Bing search results for 'top local listings for dentist near E11' took me through to a separate page full of links to dentists located in either the E1 or EC2M areas of London, miles away from me. The main page of search results included links to dentists in other areas of East London, and a site for salaried dentists, while the sponsored links had also got mixed up with the number of '1's in my postcode and were instead focused on the E111 European health insurance programme.
Google fared much better, listing several dentists all within walking distance of my house right at the top of the page, along with their phone numbers and a map showing their location.
Microsoft was also shown up by Google in its online shopping provisions. I ran a search across both search engines for 'Netbooks'. Although I thought Bing, which is powered by the Ciao shopping comparison tool Microsoft acquired last year, returned a better mix of results with netbooks from a wider range of vendors on display on the first page, the presentation was a real letdown.
The top section of the page contained a lot of white space and a bare-looking list of sponsored links, with many of the results missing either pictures or any pricing information, instead providing an 'Offers by Ebay' link. In terms of price comparison functionality, the Asus EEE PC 901 had the biggest number of retailers selling the same product. According to the results front page, the netbook was available at nine online stores with prices ranging from an incredibly cheap £39.13 through to a more realistic-sounding £335.12.
However, when I clicked on the 'Compare prices' button, it turned out several of the results were duplicated and there were only six different retailers in the list. Meanwhile, the bargain £39.13 price tag was actually for a laptop battery and the most expensive product was only £272.99 not £335.12 as listed on the front page.
Google returned a smaller selection of netbooks and vendors on its first page of results, but it kept the sponsored links to the right-hand side of the results. Presentation was much cleaner, and Google included pricing details and an image for each result.
So while Microsoft has made a big song and dance of the fact that Bing isn't just any old search engine and has moved to distance itself from Google et al, the decision to brand Bing as a 'decision engine' seems to have backfired on the firm. My early tests instead serve to highlight how Google has moved on from being a provider of links to a provider of relevant, location-based, contextual information, and how Bing appears to sit much more comfortably under the traditional definition of a search engine. I'm sure Microsoft would be quick to point out this is only a beta version, but it faces a steep climb to reach Google's level, let alone surpass its rival.
ThinkGrid's desktop-as-a-service
ThinkGrid is a company offering IT-as-a-service to business customers, including hosted Windows desktops accessed via an internet connection.
The idea behind this service is that companies can outsource the provision and management of a Windows desktop environment for their workers, complete with applications, to ThinkGrid. It could prove especially useful for smaller companies that do not have a dedicated IT staff.
I tried the service using a sample account provided by ThinkGrid, and found it pretty much like using a thin client session, except you have your own desktop that can be customised (within limits) to appear how you want it.
Access is via a login from ThinkGrid's web site, which requires you to enter a username and password. All being well, you gain entry to a full-screen session on your own virtual PC running in ThinkGrid's datacentre.
The virtual desktop looks and feels exactly as if it was running on the computer in front of you. I perceived no lag in either mouse movements or keystrokes when accessing the desktop, but for this hands-on I was using the corporate network in our central London office.
Each user has their own 5GB of disk space with their remote desktop, and it automatically maps to the local drives on the computer you are using so you can easily transfer files if necessary.
ThinkGrid costs £49 per user per month, or £490 for an annual contract. Applications are an extra charge, with Microsoft Office Pro costing £17 per user per month.
A full review of the ThinkGrid service will be posted to our web site at a later date.
First Look: Internet Explorer 8
The latest version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer is now available to download, and I've been taking a look at the newly released browser.
Overall, IE8 is a welcome improvement over previous Microsoft browsers, and I believe it is on a par with rivals such as FireFox and Safari in terms of features, performance and ease of use. This may not be enough to tempt back users who have defected to FireFox over the last few years, but it is definitely worth the upgrade for those still using older versions of IE.
The major feature of IE8 is its greater adherence to standards such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The upside of this is that it drives greater Web interoperability, but it may cause problems with web content designed around the quirks found in earlier versions of IE.
Unlike an earlier review of an IE8 beta release, I had few problems with content not displaying in IE8. In fact, I found it difficult to locate any sites that showed any problems at all. Of those that showed issues, almost all were web-based applications rather than public-facing web sites, suggesting that businesses are the most likely to require IE8's Compatibility View that displays pages as they would appear in IE7. Pages that did have problems with IE8 seemed to work fine when Compatibility View was activated.
IE8 is also not lacking in terms of performance, with no perceptible difference in page load times between it and FireFox. Microsoft itself disclosed figures last week that showed any differences between the three top browsers are measured in fractions of a second.
New in IE8 are Accelerators and Web Slices, both of which are useful but not must-have features.
Accelerators provide links to functions when you highlight text on a page. By default, IE includes Accelerators to show a pop-up map from an address, or a translation (see screenshot), or to create an email or blog entry. Others are available online from the "Get More Add-ons" button on the toolbar.
Web Slices provide a direct link to web content from the Favourites bar, akin to the way RSS feeds work. Examples include an eBay web slice that shows auctions you are interested in and alerts you to changes in bids. However, many of the currently available slices are very US-centric, such as those providing weather or traffic alerts, but only for US cities.
Like Safari and Firefox, IE8 now provides a "private" browsing mode, InPrivate Browsing. Selecting this from the Safety button launches a new browser window with InPrivate mode enabled, to avoid confusion with any pages you might already have open. IE does not retain any browsing history for sites visited in this mode, which ends when the user closes the new window.
This will be useful for hiding login information if you need to access your email via a publicly access computer, for example, but users should be aware that it does not ensure complete privacy. In a corporate environment, the internet gateway will likely have a record of all web sites visited, for example.
IE8 also helps privacy through InPrivate Filtering (called InPrivate Blocking in the beta releases), which gives users some control over third-party content such as adverts that might be used to track them. IE examines such content as the user browses sites, and if ten or more sites load the same resource, it appears on a list from which users can block it, should they choose.
Perhaps the most useful security features are the SmartScreen Filter and Cross-Site Scripting Filter. The first is an enhanced anti-phishing filter that analyses pages for suspected malicious content, as well as checking the web address against a blacklist.
The Cross-Site Scripting Filter is designed to detect code that has been inserted into a genuine web site in order to steal information such as credentials, and disable it. Microsoft has a demo that shows how this works, but whether it will work as well in a real situation remains to be seen.
The size of the install file you need to download for IE8 depends upon the platform, with the Windows XP version weighing in at 16MB. The installer checks for any new patches or updates, and a reboot is required after installation is complete.
Using Microsoft's My Phone service
Microsoft's recently unveiled My Phone service for synchronising smartphone content with a web-based storage site is still officially in beta, but the company has allowed me access to test it out.
Generally, I'm quite pleased with the service, but there is definitely room for lots of improvement. As Microsoft is garnering feedback during the beta phase, it is quite possible that many issues will be ironed out before it is opened up for broader use.
As reported in the news here, My Phone lets you synchronise various types of content from your phone up to the web site. This includes contacts, calendar and task entries, but also text messages, documents, photos, videos and music.
Each of these categories can be selected individually by checking a box. You can also synchronise content from Flash storage cards.
Once your content has been backed up online, you can access it from a PC by logging into the My Phone web site, potentially making it much easier to get photos off your phone than mucking about with direct sync cables.
Synchronisation is also bi-directional, so you can upload a file to the web site from your PC, and it will be sent to your phone the next time you synchronise - handy for sending across Word documents and such for viewing while on the move later.
This should also allow you to re-load all the content you want if you get a new handset - providing it is also Windows Mobile - but I haven't tested this out.
On the downside, synchronisation seems to take a long time, not just on the first run when all your selected content gets uploaded, but also on subsequent runs when very little has changed. One synchronisation session took close to ten minutes, even when I switched to using the Wi-Fi interface of my handset instead of the cellular HSDPA connection.
You can continue to make calls and use your handset for other purposes while synchronisation takes place in the background, but if you lose the wireless signal for any reason, My Phone simply stops and does not appear to retry without manual intervention.
You can set synchronisation to happen on a daily or weekly schedule, or keep it on manual. Unless you have a generous bandwidth allowance from your mobile operator, manual synchronisation is generally recommended.
I would also like to see more fine-grained selection of content to synchronise. For example, all my photos are stored on a Micro SD Flash card, but I can't set My Phone to synchronise photos only from there. This means that the entire set of sample images that came pre-loaded on the handset also got synchronised up to the web site, even though I don't want these.
Another drawback is that when you choose to synchronise contacts, My Phone only includes names from the Outlook contact list and not any of those stored on the phone SIM itself. This means you are likely to lose some contacts if your phone should go missing, unless you use another method of backing these up.
Access to the online content from a PC browser is also fairly basic at present. For example, while you can view a slide show of all uploaded photos, there is no facility to rotate images you might have captured by rotating the handset sideways to get a landscape shot. There does not seem to be a way to select more than one image at a time to download to your PC, either, which makes this a laborious process.
However, I should point out the My Phone is still in beta, and is not expected to be broadly available until early Q4 2009, according to Microsoft, so much could change between now and then.
My Phone will eventually come pre-installed in Windows Mobile 6.5, but users with Windows Mobile 6 or 6.1 handsets can download and install it. I am currently trying it out on an HTC S730 handset, which is based on Windows Mobile 6.
The client itself is a 560kB download and unpacks several files, one of which is a runtime of just over 700kB in size. Microsoft recently pushed out an updated version, which was a download of exactly the same size.
You need a Windows Live ID in order to login to use My Phone. If you have a Hotmail account, then this is your email address.
Hands on with Google's Multiple Inboxes
Recently, Google updates to Gmail Labs have been coming so thick and fast that one could even believe Google is considering bringing the product out of beta.
Since the beginning of January users have been given additional capabilities such as offline access, easier labelling techniques and video via Gmail chat to name just a few. Now Google has announced perhaps the most exciting one: Multiple Inboxes.
The feature makes it possible for users to have more than one 'inbox' in their default Gmail view. The look of Gmail changes so that you have your traditional inbox on the left and then a right pane with the emails you want (or need) to see separately.
To add it, click on the enable box from the Labs tab under Settings. Once enabled, it will automatically bring up your draft emails in the right pane but you can configure the feature from Settings so that you can see starred emails or particular folders (which of course Google calls Labels).
You can also configure the feature to the number of messages you want displayed and the positioning of the panels.
Although a lot of reports have called the name Multiple Inboxes 'misleading' because it implies users will be able to see email from a number of different providers, I can't see where they are coming from - they can!
For example, an external email account can be filtered to a Gmail Label (from Settings, then Accounts and by checking the option of Skipping Inbox) and then this Label can then appear in a separate pane in your inbox.
I am going to use the new panes to show my personal Gmail messages, my Hotmail inbox and my starred messages in Gmail, which I use when I have an email I have to reply to.
The only necessity with the new feature is that users need to be organised. If they do not have Labels set up and do not use the starred option, then the feature will just clutter their view (unless they really want to see their draft messages).
Another difficulty is setting up the external email account filtering. I admit to having problems when Google asked for Hotmail's POP server address and Port number. Google said to contact Hotmail if experiencing problems connecting. The best place to start is WindowsLiveHelp.com but it is quite a long-winded way of doing things.
Where is Skyfire?
Back in December, I wrote in this blog about the Skyfire mobile browser, which is virtually unique in being able to show web pages not only as they should appear in a desktop browser, but also supporting Java, Flash and moving video content.
Since that posting, things have gone a little quiet, so I contacted Skyfire to see if there was any news. It appears the company is working on an updated beta release, but the spokesperson would only say that this is expected "in the spring", which implies it is a month or two away at least. No word yet on when a full release version might be available.
I also shared with Skyfire some of the problems I've noticed after using the browser for a while. My main concern is that it is often slow - taking several minutes to load a page, for example. The spokesperson said that some issues are due to the mobile network and tariff a specific mobile user has signed up with, but it should be noted that another mobile browser I have installed - Opera Mini - does not seem to suffer as much from this snail-like download problem.
Other gripes include Skyfire's behaviour if it cannot load a page, which might happen for various reasons, such as momentary loss of signal. When this happens, the browser just does nothing. No error message, nothing. Skyfire just reverts to the page you were looking at before, as if you hadn't clicked a link at all.
However, it should be pointed out that this is a beta version (v 0.85.0.7927), and that bugs are still being ironed out at this stage. And when Skyfire does work as expected, it really is impressive.
E-Commerce meets Unreal Tournament
Anybody who's played Epic MegaGames Unreal Tournament will recognise it as one of the best the software industry has been produced. Tie the stunning visuals in with a fairly simple plot line - blast your enemies or die - and it was easy to see why gamers liked it.
The worlds created in the game itself are still stunning, even though the last version of Unreal Tournament saw the light of day in 2004, and gamers are champing at the bit waiting for the next version of Unreal to hit the shops.
The recent news that Nortel has announced a deal to license Epic's Unreal computer engine to emblazon its online virtual e-commerce world - called web.alive - raises some interesting possibilities.
It was last August that the Canadian network kit vendor announced it would be developing web.alive, also known ironically as 'Project Chainsaw', to move e-commerce portals on from the current dowdy ones scattered throughout the Internet, to something with a bit more life in them. As well as aiming at the e-commerce website market, Nortel is also touting the virtual world as a virtual web-based meeting place, although it's a bit ironic that Nortel filed for bankrupcy protection in the US earlier today, after announcing its first customer for its web 2.0 technology a week earlier.
Licensing the Unreal graphics engine adds the visuals to its DiamondWare acquisition, announced when web.alive was born. DiamondWare was acquired to give the site high-definition, proximity-based 3D positional voice technology. The first customer announced for the technology is Lenovo and users can take a peek at its site here.
One of the problems with creating an HD virtual world e.commerce portal with Unreal-type visualisation is that a dedicated client is needed for the real-time rendering required, and that is what happens. You're prompted to download and install what Nortel call a 'thin client', which can then process the scenery and actions when you're in 'Project Chainsaw'. The installed client is 86MB in size - would you called that 'thin'?
I did install the client and have a quick shufty, and the Lenovo's e-Lounge site does look neat, with great sound - albeit it was slightly deserted.
I suppose users familiar with Unreal Tournament, might have expected customers to be wandering around dressed to kill - sorry. Was I expecting any security guards present to be tooled up ready for action? That would have been true to the Unreal engine the site is based on, as would a failed attempt to buy Lenovo laptops with your credit card!
