dom.blog

Well, it seems to be a Babble tradition that has carried on into RV:Blog so I might as well join in. I’m in the Apple store in Brent Cross and everything’s white and funky and glowing. Oooh I want to walk around and play with Appley things now Next to me a sales person seems to be doing well. “We’re not leaving without buying one of these!” He’s demonstrating Spotlight. Microsoft really needs to hurry up with Vista!

Edit – Big screens. Big screens!

Grabbed the latest IE 7 Beta from Microsoft today to try out the long-awaited version of the ubiquitous browser. And it’s good. Confused me at first because for some reason it turned ClearType on, but after I found the setting, I played about with the new IE.

The obvious change is the user interface. I’m getting used to it surprisingly quickly, despite it being rough around the edges (as you’d expect) and markedly different from IE 6. I use Firefox for browsing and while this doesn’t manage to overtake its rival, Microsoft do make a valiant attempt to catch up – at last! Printing is fixed, tabbed browsing is here at last, and the nastiest CSS bugs are gone. The new phishing filter also looks promising although I’m sure they’ll be some users who won’t use it on the privacy principle.

One small improvement that I do really like is the ease at which you can enable, disable and remove ActiveX controls. Many of the little things in Firefox that I couldn’t live without, like spell checking, are actually done via extensions which I’m a lot happier installing in Firefox than I am loading a plugin in IE. This might change that and make it easier for Internet Explorer to acquire some of this extra functionality safely. (In fact – ieSpell seems quite promising for spell checking in particular!)

So – anyone willing to try it out too?

And I’m not even a regular Hotmail user (People who know me on MSN feel free to ask if you want this – but hurry, it might not work for long)

Or search for the trick yourself of course

The proof!

Oooh – dust off your copies of Google Earth and train it on the UK because they’ve upgraded the detail level hugely. And when I say hugely, I mean you can see my house. Not just a smudge where my house is – you can actually make out my house. I think this is the high point for human civilisation. Unless we get Google Earth in Real Time (note – probably physically impossible) I don’t think there is anywhere for us to go but down.

Oh, and proper Firefox is now out. En-GB Firefox. With colour spelt correctly and everything.

Good night!

Which of these search engines are the best – Google, Yahoo… or MSN?

Don’t answer yet! Take the amazing Search Engine Experiment first and decide which one is really most relevant to you. It’s a blind test, and for what it’s worth, I picked Google each time.

Hat Tip: Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble.