Sunday 11 May 2008

Foxmarks the killer app for Firefox?

I've been using Foxmarks a bookmark synchronizer for FireFox for the last year or so.



Its just this little icon on the corner of Firefox


It is fantastic, it kills del.iciou.us by a mile. It so easy its just totally behind the scenes and I can organize my bookmarks using the standard bookmark manager. Check it out if you can. No crappy extra menu like delicious which, when i last used it, had no sub menus and i had to regroup/organize every single one of my existing bookmarks. No way! They lost me.



Firefox
is my browser of choice because it forces Microsoft to innovate and competition is a good thing. I encourage everyone to download Firefox and use it as their primary browser with Foxmarks as their bookmark synchronization program, if for no other reason than a monopoly on the internet is not a good thing. I don't mind there being big players and small players but without a critical mass people won't write their pages to work with Firefox, so no one will use it, so there will be a real incentive for Microsoft to create proprietary standards. I'm assuming you are the technical elite or why are you reading a blog on software? Go download Firefox, so it keeps its critical mass, which will keep standards Open and maintain internet diversity.


Its Free! 10/10 Foxmarks! Get Firefox.

Tuesday 6 May 2008

The Office 2007 Orb

I found this link that says a bit about the Office 2007 orb.

The old style menu system from Office 2003, Office XP, and earlier versions has been replaced with a brand new interface, which most people call the ‘Ribbon’. Why did Microsoft replace the old style menu with the new Ribbon? Because it was getting to difficult to find the right menu options because the menus were too complicated. The Ribbon is designed to make it easier to find the features that you need to use.

It still doesn't tell me why it doesn't have a word on it, and why it doesn't actually look like a button. Its like its deliberately hidden. I assume there was some logic based upon some statistics but I don't grok this one.

Anyway you can get your old toolbar back it seems.

Improve your IQ

I ran into this little game today. Gee it can get hard. Its a game designed to improve your IQ, I can understand how it might work.

http://dual-n-back.com/nback.html

In addendum, my brothers laptop has easily migrated back to windows XP and he is a happy user again.

In one final comment why is the menu for MS Office Vista an icon, not a word?



Yep that sqiggly round hashy thing on the top left is a menu.



In nearly every other program I have used in windows the menu's are labeled with words. Talk about breaking conventions, no wonder Joel Spolsky was not a fan.