Thankfully we don’t have to deal with that anymore, right?

Wrong.

A smartphone’s browser interface more or less acts the same way our desktop PCs did in the late ’90s.

While it’s true that 3G connectivity – when it works – is faster than dialup was, you’re still stuck waiting for things to load. And when it does load, the browsers that smartphones have are watered down to the point where many "regular" web sites are simply unusable on a mobile device.

Developers are making continual improvements to make smartphones more usable, but the overall browsing experience hearkens back to a day when internet browsing was a chore at best.

Using the iPhone as an example, it only has a 480×320 screen resolution. That’s lower than VGA spec which is 640×480. Anybody who uses an iPhone or like mobile device knows full well that the browser has "creative" ways of getting around a resolution so low. And you have to use those creative ways (such as zoom and pan in/out) else you can’t browse with it regularly at all.

For you older ladies and gentlemen that think the kids today don’t know what it was like to browse the internet Web 1.0 style, they do because current browser technology and network speed on a smartphone is pretty darn close to the mark of what a browsing experience was like in the late 1990s.

How long will it take smartphones to graduate to a desktop PC’s level of web browsing?

Indeterminate. But there are three things that will kick-start mobile browsing forward exponentially.

The first is the network itself. 3G is just too darned slow. Better than EDGE, yes, but still slow. The next-gen network for whatever it will be called should fix that ill in short order.

The second is the hardware, namely the processor. Newer chips will be introduced within the next five years that run faster without adding any additional heat. (It’s always the heat that’s the big deal by the way.)

The third is the software, but that’s being attended to right now. All the major players have good solid OSes for their respective platforms. Better mobile browsers like Opera Mobile (which does do tabs very well by the way) means a better mobile browsing experience.

A problem all software developers for smartphones face is having to work around – meaning not with – the aforementioned points above. It seriously curtails development when your biggest roadblocks are the processing speed of a smartphone and the network in which it connects to. Shades of how software development used to be for PCs? Oh, yes. Even the programmers have to deal with Web 1.0 era style crapola.

I want to make clear that I’m not saying smartphones are unsuable. They obviously have their place in the modern tech world, and tons of people use them on a daily basis. However you have to admit, browsing on one is very reminiscent of the usability problems we had years ago.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

On Mobile, It’s Web 1.0 All Over Again

I ran into this the other day when I want to rename of the folders I have set up. I figured it was a simple enough process, just go to the ‘Tag Settings’ folder and rename it but this is not a something you can do. Instead you have to go through this process to easily rename a folder.

Basically, it involves creating a new folder, moving the items and then deleting the old folder. To me, it shouldn’t be this difficult but I don’t rename folders often enough to where this bothers me. Regardless, I now have an easy way to ‘mass move’ my subscriptions thanks to the instructions above.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Renaming Folders In Google Reader

That being the case, MSN’s upcoming changes are sure to get noticed. The logo changes both with the butterfly and font, the blue background is (finally) gone and said honestly the overall experience of using it is a whole lot better. Heck, you might even find it useful because we all know the current MSN just plain sucks.

Why does the current MSN.com suck? Because the design coddles to a bygone era where web designers were deathly afraid of making anybody scroll for anything, hence the stupid tiny text on the current MSN. There’s this ridiculous belief that if anybody has to scroll down for any content on your web site, you lose. This is only true if your content sucks. Scrolling down is not evil, never has been and never will be. If you’ve got something worth reading, the reader will happily scroll; there is nothing wrong with that.

What makes the new MSN.com a notable improvement?

Color coded organization:

This is a big deal and it’s not easy to pull off design-wise, but the new MSN makes it work. And when hovering over menus, a nice dotted border appears with menu choices below.

Tabs:

The blue "Games" in the screen shot above is an example of a tab in the new MSN interface. These are located in several areas and yes, they work well. Like with the top menu, some (but not all) tabs will have different colors compared to others.

Social connectivity:

Oh yes, it has it. The old-school Web 1.0 portal finally jumps into the modern age with Facebook and Twitter connectivity right from the same page. This is a really big deal because it gives people a reason to use MSN as their home page other than for just looks and information.

The beauty of the way it works is that the new MSN doesn’t shove you elsewhere, such as a "my.[web-service-here].com" just to get this feature. It’s on the home page right where it should be. That counts and counts huge. And YES, you can post status updates right from there as well for Facebook or Twitter. I tested it myself.

Microsoft said a few years back that they were going to put a huge effort into making their offerings modern. This started with Windows Live, then Bing and now MSN. I never thought I’d ever see MSN get out of Internet Stone Age, but it looks like it finally will – and do so in a way that truly will wow you and prove to be useful at the same time.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

The Soon-To-Be New MSN.com

When it comes to email, there are many who prefer the convenience of web-based mail but wish there was a local application that looked and acted like a mail client. Zimbra Desktop is it. This software absolutely nails it in terms of friendliness, ease-of-use, convenience and everything in between.

First of all, it’s multi-platform. Windows, Mac or Linux. Any truly good application these days supports all three, and this does.

Second, it has support for multiple types of email:

Zimbra, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL Mail, two types of IMAP and POP.

It always pleases me when I see an offering by a major player like Yahoo! that is willing to support a competitor’s product like Hotmail or Gmail because it shows confidence in their own offering.

It should be noted however that only some Hotmail accounts are supported due to compatibility issues. Most will be, but if yours doesn’t connect, the software will explain why.

Third, look at this interface:

Slim, clean and super-easy. Look at the tabs on top. Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Documents and so on are all just a single click away. Folder support is easy too.

Oh, and speaking of which, did you ever want your Gmail account to have accessible "normal" folders like all other webmail does? It will when you use Zimbra. Simply add a folder via a connected Gmail account, and it will create nested folders that look and act just like normal ones – and yes they’re completely accessible via the regular Gmail interface as well.

Fourth, although this sounds a bit dopey I really dig it – a mail indicator icon in the taskbar in Windows when new mail arrives:

The yellow envelope is the new mail indicator. This seemingly insignificant feature is just so nice to have.

Fifth, yes it has multiple account support. In the screen shot above, look on the left sidebar. Your other accounts are listed at the bottom and can be accessed easily with a single click. If there is any new mail in accounts lists there, there is a small number in parentheses telling you how much new mail there is.

Sixth is the synchronization features. Using Yahoo Calendar and Contacts? It will sync seamlessly. Using Gmail’s version? It’ll sync that too.

It goes without saying that Yahoo! Mail users will appreciate Zimbra the most because it FINALLY brings a true native client to the desktop. This is Yahoo’s equivalent of Windows Live Mail and it does a fine job even though it’s beta software.

And yes, it’s beta. That means some things may go buggy from time to time. But in my use of it I’ve encountered no issues as of yet.

The way Zimbra works in Windows is by installing itself as a service. You will see a small red icon in your taskbar (when no new mail is present) like this:

This is not a bad thing whatsoever, because when the Zimbra client is minimized, it goes completely out of the way and shrinks to this little icon, which can be clicked to bring the client back up. In addition, it can be right-clicked to completely shut down the service.

Zimbra Desktop was definitely done right the first time. It is the only software I’ve seen that offers a true alternative to Windows Live Mail (especially if you don’t use Hotmail) and the feature set is just plain great.

Oh, one last note. This may be a frilly feature but still worth mentioning. It has 12 different themes you can use:

This is available via the Options tab.

Let’s say for example you want Zimbra to look like Gmail. You would choose "Zmail." This is what it looks like:

Looks pretty close to Gmail, doesn’t it?

Zimbra’s dev team really thought this product through.

As said at the top of this article, this is a product that accesses web-based mail but still retains the total look and feel of a local mail client – and has the very-super-awesome-cool sync features like Windows Live Mail does, so it isn’t an island unto itself whatsoever.

Two huge thumbs up for Zimbra Desktop. You’d be very hard pressed not to like this.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Zimbra Desktop Is Just Plain Awesome

When you just play around with the numbers you can really see the true impact you can have by brown bagging it. On top this, something you bring from home is most likely going to be more healthy than fast food.

Now, I am not saying you shouldn’t eat out as I understand there is a social aspect to it, but taking a look at the “what if” scenario can be eye opening.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Calculate The Money You Can Save By Not Eating Out At Lunch

This page includes just about every browser you can think of and compares the native functionality of each. This information is extensive and detailed, unfortunately it can be a little hard to follow since there are so many charts. However, if you only want to see what browser supports “X”, this is a great resource.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Detailed Browser Feature Comparison Chart

Did you know that PCMech.com got its start on Geocities? Back before I even owned the domain, the concept behind this site was run on GeoCities. At SiliconValley/Lakes/3553/, to be exact.

Well, Yahoo bought Geocities. It went nowhere. And, they just recently pulled the plug. Adios to a little piece of 90’s Internet history.

While most people look at it kind of like the demolition of a dusty old Vegas casino, some people don’t take it sitting down. One man set out to save it. In six days.

Say hello to Reocities. A private vendetta to recover and restore as much of Geocities as possible prior to the October 26th shutdown. It started with SiliconValley, but then expanded into other neighborhoods. They managed to get a fairly expansive segment of the community.

You can read about how they did it, but here is a small segment of it:

At this point in time there are only 44 hours to go until it is permanently curtains for GeoCities. We’re talking Friday to Saturday night, and I realize that if I don’t do something drastic, then this effort is going to fail.

So, enter the secret weapon. A couple of years ago I wrote a small (about 1 billion pages) search engine. For that purpose I bought a cluster of 5 machines, which have since been upgraded with 4 TB storage each, and already had a fairly beefy CPU. They’re also connected to the net with some good uplinks and have a 1Gb/s connection between them to a dedicated switch. Time to get those guys involved.

Now that we know the structure of GeoCities, it is possible to farm out the fetching of pieces to each of the cluster nodes. A small program figures out who is busy with what, and each cluster can concentrate on one of the 721 shelves, and the 10 000 possible accounts on that shelf. In the past 4 days some of those shelves have already seen extensive coverage, so we mark those as done, leaving about half to be processed still. After a few more hours to get this all set up the cluster was humming along at 150 Mb/s inbound. That’s a CD every 30 seconds or so!

Impressive effort. I’m sure anybody who was still (stupidly) depending on Geocities will be very happy with these efforts.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Some Just Can’t Let Geocities Die [Reocities]

Here in the U.S., Comcast is gunning to impose monthly data restrictions widely, however there’s a problem and a huge one at that. There’s no way for the customer to check what they’ve used. This is like having a car without a fuel gauge or a cell phone without a battery life indicator. Comical? Yes.

Here are some things that are even more comical.

If you use any online banking at all, every time you login to whatever system you use, you’re blasted to "go paperless." The supposed benefits are that it saves trees. Not true. All it does is save the bank the cost of mailing a bill to you. Regardless of that, what’s the point of going paperless if it puts a draw on your monthly bandwidth restriction that would potentially cost you more?

Want a better example? No problem.

Video web sites like YouTube and Hulu tell everybody that you should watch them instead of regular television. So let’s say you do. Do you have any idea how much draw all that video Flash content has? Quite a bit.

And the best example of all:

Our own President want to make sure that the entire nation has a minimum 10 megabit connectivity speed for all broadband connections. This is a good idea. But then all this means is that you’ll tap your bandwidth limit faster, so it serves no benefit.

It could be that our very own ISPs make this massive speed-increase effort by our own government to drop like a brick by widely imposing bandwidth restrictions. They have a saying in the military to describe this scenario: "Hurry up and wait."

Do you have a monthly bandwidth limit where you are?

If you do, do you have some sort or metering program that tells you what you’ve used? If so, great! Comcast doesn’t.

Have you found your bandwidth restriction to get in the way of doing things you want to do on the internet?

Let us know by posting a comment.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Are You Under The Thumb Of A Bandwidth Restriction?

There are several different ways to archive web pages.

You could use ScreenGrab for Firefox. But the problem is that you can text-search anything in an image.

You could use PDF Creator and "print" pages to PDF. This does allow text searching, but the PDF rarely looks anything like the original page and any images present look "off."

What truly works are MHT files. I’ve mentioned this before but have a few extra goodies to make it even easier.

What’s the difference between an MHT and a regular "Save Page As.."? The MHT is an actual single-file archive that contains all the code and images. It’s a great way to archive web pages that contain information you want to save.

Firefox does not have native ability to read or save MHT files, however with UnMHT, you can. It will even read MHTs saved by Internet Explorer, and IE will also read MHTs saved by Firefox. In addition to that, UnMHT has the ability to save all open tabs at once – something that IE 8 doesn’t do.

See video below for details on how it all works.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

How To Easily Archive Web Pages Using MHT Files

Y! Mail doesn’t have either of those options.

A full backup includes not only your inbox, but also the "Sent" folder and any other folders you have. Even if you have a Yahoo! Mail Plus account, the only thing you can ever download is the inbox and nothing else.

With that said, this is how to perform a full Yahoo! Mail backup. The process of how it’s done is long and tedious, but if you care about your mail at all, this is better than nothing.

To note: These instructions are the same whether you’re using Windows 2000, XP, Vista or 7.

1. Download and install FreePOPs

(Yahoo! Mail Plus users can skip this step because you’ve already most likely set up your POP access and use it regularly.)

Quick question answered: Why not YPOPs? Because it times out too much on attempt to connect. It works, but not nearly as well as FreePOPs does.

FreePOPs is easy enough to set up. Download the program, then install it and run it. You’ll see a small green icon indicating it’s running in the taskbar next to the clock.

After that, run the FreePOPs Updater…

…and let it update whatever it needs to. This will include a small Y! Mail update that’s necessary to have.

Remember that FreePOPs must be running in order for the next steps to work. If you see that little green icon in the taskbar, it’s running.

2. Configure a mail client to download your Y! Mail

For this example I’ll be using the Windows Live Mail client.

Below: Click "Add e-mail account" from the left.

Below: Enter your Yahoo! Mail address, Yahoo! Mail password, and your name. Then check "Manually configure server settings for e-mail account."

Below: Set your incoming mail server as POP3. Set the incoming server as localhost (FreePOPs is acting as the localhost.) Set the incoming server port to 2000 (FreePOPs requires this.) Set the authentication method to be clear text. Set the login ID as your full Yahoo! Mail address.

Where people get most confused is with the outgoing server. This is the mail server used to send mail and not receive. FreePOPs has no ability to send mail; it can only receive. Therefore to send mail, should you wish to do so from the mail client, you need to use your ISP’s outgoing mail server. This information will be listed at your ISP’s web site. As for whether it not it requires authentication in order to use, that’s dependent on how the ISP has it configured for access. Some require it while others do not. If it does require a separate username/password to use the outgoing mail server, you would want to check "My outgoing server requires authentication" seen below.

Below: When finished, Windows Live Mail will immediately start downloading mail.

WL Mail is configured by default for new POP accounts to purposely leave copies of the mail on the server. This is good, because it will not remove mail out of the Yahoo! Mail system.

Once all the mail from the inbox is downloaded, proceed to the next step.

3. Backing up the mail out of the other folders in your Yahoo! Mail account

This is the "fun" (as in annoying and tedious) part.

On the local client side, we first create a folder to temporary hold the contents of the inbox.

Right-click the header text, usually titled "Yahoo (YOUR-YAHOO-ID)" and choose to create a new folder, like this:

Title the folder "inbox backup." After that, click the Inbox and highlight all mail by pressing CTRL+A, then drag to the "inbox backup" folder you just created.

It will look something like this when completed:

Go to Yahoo! Mail and do the exact same thing. Create a folder called "inbox backup," then highlight everything in the inbox and drag it there. It will look something like this when completed:

Now that we’ve backed up the inbox on both local and web, we can backup another Y! Mail folder.

For this example, we’ll backup the "Sent" folder.

In Yahoo! Mail, click the "Sent" folder, highlight all mail in there, then drag it to the Yahoo! Mail inbox, like this:

Perform a Send/Receive locally with your mail client to get this mail. It will go to the local inbox and look like this when completed:

Highlight all these mails and drag them to the "Sent Items" folder locally. At this point, now they’re backed up and in their proper location.

Go to your "inbox backup" folder locally, and drag those mails back to the inbox.

Now is the time when you perform your official backup. Use a utility like KLS Mail Backup to back up all the mail in the client before continuing.

In Yahoo! Mail, drag the "Sent" mail you dragged to the inbox back to the "Sent" folder, then drag the "inbox backup" mail back to the inbox.

Perform these steps for each folder you want to backup in Yahoo! Mail.

Quick questions answered

Why do I have to backup the local mail before I move anything back to the inbox in Yahoo! Mail?

If you don’t you’ll get duplicate emails, and that’s annoying to deal with. This is why you backup your local copy before moving anything back to the inbox on the Yahoo! Mail side.

Will the timestamps be kept on each mail downloaded?

Yes.

Why do I have to keep moving around mail to the Y! inbox just to download it via POP?

Because Yahoo! allows mail to be downloaded via POP from the inbox only.

Can I move mail from local to Yahoo! Mail?

No. You can only get mail from Yahoo! to local and not the other way around. That’s the way POP works. The only way to get mail from local to a Yahoo! Mail account is to forward it. Yes, this sucks, but that’s the only way.

If I send a mail via the client, will this sync to my Yahoo! Mail "Sent" folder?

No. If you want that ability you’ll have to use YPOPs, linked above. It has the ability to copy sent mail to your Y! Mail’s "Sent" folder on each send. However I don’t recommend the use of that due to the fact it times out so much. This can prove to be very frustrating in short order.

If I create folders in the client, will they sync with Yahoo! Mail?

No.

Being that FreePOPs supports a ton of different mail besides Yahoo! Mail, could I use it to back up a different account, such as mail.com mail, aim.com mail and so on?

Absolutely. Using the methods above you could backup mail the exact same way with any one or more of these providers.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

How To Perform A Full Yahoo! Mail Backup