AIM is the primary instant messenger I use. Out of all the IM services I’ve used over the years, it is the most reliable. In addition, it runs flawlessly on any operating system. Whether you’re on Windows, Mac or Linux, you can run AIM.

The latest client offering on the Windows platform is AIM 7 Beta 2.

Short review:

It’s awesome. If you use AIM, get it.

Long review:

This is best given in points.

• If you run multiple computers at home, you can run it on each computer at the same time. Previously I was only able to do this with AIM Lite.
• Following in the footsteps of AIM Express, messages from those not on your contact list will prompt a window asking if you want to chat with them or not. Previously this wasn’t there.
• Linked accounts work great. In addition, you can have them all set to invisible on login instead of having to set each individually.
• The interface is a whole lot cleaner and a lot less "cartoony" (something Yahoo and Windows Live suffer from in abundance).
• "Me" tab makes it super-easy to manage blocked users in just two clicks (you had to really dig for this previously).
• Integrates with Facebook and Twitter easily with new "Lifestream" tab.
• Integrates with Delicious and YouTube.
• Runs light and doesn’t eat up memory.
• I tested on my XP laptop and Win 7 PC. Runs great on both.

AIM 7 is full of awesome stuff. If you use AIM, you will really like this client.

Opera is one of those browsers that has a very dedicated community, but pales in usage compared to Firefox and Internet Explorer.

The perks of Opera have pretty much always been the same.

• Best native tab management
• Lightning fast operation in just about every way
• Low memory usage
• A user interface that just makes sense
• More options that are actually usable

I’d dare to say that other browsers "borrow" features from Opera routinely. The Opera browser always seems to come up with something really cool but people really don’t take notice of it. Then after a while, a competing browser will introduce a very similar feature and be lauded as if they invented it.

An example of this is the zoom feature. Opera was the first browser I can remember that got zoom right the first time. Firefox didn’t get that right until version 3 and IE not until 7, both several years after Opera more or less perfected it.

The only thing about Opera that was obvious is that it looked old. The current Opera 9.64 does look a bit antiquated while IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome look snazzy and modern.

Opera 10 on the other hand finally gets a freshened interface. It’s nothing particularly groundbreaking, but considering how often we all use our web browsers, this is a welcome sight to see. There is no part of this browser that says "old" anymore.

Concerning the address bar…

The AwesomeBar in Firefox sucks. Even in FF 3.5 it’s still a drag to use. You will realize why once you use Opera’s address bar. Why? Because Opera never "thinks" when trying to pull up information. The moment you start typing, wham, instant search of your bookmarks with no "thinking". It is nothing short of amazing how fast it is (even on slow PCs!)

Concerning better web integration…

From the Opera 10 page:

If you use a Web mail service as your default mail client, you can tell Opera 10 to do the same. Clicking on e-mail addresses or "Send by Mail" in Opera will open the compose page from your Web mail service provider. The same is true with the Feed reader — you can now also add any RSS/atom feed into your favorite online feed reader from within Opera 10.

This is actually really cool. But unfortunately the selections available do not include what most people use.

For example, when you click on an email address on a web page, this is what happens:

Okay, cool, I can choose a webmail service of my choice, let’s see what choices I have.

That’s it? No Hotmail? No Yahoo Mail? No Gmail? I’m hoping those services will be added in when this browser is out of beta.

Concerning the other stuff…

Opera Turbo

The Opera Turbo feature is an accelerator of sorts that is supposed to increase the speed of browsing when on a slow or choked (i.e. a slow public wi-fi) network. It is enabled by clicking the clock icon at the lower left of the browser. I can’t use it because my network is too fast (oh, darn it all). You can read more about Turbo here.

Resizable search field

At top right next to the address bar you can search Google (just like in Firefox or IE) and now you can adjust the size of it, but I bet you didn’t know that IE and FF can do the exact same thing. Opera makes it easy to spot. The other guys do that hiding-in-plain-sight thing.

Auto-update

Summed up: It’s about time Opera got this.

Would I recommend Opera now?

Opera 10 is the first version of this browser that I would actually recommend. As good as 9 and all the previous versions were, I just couldn’t recommend those. And the main reason for that is sub-par web standards support.

Version 10 on the other hand does have proper web standard support (believe me, that’s important). And as soon as the loose ends are tied up from the beta to the final release, I think this will finally be the one that will get Opera more new users.

Using a beta edition web browser is something most people don’t want to do, especially when it comes to Firefox. Why? Because there’s a risk it may break one or more of the add-ons you have installed in the browser. And it’s a pain to do all that install/uninstall crap because it’s not just for the browser but all your add-ons as well. This can prove to be irritating in short order.

Is there a way to use the new Firefox without actually installing it on your hard drive? Of course there is. You can install it to your USB stick where it will stay self-contained.

Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 does have a PortableApps version, and said honestly this is the absolute best way to try out the browser without messing with your existing 3.0.10 that’s on your hard drive now. Not only can you use it but also test your add-ons to see which will work or bust.

For those that haven’t used PortableApps before, here’s how to use it:

First, find a USB stick you’ve got lying around somewhere. Even if it’s an ancient 128MB stick, that’s fine. Erase/format the stick to free up the space.

Second, after installation, make note of the drive letter assigned to the stick. For most people this is drive E or F.

Third, download PortableApps and install it. When it asks where to install to, use the drive letter assigned to the USB stick.

Note: I suggest downloading the "Platform Only" version of PortableApps, especially if you have a stick with a minimal amount of space on it.

Fourth, download FF 3.5 beta 4 from here. Run the installer (the installation directory should point to the PortableApps directory on your USB stick).

Run the browser from PortableApps afterward, and that’s all there is to it.

Looks like this when finished:

On launch:

Confirmation it is 3.5 beta 4:

To those wondering, no, you cannot run FF 3.0.10 and 3.5 at the same time. That was the first thing I tried. Regardless of that, it was cool I can run this browser without having to actually install it to the hard drive.

Once launched it’s quite speedy even though it’s running off USB.

If you want to try out add-ons, go right ahead; they will be installed to the stick directly.

To those with slower PCs and/or (gasp) USB 1.1, there is the option to not store session information when you first run FF. Otherwise if you’ve got USB 2.0 and a relatively decent PC speed-wise, you can have it store sessions and it runs just fine.

Beta, to the best of my understanding, is a level of completion concerning software development.

There’s the alpha stage, which loosely translates to "this is the very early stage; it’s very rough around the edges".

Then comes the beta stage which usually means "almost everything works but its still somewhat buggy".

After that there may be several beta versions. Beta 1, 2, 3, 3a, etc.

Then comes the release candidate, often abbreviated as RC. The latest downloadable version of Windows 7 at the time of this writing, for example, is an RC. There may be a few versions of that as well. RC 1, RC 2, etc.

Some software titles skip the RC development part altogether and go straight from beta to release.

Speaking of which, the official release is the final version. For example, on my XP computer box I am running Internet Explorer 8. Not 8 beta. Not 8 RC. It’s the official release of 8, period. The long version number is 8.0.6001.18702, like this:

And with Firefox it looks like this:

You get the idea.

Beta to me means unfinished. I have never defined beta as "cool", because anything "cool" is worthless when you’re trying to get things done.

If Apple released an "iPhone 4G beta", the first question by iPhone users would be, "Why would Apple release an unfinished product?"

Upcoming Linux distributions that are in beta stage make it quite clear that everything doesn’t work like it’s supposed to and to expect that. This is perfectly okay because, well, betas are supposed to be buggy.

Generally speaking, the only time beta is misused as "cool" is when it comes to web sites such as Gmail. And in fact this may work against Google, because in all honesty, who wants to subscribe to a service for enterprise use that has "unfinished" tacked right on the title of the product?

Not exactly a confidence booster.

What do you think?

Since upgrading to Windows 7 I was finally about to try out Windows Live Movie Maker Beta.

Summary: I hate it.

This software is awful. I have tried hard to find anything good about this app, but the XP version was just so, so much better than this.

The only saving grace of this app is that it’s in beta, so I am praying when out of beta this software changes drastically.

Here are the problems I’m talking about with Movie Maker Live Beta:

1. Where’s my timeline?

I have no timeline at all and couldn’t find any way to get it.

iMovie tried this too and Mac users griped about it loudly, so I’ll say it loudly as well for Windows users – KEEP THE TIMELINE IN YOUR VIDEO EDITING SOFTWARE. This is required stuff, guys.

2. Ribbon interface will confuse the crap out of people.

I can see the ribbon interface being easy to use in WLMM, but only if it has a complete revamp. In its present state it’s just bad.

When you have a drastic change in the way the software works, it should greet you with, "Hi! Here’s how to use me!" No such instruction exists. And the help section is Spartan and terrible.

Again, yes I know this is beta software.

3. Lack of features.

Three transition effects, six "color change" effects, a text box and a trim feature. That’s it.

And that’s not enough. XP’s old Movie Maker had way more than this.

Windows Live Movie Maker beta gets a huge thumbs down from me.

It’s a good thing this wasn’t included with Windows 7 as it’s definitely not finished. Not by a long shot.

Firefox, while a great browser, is a bit behind the times at the moment because it’s the only major player that doesn’t have a private-browsing mode. I personally think this is an important feature to have because of the enhanced security. Some jokingly call this feature "porn mode", but where I would use it most is for online banking.

So, you’re a big Firefox fan and want to see what’s in store? Firefox 3.5 beta 4 is available now for download right here.

What’s new in 3.5?

Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform. It supports new web technologies and has improved performance.

Private browsing mode. This is what the browser needed most to keep up with the competition.

A new JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey. This adds in better performance. Webmail users (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) in particular should notice a notable speed improvement from this.

And lots of other stuff too.

However..

Be sure to read the Known Issues portion of the link above. It’s important to know things like:

Occasionally Google Mail will fail to respond when creating a new filter, showing advanced search options, or clearing the spam folder. Reloading Google Mail fixes the issue (see bug 477101 and bug 478778)

If you’re a Gmail user, this is a deal-breaker until that’s fixed. Take the time to read over the other known issues as well. If there’s nothing listed that sounds too bad, give FF 3.5 a shot, you might like it.

The best advice I can give for those who want to try out the bleeding-edge version of Firefox is to backup your add-ons first. Either copy the add-on XPIs directly from your associated folder, or alternatively re-download them to a backup folder in case you need to uninstall and go back to FF 3.0.10.

To re-download add-ons manually: Launch Firefox, click Tools then Add-ons, a small window will pop open listing them all. Right-click the add-on you want to re-download and from the small menu that appears click Visit Home Page. This will take you directly to the web site for that add-on where you can download it.

The browser install/uninstall isn’t the bad part, it’s always the add-ons. Having them backed up is mandatory. After all, who uses FF without add-ons anyway?

Being that I hadn’t used Apple’s Safari browser for some time I decided to check it out again. It’s now at version 4 beta. This is the exact version I have:

The install completed easily, however on attempt to load www.google.com (yes, that Google), this happened:

Not good.

Everything with my internet connection was fine as my other browsers worked with no issue. Eventually Safari started working properly. Must be a beta bug thing (it is a beta browser, after all).

When you first start Safari you are presented with “Top Sites”, which is a paneled/skewed thumbnail collection of the sites you visit the most.

The panels are clickable, obviously. And yes, Apple thought enough to put an “Edit” button at the bottom left to edit out sites you don’t want to appear here.

If you’re saying to yourself, “I’ve seen this feature somewhere else..”, you’re right. The Opera browser has had this for a while. Safari’s Top Sites is just a fancy version of Opera’s Speed Dial, with the difference being Safari fills in the panels automatically whereas Opera doesn’t (and if I’m wrong there, feel free to comment and correct me).

Tabs in Safari are placed on the very top of the browser. You will either love or hate this. Users of Safari on OS X give mixed reviews on the above-bar tab placement, so you’ll have to decide for yourself whether you like it or not.

The Flash plugin works fine and I didn’t have to install/reinstall anything from Adobe. Browsing YouTube or any other Flash video-enabled site won’t be a problem.

The menu bar, like in Internet Explorer, is hidden by default and is accessed by pressing ALT. However you will probably never need to do this since everything important is accessed via the sprocket-looking icon.

From that menu is all the necessary stuff, like preferences, Private Browsing and so on.

Speaking of which, Safari’s Private Browsing is nice to have but the problem is that there is absolutely no confirmation to let you know it’s enabled after the OK, other than going back to the menu and looking for the checkmark next to the phrase.

By comparison, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 make it very obvious you are have private-mode enabled.

If you used Safari on Windows before, you’ll immediately notice the browser now uses Windows font smoothing (OpenType/ClearType) by default and not the thicker Apple-style font rendering. Is there a way to enable this, which was arguably its best feature? Yes. Go to Preferences and then Appearance and you’ll find it there:

Compared to previous versions there are now several different types of smoothing to choose from. Windows Standard is the default choice, but if you want the fatter/thicker style, use Medium or Strong. Light (at least to my eyes) tends to be too “fuzzy” looking.

If you have bad eyes, you will really like Safari set on Strong. Here’s an example:

“Windows Standard”

“Strong”

It does looks a bit “smudgy”, but for those with bad eyes this may really make a big difference when reading web pages.

If you use “Strong” in combination with increasing the size of a web page (CTRL and plus-key to enlarge, CTRL and minus key to reduce), the larger the font, the better it looks.

Will this browser switch anyone off of what they normally use?

Save for Mac people who want a Mac look in Windows and people who want a browser that renders thicker fonts, not really.

Safari is a decent browser but is trounced by other offerings. It’s not as extensible as Firefox (FF is king of the add-ons, no question). It doesn’t have as much support as IE 7 (and soon to be 8 once more market share is gained). It doesn’t have any super-whiz-bang features no other browser has like Opera does (such as voice  recognition).

Simply put, Safari is at the back of the pack. But as said above, it is decent. Version 4 brings good new stuff to the table.

Try it out, you may like it.

And by the way, the claim of “world’s fastest web browser” isn’t exactly true. That honor belongs to Lynx. A GUI-based browser cannot outrun a text-based one, period.

For those of you out there that compute in a Red Hat way, both Cent and Fedora have been quite busy as of late.

The deal with the new CentOS is that the contribs repository is back with v5.3. In plain English this means more empowerment to the user (you) to submit and manage packages. There’s obviously more to 5.3, so read up on that if you like. CentOS is still one of the best Linux distros out there. It’s enterprise-style Red Hat Linux’ing is very attractive to many.

Fedora 11 is coming but the beta is available now. According to the Fedora team, a bunch of improvements are coming including cutting boot time, on-demand font and file support, new virtualization features and a lot more.

For those of you who like Red Hat or just the Red Hat style and are wondering which is better for you, the answer is dependent on what you want to do with the OS. If running servers and doing enterprise-style stuff is your thing, CentOS is better. If you want something more tailored to desktop use, Fedora is the better choice. This is not to say Fedora can’t do enterprise or Cent can’t do desktop. Both can do either. But each has their intended purpose.

If one were to ask which is better overall, that’s a really tough call because both are great.

According to a recent news story, the official release of IE 8 will not be in 2008 as once planned. Basically put, Microsoft feels it needs more shakedown and testing before becoming official – and to be honest I am in 100% agreement with this.

I’ve used the beta version of 8 (which obviously isn’t finished since it’s beta), and while the browser is better at some things than 7 it does need some buttoning up. I do sincerely appreciate that Microsoft is basically stating "We want to know every single possible complaint you have about 8 and address it before release."

Some are quick to say to use Firefox or Opera as an alternative instead of IE, however there are those who (believe it or not) like IE and want to stick with it. As long as 8 delivers (primarily with its enhanced security and privacy), it will be a worthy upgrade.

On a personal note, some have written that 8 is slower than 7. In the time I used beta 8 that certainly wasn’t the case. Tabs were faster, rendering was better and simply put, it was just easier to use than 7. I will be happy to ditch 7 for 8 and will do so without hesitation – but not until official release.

[Source: ChannelWeb]

Usually I’m not akin to using beta software but Microsoft has a whole bunch of "Live" branded stuff at ideas.live.com so I figured I’d check it out.

I first tested some of the software on my laptop which happens to be a 1.5GHz Celeron M with 1GB of RAM. Way too slow; I had to revert back to the current-gen Live products because the slowness was agonizing.

On my big box (1.8GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM) the Live beta software runs a whole lot better, and in fact I’m using Windows Live Writer beta to publish this article.

Here’s my quickie reviews of Writer, Mail and Messenger beta.

Before I get into the reviews, I noticed something during the install.

Microsoft, there is NO EXCUSE FOR THIS. None. Shame, shame.

Anyway..

Windows Live Writer Beta

Verdict: Good.

This is better than the current version. No question. The image editing capability that’s in the Technical Preview version (such as "Crop", "Tilt" and so on) is in this. Very cool.

In addition the interface is a whole lot cleaner.

Windows Live Mail Beta

Verdict: Bad.

Those nice little icons at the top indicating what did what are completely gone. It’s nothing but "text buttons" now. Looks like Netscape 1.0. BAD. Usability goes down a huge notch just from that alone.

Switching back to "Default color" does not work.

The calendar is nice and all that, but the software gets "confused" when you try to switch back and forth between mail and the calendar.

Buggy. Not good.

Windows Live Messenger

Verdict: Good.

Notable improvements can be seen immediately. The new mail indicator is much more visible (very nice), the "What’s New" at the bottom allows you to scroll thru your Contacts updates (very cool), the overall look is far cleaner and doesn’t look "toy" like as the current version does.

This is probably the best product of all the betas. If you use Windows Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger), yes you will like this. A lot.

Will I continue to use these?

Not in the beta versions, no. I will wait until the full versions are released.

To note: When you uninstall the betas, it does not revert back to the previous versions of the software. You have to go back to get.live.com and re-download them.

And no, your mail will not disappear. When you reinstall the previous version of mail, your mail store will still be there (mine was).

The last time I used IE 8 I had to stop using it because it was reported that it broke Windows Update. But being that I just reinstalled XP on my older Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop I decided to give IE 8 a go to see what had been improved since it’s in Beta 2.

My particular laptop was a good test bed for this because it’s an older machine with a 1.5GHz Celeron M with 1GB of RAM, and testing newer software on older hardware is a good test to see if performance has improved or not. Continued

Since the release of Mozilla Firefox 3 there have been issues with the Adobe Flash player (currently at release 9), particularly with Flash video. What happens is that you’ll attempt to watch a video (say on YouTube) and the first 2 seconds will play and then stop. And you’re left with no choice but to restart the browser and sometimes that doesn’t even work.

There is a Flash 10 beta available right now if you want to use it. It’s recently been updated for both Windows and Mac. Personally speaking I won’t be using it because all I have to do is that if Flash bugs up on me I just go into Internet Explorer 7 and everything is okey-dokey. I figure if I want to view a Flash video that bad, going to another browser just for that video doesn’t bother me.

So if you’re a Firefox user and have been experiencing that maddening 2-second-and-stop issue, it’s not your fault. When version 10 of the Adobe Player is officially released it should resolve that issue.

The Xbox rules the school largely in part because of how easy it is to connect to the internet and hook up to Xbox Live.

The Live service is about to get more interesting because of a service called “Community Games.” It’s in beta right now and only the Cool Kids Club XNA Creators Club Online can participate in it for now.

People who participate in this community system will be able to create games and rate the work of others. The ones voted best appear on the Live system.

If this works for Microsoft (and they’ve been hitting many home runs in the gaming console department by the way,) this could give WiiWare a run for the money.