Wheelz Online

I’m sure if any of you are techy then you will have knows about Microsofts plans for IE8. In a nutshell, what they decided they were going to do was to have IE8 display, by default, the same as IE7 and if you wanted it to be displayed in IE8 mode you had to use a meta switch. This pissed off most of the web development community as it seemed that by default we would all be stuck in web circa 2007 unless we coded a switch in.

Well now it appears that common sense has prevailed in Redmond and now unless you specify otherwise IE8 will render pages using the IE8 standards mode. For more information check out this post on the IE site

Finally today I have to put up this advert I saw online. It gave me a laugh as its probably totally true in reality.

The two things which I connect to my PC which are most important to me are my PocketPC phone and my iPod.  When I installed Vista on my PC I was confussed as I thought that I hadn’t installed it correctly or missed a step or something because I couldn’t get either of my items to be noticed by Vista - Hence, no updating my ipod with my latest music and my Pocket PC was useless as I couldn’t sync the calender and contacts etc.

Fast forward to this morning and both issues are made a little clearer to me.  Firstly, on reading the headlines it turns out that iTunes is not compatible with Vista and has issues with purchased music and also syncing with the iPod; an update will be available “within weeks”.  Great so no new music for me until Apple pull their finger out.  I mean, the Beta has only been available for what?  a year or so???

Secondly and this is aimed squarly at M$.  when I installed Vista there was an app in the control panel called Windows Mobile Centre.  From reading the Microsoft website this is the update to Activsync.  But I couldn’t get my phone to work - no way.   So again, I wake up this morning and windows wants to download and install ‘updates’.  Want to know what the update was?  Well it was the setup.exe file for the above mentioned Windows Mobile Centre.

Why do Microsoft insist on selling up products which aren’t finished?   Now onto the good news.  Lots more hardware and software drivers I need are becoming available, so Vista is at least more stable than it was when I initially installed it.  I still recommend to my clients and friends to wait for a few months before thinking about upgrading.

So, last week I opened my quaterly package from Microsoft which contained Vista Business and Office 2007.  I’ve been playing with Vista Beta 2 for months now, so I thought I had it sorted.  How much different could it be, it seemed that Beta 2 was pretty stable and had most of the final bits on it - or so I thought.

Friday night was spent installing the upgrade from XP.  After 3 hours of trying, my first impression is “Vista sucks”.  It seems that if anything crashed whilst you were logged in, you couldn’t then log out and shut down.  So I was forced to on more than one occasion kill the machine and re-boot.  By 11pm I’d had enough and went to bed.

Saturday morning I approached it with a new view.  I imediatly re-installed the upgrade, which in this edition won’t let you perform a clean install, rather you have to install it over a copy of XP.  But it was looking better than Friday night.  The main problem I found was that too many bits of my hardware still don’t have Vista drivers ready for them, so I spent most of the morning realising that my MoBo maker (Asus) had no drivers for Vista, Creative had only Beta Drivers for Vista and so on.

The final thing I want to moan about today is Windows Live Messenger.  It doesn’t work!!!  8.1 crashes your machine and then you get the problems mentioned earlier.  So at the moment, I don’t have Messenger on my machine to use.

I can see there are some good reasons to upgrade to Vista, the sidebar for one is very useful, but until they get the driver issues sorted it won’t be having a place on my main PC.

Finally, Microsoft Office 2007 is finished.  This week the code for the suite of products was released to manufacturers ready for going on sale to businesses at the end of November.  My Thoughts?  I’ve been using Office 2007 since the Beta 1 build earlier this year and I like it.  It is radically different to the previous versions in my view, which in some ways makes it easier to use.  For example the toolbars are now replaced by ‘ribbons’ across the top of the work area.  These are context sensitive so depending on what you are working on, the ribbon shows you the buttons and tools which are most relative to your activity.  Also they have been grouped into a more familiar set of options.  I’m excited to get my hands on it when its released to the public along with Vista.  Definatly a feather in the cap of Microsoft.

Along with this, Windows Vista is also due to be released to manufacturers this week which is also good news.  The wait is almost over.

OK, so we have all been waiting for years for Windows Vista to be released, and while we all know that it is ’supposed’ to be secure and better for us, we are all thinking “Is it going to look as cool as Apple’s OSX?” From what i’ve read and seen about it I think It will be a huge visual imprtovement on what us PC folk have been used to so I’m waiting for next year somtime for its release with anticipation.

But with all the hastle of trying to ship it when they said so, you would think thats what they would concentrate on. But they have also sent out a “Vista Industrial Design Toolkit” to a ton of PC Manufacturers on how to build a ‘pretty looking’ box for vista to sit in. from an article on the subject

… contains a whole host of suggestions about how to build a PC that will fit with the look and style of Windows Vista

Now lets be honest about this, off the shelf PC’s have come a long way since the beige boxes of 10 years ago, but they are still pretty dull. But why do Microsoft think that its their responsibility to make sure that the PC’s of the future are nice looking and “want PCs to be objects of pure desire”. I think they have stumbled upon the fact that an awful lot of people are into the mac’s because they look cool compared to a PC. But lets be honest, for a techie, even a novice one at that, its not hard to change the box on your computer to something you like rather than a black case, or a silver one.

So is this another sign that Microsoft is starting to get twitchy over Apples encroaching slice of the computer market? I think so

You can read the full article on ars technica

I read alot of columns and forums on the web around technology, and one name comes up time and again called Dvorak. Most people seem to think he talks out of his arse, but I hadn’t read any of his articles and so didn’t want to pass judgement on him. That all changed yesterday when I read an article he wrote called ‘Why CSS Bugs Me‘ Essentially what he goes on about is that CSS is breaking the web because you can’t display things cross browser using CSS. From his article

The real problem is that no two browsers—let alone no two versions of any one browser—interpret CSS the same way! The Microsoft browser interprets a style sheet one way, Firefox interprets it another way, and Opera a third way. Can someone explain to me exactly what kind of “standard” CSS is, anyway?

From reading the article, it appears to me that rather than saying that CSS is rubish and is making the web ‘fall apart’ what he actually manages to do is to show that he doesn’t actually understand CSS in the real world. His central argument is that CSS doesn’t work in different browsers identically. This is not a fault of CSS, this is the way that each agent interprets style sheets. He has a simplistic view of how to use CSS. Before he goes off about why a technology is rubbish perhaps he should do more research.