My Comprehensive Look at IE8 Beta 2
Wednesday, August 27 2008 by Brandon LeBlanc - 0 comments
I published a comprehensive look at IE8 Beta 2 today over on the Windows Experience Blog highlighting all the new features IE8 users will enjoy such as Accelerators (previously called Activities), Web Slices, and Tab Groups. Check out my post. It’s probably one of my longest posts to-date but I really wanted to be sure I cover all the good stuff for the Beta 2 release.
Ed Bott published his comprehensive look at IE8 Beta 2 as well which I also recommend reading. If you don’t want to read mine, definitely read his. I am also looking forward to Paul Thurrott’s take on IE8 later today.
Tags: internet-explorer, internet-explorer-8, ie8, beta, beta-2, windows-experience-blog, ed-bott
Mozilla’s Ubiquity and IE8 – Hold on a second!
Tuesday, August 26 2008 by Brandon LeBlanc - 2 comments
The talk of the “town” tonight is Mozilla’s neat new Firefox add-on called Ubiquity. This add-on is designed to “connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily” – according to Mozilla. Robert Scoble posted about Ubiquity tonight – saying that this (Ubiquity) is the reason why he won’t be using IE8.
Wait a second – hold up!
If you’ve taken a look at IE8 Beta 1 you would have noticed that it has a feature very similar to this new Firefox add-on called “Activities”. You can read about Activities from a developer’s stand point here on the Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit. IE Program Manager Jane Kim also discusses Activities as well as Web Slices (another important IE8 feature) here in this blog post too. Essentially developers can write Activities for IE8 that can do a variety of things from mapping a address on a webpage to looking up definitions on Encarta, to even doing min searches on the web. The fact of the matter is that these Activities in IE8 allow users to “do common Web tasks more quickly and easily” as Mozilla says about their Ubiquity. Granted, these Activities aren’t anything special in regards to “new user interfaces” but certainly do their job in giving me what I need to perform web tasks quicker and easier than before. To use Activities, users can right click on pieces of information on websites to access the Activities. In Mozilla’s Ubiquity you have to hit ctrl + space (on Windows) to activate a screen where you can type “commands” to get quick information you want. But simply right-clicking and choosing a Activity in IE8 works pretty good too. Like Scoble says of Ubiquity – “It’s sort of like search. But more powerful.” I imagine more complex and interesting Activities will be designed by developers for IE8 as IE8 hits Beta 2. I’m certainly excited. And this is certainly a feature folks should take notice of.
Scoble says Microsoft doesn’t care about “passionates” anymore and cares more about the people who read USA Today. Bullshit. IE8’s Activities are proof Microsoft cares about the “passionates” – people passionate about the Internet according to Scoble’s definition. And I believe IE8’s Activities has much more potential to take those “non-passionate” and make them passionate about using the web.
So yes – Microsoft has indeed put something like Ubiquity into IE8 and it’s been there for months (since MIX08) with Beta 1.
I am totally prepared for folks to come here and tell me I am wrong and that IE8’s Activity feature is nothing like Mozilla’s Ubiquity. That’s fine. If you’re going to tell me I’m wrong don’t give me that “Microsoft doesn’t care” garbage. I think having Activities in IE8 alone is proof Microsoft knows those who are passionate about the Internet need a better way to do web tasks easier and quicker than what is available today. IE8’s Activities may not be some full-on uber-browser-mashup utility like Ubiquity is suppose to be but there seems to be functionality that is shared amongst the two which I think is worth calling out.
Tags: mozilla, firefox, ubiquity, microsoft, internet, web-browsing, ie8, internet-explorer, internet-explorer-8, web-slices, activities
New Theme: Pardon the dust…
Sunday, August 24 2008 by Brandon LeBlanc - 8 comments
I spent most of tonight deploying a new theme that brings back some history. A while ago I had a header very similar to the one I have now with photos that represent aspects of “me”. Those aspects range from Windows to my favorite drink – Dr. Pepper. I also went with a color scheme of blues and grays. Blue seems to be one of my favorite colors.
I developed the theme under IE7, IE8 and Firefox 3. In IE8 – I developed under IE8’s new “standards mode”. However my new theme looks not so hot in Firefox 3. I am not sure why. Any suggestions or pointers would be highly appreciated.
With me sporting a new theme here on this blog – I guess I made my decision that I’m staying here instead of heading to Windows Live Spaces.
Tags: blog, theme, firefox-3, mozilla, internet-explorer-7, internet-explorer-8, ie8, standards, graffiti, blogging
Move blog to Windows Live Spaces?
Saturday, August 23 2008 by Brandon LeBlanc - 7 comments
It’s been a while since I’ve posted. I’ve been really busy pumping awesome content into the Windows Experience Blog. Haven’t had much time to post here. I am thinking about moving my blog back to Windows Live Spaces. Why? Simple. It gives me one less thing to worry about. I am running this blog on its own dedicated Windows Server 2008 box which I maintain. If I were to move to Windows Live Spaces, I wouldn’t have to worry about maintaining my own server. Also: Windows Live is becoming a central point for my day to day activities. I check my What’s New feed every few hours throughout the day to see what my friends are up to on Windows Live. I am also looking to post photos there as well. It just seems like Windows Live can be a all-in-one spot for my personal online needs.
There are a few problems with this however.
Windows Live Spaces doesn’t support a lot of customizability (is that a word?). For example: Photosynth just went public. However in Windows Live Spaces I won’t be able to embed any Synths I create on Photosynth. Also: Windows Live Spaces is pretty limited in regards to themes. But I can add a custom HTML header that should look fine.
And will people take my opinions and things I write about on my blog if it were on Windows Live Spaces seriously? Am I not a “serious blogger” if I use Windows Live Spaces as my blogging platform? Unfortunately I’ve noticed that folks tend to avoid blogs on Windows Live Spaces. It seems if you’re not on a well established blog platform like WordPress – its hard to take you seriously as a blogger.
A lot of folks I know have a personal blog and a work-related blog. I’d like to keep with the same mentality. Ed Bott has his work-related blog at ZDNet and his own personal blog on his own domain. What I’d do is simply direct www.brandonleblanc.com to my Windows Live Space. And for RSS I will just redirect the feed in FeedBurner and everyone who’s subscribed to the feed won’t know the difference.
Going forward my priority will continue to be the Windows Experience Blog. However its nice to have a place to go to talk about opinions and discuss topics that isn’t necessarily appropriate for the Windows Experience Blog. I definitely want to keep my personal blog going.
What do you think?
Note: Me suggesting I move Windows Live Spaces has nothing to do with Graffiti as a blog platform or any issues I’ve had with it. Telligent has created a very interesting new platform with a lot of potential and I strongly recommend it to other bloggers. My goal here is simply looking to consolidate some of the “online properties” I am involved with and try to bring them all into a more central point.
Tags: blogging, windows-live, windows-live-spaces
What Apple Should Have Done with MobileMe
Sunday, August 03 2008 by Brandon LeBlanc - 4 comments
In case you haven’t heard – Apple’s MobileMe service has experienced nothing but massive issues since the day it went (er supposedly went…) live. MobileMe is the replacement to Apple’s .Mac service and is a all-in-one place for email, calendar, photos, online storage etc. MobileMe has been plagued with downtime, shoddy email service, and significant reliability issues. Walt Mossberg says Apple’s MobileMe is far too flawed to even be reliable. Robert Scoble has posted today about a new problem after finding his events wiped from his Outlook calendar thanks to MobileMe. Matter a fact, Scoble is warning users to stay away from MobileMe:
“Do not buy Mobile Me. Do not install it. Be warned.”
I’ve read Scoble for a long time (as many others have of course) but when he posts a warning such as this about a product – that’s really bad.
The rest of the blogosphere has nicknamed MobileMe “FailMe”.
Of course people who read me are going to assume because I’m “Pro-Microsoft” I’m going to use this and go off on some sort of rant about how Apple sucks etc.
Nope.
Instead, I am going to write about what I think Apple should have done since Day 1 for MobileMe to avoid this whole mess.
It’s simple: Apple should have launched MobileMe as a BETA service first. Instead, Apple arrogantly chose to launch the service (I use the word “launch” loosely) full-on at the same time completely closing down their already existing .Mac service. Apple thought everything would turn out super-awesome. Of course the .Mac customers were automatically thrown into MobileMe. Now having .Mac users ported into MobileMe would have been fine if MobileMe actually worked but it didn’t. Apple should have kept the .Mac service alive and kicking while they beta tested MobileMe separately so they can make fixes and tweaks to the service so when they do officially “launch” MobileMe, it wouldn’t be such a disaster. I find it hard to believe Apple, being as secret as they are, gets enough feedback simply by internal testing alone. I mean you would assume significant internal testing of MobileMe occurred and look what happened? Apple simply didn’t have enough testing done on MobileMe. That’s why I believe the problems happening now are happening. Testing a web service release is very important.
Anyway, I wish Apple best of luck with MobileMe. It sucks to see them struggling with it. I have several friends who are really upset right now at Apple because of MobileMe and I don’t blame them. However there are quite a few free services from lots of other people that offer quite a bit of what MobileMe offers so I list off several alternatives for my friends to explore. I imagine some folks will be asking for their money back if they’ve actually chosen to pay for the service rather than the 30 day trial.
Tags: apple, mobileme, mac, web-services, calendar, beta, opinion
Apple’s 3G iPhone Launch Problems: Unacceptable
Saturday, July 12 2008 by Brandon LeBlanc - 12 comments
Robert Scoble says the 3G iPhone is “worth the hell”…
“After playing with it today I’ve got to agree. This is the company that can give you a crappy camera. No video. Charge you more than other devices. Make you wait hours in line. Take hours to get your credit card approved, your iPhones activated. And, at the end of it all, make you feel good.”
I don’t have a iPhone currently so I can’t say if today’s issues and all that was worth what people went through to get it. However what I don’t like about Scoble’s post is he implies (and forgive me if this isn’t the case – it just came off that way) that its ok for Apple to have the kind of issues they had today. It is absolutely unacceptable on such a high profile launch of a product for Apple to have had the massive problems they did. Customers should not think its ok to wait in line up to 4 or 5 hours for a product only to have something as important as activation fail. Customers today essentially went in and bought very expensive bricks. That is NOT ok.
Putting this into perspective – had this been some Microsoft product that experienced such massive issues on a launch day – the blogosphere (and customers) would have ripped them to shreds. Hell, even Google couldn’t get away with doing some half-assed launch of a highly anticipated product. Imagine if Google launches its first Android device and that device somehow has massive issues on launch day?
For people to say its ok for Apple to have these kinds of problems seen with today’s 3G iPhone launch sends the wrong message to companies like Apple and others. It’s not ok to put customers through “hell” to get a product. I don’t care how pretty and awesome the product is. We can’t be push-overs to these kinds of things. As customers we should expect more from Apple.
Congratulations Apple for f**king up the 3G iPhone launch.
Tags: launch, product-launch, apple, iphone, 3g-iphone, at-t, customers, sales
FeedDemon still having problems?
Wednesday, July 09 2008 by Brandon LeBlanc - 1 comments
A few weeks ago I posted about my displeasure in discovering that all my http://blogs.msdn.com feeds suddenly stopped working. I highlighted the fact that for weeks I had not known these feeds weren’t updated and was pretty frustrated with FeedDemon simply because there was no way of me knowing which feeds weren’t updating etc. Nick Bradbury left a comment and let me know Newsgator was working on the issue with Microsoft and hoped to have it cleared up soon. It did get cleared up… I think.
Today at the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit here in Seattle, I met up with Kip Kniskern from LiveSide (who is the one who got to me go to FeedDemon way back when and uses FeedDemon just like me) and discovered Kip had something odd happen yesterday that also happened to me. Suddenly tons of our feeds showed tons of updates – as if a block was released on these feeds. These feeds were NOT feeds from http://blogs.msdn.com and were feeds from all sorts of sources – pretty much across the board.
Ok so what’s the deal here? How the hell am I suppose to know which feeds are updating and which ones aren’t? How the hell am I suppose to depend on FeedDemon to stay up to date with RSS feeds?
Tweaking my Theme
Friday, July 04 2008 by Brandon LeBlanc - 1 comments
I’m tweaking my theme today. I am going for a more simple and whiter (brighter) look. I’d like to utilize less dark colors and go a little lighter. Any feedback/thoughts/suggestions would be welcome!
Upgrading to Graffiti 1.1 Worst Blog Upgrade Experience Ever
Thursday, July 03 2008 by Brandon LeBlanc - 6 comments
I just finished upgrading to Graffiti 1.1 which was probably the worst upgrade experience for a new version of a blog platform I’ve seen to-date. I came into using Graffiti from being a WordPress user. I was used to the easy upgrades WordPress offers. However this is not the case with Graffiti. To upgrade your blog with Graffiti you have to migrate your database which is a complete mess in itself – mainly due to poor documentation. The upgrade instructions make it look really easy and their announcement post didn’t include much (note someone had to leave a comment in their 1.1 release announcement post to include the upgrade instructions). Things go whacky when you are required to migrate your database. I read and re-read what I was suppose to do but simply could not get my database to “migrate” using the migration tool included with the Graffiti 1.1 release. Why the heck isn’t this automated in the backend where I go to some upgrade page where it updates my site for the new release? WordPress does this with their releases. After a few hours of troubleshooting, as you can see I am now back online. But several parts of my theme are borked and my RSS feed looks to be busted as well. To top things off my site runs like crap. Everything is extremely slow compared to the 1.01 was release I was running previously. The Control Panel is the most noticeable with performance degradation over the previous release. Blog posts seem to load slower etc. No, I’m not seeing a increase in traffic to my site either. I am hoping to resolve some of the outstanding issues with the site by tonight.
I’m frustrated because I’m not a very technical person. I never faced these issues with WordPress. When it tells me my database won’t migrate and throws a bunch of code at me it frustrates me because I have no idea (other than by trial and error) how to fix it. When my RSS feed simply stops working I have no idea what to do to make it work again.
I am comparing Graffiti with my experiences with WordPress because my hope is Graffiti will become the best ASP.NET blogging platform to go head-to-head with WordPress (which runs on PHP). I’m just not sure at this point if Graffiti will ever be that and from what I gather Graffiti’s primary focus isn’t really blogging anyway. Its really suppose to be a content management system for websites with blogging features. I’ve not gotten any indication from Telligent they want to focus on making Graffiti a excellent blogging platform and go head-to-head with WordPress. So I am now faced with the question of whether I should continue to stay with Graffiti at all? Will Graffiti be something for more technical ASP.NET folks to manage websites and content on websites rather than a worthy blogging platform competitor to the likes of WordPress? Will is remain something for the more technical folks versus how WordPress accommodates the lesser-technical peoples such as myself?
I apologize for the rant.
UPDATE: RSS seems to be working. Unfortunately it may cause dupes of posts to appear (it did for me in FeedDemon). At least it is working now. Also: I tweaked my theme and I believe I corrected some of the wonkiness.
Tags: telligent, graffiti, graffiti-1-1, update, upgrade, technical, code, rss, troubleshooting, problems, migration, database, asp-net, blogging
Graffiti 1.1 Released
Wednesday, July 02 2008 by Brandon LeBlanc - 2 comments
Telligent has released Graffiti 1.1 to the Web. You can download it here. I’ll be upgrading my blog here to Graffiti 1.1 hopefully this evening. If you’ve already done the upgrade I’d love to hear how it went.
Tags: telligent, graffiti, graffiti-1-1, blogging, platform, release