09/10/2008 by Gavin.

Does Windows Cloud equal Windows Strata? | Beyond Binary - A blog by Ina Fried - CNET News

Windows Strata eh?   I’m actually looking forward to see what MS bring out.  I believe that it doesn’t have to be one or the other when it comes to ‘cloud’ computing and that a great mix of desktop and cloud apps is the way to go to ensure productivity whatever your circumstances.

My two favourite cloud apps are  Evernote and Live Mesh.  I use Evernote constantly for taking notes or photos with which I can access on any net enabled device I own.  Live Mesh keeps all my work docs accessible wherever and whenever, with sync’d local copies of files all nicely backed up online.

Posted in Cloud computing | Print | 1 Comment »

01/10/2008 by Gavin.

‘Windows Cloud’ to descend this month, says Ballmer • The Register

A new OS from Microsoft!  Surely this will be an extention to  Live Mesh?

Posted in Cloud computing, Microsoft | Print | 1 Comment »

12/09/2008 by Gavin.

Working with Office files, especially presentations can sometimes result in bloated file sizes.  I’ve seen it with co-workers when working on presentations, the file size increases until in one extreme case I was sent a 99Mb Powerpoint presentation.  One option is of course to use Zip or Rar compression.  however, both these approaches mean uncompressing the file before each use or edit.

NXPowerLite  http://www.nxpowerlite.com works on Microsoft Office files from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint by compressing their content without changing the file format.  This is a terrific thing to have for the reasons given above.

The program lists several different levels of compression -  Normal, Extra (greater compression, lower quality), High Quality (less compression, higher quality), Mobile Device, and Custom.  I must admit I didn’t notice much difference in end quality (which is a good thing!) but of course some images may well degrade with compression.

I tried it with that 99Mb powerpoint presentation and it got it down to 3Mb!  Another presentation with general text, embedded spreadsheet and photos went down from 5Mb to 768Kb at high quality.  Yes you could do all this manually but it takes literally seconds for the program to do it’s stuff!

Where this comes into its own of course is when having to work ‘in the cloud’ or via email where bandwidth might still be an issue, on a 3G or PRS connection.

There is a trial version available on the website and I can recommend it as a very useful utility if you work a lot with Office Documents.

Posted in Utilities, Cloud computing, Microsoft | Print | 1 Comment »

02/09/2008 by Gavin.

I’ve been using Google’s new Chrome web browser for half an hour now, and I already feel right at home. Downloading and installing Chrome was quick and painless - a welcome contrast to the chaos and downloading hassles accompanying the launch of Mozilla’s Firefox 3.0 browser in July.

Within just a couple of minutes, Chrome had hoovered up hundreds of Firefox bookmarks, saved passwords and my recent browsing history. This gives a pretty seamless transition to Chrome - with the exception of my RSS feeds, which weren’t imported automatically and aren’t supported in this 0.2 Beta version of Chrome.

First impressions

Chrome is so unobtrusive it almost isn’t even there - a clear design choice by Google, which has just a tiny, semi-transparent logo above the tabs, running along the top of the screen. There’s no status bar, although another semi-transparent tab appears at the bottom of the screen showing the status of loading pages.

Each tab has its own small forward, backward, reload and new tab buttons, along with a couple of menu items and the address bar - or Omnibar if you speak Google. The tabs can be ‘ripped’ to the desktop to form new windows just by drag-and-dropping - another neat touch.

The Omnibar is much more than just a place for typing URLs. Most importantly, it doubles as a search box: type search terms and hit Enter to be taken to your local Google website. It autocompletes with a level of smarts that rivals (if not exceeds) Firefox’s new Awesome bar, picking out previously visited sites intelligently and extremely quickly.

Speed freak

You want quick? You got it. Chrome feels nippier than Firefox all round, as well it should considering the demands it places on your computer. With each Chrome tab forming a separate process, you quickly build up a list of ‘chrome.exe’s in your Windows Task Manager (Linux and Mac versions coming soon, apparently). This means that one bad tab can’t crash your whole surfing session but I think I’ll have to keep a sharp eye on how many tabs I have open, especially when working on less powerful machines like my Fujitsu P1610.

Chrome munches through media sites with ease, streaming music and video and handling Flash very smoothly. PDFs open so suddenly that you might not even realise you’re using them. Opening a new tab brings up not your home page (although you can switch to that) but a thumbnail view of your nine most visited sites, plus recent bookmarks and a box to search your history. It loads almost instantly but is visually cluttered and doesn’t really do anything that the Omnibox and a good selection of bookmarks can’t handle.

And now the bad news

There are no plug ins for Chrome just yet so it does feel like a very stripped-down, Google-heavy environment right now.

But these are typical issues for a new version of any browser, let alone one that has been built from scratch. Overall, my first impression of Chrome is 9/10 for speed, 8/10 for ease of use and 7/10 for stability. And those figures should have Microsoft and Mozilla very, very worried.

Posted in Google, Cloud computing | Print | 1 Comment »

29/08/2008 by Gavin.

Live Mesh

There is an update to Live Mesh available.  Mainly seems to be reliability issues but a key change is the ability to sync file sizes greater than 2Gb.  Just need that 50Gb online storage space now!

Posted in Cloud computing | Print | No Comments »

14/08/2008 by Gavin.

Live Mesh : The potential of Live Mesh is limitless…

I’ve been using Microsoft’s Live Mesh for over 2 months now and I love it.  I have three PCs I use to work on.  My home desktop, my Toshiba M700 tablet PC, and my small and light Fujitsu P1610.  Previously to sync all my documents I used an SD card and Synctoy.

This meant remembering to run Synctoy and I was always paranoid of syncing an older file.  Live mesh means my documents are all kept in Sync ‘in the cloud’, my devices are always up to date without having to remember which machine has the  SD card.

Another great bonus is I can access documents from any Web Browser, and yes, that means document access from the iPhone and Windows Mobile.  Access to all your docs from anywhere, all backed up online.  Lovely!

Very excited watching Live Mesh develop further.

Posted in Cloud computing, Live | Print | 1 Comment »