I’m Just Being Manan

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Michael Jackson sure had a lot of a fans … many among the softies too, so much so that the guys in paying tribute to Jacko had provided MJ’s Thriller video as a free download (for some time), Bing Taxis were rolled on the streets & now MSN has a slick Deep Zoom of MJ’s life. Joystiq reported that the Xbox Live store was giving away the Thriller video for free, the offer lasted for about a day, which was really sad, they could’ve at least let be there for a week. Once the video give-away was done, All Things D was tipped about a cab(s) that had “We will miss you Michael” on top, this was sponsored by bing, NBC & another company. Here’s the image:

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The people who review software should realize that a browser is something that will be used by common users, for them the javascript rendering engine or ACID tests are as good as the number of memory addresses that can be accessed by the processor. Which means they don’t give a squat & they shouldn’t be made to give a squat! What matters is not how fast the page loads in a test but how well the browser does when it comes to user experience. But I guess the quickest way to give a verdict without actually spending time on something is use benchmarking tools. Page load times are a part of it but aren’t the make or break for a browser. I was a Firefox user till I realized that it had caused me enough mental trauma by freezing my whole machine for opening a tab or by taking more than 2 whole minutes to become usable on start, not to forget the insane amounts of RAM it consumed. Of course there are those who haven’t faced it, I haven’t seen my Windows BSoD either. I switched to IE 8 and loved it till it caused me my Facebook vanity URL. Currently I’m on Safari & Chrome. So here’s my take on all these browsers from a user’s perspective & the perfect browser.

Incase you haven’t come across it, I listed some apparent-to-the-eye new features in office 2010. What I didn’t know then was for how long could one use the Tech Preview version. About 3 days before the 30-day evaluation period got over every time I ran an Office 2010 program there was a notification saying that the version is not activated & I need to do so. Screen shot:

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Apple re-announced the iPhone 3.0 at WWDC ‘09 & it became available today, I usually don’t go for the gold-rush & am rather cool with waiting for a day or 2 before updating something, I for some reason decided to update dad’s iPhone to 3.0 immediately on release. The download was successful only to be greeted with this:

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If you watch a lot of Youtube videos on a rather slow internet connection & would prefer to download the video for peaceful viewing later or for some reason you’d prefer NOT to watch the Youtube video in the browser. Maybe, you’re on Last.FM & would want to flaunt the album art of your favorite tracks as a wallpaper. How about even downloading songs via Last.FM? Want to know what’s your most used software? Here are some interesting & cool apps for your desktop, these include:

1. Youtube Downloader
2. Sprink (WPF based Youtube viewer)
3. Last.FM Downloader
4. Last.FM Wallpaper Generator
5. Wakoopa

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Here’s a list of add-ons to include Bing as your search provider in your browsers & Win7. Though the rollout is not complete in all countries, it would be better you change your country preferences to US in order to experience the Bing. This guide collates how to add Bing in:

• Windows 7 Explorer (Search Connector)
• Windows 7 Start Menu Search
• IE (and Bing Slices for IE)
• Firefox
• Chrome

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Microsoft rolled out it’s brand new search engine, named ‘Bing’ now not getting into my thoughts on the name, I liked the video preview that was shown at the ‘All Things D’ conference. Like everyone else, I too was excited on seeing the video & waited for the public release. It happened today. And I’m not happy. I’m disappointed. A bit. For starters, a bit of ego searching for my name didn’t show my awesome blog on the first page, unlike that other search engine. If that wasn’t sad enough, Bing’s homepage for India is different … make that very different from that of US. Needless to say, the US page is the new Bing & shows better results.

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Though I had a feeling that 2010 wasn’t going to be an upgrade to Office like what Windows 7 is to the Windows family. Having said that, Office 2010 Technical Preview does show some promising upgrades. In between giving my exams I did find some time to play around with the leaked version of Office 2010 & found some improvements over Office 2007. One of the biggest additions to Office 2010 will be it’s online collaboration capabilities I wrote about & we have some proof of that in the current Preview build. Here are some noticeable improvements in the technical Preview build:

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