Gnome, Internet Explorer 7, EasyUbuntu and more

1. Internet Explorer 7

   

   I downloaded IE7 last Thursday evening, and have been using it at home since then. My first impressions were "Wow, they actually have changed a good bit", but I soon realised that just because everything has changed it doesn't mean that anything is different. On the plus side, we have
   

   
   
   1. Good RSS Support
   2. Tabs, very nicely done
   3. A nice search box in the top right
   4. An impressive page zoom feature
   5. (currently) Impressive security model
   6. Excellent distinction between first page and home page. The first page, is what you see when you load it the first time, it explains to you whats new, whats better, then allows you to configure some things such as your homepage etc.

   It's a nice tribute to firefox that Microsoft went out and assembled a large team of engineers to put all this together, it shows precisely what Mozilla achieved, they got the most successful software company the world has ever seen, and forced them to improve a product simply by bettering it. So whats bad about IE 7?

   1. The CSS is more broken than ever, although apparently this a good sign because it means they are at least tinkering with it. I noticed this straight away, when I visited the Minds homepage. (Note, the browser also messes up msnbc.com and other sites, so its not just proper XHTML/CSS that its struggling with.)
   2. The new look is horrible. They have hidden the menu bar by default, which seems ludicrous.
   3. The Javascript engine behaves terribly when you visit a page with a JS-Error on it.

   Thats all I think its fair to say at the moment, the version I have crashes, but its not a release candidate so that should be expected. It's a massive step forward for I.E, and hopefully they will sort out the CSS box model during this development cycle. For me, it will be tough to pull myself away from firefox mainly because there are so many user created extensions that I use that Microsoft won't be developing. For Example: Web Developer, PDF Notify, Adblock, Mouse Gestures, SpellChecker, and a few others. None the less, its great to see Internet Explorer improving for the first time in a long time.

   If your interested, download IE7 from here (requires genuine windows, installation is 5 minutes long and requires reboot)

2. The New Gnome

   There has been a lot of working coming out of Novell on different aspects of the Gnome desktop. I said to Aidan a while back that Windows Vista was gonna kick ass on the desktop with all its eye candy, and fancy features. Robert Scoble has been getting fairly aroused talking about them, you can watch the videos on Manos blog. Aidan replied to me about a week later (as he always does with heys), and sent me a link to the recent videos sent from the Novell Technology Preview. In fairness to Aidan, and to Novell, they have equalled Vista for eye candy. I have my suspicions about when I will actually see this stuff running on my desktop, but that said I am not confident I'll be running Vista anytime soon either.

   Also coming from Novell recently have been mockups of what I think should be called Gnome 3. And these all look very impressive to me. You can view the photoset on Flickr.

3. Easy Ubuntu

   A while back I posted one "all singing all dancing" command which was supposed to get your Ubuntu install up and running as a home desktop. The problem with this command was that it still required you to open a terminal. Easy Ubuntu is the answer to that. It's a graphical installed for all the most frequently requested changes to an Ubuntu install. (i.e. it installs all the codecs you need, all the plugins, all the graphics card drivers, all the Java stuff. Pretty much everything, all in one package. In otherwords, Easy Ubuntu is the balls. You can get more information, and download it here at the Easy Ubuntu Homepage. Here is a screenshot of the application in action

   

So thats all the stuff I've been quietly observing lately, hopefully some of it provides food for thought. If you think I've been too harsh or too complementary, please leave a comment. As most of the required links for this entry were inlined, I'll leave you with a selection of stuff that I've started reading recently. All the best!

• VarSpool The online diary of Sarah Mount, who writes about technology and education
• Web Design From Scratch A pretty comprehensive guide to web design.
• PHinisheD A support site for PhD students needing advice etc.
• 10 rules for powerpoint slides Garr Reynolds explains how to do it well.