Photoshop Express

The mighty Adobe have entered the social networking arena with a beta service called photoshop express.

Long time industry leaders Adobe, have always been ahead in photo manipulation and editing on the desktop and have even had desktop file storage and organization in the form of Adobe Photoalbum, but they have never realy competed with the likes of flickr, photobucket or picasa, until now that is.

The new services is currently in beta, and is so far limited to users in the US, but already has 16387 galleries (as on 29th march 08). It looks to be the kind of feature rich product you would expect from the "house of Adobe" .

The free package has a whopping 2gb limit,and the ability to link into your images from facebook, photobucket and picasa. While a little shallow in respect to its social networking capabilities, it more than makes up for this in its editing abilities.

Editing is split into 3 categories, basics, tuning and effects. Unsurprisingly, these give not only the standard abilities to crop and rotate that all of the online photo sharing sites offer, but also the ability to do some very high end manipulations (for a free on online service), adjusting the hue and saturation, white balance, sharpness, soft focus etc, then there are the effects with everything from tinting and pop colour to stetching and distortion effects and its all surprisingly each to usel.


The gallery side of thinks is pretty standard, with the ability to store your private images in my photos and share and manage them in the form of galleries. You can add background images to galleries and you can choose to download, email or embed images which are all nice features, There is also a favourites feature and a basic search facility,but at present there doesn't seem to be much in the way of commenting, groups or blogs.

Yahoo buzzing

Yahoo launch a new service/site this week (25th feb), buzz yahoo.

The site still at the beta stage, is a sort of cross between a search engine and a web popularity contest. It ranks content by a combination of user votes and search engine scores (from yahoo obviously). The top stories from buzz make it to the yahoo home page.

It's very graphically rich, displaying the latest feeds as images only with roll over speech bubbles giving a summary of the content. The top stories are split into sections, entertainment, world etc and show a thumbnail of the site along with a brief description and the option to vote or "buzz up" the story.

The search is also quite slick, giving you the option to restrict the search to specific sections , entertainment, technology, world and specific periods like a day, a week and month or a year, cutting down on the number results returned.

This is the latest offering in what is fast becoming a "war of the search engines" with tafiti, mahola and clusty all starting to offer a bit more competition to market leader google. According to the Alexa website, yahoo hits actually exceeding google this week.

Installing Windows and SATA

I have recently had cause to reinstall windows on a couple of pc's, in order to run some software that wasn't supported on the version of windows i was running. This seems quite a simple thing to do, yes?
I checked the website and it seemed the os would run on my hardware. I expected to purchased the appropriate licenses for the version of windows i needed (xp 32 bit or x86, i was running the 64 bit eddition that came with the pc) then i thought i'd just start from the cd, select my harddrive, reformat and do a clean install, should be done in an hour or so...
Unfortunately it wasn't that simple. My Pc (as most modern pc's) has a SATA hard drive, and in fact mine had a SATA dvd/cd drive too, unfortunately the install cd that comes with xp and previous versions of windows only supports install to ata/ide drives. So you don't get the choice to install to it.
It would seem the manufacturers have had to create specific installer disks or restore disks that recognise the SATA disk, these are often specific to their hardware (make and model) so if you have a cd for an hp it don't work with a dell.
I tried several tricks like installing a second sata drive and running the installer from the running install which obviously has the sata drivers, and even tried starting from dos floppies and loading the sata drivers, but as the installer only looks for ata/ide it still greys out the option to install.
I could of course reinstall the existing os from the original install cd that came with the pc, but that still left be with the original problem the software i needed to run won't work with the 64 bit version.
What is more interesting is when i did a bit of digging around on the internet, i found that this raises some serious issues, firstly you have to have the specific installer disk for every sata pc you own, you can't rely on using a generic windows installer, secondly many of these manufacturers disks are very specific about the hard drive set up and partitioning so you can't create dual bootable os's and if you want to replace a damaged disk you have to ensure you get exactly the same size of disk, similarly you can't install a larger hard drive.
Luckily i'm an it manager and could swap some pc's around to free up a machine with the 32 bit processor. But it did raise some very ugly possibilities.
As far as i am aware vista does come with support for sata disks - so if you are happy to run with vista you may be lucky.

Internet Access on my Mobile

When i started my present job, i sort of expected to be given a mobile phone. I bought a cheap pay as you go phone, thinking it only had to last the 4 weeks between jobs. It turned out the new place use radios rather than mobiles, that was nearly 4 years ago. This Christmas, I decided it was time to splash out and get myself a new phone. Obviously as an IT professional it had to have all the extras, blue tooth, wifi, 3 mega pixel camera with flash, push email, and fast internet access, video messaging, voice control, sat nav...basically it needed all the bells and whistles. Only thing was it also had to have good coverage, (i fell run most weekends in some pretty unaccessible areas and need the phone to work), oh and it had to be cheap.

So i set out to buy something with all the features of a top of the line Blackberry for under £100 on a pay as you go contract, with options for all day internet and call tariff's as bargain basement rates.

I spent a day battling the x-mas shoppers, and got came home armed with a sack full of product guides, tariff plans and catalogs. Many of the offers looked too good to be true, 'anysite, anytime packages' internet for £7.50 a month - only you also have to have a minimum contract of 12-18 months at £22 a month and there is a limit to the amount of content you get classified as 'fair usage'.

In the end it came down to a choice between orange and 3, with no contract daily rates at £1 and 50p. But i couldn't find any g3 phones on 3. So i in the end i could only actually find 1 phone that met the requirements. Thephone i ended up with was the Sony Ericsson k800i, at £80 (plus an initial purchase of £10's worth of calls).

So far i am loving it...The navigation is very intuitive, with tabbed browsing and joystick control. It's even pretty easy to get your head around the multiple inboxes for straight forward text, multiple pop 3 email accounts, and orange email, I love the Adress Book, its simple yet effective. Storing a contacts home, mobile office, msn and email addresses in one place so i simply find the person then decide how i want to communicate. The internet is a fair bit faster than the dial up account on my laptop.

It wasn't all plain sailing though, it doesn't integrate that well with outlook (although i think you can buy a third arty product that will sync them) it also doesn't work with my online banking system (although they do have telephone banking as well so i don't really need internet access) and the browser doesn't like frames much, so it look a while to work out the right url to be able to access my office email and contacts via microsoft web access.

Some of the things that did make life that little bit easier were some of the web 2.0 sites that i used already, like social bookmarking sites, i now have all of my favorites from the office and home on my phone. While the phone didn't have a sat nav feature built in, google maps mobile worked fantastically getting my location from the phone and showing me where i was and where i wanted to go.

There are a few features that i don't think i'll ever use, the mp3 player is never going to replace my ipod and the games are never going to rival a psp.

But on the whole i think i managed to get everything i wanted pretty much on budget with a car charger at £18 and a blue tooth headset at £8 i came in at a total of £106, £6 over budget, but i got all of the features that i wanted and a few i didn't. With a 15 per minute any network call tariff and a £1 per day £5 per week internet charge for only the days that i use it...not bad for a days shopping.

I'd recommend it as an alternative to an iphone or a blackberry (for those that want performance on a budget).

What is Tafiti?

Tafiti is being described as search visualization, it combines the search capabilities of Live Search with the graphic power of Silverlight. The result is a search engine that not only fast, but intuitive to use and also quite nice to look at.

As with google searches you can sellect whether you want to see images, news feeds, websites but you also get the choice of seeing directory listings and rss feeds. You can also stack searches, so you can instantly swap between search results without having to re-search, there is also an area called the glass shelf where you can store sites , images and feeds that look interesting to look at later.
Tafiti also remembers you latest search results, and allows you to see them anywhere you log in with the same Windows Live account. Useful if you use the internet at home and at work or on the road.

Microsoft released the open source code for "Tafiti" today so developers can download the developer kit and utilize the technology...so i for one am looking forward to seeing where the technology goes.