Recently Yahoo! released a new beta messenger (code name Diablo) for Windows Vista. Initially I tried during the alpha days and did not had a chance to try it again; and I installed it today during the free time and surprised to see that it offers almost all the existing features of regular messenger with much more enhancements.
The good thing about the new Diablo is; it is completely re-written messenger on top of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for Vista to get the rich GUI look and feel. It has number of interesting features like zooming of contacts to the desired level, multiple color choice, searching of contacts, auto spell checker, phone support, call history etc. This is for sure much better than the currently existing one; and need to see what new features the team will add in the coming days especially towards the social networking of friends as part of YOS.
The only thing that I found missing is the archive of messages; that’s one of the feature that I use a lot by archiving all the messages; so that I can refer back to them at any time.
The screenshots of the messenger can be found from here:
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Lately I started using Google Docs to keep track of my TODO and couple of important files, as online version allows me to access and edit the documents at anytime from anywhere. Even though when I download the doc file back to my PC and when I open with Microsoft office, I see the alignment of pages are gone. Which is kind of annoy.
Coming to the actual problem, when I do not have the brower window in maximixed mode, and when I open the document (especially the XLS, spreadsheet) then it opens to fit the browser; that is good..but when I maximize the browser; the doc window does not auto scale to the browser; and with the recent release; it seemed to scale; but not 100%…and when it maximizes; the horizontal scroll is totally missing; which makes document un-editable beyond what it appears on the scrreen, unless you close and reopen it. Also, even when you resize, the document goes to its original state without the horizontal scrolling.
I am wondering, why Google did not even test this feature as this is supposed to be a basic feature that everyone uses it directly or indirectly, unless they didn’t tested this on IE7/Vista. The images below shows the problem in maximized and resized mode of IE7.
Google just announced the availability online blog and news reader called Google Reader. Even though the UI design and look and feel looks great, but it takes longer time to load when you wanted to subscribe a feed. They need to fix this performance issue to compete with NewsGator Online or Bloglines along with OPML support.
Finally, even though its not too late, MSN search plug-ins are available for Firefox now. It is created by some developers from MSN community. Thanks for the MSN search team for sharing the info with us.
By the way, You need to use Firefox browser in-order to install the search plug-in else you might get page not found error from IE.
On the other hand, TechWeb reports the Firefox Momentum is slowing down.
At least on my Vista BETA1 build of Internet Explorer 7 (version 7.0.5112.0) the Google IE toolbar does not function correctly (am not the only one, check IEBlog for more information on the toolbar compatibility).
The only reason I use Google toolbar is to have the spell check support. I thought I will use this toolbar with IE7 so that I can have the spell check support before I submit any news to this site.
The installation went fine and it seemed to work fine in all aspects except when you a have form with some data and you wanted to run a spell check. Once you click on Spell check it does display the list of misspelled keywords. And when I click on this misspelled keywords the toolbar does not display any suggestion box as it does in IE6 or Firefox. Also when you click on Spell check, normally it displays a link with “editing disabled during the spell check and stop spell checking” at the bottom of the toolbar; but this is also not displayed on IE7.
May be Google needs to test it on IE7 beta and release a upgrade. I haven’t tried on XP IE7.
Well, thats not my word, its from TechDirt. After the much talk spread about the same on the internet, I too tried on my XP box, and after playing a while decided not to keep the Google’s VPN any more as the question that raised in my mind several times is ..”Why do I need this ? Why do I need to secure when I use my system only for browsing ? “.
Anyway, read the TechDirt discussion for more info on what others are telling about the same.
IE Blog Team, annouced the availability of Developer Toolbar today and it is available for download from Microsoft downloads section. For more information about its functionality, refer to IE Blog.
I just installed this toolbar on XP and it asked for a reboot after the install. First time, after rebooting, IE could not able to connect to any web sites. But started working back after reopening the IE. And at first, its a great tool for any web developer to have a look at any page to decide what the things were. Here is a screenshot of this blog with links, class and id information enabled (the loading of tags, paths are very slow, may be in RC we can expect the speed boost).
The Feed validator already listed few bugs in the website, may be this could be the reason why my RSS is not displaying the data correctly. I should spend sometime during the weekend to fix this by taking the help of the error listed using this tool. Good to go, and the tool is already helping me in fixing my coding 
You can find a detailed review about the toolbar from Nicholas Rougeux blog.
So, thought of experimenting how the install works on my Vista, and the install process went quite well (even though it took ~1 minute to install it) and asked for reboot. After rebooting, and entering the LOGIN information, I get an error as shown in the screen shot below:
After pressing OK, returns back to LOGIN screen. I captured the above image using Remote desktop. IE Dev tool broke my vista. I dont know what to do now to get my VISTA working back.
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Recently Yahoo! released a new beta messenger (code name Diablo) for Windows Vista. Initially I tried during the alpha days and did not had a chance to try it again; and I installed it today during the free time and surprised to see that it offers almost all the existing features of regular messenger with much more enhancements. 
