Category: General

At the WWDC on Monday, Apple announced the next evolution of its .Mac service, MobileMe. A cloud storage solution that handles e-mail, calendar items, contacts, photos, and other documents, it will arguably compete with Microsoft’s Live Mesh, as well as several other data synchronization start-ups like SugarSync (download).

MobileMe will replace Apple’s consumer Web site service, .Mac, and adds to that service additional storage (.Mac’s 10GB gos to MobileMe’s 20GB), plus support for the new iPhone and for Windows PCs.

The big pitch for the new service is its synchronization capabilities. E-mail to your MobileMe account will be pushed to your phone. Photos you take on your phone can be automatically uploaded to your Web-based MobileMe account and shared with your friends.

The concept is that the iPhone becomes just one way to view your data and your community. If you’re in front of a full-screen Web browser or sitting at your Mac or Windows desktop, you might prefer to use one of those larger interfaces instead, but with MobileMe, everything you do will be updated to your iPhone immediately.

The service is being pitched as “Exchange for the rest of us,” referencing Microsoft’s corporate e-mail solution that offers excellent shared calendar features and e-mail and contact sync across devices and the Web. These are features everyone deserves, and Microsoft has been late, to say the least, at offering this kind of service to consumers.

There’s no indication that MobileMe will be open to developers, although we assume not. It was launched at Apple’s developers’ conference and if it were open we would have heard it there.

Apple’s current .Mac accounts will upgraded to MobileMe automatically when the service becomes available in July. A 60-day free trial will be available. The service will cost $99 a year after that from Apple. It looks like you can sign up for .Mac on Amazon.com right now for $69, though, and get the auto-upgrade in a month. Might be worth a shot if you want to save $30.

Update: Apple has posted a Guided Tour of MobileMe.

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You can’t take it with you, at least when it comes to your social graph.

But with a new beta version of Yahoo Messenger 9 software released Thursday, users have new options for reconstructing networks of friends and contacts they’ve built elsewhere.

The new beta of Yahoo Messenger 9 can help user invite contacts on AOL, Google’s Gmail and Orkut, Microsoft’s Hotmail, MySpace, and other online services to connect through the Yahoo service. Version 9 also includes a special group of all people in your Yahoo address book, helping to connect with contacts users may have stored elsewhere within Yahoo itself.

Also tying more deeply into the rest of Yahoo, the new beta can be used to reflect some other activities within the network–for example, when somebody spotlights a Web site of interest using Yahoo Buzz.

“We’ll add more types of updates in the future,” said product manager Sarah Bacon in a blog posting about the new beta.

Yahoo Messenger 9 is intended for use on Windows XP, in contrast to the more obviously named Yahoo Messenger for Vista. The final version of the Yahoo Messenger 9 is due in the third quarter, Yahoo said. The Mac equivalent is scheduled to be released by the end of the year.

Also new in the beta is a better interface for setting status messages–even if you’re away from your IM software, Yahoo said. And links to games present in Yahoo Messenger 8 has made its way to version 9, so users can play pool, checkers, and others. However, only those with version 8.1 or later can play games with those using the version 9 beta, Yahoo said.

Yahoo Messenger’s icon, a frighteningly happy face, reflects the fact that people have a whole section of their brains just for processing facial information. Yahoo is tapping into that visual cortex a little more directly with the new beta, which uses larger emoticons.

For further information, check Yahoo’s blog about the new beta or a Messenger 9 beta demo video.

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Firefox fans looking for a major update to the open-source Web browser probably will get a final version of it next month.

One of the Firefox’s strengths is the broad collection of hundreds of add-ons, but that also means things move more slowly when programmers must update their projects to be compatible with Firefox 3. And that’s part of what Mozilla is watching closely as it seeks feedback from the 1.5 million people who have installed the Firefox 3 release candidate 1, which Mozilla issued a few days ago.

“We’re in a phase where we’re letting add-ons get a chance to update,” Schroepfer said. “We like to have RCs (release candidates) out for a while to gather feedback.”

More release candidates are possible, he said. With Firefox 2, there were three. “We’re in better shape this time, but there’s no reason to rush this,” he said.

The release candidate is available for download for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. If you want to try it out, it’s best to read the release notes first, in particular the known issues that could trip you up.

After Mozilla’s years-long slow start, Firefox has gained significant market share against its top rival, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Although the latter still dominates the market, Firefox has helped to reignite the browser wars to an extent: Microsoft is investing more resources in IE development, Apple has brought its own Safari to Windows, and Apple and Google are among those devoting attention to the open-source Webkit browser engine project.

Browsers have also become more important as the Internet has begun moving to the more lavish and interactive pages of Web 2.0. For that reason, performance has become a concern: browsers now must execute large amounts of JavaScript code that power-hungry sites such as the office applications of Google Docs and the photo editing of Picnik use.

The Mozilla Foundation has grown significantly over the years. It’s set up two subsidiaries, Mozilla Corp. to handle the browser, and the newer Mozilla Messaging group to handle the Thunderbird e-mail software.

“We’re looking for final ship sometime in June,” said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, in an interview Wednesday. Mozilla, which was spun out of AOL more than 10 years ago, oversees the Firefox programming project.

Based on market share statistics and the number of Firefox browsers that check Mozilla servers for updates, Schroepfer estimates there are about 175 million Firefox users today.

Firefox crossed the 500 million download mark in February, and now has been downloaded more than 556 million times.

What are Schroepfer’s three favorite things about Firefox 3?

• “No 1. is definitely the awesome bar–the smart location bar. It changed the way I use the browser. With a couple keyboard presses, it figures out what page I want to go to.” The smart location bar starts suggesting Web addresses based on the user’s browsing history and can sidestep problems with complicated, hard-to-remember URLs.

• Second is “the performance and memory work. It’s 2 to 3 times faster than the previous version and nearly 10 times faster than IE 7,” he boasted. “We really tuned the heck out of memory use, so it uses a lot less memory, especially with lots of windows and tabs.”

• Third: “The antimalware and security features. We used to tell people not to go to the bad part of the Net. Now we’re seeing legitimate sites being taken over,” so it’s good to have better protection by default.

The CNET review of Firefox 3 RC1 generally concurred with Schroepfer’s assessment, though we found the memory improvements were “nothing to write home about,” and some performance improvements might be related to the fact that incompatible add-ons weren’t running.

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Faster is almost always better, at least when it comes to computers. So what’s the fastest way to open a word processor?

You can create a keyboard shortcut to open Notepad, WordPad, Word, or any other word processor on your PC by right-clicking the program’s shortcut on the Start menu, choosing Properties > Shortcut > Shortcut key, entering your keystroke combination of choice (be sure not to overwrite one that’s already in use), and pressing Enter. I described how to get fast access to all your keyboard shortcuts in a post from last week.

Now press the keystroke combination to open the program, and start typing (or navigate to an existing file you want to open). When you’re done working in the file, press Ctrl-S, give the file a name (if it doesn’t have one already), choose a location to store it (or accept the program’s default storage folder), and press Enter. What could be simpler?

Well, skipping the file-naming and storage location-choosing steps, for one thing. And having access to the notes from any Internet-connected computer, for another.

Web word processors auto-save files
You can create a keyboard shortcut that opens Google Docs or any other Web word processor. Start by opening a new document in the service. Select the URL in the Address bar, and type Ctrl-C to copy it to the clipboard. Now open Windows Explorer to the Desktop or any other folder, right-click anywhere in the folder, choose New > Shortcut, paste the URL of the service into the location field, press Enter, give the shortcut a name, and press Enter again.

Next, right-click the shortcut you just created, click Properties > Shortcut > Shortcut key, type your preferred keystroke combination for opening the service, and press Enter. Now you can open the service ready to create a new file by pressing that keyboard shortcut.

Unfortunately, if you’re not already logged in, you’ll have to enter your username and password before you can open the blank file. You can avoid the login step by creating the shortcut to the Writer online word processor that mimics the look of old DOS-based text editors running on a green-phosphor display. (The service’s bare-bones look is itself modeled after the free Dark Room word processor, which, in turn, is the Windows version of the WriteRoom word processor for Mac OS X.)

Since Writer doesn’t require you to log in–or even to create an account–you need not give your files a name. Just stick with the default, and when you want to reopen the file, select it from your list of documents, which appears just below the text window.

Writer remembers your files by leaving a cookie with the identifying information. If you delete the cookie, you lose access to the files, unless you sign up for a free account. The account has the added benefit of providing access to your files from any Internet-connected PC.

Should you find Writer to your liking, be sure to make a donation to its creator to help keep the great services coming.

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You have to hand it to WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. At his talk at today’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, he managed to be the first conference speaker to put up a picture of a LOLcat while actually tying it into what his company is all about.

The LOLcat in question came from icanhazcheeseburger, a notoriously popular site that rakes in a whopping 1 million unique page views a day. It also runs on WordPress.com, Mullenwag and company’s hosted blogging platform.

While the talk was classified as a “high-order bit,” which usually involves some subtle advertising, Mullenweg used his time to talk about how much the site has grown over the last few years, as well as a downright useful feature that will be available to blog owners next week.

The new feature, called “possibly related,” scans every post you’ve written and gives your readers a list of your other posts that might be of interest, along with links to other WordPress.com blogs that line up with the keywords or context.

If this sounds familiar, it is. The technology comes from Sphere, which WordPress has partnered with. Mullenweg said that it should give the 99.997 percent of WordPress.com blogs that are getting less than 10K page views, a little love from being a part of the network.

The new feature is also the company’s attempt to help solve the problem that visitors face when viewing a permalinked page from somewhere else, often leaving them at the whim of the blog creator and their linking abilities. Mullenweg explained it as a situation that usually has people leaving the page and not coming back. The company will also be tracking the click data and potentially make it available for other upcoming WordPress features.

“Possibly related” will roll out to WordPress.com users next week, as well as a plug-in for WordPress.org users who are hosting it on their own. The service is opt-in, meaning you won’t get listed on other people’s possibly related link dumps unless you’ve got it installed on your own blog. Mullenweg noted this was not only because of privacy, but to give people an incentive to add it to their blogs to get the reciprocating traffic.

Speaking of traffic, another takeaway from Mullenweg’s talk were the usage statistics over the past few years. There were just 2 million unique users of WordPress.com in early 2006. That number has since gone up to 168 million this year. Of that, a staggering 54 million come from the U.S. alone.

Part of the reason for the growth has been some mainstream blogs using WordPress.com, including Flickr’s company blog, The FAIL Blog, and the aforementioned icanhazcheeseburger.

Mullenweg’s “one last thing” was to show off was an upcoming theme called “chameleon” that will change the color scheme, and look and feel of your site based on what photos you post. Themes, which have become a veritable commodity with their own store have proven to be a huge success among WordPress.org users. This marks the first time a company theme has taken such a high level of automatic customization–something that third-party theme-makers have been making money off with their own efforts.

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Belarc Advisor is one of those tools for Windows users that you didn’t know you were missing until you started using it. It’s hard to understate how important this program can be, as it provides a free analysis of your machine’s security weak points.

By looking at elements such as whether antivirus software and definitions are up to date, or whether all the security flaws in Windows have been patched, Belarc works quickly to inform you of what you’re missing and provide links to how you can fix it. It uses the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmark test to give the computer a score showing its overall security level and produces a report that can be viewed in a Web browser.

Not only does it analyze software and operating system components and tell you where problems are, but in its comprehensive report it tells you what your computer’s physical components are: not just how much RAM you have, for example, but what kind of RAM and which slots are occupied. Simply put, the clear advice given on how to address each issue is invaluable.

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