Google Docs

This time, i would like to do some quick review on Google Docs. As office applications has becoming more and more common even for home user, Google came out with the idea of building it into a web application and published it online for public use. The general idea behind this is to allow its user to create and store documents, spreadsheet and presentation online in such a way to make sharing of files easy and accessible anywhere with internet connection.

However, to make things available online, there are always threats on compromising of privacy and confidential data, thus i believe Google had gone through tough time in fighting this. But, in this post, i will only be concentrating on the exploration of the Google Doc's features and capability rather than the security issue.

Google Docs comes with support on different file types, namely Document, Spreadsheet and Presentation. Another additional type which i find it useful within Google Doc is the Form. Here i will be going through each of everyone of this one by one.

System Requirement:

Google Doc OS Requirement

Note: There's a chance that other browsers will work with Google Docs. However, we can't guarantee that features will work as expected.

* Google Gears only works with OSX 10.4 and higher. Offline support is not offered for Safari when using Mac OS X 10.6.

No matter what browser you use, here's what you need to do:

• Enable cookies.
• Enable JavaScript.

To use Google Gears, you'll need one of the following:

• Microsoft Windows XP or Vista with Firefox 1.5+ or Internet Explorer 6+
• Apple Mac OS X (10.4+) with Firefox 1.5+

General:
In general, Google Doc provide common text and file formatting capability, alignment, printing, undo & redo which cover for all its document, spreadsheet as well as presentation files.

Beside common formatting features, Google Doc comes together with a document list which is shown upon login to allow easy navigation of all files in storage. The list can be further customized with your own folder structure and choose to move, copy or to perform other file operations for your selected files.

To add on to the application, Google Doc allows upload of your local file from your local disk onto the web via automatic file conversion from supported format into Google Doc's format. However, user are required to understand the upload and storage constraint introduced by Google, or otherwise your uploaded file may be missing some important content, or the file will not be successfully uploaded. I have add in a summary of it are as following:

• Docs: Each doc can have a maximum size of 500K, plus up to 2MB per embedded image.
• Spreadsheets: Each can be up to 256 columns, 200,000 cells, or 100 sheets--whichever is reached first. There's no limit on rows.
• Presentations: Files in .ppt and .pps formats can have a maximum size of 10MB or 200 slides; files uploaded from the Web can be up to 2MB; emailed files can be up to 500K.
• PDFs: You can store up to 10MB per PDF from your computer and 2MB from the Web in your Docs list, up to 100 PDFs.

A more detail view on the constraint can be view from Google Doc's Getting to know Google Doc page.

Another convenience which Google Doc provide is the Email-to-upload feature where user may choose to upload their file by sending email to their unique Google Doc's email address which is linked directly into their account.

To add on and complete the application, Google Doc also come with an locally installed application named Google Gears which allows synchronization of files from online to your local drive.

Document:
Google Doc's Document is very similar to Microsoft Word from the Microsoft Office. It comes with common features of content indent, hyperlink, text highlighting, bullet numbering, word count, inserting of image, drawing, link table, comment, footnote, special char, horizontal line, page break, header & footer, find & replace capability and table insertion. You may basically find all the basic and necessary word processing features in Google Doc's document.

Inserting a hyperlink

A few of additional capabilities which i find it useful are the online word look-up and the integrated Google Search using highlighted words. The online word look-up is using the Merriam-Webmaster's Online Dictionary for the selected word's definition, synonym. User may also choose to search the selected words with the Britannica.com encyclopedia using the look-up feature as well. On the other site, user may directly Google Search the selected word by simple highlighting them and activate the search feature and you will be directly brought to the Google's search result page of your selection of words.

Edit HTML menu and HTML Editor appearance

Apart from the normal word processing feature, it also gives the user the ability to treat their document as html pages. You may choose to edit your document in html mode using their very own integrated html editor. Further more, as an add on to the html mode editing, user who is familiar with CSS may have their own style sheet defined and applied to the document, just like how you make it for your very own personal web or blog site. This is made available due to Google Doc's attempt to treat the document as a web page for their display and storage.

The Google Doc's document may be downloaded from their online storage into user's local disk in several formats (html, open office, pdf, rtf, txt and word). This makes the document created online to be available in almost every viewable format after downloaded into local copy.

Spell Check function

However, i did find some of the short coming as compared to features on what i normally use. One of them including the spell check functionality. Unlike in Ms Word, the spelling check can be configured to run real-time as you type. In Google Doc, it works in such a way that a single click activation is required everytime you required the spell check. Everytime the user activate the feature, the entire document will be checked and incorrect spelled word will be highlighted in yellow, and the yellow marking will still remain even thought the user had corrected the spelling of the word. The highlighting will only be gone after user had turned off the spell check feature. Without turning off the spell check feature, continue typing of words following the highlighted word will caused the subsequently typed word to be highlighted as well, which i think is improper cause it confuse user as thought it is another miss-spelled word even though it is being spelled correctly.

Inserting a comment and the comment appearance

Another weird behavior of this application is the comment feature. I believe the intention of this capability is to allow something similar to Ms Excel's cell comment where comment content will be shown when user hover the mouse across the commented text. However, it does not work the way i expected. Whenever a comment is added to a selected text, the comments will all be shown inline with the content of your document, as thought it is part of the content, except it is highlighted in a user selected color. For this, i would still prefer the comment is only shown when user hover on the text or all comments are shown only at a particular region, like the reviewer's comment in Ms Word.

Spreadsheet:
Google Doc's spreadsheet application is claimed to be an equivalent of Ms Excel, thus some common features such as cell formatting, function insertion, numbering format, charting, inserting of comment, image and drawing, column or row insertion, freezing of columns and rows and sheet concept.

Apart of these, Google Doc's spreadsheet application provide easy sorting of column using the always-visible separation border between your rows. Another impressive feature is the gadget insertion into your spreadsheet. The gadget window allow user to choose among the various widget for your data representation (example: Gauge)

Spreadsheet view with Gauge gadget

Other than that, Google Doc's spreadsheet provide an integrated way of hooking up with a form (also can be designed and create using the spreadsheet application) to automatically record and update with the responded result from the form. Thus, this make it extremely easy for user to create their own survey or questionnaire using the form whereby the form can be distributed to their friends just entirely through a simple web url, and the responded result will be automatically stored into the respective spreadsheet for easier analysis and data retrieval.

Sample Spreadsheet form

This spreadsheet application also comes together with a summary page when is linked with the form to display the summary view of all the responses.

Response summary

Apart from all the mentioned capability, i do find that changing of data source after inserting a graph or chart is difficult. User will need to manually check and enter the columns and rows of the data which they would like to link with the chart. Unlike Ms Excel, user may just directly change the source of range by simple highlighting the desired cells by using mouse clicks and drags.

Presentation:
Lastly, the Google Doc's presentation application is very much similar with Ms Power Point, whereby all the content is organized in slide shows type for easy browsing during a presentation.

For the content of your presentation, user is allowed to choose from a few of the readily built-in template or layout, or user may start from a totally blank slide and add in their desired content (such as image, text, video, shape, drawing or table) one at a time.

Just as other presentation applications, a speaker's note section is available for each slide created, and user is able to make changes to the theme of the entire presentation as well as making change to the background of every slide according to their preference.A great convenience of allowing images to be directly drag and drop into the presentation from any web pages make inserting of an image into my presentation file easy.

Due to the nature that the purpose of the presentation created are meant to be share across multiple user, Google Doc's presentation application had take into this into consideration and make the online real-time discussion feature available within the presentation, so that multiple user who are viewing the same presentation can exchange idea, provide feedback and start discussion real-time, all within the application itself through the chatting panel located at the right hand side of the shared presentation when the presentation is started.

Starting of presentation and discussion

However, i think that Google Doc's presentation application is missing one of a very important feature, the animation and slide transition. I used to make a lot of presentation in my company and i notice that animations is very useful to keep my audience focus on the points i am explaining on, by delay the show-up of the coming up points using animated text. Thus i was expecting at least some similar function was there, but it wasn't.

Conclusion:
To conclude my review on the Google Doc, i would say that if you are only looking for some basic office application capability to suit your personal use, Google Doc might be the right one for you as you may easily create and store your files all online, and making retrieval and reading of your file easy as long as you have internet connectivity.

However, i am not sure if there are any company out there would like to use Google Doc as their official office application, mainly due to it's limitation on storage, as well as the conversion of all their local file (created in Ms Office or Open Office application) into Google Doc's format. I believe it might gives Google a better chance if the conversion of file is able to take in full compatibility with those supported file and reduce storage constraints.

As for me, i think i would definitely give Google Doc continuous trying for my personal use, as i sometime really have some documents where i really want to make it portable for me to read and use in multiple environment (office, home, etc), and my previous solution was to make duplicated copy into my thumb drive and bring along with me all the time, until Google Docs existence, it solve my hassle of being extra gadget with me all the time.

So to my dear readers, have you tried using Google Doc? Do you have any findings or comments which you would like to share with my other readers? Please feel free to comment and feedback through my comment page. I am most happy to see you responding to this.. Thanks ya!!!

Coming up next...

As the latest trends of IT showing a great migration of offline applications into web base, i would like to start another review on one of Google's effort in this direction, the Google Docs. Within this review, i will try to make comments and review on its features, what is good and what can be improved. Thus, Google's fans or those who are keen of moving towards web base office applications, please stay tune!!!

Apple iMac comparison

I am back with my promise... a review on Apple iMac..

The purpose of this posts is to compare currently available model of iMac and their specification, and try to make some personal comment on who should go for which model and for what usage, so to make it a more cost effective choice of yours in a way.. :)

I have make some effort to extract some useful information from the Apple website and make it into a easy-to-read tabular form.

Each color represent the quality/performance of the respective item. Green represent the best, while purple represents middle range and orange represent the worst relative to the rest within the comparison. There are some items which i mark as light green represents those with no difference across the different model, and portion highlighted in light yellow represent optional upgrades available for each model.

Overall, iMac has 4 basic models, ranging from a 20" to three 24" models all power by one of Intel's most powerful processor - Core 2 Duo. This is a 2 cores processor, which is manufactured using the latest 45 nanometer technology. This basically means that the processor may contain more transistor gate using less space, and more transistor mean more performance. And apart from that, fewer space needed for transistor means more spaces for accommodation of your L2 cache, and more L2 cache mean another performance up. So from here you can see the chaining effect. :) so this is not all just about size, is about everything!!!

However, iMac is still not using the fastest Front Site Bus available for its Core 2 Duo version. The fastest version available now is on 1333 MHz, but the basic iMac model is still using the 1066 MHz version. However, you got the option to choose between 2.66, 2.93 or 3.06 GHz for your Core 2 Duo processor.

On memory wise, the all model of iMac is able to support up to maximum of 8GB DDR3 SDRAM, which i believe is far more than enough as for home and personal usage. But the basic model comes with 20" iMac contains originally only a 2GB RAM, which i think is just enough to today's usage. But not to worry, as i said, you may always choose to give your machine a little upgrade on this. :)

To boost the graphic performance, iMac had chosen the use of NVidia GeForce Graphic. There are all together 3 different NVidia GeForce to choose from for your iMac, namely 9400M with shared 256MB memory, GT120 with individual 256MB and GT130 with individual 512 MB memory.

After all the technical specification, is time for some review on it's look-and-feel. I have been impressed by Apple's product design ever since i knew their brand many years back. Simple yet stylish is always the direction of their designer to create elegant looks product. Another thing i like so much about the iMac is their all-in-one packaging. It will save me a lot of time on cable management and keeping my table top managed and clean.

Other than that, iMac gives its user plenty of various ports for connecting to their devices. Every iMac comes with total of 6 USB ports (with 2 on keyboard) and 1 FireWire 800 port. Together with the earphone jack, networking port and etc, all nicely fitted at the back of your screen.

Overall, as a conclusion, as a personal and home user, i will opt for the model MB419ZP/A. With a little extra payment, what you get is more performance with a faster Core 2 Duo, and a larger memory space of 4GB RAM, and also to offload your RAM with the usage of a dedicated memory for your graphic. As for storage wise, 640GB is reasonable as of today's personal and home usage for storing of all your photo, musics as well as videos.

So my friend, what is your choice of iMac?? Leave your comment here to tell us!!!

**Source of images above are from www.apple.com

Coming up next....

Thinking of buying a Mac machine from Apple? Don't know which one go choose for? Stay tune then.. i'll be coming up with comparisons among different Mac and their specifications.. and hopefully their price as well.. :)

I'll be back... soon..:)

Online photo sharing: Facebook Vs Flickr Vs Picasa Web‏

Photo sharing has becoming one of the major activities which online community are using so heavily, until one will never feel complete should there be any online services like social networking site without such capability. I myself have been using web services as way to share some details of my life with my friends and family, and one of the most common way is of cause photo sharing. That is why I am coming out with the idea of doing some comparison between some famous free photo sharing service available on the web as of today – Facebook, Flickr and Picasa Web. By the end of this post, you should be able to know what are the capabilities and features provided by each of the mentioned service provides.

Facebook:
Facebook is the most popular social networking site which ramp up just within these few years. It become so popular that its number of users had exceeded all other similar social networking sites. And according to some data collected by a third party company, the average number of photo uploaded Facebook had exceeded all its rivals and even other photo hosting website. But how far do you know what Facebook’s can and can’t do on your uploaded photo?

Facebook does provide some must have basic feature as I listed at the beginning of this section. First of all, user is able to add in description to individual photo as caption.

Secondly, rotating your photo is never easier than just clicking a simple button, but Facebook gives you options of rotating it either before you upload (during selection of your photo to be uploaded) or rotate directly from your album after they have been uploaded. And Of coz, user will be able to organize their photo and albums and set privacy setting for their album

Great job done:
- Thumbnail view of photo on upload selection page
- Tag the people in your photo
- Relatively fast upload speed
- Virtually unlimited number of photo (only restrictions is max of 200 photo per album)

What I must praise about Facebook upload tool is that it allows on-time thumbnail preview of your all photo right in the selection view, making it easier for the user to clearly see and choose the photo they want, simply just by marking the check box respective to each of the photo. User may select multiple photo and try to upload all of them at once with single click on the upload button

A brilliant idea from the Facebook is on its capability to allow user to “Tag” the person in your photo with their name, or even link it to their Facebook profile (if they are Facebook users). That will allow easy identification of all the person by just pointing your mouse cursor near to their face, especially for your friends whom you have not seen for X number of years when sometimes you could hardly recognized them in the photo.

And what surprised me is the uploading speed of Facebook. Despite the huge number of users and the traffic load to their Facebook servers, the photo uploading speed is the fastest among the 3 services which I had done benchmarking on (Facebook, Picasa Web and Flikr). It took only ~16 seconds to upload one 1.42MB photo on my machine.

Another good about Facebook is that virtually there is no restriction on how many photo you may upload to your account, but the only restriction is that it is limited to maximum of 200 photo per album. But you may have as many album as you like within your account (please correct me if I am wrong). I am really amazed by how daring the Facebook is on this for not restricting the capacity for each user. :)

What I think Facebook should improved:
- Direct sharing with Facebook friends only
- Privacy setting is per album only
- No photo editing feature at all

One thing I believe Facebook may improve is the sharing of the uploaded photo. Currently, it only allows sharing among Facebook users who are within your friends list. However, I would be more appreciate if I am allowed to share the photo (or album) with non-facebook user as well (example: just a simple external link to the album with view-only access on the album).

The next thing I would like to see will be the privacy setting to allow per photo privacy setting. For me, I would prefer to group/categorized my photo according to events. Some sometime, there will be some photo which I would really like to keep it hidden from some of my friends while allowing only others to view. But since that the privacy setting applies only on the album level, this cannot be done unless I move those photo to another album and mark the privacy setting as what I desired. However, this result in my photo on single events were scattered around in multiple album, and that make it difficult for me to manage them.

Another thing which I found is lacking in Facebook is the photo editing features. I myself would like to add some watermark text to my photo before sharing it publically. However, whenever I want to do such work for my facebook’s photo, I need to launch a third party application just to add in the watermark and then upload the watermarked copy to my Facebook account. What I am thinking is not a professional photo editing features, maybe just a few simple editing feature like watermarking, adjusting of contrast and white balance will be fine.

Flickr:
Flickr is another online service which target mostly on photo hosting and sharing than other features like facebook. Some basic feature which Flickr provides include the adding of note to photo, sharing of the photo to multiple group, organizing the photo into set (similar concept with album), allowing viewing of the photo in different size, allow print order via Flickr service and etc.

Great job done:
- Advance photo editing features
- Privacy setting for each photo
- Allow direct photo blog entry to various blogging service

Since that I had mentioned that Flickr’s is targeting mostly on photo hosting and sharing than all other services. Thus, I would be expecting photo editing features on it, and Flickr did it quite a good job. Other than the watermarking and constrast as well as white balance adjustment on your uploaded photo, Flickr do also provide lots of other advance editing features such as exposure adjustment, colors sharpen, red-eye, touch-up tool, adding of frames and stickers, sandbox, and other build-in effects such as blurry and oil-painting effects. With all these effects and advance tool, one can make adjustment on what they need on their uploaded copy of the photo, all in the Flickr website (but you will need to download a plugin in order to have it run on your browser)

Apart from the editing tool, I like the feature of Flickr to allow direct blog entry into famous blogging service such as Blogger, WordPress and etc. By simple click from your photo, you will be brought to a page for your blog entry with the photo you have just selected, and once completed, only a few simple steps are needed for your new photo blog to appear in your favorite blogging site.

And of coz, not to mentioned one of my favorite features, the privacy setting per photo. Since I had mentioned what I prefer in Facebook section, I will not elaborate further for the same thing here. :)

What I think Flickr should improved:
- Photo uploading speed
- Capacity (100MB Max per user)

I have tried uploading the same photo as I did in Facebook using Flickr, but it turn uot to be unexpectedly slow. It took me 1 min and 10 seconds to upload the 1.42MB photo to their server. I believe there should be something that can be done to ensure a better upload speed. And related to photo uploading, Although you don’t get to see the preview of the photo as what it does in Facebook, but you may still add multiple files and upload them all at once to your Flickr account.

However, what concern me the most will be the capacity allocated for each users. A merely 100MB of storage space for each user is simply too small, especially with todays DLSR image quality up to few MB per photo, it does need long for the 100MB to be all filled up. For me I do sometimes use the web photo hosting service as my backup copy of all my precious photos, thus there is no way I would want to resize my photo from its original quality to a lower one before uploading it. Who know one day I might just want to download the original quality and size image from the web again, just in case my local copy had gone missing or corrupted?

Picasa Web:
Picasa is another service which only do photo hosting. As in Flickr, Picasa Web do provide basic functionality such as rotating your photo, viewing in different size (via magnifying features), printing and adding of caption for your photo.

Great job done:
- Photo editing features
- Useful client Picasa application
- Photo & camera information available
- Copy or move between album
- Fast upload speed
- Easy sharing

What had been done by PicasaWeb is smart enough to offload their server with all kinds of editing feature, by transferring them to your local PC. PicasaWeb did that by deploying an offline Picasa client application (which has to be installed on your machine as an application) and have the online photo downloaded temporarily to your local PC and edit the copy locally. Picasa did it smart also by providing features to sync your local copy of the photo back to their server once you have done editing on it. Using the Picasa client, you may do editing on your photo by adjusting different levels of contrast, white balance, lighting and adding special effects.

Another good thing about this Picasa client is that you can also use it to edit any of your photo stored within your local hard drive, and have the option to upload them all to your picasa web account directly from the client application with a pretty good upload speed as well (~19 seconds to upload the same photo). This client application also comes with a nice build-in image viewer to allow you to easily browse through all the photo stored within your offline storage.

Back to the Picasa Web, it also provide information on your camera and camera setting used to take the picture. For people (especially photographer) who would like peek into these details, Picasa Web is the only web service among the three of my comparison to provide this capability. I do also like the service from Picasa Web to allow simple move or copy of the uploaded photo from one album to another, and it is done so fast, without you noticing it, it would have done moving or copying hundreds of already uploaded photo to your new album

Picasa web also allow the sharing of the uploaded photo to anyone (even not Picasa Web user), what you need is just to send them the external link of your album, and you friends will be able to go to the link to view all your pictures. As long as you have set your album’s privacy setting to public. You may also set your album to unlisted should you choose to make it only your private collection without sharing it out.

What I think Picasa Web should improved:
- Picasa web upload tool
- Capacity (1GB Max per user)

What I think can be improved on Picasa Web, is that although the Picasa client done a good job in uploading photo, but they will still need to consider for people who are using shared computer to upload their photo whereby installation of application are restricted. As of today, Picasa Web’s online uploading tool only allows selection of up to 5 photo per upload. Meaning if I have more than 5 photo to upload, I’ll need to repeat the upload process (5 at a time) until I complete upload of all my photo. Yet, not to mention that during the upload, there is no progress bar or any kind of indication that how is the upload progressing. The only way you will know is the automatic refresh of the page upon completion of the upload.

Although 1GB per user seems to be far better than Flickr, but I am not sure whether this is really enough for all types of users. :) but at least for me I would think that the more the merrier, isn’t it? :)

Conclusion:
If you are sharing picture only among your friends and family, without hesitating to even editing them, go for Facebook as it is more concentrating on sharing among your own online community.

If you are a photographer and looking for some photo hosting site to showcase your work and profile, go for Picasa Web, as it has more storage capacity and it provide rather full photo hosting and editing features with both its online and offline client version.

If you are a person just simply want to share your numerous amount of self-taken cute (or acting cute) photo of yourself, go for Flickr, because you got lots of effect and frames to be added in to your online photo just to make yourself or your picture looks more “artistic” or “cute”

Please do not hesitate to comment if you have a different thought on this.. :)

Comparison Chart:

Coming up next...

Ok.. after all the heavy weighted comparison and reviews on a few operating system, this time, i would like to go for something light for my readers..

I believe everyone of you have at least used some free online photo storage and sharing site (including social networking site) once for sharing of your photo with friends and family. But which one are you in as of now? have you tried any other service previously, and why did you switch away from it?

In my next post, i'll be doing a comparison between photo sharing capability in different photo sharing or social networking sites and its features (i'll make it as the base for my comparisons..)... Thus Flickr, Friendster, Facebook, Picasa Web, which one is better and which one you prefer to most??

Stay tune.. and I'LL BE BACK!!!

My Moblin V2.0 Beta (release 2009-07-10) try out

I have been running Moblin V2.0 Beta on my AcerAspireOne netbook for the past 1 week, I think is time for me to do some commenting about my experience.

Responsiveness:
As far as I concern, Moblin’s has a very good responsiveness towards my expectation.

In terms of OS start up, it took me merely approximately 30 seconds from boot up till the MyZone is being shown on my screen. But due to the reason that I only do boot-up directly from the live images via my USB thumb drive, thus I am not sure on how much delay it will incurred if I have my Messenger and Social Networking site properly setup and hooked up to MyZone.

On other aspect, Moblin’s UI responses towards my command is rather fast as well. The Moblin’s toolbar slides down from the top edge of the screen just in time whenever I point my pointer on the top edge of my screen. I don’t see any lagging on the sliding down animation. And when I move my mouse pointer across different icons within the tool bar, the icon highlighting animation run smoothly and accurately on where your pointer is pointing to.

However, for being fussy, I do see some area of improvement needed on the responsiveness. First of all will be the scrolling function. I do find the vertical scroll bar response towards my action rather slow, and sometime it is just not start scrolling at all. Secondly, I do see a couple of seconds delay in launching of a webpage after I entered a web url into the Internal Panel and hit the Enter key. The other one which is the most annoying to me, will be the tooltips of opened application/dialog from Zones Panel, because on random case, the tooltip will be stuck on the screen itself, not disappearing, even I have close the Zones Panel, resulting on some floating tool tips which neither can be closed or clicked or activated on the screen, overlaying with other running component’s of window/dialog.

Features:
As Moblin is still in Beta version, I believe there are still plenty of rooms for Moblin to expand in terms of it features and capability. As of today, it does offer some very basic feature such as multimedia player, internet browser, integrated IM, calculator, text editor, tasks list and calendar.

Going back to the IM where I mentioned in my previous post (Moblin Vs Google Chrome OS). I did say that I am not sure on which Messenger service I may connect to, but now I do after trying it out. There are quite a number of Messenger service which Moblin is able to connect and integrated with its People Panel. I have not tried the other but my Yahoo and MSN account. Moblin successfully connect to both my Messenger service account and “virtualized” them in such a way that from the People Panel, you wouldn’t know which of your contact is from which service, they are all virtually in just one account, where you may interact with anyone of them from any messenger service all in the same way within Moblin.

Personally, I do hope there will be some very light weight version of open format document reader (and editor if possible). This is because I believe that most user of the netbook will not just merely do web browsing, most of the time they will need to use for advance editing tool other than basic text editor to do some simple documentation works.

Additionally, not everything can be launched into the Zone of your choice at anytime. Only applications launched from within the Applications Panel will have the options of preferred launching Zone. In example, whatever you launch from the toolbar will be defaulted to be always launched into Zone 1. From my own personal point of view, it could have been done better by allowing them to be launched into user’s preference Zone, such that user will have more control on how they would like to organize their running applications. :)

Another thing which I think is really missing currently will be the shut down feature. Yes, you heard me correctly. The current beta version is a OS with no shutdown feature. The only way you could do the shutdown it via pressing your netbook’s On/Off button. I think it is really necessary to have a proper shut down procedure so to ensure that everything is properly closed/ended before the machine is turned off.

Connectivity:
The connectivity panel I tried out is just a very basic connectivity panel, with simple buttons and a simple list of all found networks (I was using Wireless connection) for you to connect to.

One thing I like it in the Connectivity panel is that it will automatically identify the type of encryption method used by the network and what user needs to do is merely click on “Connect” button and enter the passkey into the requested field and you are connected, unlike in Windows XP/Vista, where user will need to identify and set accordingly for every single details of the network before they can gain the access to it.

However, I did consistently experience connection lost whenever I visit certain website (example Facebook games), and it will not re-connect by itself, not even if I manually re-connect to the network. It just simple don’t connect after that. The only way to reconnect it is to do a reboot and reconnect. And sometimes the connectivity status does not reflect the right status (example, while the status said I am not connected to any network, I might still be able to do web browsing and have my IM account logged in). I have report this to Moblin’s group and they claimed that this issue should be fixed within their latest Moblin V2.0 Beta Live Image (the one I used was released 2009-07-10) whereby some of the connectivity modules are updated and will provide a more proper and user friendly graphical user interface.

Support:
I got a very good support from the Moblin’s development team when I report my connectivity issue to them. I do also subscribe to their BugZilla (so I can report bugs and receive bug fixes update directly from the developer’s community). I suppose due to the reason of the rapid development which is going on currently on Moblin’s developer community, I receive so much updates from them about existing defects/bugs update via my email, frequent enough to get me busy for checking my inbox for the latest update from time to time. :)

I believe Moblin’s group had done a good job to put on all relevant and useful information on their comprehensive official website (http://moblin.org) where user will be able to get all the required information (at least to me) and they will be a whole group of Moblin’s developer willing to get in touch with you to help you solve your problem.

Overall:
Overall, I am satisfied with what Moblin’s V2.0 Beta version had offered to me and I will say it is up to my expectation as of the current state as a Beta version. I am looking forward for their next release (their release candidate) so that I could try out more and expect more surprises, so they could really turn me ON and convinced me to switch to the full use of Moblin on my netbook. :)

Coming up next...

I am currently giving a personal try-out on the Moblin V2.0 Beta (2009-071-0) version. And I will be making some comments about my user experience and some issue that I found out during my try out. Stay tune.. J

Moblin Vs Google Chrome OS

Ever since few years ago when netbook was first released to the market, it started to change the way the computer is being used. The most recent focus of all computer industry is how user's internet experience can be changed and improved. However, all the existing computer operating system was developed not with this idea in mind as the OS base, but focus more on applications and application extensibility.

Thus, after all these years of change of computer use towards more internet base, it is just the right time for the releasing of a brand new operating system which is highly internet based. And that is why that the announcement by Google about their new Google Chrome OS as well as the new Moblin by Intel Software and Service Group, hosted by the Linux Foundation and with collaboration with various OS vendors.

I myself is a netbook user, and loading a full OS such as Vista or XP is definitely somehow overloading my netbook. Thus i mostly welcome the new OS which is light, and tailored according to the needs of netbook's used. But between the 2, which one is better?

Moblin V2.0 Beta
Moblin is an open source operating system which is built on top of an optimized Linux
platform, which is lead by a group of Intel's software engineer, with collaboration with a few operating system vendors such as Asianux, Canonical, DeviceVM, gOS, MontaVista, Novell, Wind River, and others.

Moblin is built with the vision to make a total different internet experience for their user community. For this, Moblin had come out with several brand new idea for operating system to achieve the vision.

One among all brilliant idea is the MyZone feature which is shown to the user when Moblin is loaded on the netbook. The user will be presented with 3 different sections with the MyZone, which includes Recent Activity, Recent Files and Recent Social Network Update. Yes, you heard me correctly. Moblin has the capability to hook up with your social networking site and display updates and contents within your MyZone. However, up to now, Moblin is only able to hook up with the Last.fm and Twitter, although a lot of the users are requesting for the Facebook integration.

Another brilliant idea is the Zones Panel. Zones Panel can be easily accessed from the toolbar's icon which is located on the top edges of the screen. It's purpose is to get rid of the tasks bar you have on your XP or Vista machine. Moblin will no longer show the running applications or opened files as series of buttons in the tasks bar, however, it try to hide it in such a way that every application or file will be opened to a zone which user can customized, and switching from zone to zone will bring user a different view (just like multiple virtual windows) and each zone's view will only shows what is being opened into that particular zone. Thus, user do not need to be worried about opening too many application which will eventually filled up your tasks bar with too many buttons, while conserving the taskbar (or toolbar in Moblin) for some other more useful quick launched selection.

Another feature worth mentioning in Moblin is the integrated messaging tool. It works just like your social networking integration into Moblin, so that from the People Panels of your Toolbar, just a single click will bring you to a screen where all your Instant Messenger (IM) buddies is being shown. You will be able to do a direct messaging from the same screen as well. However, up to now, i have no information on whether it will be a Moblin's messaging tool which requires user to register for new Moblin's accounts, or it will be able to load up contact list from existing messenger services (such as MSN, Yahoo or others).

Moblin also includes multimedia features live media player and image viewer, all can be found within the Media Panel with one-click easy access via the toolbar. In Windows XP or Vista, all the installed program can be found from your desktop's "All Programs" from the start menu. However in Moblin, it is listed under another page call Application Panel, also easily accessible via the tool bar.

All Moblin's image from here

You may find further details of the Moblin V2.0 Beta or the free beta 2.0 version from Moblin's Official Website.


Chrome OS

Image source from here

After its launched of the new Google Chrome Browser approximately 9 months ago, Google again announces that it is going to launched it's first Netbook operating system, Chrome OS by second half of year 2010.

According to Google, this Chrome OS is and extension from the current Chrome Browser. Its target is the same as Moblin's - the Netbook market, and so happen that it is going to be an open source, light weight operating system which focusing highly on internet user experiance.

However, up to date, there is no alpha version available, which user can try. But base on official announcement via Google's Official Blog, this OS will be loaded and started up and get user onto the web in just few seconds. Google Chrome will be running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel, and using web as the platform. Thus, Google claimed that all web-based application will be running well within their new OS.

Except focusing on enhancing internet user's experiance, Google also put a major look-into for the security of the new OS so that the user can leave all handling of malware, viruses and security update entirely to the OS itself without the need to worry about it.

Due to limited resources and official article about Google Chrome OS, i am not able to put an in details study on the features and feel-and-look for it. Thus, i will leave this to my future post when more information becomes available.

Something that the user will need to take note is that both Moblin and Google Chrome OS are light weight operating system which is targeting on heavy internet usage, and for netbook platform to allow quick start-up and easy access to the web content anywhere with WiFi connection. Thus you should not expect some other resource-hungry application to be loaded and running in this platform (such as games and software development kits)

Up to now, i think Moblin looks quite promising to me since there is a working beta available for me to try out and i will be able to see what's gonna happen and how the OS actually works in front of me, as compared to Chrome OS where there is still no available version for user to try out. But who knows Google might be able to change me when they have their first beta available someday.. :) So before that, i'll just wait and see what both Chrome OS and Moblin will turn out to be and gives me another worth-full surprises..

Coming up next...

Ok, after my previous posts about the Windows 7, what's coming up on my next post? hm.. since i started up with OS, i think is still good for me to continue talking on OS. But this time, a slightly different one - the netbook's OS.

In my coming up posts, i'll be sharing some information (and hopefully some useful comparison) between 2 brand new netbook's operation system, the Moblin (from Intel - beta available) and the Chrome OS (from Google - yet to be released).

So those who own a netbook or those who would like to know more about it, please stay tune!!!!

Windows 7 (RC1)

Here i am back with my post about the latest Windows 7 (RC1)..

Images source from here

Some of you might have already noticed that Microsoft had announced the release of Windows 7 (RC1) package recently. Some commonly heard question includes "I have Window XP and i am happy with it, why do i need another OS?", "I have the latest Vista, and Microsoft is coming up with Vista SP2, what's the point of coming up with an entirely new OS?"

I myself once had the same questions as most of the people does, thus i did some reading the study about the new Windows 7 and i think it might be good to share what i understand so far to my readers... :)

Image source from here

"I have Window XP and i am happy with it, why do i need another OS?"
To answer this question is rather easy. If you can do a simple study on the history of Window XP, you will realize that XP is reaching 8-year-old to date. Just like Microsoft's all previous versions of operating system, it will soon being phased out and end-of-life (EOL) by Microsoft. You might be wondering when will this be?? Well, Microsoft had confirmed that they are ceasing the mainstream support for Window XP recently, and it will only receive security patches up to April 2014. This means that there will not be any functional enhancement for XP, except security fixes. And of coz when you match this timeline with Windows 7's timeline, it is actually making sense to give Windows 7 a couple of years after its first release for the market to actually adapted to it and then EOL Windows XP (by the time it would have reaching ~13 year old, and in software world, these life-span is long enough, for the sake of its maintenance and sustaining cost).

Some little fact about Window XP:
In the rapid changing IT world, price per memory is relatively cheaper than it used to be. A lot of people might be thinking that "i can have much memory than that installed as the price of RAM is relatively cheaper.."..Yes, i do agree that price is becoming cheaper these day, but that isn't everything (at least not for Window XP). Window XP is an 32-bit window system, and do you know with these 32-bit OS, the maximum effective memory which can be utilized and recognized by these OS is only 3GB?? Meaning that even if you hardware do support up to 4 GB RAM installed on your machine, in terms of window wise, you are still being lock-in within the 3GB RAM window size

"I have the latest Vista, and Microsoft is coming up with Vista SP2, what's the point of coming up with an entirely new OS?"
To answer this question instead, we need a lot more discussion and comparison against the 2 OS.

First of all, for all Vista user would know, that Vista is a memory and resource-hungry beast. You would have noticed that as compared to XP, Vista's recommended minimum of 1GB memory and 15GB of free space for it to run "reasonably", while XP required only minimum 128MB of memory and 1.5GB of free space. As compared to the new Windows 7, with the same requirement as Vista, Microsoft promised a more effective and very much less resource-hungry than the Vista, while retaining and improving very much of the fancy-looking interface which Vista offers.

And of coz that is not the only thing. There are plenty of stuff that Microsoft promised to offer (or improve) in this new version of Windows over the previous one. Something which they have been putting the highlights on will be the "Jump-List" which offer the user a more easy access to the most frequently used files by just a few clicks away. And another highlight will be the newly designed tasks bar which is claimed to be more user friendly and more easily customizable. The new task bar allows user to place as much application as possible on it and having some eye-catching indicating on the taskbar icon itself to tell the user which application are currently running or multiple instance of the application is running, and of coz, to allow some thumbnail like preview of the running application.

Still being annoyed by the User Account Control (UAC) asking for permission dialog which keep on popping up whenever you try to do something on you File System (like manually running some custom-build application, replacing some file, and many many more?) in Window Vista? Well, this same old feature is still there in Windows 7, however it works in the more intelligent way by popping up only when really suspicious action is in progress by an automated tool (example, some unknown application is trying to overwrite some files in your system). And what more? it allow user to customize the security level for UAC, to give user much more control on what should be allowed and what is not.

Just a side story about the UAC. I am a full time software engineer and almost 100% of my work are building custom-build software. And due to compatibility issue, we need to always test our programm in both XP and Vista OS. There was once when i wrote a simple program named "XXXUpdateTool", in was running perfectly in XP, however when it comes to Vista, it just doesn't work at all (thanks to the UAC in Vista.. ).. i spent days on debugging just to find out why. And finally guess what? i simple rename my tool to "XXXUpdtTool", and it works!!! Yes, it is just the "Update" word in my tool's name, the UAC "suspect" that it is some silly malicious tool which is trying to do something funny on the system, so it blocks it from running..

And of coz, as of most of the user, i would switch from XP to Vista only because of its better security features than XP. Other than that, i think the only other reason might be the look-and-feel. However, with the release of Windows 7, it combine the good from both XP (for its performance) and Vista (for its security and look-and-feel). Base on a benchmarking done by PC Plus magazine over XP, Vista and Window 7 RC1, Vista was overtaken by Windows 7 in almost all aspect (including boot time, shutdown time, copy file time, gaming frame rate fps, burn data dvd, ripping audio cd, etc)

After all, is Windows 7 ready to go? I would suggest that those who are interested give the Rc1 a try to get a feel on how it work for you yourself. Microsoft actually offering free download and installation of Windows 7 RC1 for free until March of next year. Until then, you have months and your option to decide whether to switch to the new Windows 7

Coming up next...

What's coming up in my next post? for fans of the Microsoft, you might have heard about the release of the latest Windows 7 (RC1), but how far do you know the details of it? In my next post, as what i promised in my first "Starting up" post, i will be talking something about the new Windows 7 (RC1).. I am still working hard on this, so boys and girls, stay tune.. :)

Starting up...

Being a software guy for more than 5 years, "soaking" in the software world for more than 9 years (including the time when i was still an Information System Engineering student in MMU), i am now starting to think that i should be blogging something back to what i am familiar with - the computing world.

Being a computing guy, my wife commented me that i am not so up-to-date to the latest available technology and IT trends (or in hash word, i am an outdated IT guy... sob sob...). That is why i am encouraged to start up this brand new blog, to blog about the latest technology (hopefully), IT trends, software, or something related which i might come across from time to time, and of coz, to force myself to be up-to-date with the IT trends.. :) coz i need to do a lot of readings and research before i can actually write something, or anything here without giving the wrong information or worst, mislead my beloved "fans".. (do i have any?? hahaha, you are the one who should be telling me)

so my friends (or any visitors of my blog, friends-to-be), i am working on this... kick-starting.. so please stay tune for the up coming post... i might be discussing something which might interest you.. :)

why do i call this blog "MyBlueFeelSay"?? if you know me well, you will know that i had another personal blog all written in chinese named "MyBlueFeel"... so just to make it straight forward, "MyBlueFeelSay" it kind of self-explained everything.. is about what i say about IT.. :)

and lastly, of coz, credit to my beloved wife for helping in setting up this lovely blog template.. :) it is nice, isn't it? :)