Eye Candy

So what's wrong with eye-candy?. In my last post I mentioned that Vista was offering mostly eye-candy as opposed to real features. Don't get me wrong, I like cool looking applications just as much as anyone else. But do you need Vista for that? You could of course get a Mac, they're all about eye-candy anyway. Not just their software but their general styling as well, but you do pay for it.

What about dressing up XP, that is easy enough to do also. Two things I use and really like. First an old one, the Google Desktop. Want all those gizmos on your screen along with that slick glassy look and a great search, then this does just that. Works great on my wide screen laptop because frankly I don't care for most applications to run that wide. Ever tried following small print all the way across a 17" wide screen? I just keep my application in a more normal aspect and let GD fill the right 2" of my screen. Well I'm a sucker for a lot of Google ware as it is. Gmail, Google Docs, Blogger and Picasa - both the program and the on-line photo sharing.

That brings me to my latest little piece of eye-candy. Pic Lens as a FireFox addon.
Those iphone commercials where they glide through pictures. Go there and check it out.
http://www.piclens.com/

Such a cool interface for Picasa on-line.

I said two items but I offer one honorable mention. Opera. The latest version sports a new look if nothing else. And it just works. Excellent browser that still has a really nice feature of fit-to-width view. The look is by default a very pleasing and glassy modern black and dark red that I truly like.
opera.com

Opera and FireFox are both skinable and there are quite a few offerings, or do your own is always an option (yeah in my free time).

The Fat Lady Sings

Most of what I do involves small businesses, but I sometimes do work for individuals so the other day when a retired fellow I'd helped before called I went over to his house. He has an older Dell computer which he had some sort of trouble with. He had taken it to CompUSA and after a month they managed to wipe out his installation of XP Home and reinstall Win 98 SP2. He was unable to find the product code for his win XP update even though he had the cd. He was forced to go back to the Win 98 that came with the computer.

They told him they had been bought out and their regular techs had left. He wasn't aware CompUSA was going out of business.
(They are, they were sold out to a liquidation firm, not to some one who is going to run it. In a way I will miss them as they were often a ready source for hardware but on the other hand their help was lousy, and their techs usually incompetent.)

Back to the story. His machine had a usb keyboard and mouse. Win 98 will usually not recognize those until you install drivers but try to install drivers without a keyboard and mouse. A quick hookup of some usb to standard adapters (which I carry in my laptop case), got us started, drivers installed and Bob's your uncle.

Now go to windows update and run the critical updates. So far so good. Now he uses Hotmail for his email and accesses through the IE browser. We head over there and signin but when we get to the inbox it renders completely out of wack and is unreadable. Seeeeesh! what now?

We just want to get this done and let him read his emails before he heads out for the holidays. First I think Firefox but since Hotmail is an MS site I think again and decide on Opera.

Quick download and install. Signin to Hoptmail and we're off. Damn I'm good some days.
If you've never tried Opera let me tell you ist pretty nice. Fast, has tabbed browsing and my favorite that even Firefox doesn't have, fit to screen. Ever have a page that wanders way off to the right and you have to keep scrolling side to side? When I hit those I just fire up Opera and away I go.

Opera web browser. Recommended.
http://www.opera.com/