Articles

Earlier blog posts and articles are available here.

August 23rd 2009 - Office 2010 Preview Released

Microsoft released a "technical preview" of Office 2010 to selected users last month, so you should expect to see reviews of it appearing in the next few months. It's due to go on sale to the public in early 2010.

According to Microsoft, there are a few new features for Outlook, but it doesn't sound like a major change in functionality. For example, they mention a better "Conversation View" that organizes message threads by the "natural conversation flow between parties".

However, the biggest change seems to be that Outlook will get the "ribbon" that the other Office applications already have, which replaces the menus. I'm kind of old fashioned and prefer the menus, but I'll just have to move into the 21st century ;-)

Good news is, it sounds like it'll be easier to cleanup your inbox if it's gets out of control in Outlook 2010. Useful when you get back from holiday and are faced with the dreaded hundreds of unread messages.

Otherwise though, it doesn't sound compelling to upgrade Outlook.

The Microsoft pressroom has some good screenshots.

August 4th 2009 - New launch

We've just spent the last few months getting our systems up-to-date to support Windows 7, the new Microsoft OS, which is due out in October. At the same time, we improved the support for Vista, speeded Qlockwork up and put in some fixes and minor feature requests.

Windows 7 is supposed to be better than Vista. I hope so. I have Vista installed on my personal laptop and I find it very slow, though there are a few things you can do to speed it up. The best results I got for speeding it up were from the following.

• Disabling the look and feel ("Aero") and going back to an XP-style look. Sorry Microsoft, I know Aero looks nice, but it slows things down. Here's a useful link to how to turn Aero off.
• Not using Internet Explorer as my browser. I love IE, but I just found it ran too slowly with Vista. I switched to Mozilla Firefox as my default browser and I did get better performance.

The good news for Microsoft fans like me is that Windows 7 looks faster than Vista. We have Windows 7 running on some of our test machines and the performance seems OK so far.

Now the new version of Qlockwork is out there, the time has come once more to work on our Google rankings. I need to look at our inbound links (links that come to us from other sites on the web). After spending a morning slowly submitting to directories, I ran across a site called onewaytextlink.com which seems to make it easier to enrol with directories. I'll try it out. It's free. Here's an advert to one of their associated companies:

“Search engine optimization services”

I'll see how good onewaytextlink are.

July 7th 2009 - How do I make my PC easier to see?

Recently I was helping a friend make their PC a bit easier to see. There are quite a few useful accessibiity options on Windows, but they can be hard to find (which is ironic). Here are two of the most effective, in my opinion.

• Increasing the text size across your PC
• Making the mouse pointer bigger and bolder

Increase the default text size

This is particularly useful. For Vista:

• Click on the "Start" menu (the button the the extreme botton left)
• Click on the text "Control Panel" which is on the bottom right of the Start menu
• From the Control Panel, click on the "Ease of Access Center"
• Scroll down and click on the option "Make the computer easier to see"

• Scroll down to "Make things on the screen larger" and click the link "Change the size of text and icons"

• Vista will ask you if you want to continue. Press "Continue"
• You'll see a new window which asks you what text size you want to use, the default scale (small size) or large scale. Select larger scale.

• Now hit OK. The new text size will take effect after a reboot. To get back to the original size, follow these instructions but choose "default scale" on the screen above.

Make the mouse bigger

A bigger mouse is easier to spot. You can also make the mouse stand out more against the background by making it black. On Vista

• Click on the "Start" menu (the button the the extreme botton left)
• Click on the text "Control Panel" which is on the bottom right of the Start menu
• Double click on "Mouse"
• On the dialog box that appears, click on the "Pointers" tab
• in the top section ("Scheme") Choose the "Windows Standard (extra large)" scheme from the dropdown menu, then hit the apply button.

• That gives you a bigger pointer. To get a bigger pointer that's also black, choose the "Windows Black (extra large)" scheme.
• You can change back at any time by following these instructions and selecting the "Windows Standard (large)" scheme.