There's been many updates to gmail over the past few days. Several changes include design changes, a better header view, update notification when a thread you are viewing has a new email come in, and of course, gmail mobile. The most recent enhancement though is the ability to "mute" threads. So if you are on a mailing list and a discussion doesn't interest you, you can archive it and all future messages in that thread. GOS has details here and here.
1videoConference is a new free video conference system making some waves. At novcon, we've tested DimDim, though it is in a very alpha state currently. Unfortunately, 1videoConference appears to be a windows only app that uses IE only. TechCrunch has a writeup here.
Black Friday is coming up, the annual shopping bonanza/circus. You can already get some of the ads here, here and here... that way, you can start planning where you are going to be at 2am to wait in line for your favorite store's opening that day.
So I downloaded IE7 and have been running it since the day it was released, so far no problems, other than for some reason the phishing filter (philter?) wants to classify novcon.net as a fraudulent site... Working on that... As for firefox, I downloaded 2.0 first day as well, but (flame shields up) I don't really see that much of a difference between this version and 1.0. Also, due to the nature of my development work, I still find myself chained to IE. So yes, I am *THAT* guy, the techie who is actually using IE on his windows box. Now granted, that's only when I am actually on my windows box. For the most part, I work from my macs.
.Mac webmail has been upgraded, and all I can say is "whoa". So I consider myself an example of the worst effects of being addicted to bleeding edge technology. I change webmail providers probably as often as my socks these days, and I had left .mac a long, long time ago, for the same reasons that everyone else did: the interface was designed over half a decade ago, and the site is slow, and they have a lot of outages, and it's expensive. Well, at least one of those concerns is no longer applicable. The new interface is stunning (for webmail) with the exception of having that now-ancient tab-bar across the top, an element of the apple website template, which was also created a very long time ago. What's even better is how well the interface mimics the look and feel of mail.app, which will help out the less elite users in getting the most out of their webmail.
So how does it rank against yahoo, google, etc? Well... interesting question... Because they still have not released an online version of iCal, I think the job is only half finished, if that much. I think the interface is more useable than gmail (Sorry google, some of us still want folders rather than just tags, and IMAP support is a must), cleaner than yahoo's interface, prettier than windows live mail, and less annoying than AOL webmail in that you can re-use the same window for navigating mail and creating new messages if you would like to. I think it is a great start, but I am still looking for the perfect online "everything" suite: all my mail, calendar, contacts, notes, office documents, chat, rss, groups, tasks, projects, etc all perfectly integrated together.... oh and preferably for free.
Along those lines, I have come across bluetie.com today, which is close, but seems to be giving me some issues with running the feature rich, ajax web client under safari. They do however have many of the components above, nicely integrated, though without the stylish simplicity of apple products.
Windows Defender has gone live. So far, not too much seems to be different from recent pre-release versions. Windows Defender is Microsoft's free anti-spyware scanner. It has pretty low overhead, though at this time I have not seen a comparison of its accuracy and other anti-spyware products.
Disco has been making waves in the Mac community. It is a disc burning application on the mac, which is not something I would think would be in such high demand due to the fact that Mac OS X itself has much of this functionality. Though the interface is something to behold.
One of the most important things that happened this week was the release of a firmware patch for macbook users that is alleged to stop those random shutdowns. I have sent my macbook in twice for repair for this. Although I have not experienced random shutdowns since the last repair, many others have gone through several repairs only to still have the issue. It is good to see that there is a patch out to fix it universally once and for all, but it is also scary. If this is a heat related issue, it's possible apple would just turn down the cpu a bit to produce less heat. I hope that's not what it does, my macbook is slow enough trying to run photoshop under rosetta.
Adobe has released a public beta of "Soundbooth", a pro audio recording app, for both mac and PC. This will be a welcomed product for the professional podcasting community and is going head-to-head with Apple's SoundTrack Pro. Nothing revolutionary at first glance, but the more of these pro apps that make it to the mac platform, the less time we all have to spend in windows =)
Verizon has announced new FlashLite content for their wireless subscribers. This is actually pretty big, because it means custom content and applications will be much easier to write and design for mobile phones. Which brings me to the next bleeding edge tech I am unhappy with.... MySprint PPC 6700... It does everything I need pretty much, it just doesn't do much of it well. It has a great camera, one of the best I've seen on a pda, but I am an instant message and email fiend, and much to my dismay, the ppc-6700 doesn't really work wonders in either category. So, I miss the sidekick a little, but it had it's shortcomings as well. I feel like I need to carry a sidekick, a razr and a treo to make things work. So much for convergence. So I am again in the market, looking around at the latest offerings, time to move on in the mobile department again.
Another very cool service I've come across this week is TalkShoe, which is a service that blends podcasting and services like livemeeting into one easy to use service. So basically, you can start your own podcast show on a schedule on TalkShoe. Your fans can then access talkshoe and listen live while the show is going on. While they are listening, they can text-chat with each other about the show, as well as even call in to the show if you set that ability up. While the show is going on, it is recorded on TalkShoe and then hosted to be listened to later by your users. Some excellent new ideas here, and who knows, maybe something is in the works for novcon....
I learned some VERY cool things from this week's episode of PhotoShop TV, some of which I used to create the latest wallpaper in novcon.net's galleries. One cool thing I'm still playing with though is how to very easily create a sketch from a photo in just seconds (and no, it's not a preset filter, although they might make one out of this tip oneday). I could not believe how easy this was.
Another podcast I keep an eye on, SceenCastsOnline has recently done a great getting-started video for google reader. If you haven't started using RSS feeds yet rather than constantly checking out 12 websites a day to see if anything has changed, you need to see this video. And if you're not new to RSS, but like me have tons of different RSS clients, and haven't checked out google reader yet, you should see this as well. I am using google reader for now, awaiting to see what sync capabilities will be in the rss reader that is built into Leopard's new version of Mail.App.
That's enough for the tech updates for this week for now.
You'll notice that our site chat is back and better than ever, along with a new gallery and forums system, a great profile system and lots of other changes. When we moved from dreamhost to 1and1, a lot of features didn't come with us for various reasons, and we've been really busy locking down the site's security so we didn't get a chance to bring stuff back up.
But all is well now. Be sure to check out the site chat system, which can now be detached to stay with you through the site.
There's a beta of a new project of ours online right now at security.novcon.net. It's certainly not finished or ready from primetime, but it's what we've been up to over the past few months. We have some automatically generated reports which are nice and informative, a great portal, a growing wiki, and a lot of useful information in the blog. Some screens are blank, some will crash, scripts are unstable, but you'll get the idea. If you would like to contribute content to the project or find out more about the project, please email
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This Saturday, September 9th is the grand opening of the Apple store at MacArthur Center in Norfolk, VA and we will be there early in the morning. If you've never been to an Apple store opening, it's quite an event and this is your chance.
The mall opens at 10am and it's website is here while the Apple store's website is here.
We're still alive! It's been a while since the last update, but that's because we're busy on some new services that should impact their respective communities.
We've also moved to a new host now, which should be more reliable and a bit better performance.
There's a great article on Computerworld (New Zealand) about hacking yourself before hackers do. The link is here and the article covers the swiss army knife of security evaluation tools, the Metasploit Framework.
NovCon shares the mentality that you have to know your own weaknesses in the eyes of your enemies if you want to protect against them. Do not wait passively to be reactive in security, but rather be proactive, searching for holes in your security infrastructure before someone else finds them for you.
