The main search page for Google has always tried to have a minimalistic design. However, recently, Google seems to have taken a page out of Bing’s playbook and now offers a way for users to customise the background of their Google main search page.

In order to make best use of this, you need to be logged into your Gmail/Google account.

Once logged in, there is an option on the bottom left hand corner of the screen to “Change Background Image”.

This allows the user to change the background with a picture from their Picasa Web Albums, or uploaded from their computer or from a public gallery.

In order to use your own pictures, the minimum image size is 800×600. The image is scaled as the window is resized.

The results are still displayed against a white background. It is a bit flaky and doesn’t “feel” like Google. But hey, if anyone wants to, here is it :)

Up till now, Google Doc’s has been a free service that gives the user an ability to create, maintain and store various documents online. It had functionality to allow the user to upload and read Microsoft Office documents as well.

Microsoft has now struck back by releasing free online versions of its Office Suite and giving the users an alternative to Google Docs.

Called Office Web Apps, this suite is a cut down version of the desktop applications and allows for document viewing, sharing and light editing.

The consumer version of the tools are free and store the documents on Live SkyDrive. The corporate versions can get self hosted versions of the applications using Sharepoint.

Being online applications means that the applications will work regardless of the operating system and have been tested in Windows, Mac’s and Linux based machines through various internet browsers.

If you have Office 2010 installed, then Office Web Apps takes advantage of offline and online editing and can present a richer experience for users.

Office Web Apps are also supported via mobile browsers and allows the user to view documents saved onto their Live SkyDrive account directly on their mobiles.

Read below on how to use Office Web Apps.

Using Office Web Apps

In order to use this facility, you can sign up to your Windows Live account, or navigate to http://office.live.com.

Once you have signed on, you will be presented with a new “live” page similar to below:

The page will list all recent documents created using Office Web Apps as well as giving an option on the right to create a new document.

The interface is uncluttered and is user friendly. Hovering over an existing document displays a menu that allows for additional options:

These menus allow the user to share a document, view version history, download a local copy, etc.

When creating a new document, the first thing Web Apps asks for is a file name

Because this is a web application, the speed at which the application opens is dependent on your internet connection. It can take a bit of time to open the applications themselves.

Word

Any existing user of Microsoft Word will be familiar with the lighter online version of the application. It has a subset of functionality, but enough common functionality to be a good alternative at a pinch.

Opening up the document locally directly from this interface won’t work unless you are running Office 2010. Note: 2007 does not meet the requirements.

Excel

Again, a familiar interface to anyone who has used a spreadsheet before.

The one thing I couldn’t locate in here was a charting option. Which is a big omission. Maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough, but given the limited functionality, I couldn’t seem to see it anywhere.

PowerPoint

This allows you to create quick presentation slides or brochures. A lightweight again compared to the full version, but it comes with a variety of themes that can make a good looking presentation quickly and easily.

Because this can be graphically heavy, it can get cumbersome to work with online.

OneNote

OneNote is Office’s version of a catch all information store for storing ideas, plans, etc. It can contain multiple “notebooks” that can have pages that can hold all manner of information.

The online version is similar to the full version and while it hasn’t got the place notes and clips everywhere, it has enough to allow the user to jot quick notes down and store in an organised manner.

Conclusion

Working with the online version can present a bit of an issue if you have been using the full versions and are used to having functionality that suddenly is not there.

However, the subset of functions available are usually enough to use on demand.

I don’t believe this suite will replace the desktop versions (I don’t believe that is the aim). But if required, this can be a good half way house.

To enable full integration, you will need to use Office 2010 which supports opening documents from the web.

Related Posts

• Live SkyDrive – Mounting as a Network Drive via Gladinet
• Live SkyDrive – Saving files larger than 50 megs
• Zoho Personal – Online Office Suite

The newest version of one of the more popular blogging applications, Windows Live Writer  is now out.

Version 14.0.8117.416 is part of the new Wave 3 suite of the Live Essentials package.

Most Windows platforms are supported, however the installer still complains when trying to run via Windows 2003 Server.

I’ve extracted the MSI package for Writer and placed it on my Live SkyDrive in case you need to install it for Windows Server 2003. Read below for instructions and download links.

You can download the MSI here: http://bit.ly/Writer14_0_8117_416 

A few notes:

If you already have an older version of Writer installed, you will need to uninstall it first. To be safe, back up your Plugins folder (normally found in c:\program files\Windows Live Writer\Plugins) and store in a safe place before uninstalling.

I uninstalled Writer using the Add/Remove programs applet in my control panel.

Once uninstalled, you can then right click on my MSI and select Install. It should install Writer automatically.

When I installed it, it didn’t lose my blog settings or my plug ins. Be prepared to set up everything again should it be required.

If you have any issues, feel free to place a comment and I’ll try and assist as much as possible.

Would appreciate a tweet/share/comment if you found the above useful :)

Related Posts

An increasing number of phishing emails are getting sent out asking people to verify their World of Warcraft credentials. The sad thing is that more people are falling for this every day resulting in forum posts like this:

I had a chance to look at my spam folder in Gmail and I was amazed to see so many emails from “Blizzard” asking me to verify my password:

If you get an email like this, the first thing you do is NOT TO CLICK ANY FRICKIN’ LINK IN THE EMAIL!!!!

Here is how you can spot a fishy email and some steps around keeping your WoW account a bit safer….

Ensure that you look at the email headers and see where the emails originate from. If you are using Gmail, the easiest way to do this is to click on “Show Details” on the top of the email:

Just checking the “from” address is never ever enough. In this case, some idiot tried to send me to a nice looking page to give him my username and password.. lovely.

If you need more information, see if you can see the entire message header. In Gmail, you can click the little drop down button beside the Reply button and select “Show Original” to see the entire trail:

And the real address is now shown:

The funny thing is that my Gmail address is NOT associated with any battle.net accounts :)

Some Suggestions to keep a**holes from stealing your keys

1. Blizzard will NEVER EVER EVER ask for your password. So if you get an email from anyone purporting to be Blizzard and asking for your username and password, its a hacker trying to get your hard earned account.

2. NEVER EVER EVER click any link in any emails that come from Blizzard. It may look like its going to the WoW or Battle.Net sites, but trust me, its not. If you mouse over the link, looking at the status bar on your browser will show you where the link is actually going. This is done by showing you one address, but the on-click takes you somewhere else:

3. If you are in doubt, enter the link to the Blizzard site manually in a browser. Don’t click on any links! (worth frickin’ repeating!)

4. If you are still paranoid, don’t even open any emails that look like these especially if they are not trapped by your spam filters. At the very worst, it is possible for hackers to put malicious code that can redirect you to sites that contains key loggers that can be used to steal your WoW and other personal details.

5. As a general rule, always be careful when using online cafe’s or other public places to log onto any sensitive sites. You cannot guarantee that these machines are not infected with key loggers.

6. Always ensure that your battle.net password is not easily guessable and is different from what you use for other sensitive sites.

7. Always ensure that your machine is up to date in terms of its updates and virus software and that you do run regular scans. I know a few people who have downloaded dodgy software and the “setup.exe” come frequently with a bootstrapper that installs a virus first and then runs the real setup.

8. The most important item that you need to ALWAYS have secure is your email address. Its amazing how often people think that it doesn’t need to be that secure because you don’t have sensitive enough information in it. But imagine how easy it would be for a hacker (once they have your email account) to “reset” any services and be able to have that sent to your email box.

Having your email address details is the first step in terms of having the ability to reset most things that address has been registered against. This includes financial institutions, your battle.net account, etc etc etc. At the very least make sure your email password is frickin’ secure!!

Summary

There is a LOT that can be written around the areas of keeping your “stuff” secure. I’ve only brushed on a high level some of the common sense practices.. There are entire sites dedicated to online security and best practices. Just saw a whole bunch of spam in my Gmail, hence why I thought I’d write something about it to convey my opinion.. :)

Related Posts

In my previous articles, I’ve listed of ways to get the best use out of Windows Live SkyDrive. This has consistently been one of the most read posts on my blog especially around using Gladinet to set up Live SkyDrive as a network drive on your computer.

Recently, a new product has come into Beta, that allows for the same level of functionality and allows the user to set up their SkyDrive account as a network drive without going through extended configuration steps that Gladinet takes us through.

In all fairness, connecting via Gladinet offers many more options such as connecting to other types of cloud storage at the same time (for example,  Google Picasa, Amazon S3 and Google Docs). SkyDrive Explorer only connects you to Live SkyDrive.

SkyDrive Explorer is a free product and is easy to use. It requires little to no configuration and allows the user to use their SkyDrive just like any other folder on their computer….

To install SkyDrive Explorer, go to http://www.skydriveexplorer.com and click on the Free Download menu.

Step 1

Download the setup via the download link and run through the steps to install the application:

When you hit Finish, the installer will close. At this point in time, there is no “executable file” that you need to run to start the application itself.

Step 2

Open up your “My Computer” and you’ll see the SkyDrive Explorer under the list of your “Other” drives:

Step 3

The first time you double-click on the icon, the following dialog box will show:

Put in your Live user details and hit Sign In

Step 4

Once authorized, your windows explorer will now show the contents of your SkyDrive account:

And that is pretty much it! Again, you can treat this just like any other windows folder and/or drive on your computer. The advantage of this drive is that it is stored on the cloud and so available wherever you go.

Warning

SkyDrive Explorer communicates with your SkyDrive account by HTML Web page parsing, which means that should Windows Live decide to change their content format, this application may not work any more. However, I’m sure that the SkyDrive Explorer folks will update regularly should any of their functionality gets disabled due to Live SkyDrive changes.

I don’t know about you, but I find the mouse over ad’s on Windows Live Messenger extremely annoying. Every time I accidently move the mouse over the ad, it keeps popping up forcing me to move my mouse all the way to the top to close it.

As you can see on the left, it can get quite annoying and almost made me stop using Windows Live Messenger. To top it off, the ad’s appear OVER other applications if they are on top of (and overlap) Messenger.

While I don’t condone removing advertising from free products, this was one exception I had to make simply to save bandwidth as well as stop me from uninstalling an otherwise excellent application.

In order to remove the ads follow the steps below:

Step 1

Open up Notepad, and select File..Open. In the resulting window, navigate to \Windows\System32\Drivers\etc

Ensure that Files of Type is set to “All Files”

Step 2

Select the file called “hosts” and click on Open. This will open the hosts file and it should look something similar to below:

Step 3

You may have more than one line in the list of IP addresses. Add this line to the list:

127.0.0.1      rad.msn.com

Ensure there is a TAB between the IP Address and the URL.

Step 4

Save the file and close it.

Step 5

Restart Windows Live Messenger and check to ensure that the images are now gone. The ad’s should now be replaced by a blank white space. The space will still be there, but at least, now we no longer have that annoying flash advert that pops up and kills what would be an otherwise love user experience :)

Hope that helps someone out there :)

From time to time, all bloggers like to tune their blog via a new theme or style sheet etc. Windows Live Writer has an excellent functionality to allow a blogger to preview what their post will look like before they publish their article. This is done by clicking on the Preview tab in Windows Live Writer.

When a blog is set up first in Windows Live Writer, the theme and style sheet is automatically downloaded from the blog to provide this preview functionality.

If the theme or style sheet is changed, you will need to manually refresh in Windows Live Writer to get the latest version to ensure that the preview remains accurate. Its a few simple steps to do this…

Open Windows Live Writer and select your blog from the Blogs menu. If you haven’t configured Windows Live Writer yet, feel free to go here to for a refresher: How To Configure Windows Live Writer for WordPress Blogs.

Once you have selected the blog you wish to refresh, select Blogs..Edit Blog Settings from the menu bar:

Click on the Editing menu and you’ll see a button to Refresh Theme. Click that. A small dialog box will appear that shows the progress:

Once this is complete, the theme should be refreshed and clicking on the Preview tab in Windows Live Writer should show the latest version of your website with your new article in it.

Note: The application may ask you if it can post a dummy article to your blog to allow it to retrieve the theme correctly. This post is deleted immediately afterwards, so feel free to allow it to do so.

Windows Live Writer is currently one of the most popular applications for blogging. It is an easy to use application that allows anyone to quickly post articles to their blogs in a WYSIWYG fashion. With live previews, its possible to see exactly how your post will look like before you publish the article.

This article will show you how to configure Windows Live Writer to work with your WordPress blog.

Prerequisites

The requirements before you start is that you have downloaded Windows Liver Writer and have it installed on your machine and also that you have a hosted WordPress installation somewhere. It doesn’t matter if the blog is a self-hosted one or one that is hosted on wordpress.com, the steps are the same…

Step 1

NOTE: This may not be required for blogs hosted on wordpress.com. This is typically only required for self-hosted WordPress blogs. In this case, go to Step 2.

Go to your WordPress Admin Dashboard, and under Settings.. Writing, ensure that the following item is checked:

Turning on XML-RPC will allow Windows Live Writer to connect to your WordPress blog. Scroll down and hit “Save Changes” to commit the changes.

Step 2

Start Windows Live Writer, go to the Blogs menu and click on “Add Blog Account…”

Choose “Other Blog Service” and hit Next

Step 3

Enter your web address of your blog, your admin username and password and hit next. If you like you can select “Remember my password”

Step 4

Windows Live Writer will now connect to the blog, analyze and set up the application.

During the analysis process, you may get a dialog box as below:

Hit Yes to this as this will ensure that you can get an accurate preview of your posts in Windows Live Writer.

Once it has completed setting up the application, it will display the following information:

Choose a name that can identify your blog and hit Finish.

Conclusion

That should be it. You can connect to several blogs at the same time in Windows Live Writer. To switch from one blog to another, its as simple as selecting the relevant blog from the Blogs menu in the menu bar.

I’ll set up some more posts later on how to get the best use out of Windows Live Writer. If there is anything in particular that you wish to know, please leave a comment and let us know :)

Relevant Links

• Download Windows Live Writer page: http://download.live.com/writer
• Installing Windows Live Writer on Windows Server 2003

If you try and install iTunes 8.2 or above on Windows Server 2003, you will most likely get an issue during the install where it complains during installation of one of the components (namely, Apple Mobile Device Support). The error looks like “Apple mobile device support requires that your computer is running Windows XP SP2 or newer”.

iTunes will complete its install, but when you plug in your iPhone or iPod, it will not get recognized and as such, won’t allow you to synch.

If you are having difficulty getting your IPhone or IPod recognized by Windows Server 2003, try the following:

Step 1

Download iTunes Setup as usual from the Apple site. Don’t install it at the moment. If you have already installed it, then don’t worry. Follow the rest of the steps through as normal.

Step 2

Open the following location in your web browser:
http://bit.ly/ItunesForWin2k3

That is my personal SkyDrive account and has two files in it. One is the MSI file for the Apple Mobile Device Support for iTunes 8.2 and the other is an .mst file (I found the MST file on the web – thanks to whoever set it up!). Download both of these into a folder on your PC. In my case below, I’ve created a folder on my c drive called ITunes and downloaded both files there:

Step 3

Open a command prompt window and type the following (with an enter after each line):

cd c:\itunes
msiexec /i AppleMobileDeviceSupport.msi TRANSFORMS=w2k3.mst

When you hit enter on the second line, it should start the install process. This will install the Apple Mobile Device Support service on Windows 2003 Server.

Step 4

The last step is now to install ITunes as normal. If you had already installed iTunes, you can re-run the set up and select Repair to re-install the application.

Once complete, you should be able to start iTunes and when you plug in your iPod or iPhone, it should get discovered and displayed in your iTunes

That should be it :) I know the instructions are quite sparse. I’d love to hear any comments you may have around this. If you need me to elaborate on any step further, please let me know.

I use both Google Chrome and Firefox for my main personal browsing. I love both browsers and think each of them does some things better than the other, so I tend to switch between the two depending on my requirements.

I love the development add-on’s that I can get for Firefox so most of my design type browsing is performed on there. However, there is one thing that I would love to have seen on Firefox that Chrome does really well. The New Tab functionality in Chrome results in a webpage dashboard that lays out my most common websites, recent book marks and recently closed web pages all in an easy to read manner. I miss that the most in Firefox.

Well, obviously someone else did too, and there is now an experimental add-on called JumpStart for Firefox that does exactly that!

To Install The Add-on:

Step 1

Navigate to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8914

You will notice that this is an experimental release and as such is not guaranteed to work. These are add-on’s that are still to go through a public review process and may be in beta or prototype form. You can get more information about Experimental Add-on’s here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/pages/faq#experimental-addons.

Step 2

In order to authorize the install of this add-on, tick the “Let me install this experimental add-on”. The “Add to Firefox” button will then become active. Click it.

You will see the add-on window pop up to ask again for authorization. Click on Install.

Step 3

When the install is complete, it will ask you to restart Firefox.

Click the button to restart Firefox. Firefox will restart and display you your Add-ons window. Close this now to get back to Firefox.

Step 4

That’s pretty much it now. Whenever you open a new tab, you’ll get to see a screen similar to what Chrome displays

There is a button on the top right that allows for further personalization if you wish. The Searches button allows you to search through your history.

Conclusions

There are few things still not working correctly for me. These include:

• The ability to pin a website to the dashboard doesn’t seem to work as well as the ability to remove the website from the grid (you get these options by mousing over a website thumbnail).
• The Recently Closed items apply only to the current session, so if you have multiple windows open and you close Firefox, the recently closed items reset
• It may have some issues working with some existing add-ons so use at your own discretion.
• It does consume some memory so keep an eye on that and if it’s not to your liking, then feel free to disable the add-on.
• Its an experimental build, so it may not be compatible with the latest versions of Firefox. However, this should get better as it moves towards a more stable build.

For an experimental build, its certainly better than looking at a blank page :) And it gives me a few more options to play with to personalize Firefox as a web browser. For the brave amongst you, feel free to try it out and let me know what you think :)

Alternative Solutions

Updated: June 11th 2009:
As JumpStart is still an Experimental Addon, there are a couple of alternatives that can serve a similar purpose (though they don’t go to the lengths of emulating Google Chrome’s functionality completely). These include New Tab King (thanks shelly!) and Speed Dial. I’ve put links to their home pages below for your reference.

Relevant Links

• JumpStart Add-on Page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8914
• JumpStart Add-on Home Page: http://digitalmihailo.blogspot.com/search/label/JumpStart
• New Tab King Add-on Home Page: http://www.newtabking.com
• Speed Dial Add-on Page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4810  (Home Page)