I've been using Windows Vista for a few days and here are some first thoughtsI like the new interface a lot. The L&F is very nice (tho no aero for me).

- The way things work now makes it a lot easier to do things.
- If the changes on how you get things done are confusing, you can switch to classic view in some things such as the 'control panel'. I was looking for something in the Vista view that at first was unable to find, then I found the option to switch to 'classic view' - Nice! It's very handy to be able to do things both ways till you are used to the new 'easier' way of doing them.

- The replacement of the 'File' menu such as the case in IE with the new tab like menus is great! This change just seemed to make a lot of sense, not hard to transion - or so I found - even better if this frustrates you, you can still select the option of showing the file menu.

- The tabs in IE and the thumbnail view are amazing.

- Some sites still dont render correctly in IE though, I was however very disappointed that macromedia.com was one of those!!!

- The thing that frustrated me most was the search feature, this has been made much much much more easy that it's too frurstrating... I tried several times to use wild cards in the search box but hmm... it seeems you cant, then was wondering so how do you get to a specific file ...etc. It's all in the menus available witht he search feature.

- I would have imagined you should still be able to  use wild cards, but cant figure how yet.

More on Vista in later posts

There has been a few posts about the new Geekzone blog feature lately.
Want to know what people think.

Mauricio, Tim , Darryl and Nic all posted about this.

I was lucky to get no 9!

Still not convinced you should try it, then here are my comments!

"A security association is reporting what it says is the first virus that can pass from a PC to a mobile device and then erase files."

I guess with viruses targeting new markets in the near future, we might see lots of antivirus software moving there in the future too... I would have never thought I might be running say Norton or McAFee on my Smartphone but who knows; if viruses can go mobile then surely antiviruses will too!

See the article here

With the latest release of the Windows Vista CTP build this week. I was doing some recap with some of the changes made in the history of windows and one of the things that I didnt pay much attention to lately is the Windows 'start' button. Most of you will probably know that the start button was a big talk within HCI for it's inconsistency with user actions - clicking a button called start to shut down - end - a computer ... etc. With a bit of search I found the following link with all the windows buttons from Windows 95 to Vista build 5259 (2 builds back I think) but the button in this build is still the same. So by the looks of it, in the last 3 builds of vista, including the one released this week 5308 the word 'start' is finally no longer going to be present. I think this will make HCI guys happy now

For a recap on the start button in the past 10 years I've included the images I found in the link above.

Windows 95/98/NT 4	Windows 2000/ME
Windows XP Build 2250	Windows XP Build 2257
Windows XP Build 2410	Windows XP Beta 1
Windows XP Beta 2	Windows XP
Windows Server 2003	Windows Media Center 2005
Windows Vista Build 3683	Windows Vista Build 3718
Windows Vista Build 4008	Windows Vista Build 4015
Windows Vista Build 4051	Windows Vista Build 4083 (64-bit)
Windows Vista Beta 1	Windows Vista Build 5219
Windows Vista Build 5259-5308

Watched this on the news today and had to check it out. Telecom are finally upgrading the Broadband plans. Yay! Now it's taken quite a while for this to happen I think but it's finally happening, and I believe there is now room for it to be even better. The even better news - for businesses that is - is that the plans and prices are the same for both!!.

To see the range of the new plans offered by Telecom go here - the plans are effective from April this year.

Ok so on the same day IE 7 beta 2 preview is released a bug is found!! According to PCWorld here. An independent researcher only needed 15 minutes to find to find the first bug in the beta 2 preview.

The interesting thing is that "Ferris's discovery is one of the quickest such bug-findings on record". I personally dont think this is bad news tho. I mean the software is not even a beta yet... and discovering bugs early leads to having a better, less vulnerable final product.

More details on the bug can be found here.

Update: here's a post from the IE blog regarding the issue.

Just read about one of the nice new features available in VS 2005 - Code Snippets! In VS 2005 you can select code from a list of commonly used patterns and  "What makes code snippets really cool is that you can easily create and define your own." as Scott says.

The snippets are not available in C# by default but you can download them from here

See Scott's post for more detail on this here

A couple of days ago I got a Windows Live Messenger invitation and been using it since. Over all it looks good and has some nice new features new user interface ...etc, but here's the one that caught my attention. In Windows Live Messenger you can actually send offline messages to people when they are not online so that they'd receive them on their next login, very cool! This used to be one of my favourite features in ICQ and I'm glad to see it in Windows Live Messenger now. I havent tried MSN Messenger 7.5 but I'm sure that this feature was not available in MSN 7 and earlier.

To send an offline message just right click an offline name or just double click the name...

Update: I also just noticed that you can now also talk to people while you are appearing offline, nice!!! I wished for this feature long time ago to be on MSN...