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Upgrades, gotta love ‘em.

As it turned out, I foolishly accepted the offer of an upgrade to Windows Media Player 11 a couple of days ago. It all looked to have gone smoothly to begin with, and in fact I like the look of it – seems easier to find things and is a much nicer interface, all in all.

So I ripped a couple of CD’s I’d been meaning to put on my PC for a while, then connected my MP3 player. And… nada. Well, the helpful error message said words to the effect that my player was using an old USB driver which was no longer supported, and I should go get a new one. Great! It was getting very late, so I decided not to wrestle with it and left it til the next day.

The player in question is a Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen NX (nice and snappy that, ha), so I hopped over to Creative Europe’s website and downloaded the latest USB driver and installed that. Still the same error message.

A bit of Googling later, and I found that WMP11 has “known issues” with Zen portable devices. It would have been nice to have been told this before I did the upgrade, Microsoft! The suggested bodge fix is to roll back to WMP10, upgrade the firmware on the Jukebox and reinstall WMP11.

OK, I’ll give that a go. Except that, having trawled around Creative’s support site (again) and found the supposedly correct firmware upgrade, I get this lovely little error message when trying to run it:
Brilliant! So I send off an email to Creative’s Support asking just which file I should be using, and sit back to wait for a reply.

Meanwhile, there’s a troubleshooting bit on Creative’s site which suggests another possible bodge fix if the device is seen in Device Manager (it is) but not recognised by WMP10 (it isn’t). I follow the instructions which get me to mess about with the registry! And it still does nada.

Last resort is the section of Microsoft’s Readme for WMP11 which says your player might have problems after rolling back to v10; uninstall the USB device in Device Mangler™, disconnect device and reconnect, forcing Windows to reinstall. Still five parts of you know what.

So now I’ve got the (un)shiny Media Player 10 back on my system but I’m not even back to square one as the Jukebox is still not being recognised.

Thank you Creative Labs, and Microsoft, for wasting at least three hours of my time. And I’m still not done. You need your collective heads banging together. I don’t care who’s problem it is, but it shouldn’t be mine.

Two new browsers have launched in the same week. As Olly says, it’s a bit like London Buses. First a drought, and then they all come at once.

Firefox 2 – first impressions

As a regular user of FF1.5, I was keen to get the 2.0 release and like the slightly “shinier” look of the browser – someone’s polished the chrome!

I found an excellent article on tweaking Firefox, and have done a little customisation to make myself happy with it. One thing I was having trouble with – the new version put an “X” on every tab to close it, whereas 1.5 just had the one at the righ hand end of the tab bar.

Fiddling with the browser.tabs.closeButtons parameter, and setting it to “0″ just gives you the close button on the active tab. Much better!

The browser.tabs.tabMinWidth default is 100[px]. If you have many tabs open at once, you end up with scroll arrows in the tab bar, and only get about 7 tabs across by default before this happens. Changing this parameter to 75 gives you about 10 tabs before they start scrolling.

I like the “Recently closed tabs” in the History menu too – how many times have you closed a tab, only to think, “damn, I wanted that one”? Restore it quickly via this menu, and voilà!

Setting browser.urlbar.hideGoButton to “true” (default false) will get rid of the annoying green arrow next to the address bar. Personally, I never use it, I’m in the habit of bashing “return” once I’ve typed in a URL.

There are other new features, but I’ve yet to fully explore them.

IE7 – first impressions

I’ve been waiting in trepidation for Microsoft’s latest browser to be released. Yet ANOTHER browser us poor web developers will have to take into account when testing our sites. Yesterday, I bit the bullet.

No troubles in downloading the update, or installing it (thankfully!). Similarly, I went and trawled the evolt.org browser archive for a standalone version of IE6. I’ve heard some people have had problems with these standalone versions, but thankfully, no aggro as yet. So I’ve now got IE6, IE5.5 and IE5.01 on my PC too. Along with Opera, that has most of the major PC browsers covered.

Looks like none of my sites have major issues in IE7 – thank heavens! But I would have been surprised if they did – most were designed with standards in mind (IE7 is just catching up with the standards used by Firefox for years), and I haven’t got loads of IE-specific hacks lurking in my code.

Two things about IE7 I do like, and don’t think Firefox2 has (let me know if I’ve missed these options buried in FF somewhere):

1. Page thumbnails
2. Whole-page zoom

Page Thumbnails

If you click the thumbnails tab at the LHS of the tab bar (outlined in red) –
the browser gives you a large thumbnail of what each tab’s page looks like. A bit trivial if you have lots of different sites open, perhaps, but useful if you quickly want to tell the difference between several pages from the same site. The thumbnail display looks like this:

Whole-Page Zoom

And secondly, with accessibility in mind, IE7 will actually zoom the whole page, rather than just text. So if your standard page looks like this:

Once the page is zoomed, even up to 400%, it makes a pretty decent job of rendering text in graphics at this larger size (click the image below to see an actual-pixels version):

I’m sure there will be little niggles and glitches which become apparent as the web community gets used to these new browsers. For the moment, although I see IE7 as a massive improvement over the crusty old IE6, I don’t think it’s quite persuded me to swich from Firefox as my default browser. And that’s largely to do with the developer extensions and addons I use. Perhaps for a regular surfer, it would be enough.

Finally, A Night At The Opera

Lastly, I’ve just downloaded the upgrade for Opera, now version 9. The Opera website details what’s new in Opera9. Haven’t really had a chance to look at this in depth, but it’s always good to have another browser option to test.

No, not the slogan from the Marketing Division of Sirius Cybernetics Corp…

I was at a Microsoft SharePoint 2007 demo today. We were treated to lots of glossy PowerPoint slides and a stand-alone demo, but it all flashed by pretty quickly. The product seems to be very versatile with inifinite possibilities, but I think it will sink or swim depending on the amount of time given to proper configuration. Much business analysis would also need to be done to accurately guague what features are appropriate for your particular setup, and how best they may be implemented.

As an Enterprise Content Management system, it seems (at first look) quite comprehensive. It has native Web Content Management capabilities out of the box (my particular sphere of interest), as well as tons of other integration with the Office 2007 suite of apps.

Architecture
The system is held together by the Plaform Services which handles things such as workspace, security, topology and the site model. Around this links the six main functional sections:

• Collaboration – enables wikis, blogs, calendars, tasks and other Outlook integration
• Portal – the Enterprise Portal, tailored content for users and their MySites area
• Search – scalable search with tabbed contextual results – such as data (documents), people, business.
• Content Management – integrates the document and records management functions, retention policies, workflow etc
• Business Forms – allows rich XML web forms to gather data for workflows etc
• Business Intelligence – allowing server-based Excel analysis, reporting of KPIs, data visualisation etc

Technologies
The system runs ASP.NET 2.0 with SQL Server; MasterPages provide templates for content (in the portal itself or for web publishing); there are also database services (for interaction with other external databases), search services, and workflow services. Unlike the 2003 implementation, the 2007 release is fully customisable in terms of layout, branding etc.

Making It Look Nice
The overlayed CSS skins can be edited with the SharePointDesigner package. This is apparently an “upgrade” to FrontPage (which the Microsoft man admitted was “crap” – tell us something we don’t know!). The CSS works in conjuction with the ASP.NET Master Pages. Content and presentation layers are fully separated, such that the XML services (Web Parts play a Big Part) are consumed by the ASP.NET Master Pages, which are then styled with the required CSS.

Content Types
Each content type can be configured at setup to require (or not) additional meta data to be saved with the file, by defining a document template. Out of the box, there are also a number of built-in behaviours associated with each content/document type (these were not elaborated on further).

Easy Peasy
Designing a customised web page within the portal is as easy as dragging and dropping the Web Parts onto a page – provided you have the correct permissions to do so. The system will also integrate with other document management systems such as Documentum. Offline integration with Outlook enables a user to take documents (or even whole websites) offline to work on (they can be checked out or just copied), then when they are back in connectivity with the server, they will be updated as appropriate. Last Saved Wins! (if the file was not checked out) Although, there is a facility in Word 2007 which will highlight the changes made between versions of a document to aid comparisons.

Accessibility
I asked how accessible the system was – and the reply was “it depends how you implement it”. Microsoft nicely passing the buck to those looking after the system! Also, the more freedom you give to local editors of content (devloved content provision being the point of it all, really) potentially the more problems you may have with accessibility, if these editors do not know what’s required.

Is Anyone There?
Presence is the term given to a system of icons (whether it be against a Word document or person in a search result) which let you know if the author/person is currently online, or out at a meeting (it interrogates their Outlook calendar) etc. Right-clicking the icon will get you access for initiating an IM conversation, or VoIP call (if you have the software installed), or looking at their MySpace page (personalised page which gives details of their interests, specialisms etc). Microsoft intranet users find this very helpful in communicating amongst themselves, without having to leave the SharePoint application to launch IM, for instance.

What now?
That was a whistle-stop tour of some features, from their standard demo. I will write more if I get involved in implementing an instance of SharePoint in the future (it’s a distinct possibility).