Thursday, December 02, 2004 - Posts
Yes, the announced MSN Spaces service is started...
It seems a nice Blogging environment at the moment, easy and quick to setup. In few minutes (you only need to have a valid Passport account) you can setup your personal Blog (with a personal layout chosen from the templates available). You can post by email (cool) and also from mobile devices...
Now, if posting from other tools such as MSN will be possible soon, I think it could be the number 1 free Blogging environment available.
Only a thing I don't like now (a stupid thing, I know 
): the final URL of your blog. Why this http://spaces.msn.com/members/YourName and not simply http://spaces.msn.com/YourName ?
TheServerSide has published a nice list of the Top 10 Things to Be Thankful for in .NET. 
My personal addition: .NET has stopped one of the worst things on a Windows environment: the DLL Hell.
P.S. Smart Client is not only the word "smart" and "client" on the same sentence but something more and more powerful...
Most of us know that I'm a Thunderbird (and Firefox) lover and I'm happy to see that the Thunderbird 1.0 Release Candidate is out and ready to be tested...
The improvements are a lot:
- Significant theme improvements for all platforms.
- Migration improvements for Outlook 2003, Eudora and Mozilla Suite users.
- Fix for a 0.9 regression on Mac OS X when creating folders with non ascii characters.
- Saved Search Folder Improvements (i.e. lots of bug fixes)
- Message Grouping Improvements (i.e. lots of bug fixes)
- Improved RSS support (i.e. lots of bug fixes)
- Improved support for Multiple Identities for an account.
- Improved Account Central for Windows and Linux
- Improvements to Global Inbox, in particular how we manage filters.
- Fix problems creating folders with semicolons or # signs in the name
- Stability Improvements
- POP3 Filters can now filter messages to IMAP folders
- RSS Feeds that require http authentication now work in Thunderbird
- Fix an issue on Mac OS X where you could not paste text from Microsoft Word into the compose window
- Offline UI is now installed by default for Windows (it already was for Linux and Mac OS X)
- New quick search bar for address book and mail compose contacts sidebar.
- Deleting a saved search folder now prompts you before it gets deleted.
If you want to try the new 1.0 RC, you can download it from HERE.
In the time of a Windows Media Center Mania (I think I'm one of the few guys that are not too much attracted on it) there's someone on the Open Source world that has start thinking to do something similar...
The result of this work is MediaPortal, a free open sourced Multimedia Center Software for Windows that turns your PC in a very advanced HTPC (Home-Theatre PC) and PVR/DVR (Personal/Digital Video Recorder). It allows you to listen to your favorite music and radio, watch all your video's and DVD's, view, schedule and record live TV and much more (obviously, this is what it promises to do ).
What is interesting is that MediaPortal is an Xbox Media Center (XBMC) GUI ported to Windows from an XBMC co-founder, so it could be a promising project to observ with attention.
P.S. Screenshots are nice!
