Microhoo?

Microsoft to buy Yahoo? So reports the Sydney Morning Herald:

Yahoo would plug a "strategic hole" at Microsoft that was not filled by the purchase of AQuantive, announced last week, Mr Noto [a Goldman Sachs analyst] wrote in a note to clients.

AQuantive, which creates web ads and measures whether they reach the target audience, does not give Microsoft the roughly half a million advertisers required to compete against Google, Mr Noto said.

Windows Live Search obviously isn't being used for search as Microsoft had hoped. But one has to ask: would this be a good thing or a bad thing for Yahoo? And does Google care?

Measure Map and Google Analytics

Google updated their Analytics statistics tool during the week - and what a huge improvement. Analytics always offered heaps of data, it was just presented in a very dull way.

You can really see that their purchase of Measure Map, a blog-specific statistics tool, has inspired much of the Analytics overhaul.

Below is the menu from Measure Map on the left, and Google Analytics on the right.



Now, they are obviously different as they serve different purposes, but the revised Analytics layout is much fresher - benefiting from the great work Adaptive Path did with Measure Map.

If you haven't already, sign up for an Analytics account. It's amazing what info you can get, and now how easy it is to access! (And have nice reports automatically emailed to you every week!)

Do This.

NetOffice Light: Status Report

Set up an account at Sourceforge this week, so we now have a place to work: http://sourceforge.net/projects/netoffice-light/. If you have any specific requests, post them there.

As I have mentioned previously, our first step is to remove all the existing javascript. Yep, all of it. I'm a big fan of progressive enhancement and so we'll be looking to have everything working without any javascript. Sure, it won't be as fancy, but if you don't have javascript enabled for any reason, you'll at least be able to use it.

We'll then add the fabulous jQuery library which should take care of pretty much any scripting we need. (With the exception of the editor toolbar of course.)

We'll also get rid of all the layout tables and convert it over to a nice, tidy, CSS layout. There will still be plenty of tables, but we'll get them all sorted with class names so it shouldn't be too hard to write your own skins or themes.

So our first release will be very much the same (function-wise) as NetOffice 2.6 - but a 'plainish' version that we'll make available, so any designers out there that feel the urge can start preparing skins.

WAMP - No More Messing Around

Thanks to Schmeegs for this - a very simple, straight-forward was to get Apache/MySQL/PHP running on your Windows box.

EasyPHP. Worked straight away for me without having to do anything!

Any if you do need to customise it, a little interface makes that pretty simple, too.

The Big Upgrade: XP to Vista

My little box of goodies arrived from Microsoft yesterday so last night I upgraded my notebook to Vista. So far, so good, mostly.

There was bound to be a few issues, and here are the ones I faced:

1. It takes a long time. I started at about 9pm and gave up waiting at about 12:30. A clean install is supposedly faster (but that means reinstalling all your software) so I elected to go for the upgrade. Put aside half a day. (Or overnight!)


2. Avast Antivirus needs to be uninstalled. On their website they say it works with Vista, and it does, but you have to uninstall it and then reinstall it after Vista has loaded. You can use the same install file though if you still have it.


3. Missing printer driver. The drivers for my Fuji Xerox Document Centre C250 just vanished during the install. I reinstalled the XP drivers (as the Vista ones are still a few months away apparently) and I can do basic printing, but nothing fancy (like double-sided for example)


4. iPod/iTunes. Aaaaaargh! You have to a bit of tap dancing to get this to sort-of behave. And even then iTunes keeps freezing. And I can't play my purchased songs, even after downloading their so-called 'patch'. Don't get me started on that!

Other than those things it seems to be doing pretty well. My notebook is nearly 2 years old and it's coping resonably well - I even get the Windows Aero fancy bits!

One of the coolest things though is the gadget sidebar. It comes with a few basic things you can add, but there are already heaps more you can download.

That's about it after day 1 - we'll see how she behaves over time...

The "Client Site" in NetOffice

Getting ready to release our first version of NetOffice Light, and I was initially planning on removing the Client Site functionality altogether. This brought about a few protests - so I'm asking anyone who does use that function:

1. What parts do you use the most?


2. What parts do you use the least?


3. What's missing?

Specifically relating to the Client Site part of NetOffice. Thoughts anyone?