Web Directions South: I'm There!

Missed out last year, but the 04 and 05 conferences were both excellent. Inspirational.

So I managed to convince the 'boss' to let me loose again this year.

They have split it into 3 streams this year: Design, Development, and Management & Strategy. A designer I am not (kinda wish I had some 'skilz' there though) but I like some of the stuff in the Development stream and some in the Management & Strategy stream. Hope I can chop and change a bit.

I guess I'll find out in due course.

Internet Explorer Cannot Download / From Help

Funny bug in Windows Vista - apparently caused when Dreamweaver 8 is installed. If you try to get help from within Windows, this happens:



There is a pretty painless fix, found here.

Safari For Windows

Apple have released Safari (their web browser) for Windows.

Why would you want to use Safari instead of Firefox?

I don't know... but now you can.

Getting Nokia PC Suite to Work on a New Toshiba Notebook

Got a new Toshiba A200 notebook on Friday so just spent the weekend setting it all up. All went pretty well until I got to setting up my Nokia 6111 to sync with Outlook - a very handy feature you can do with Nokia's PC Suite.

Except it didn't work.

After much digging I found that Nokia's software won't work with Toshiba's bluetooth stack in Windows Vista. It found the phone, but no amount of persuasion would make it pair with the computer. You need Microsoft's bluetooth stack.

So here's the fix:

1. Go to your Control Panel in Windows and uninstall the existing Bluetooth by Toshiba.


2. Reboot


3. Go to C:\TOSAPINS\Bluetooth-Monitor\BtMon3Inst_v301.exe and install that.

This process has removed the Toshiba bluetooth stack and installed the Microsoft one.

Easy...!

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.