Improvements for OneNote to be more helpful for students

Office 2010, the next generation of Microsoft office is due out soon, and has improvements to work with windows 7, and all the applications bundles in any package available from home to and student, to the enterprise edition, and all programs in them, all use the much hated ribbon. Including OneNote. My thoughts when I heard this was something to the point of “what the hell”. OneNote’s usefulness came from the toolbars, could be dragged on all sides of the program, or floated on top of your page of notes. Well the ribbons dropped that. Yuck. You know you want a peak, so merry Christmas.

Also, they’re also a few new buttons and feature, I’ll get into those goodies later, but the buttons are shown on these screenshots of all the new toolbars. I showed some of the new buttons down below.

Somehow, the ribbon is not the worst thing they’ve done. The Menu. *pukes* Its a fullscreen menu, not a pop-up as it use to be, and at least for the virtualized version of office 2010 the dev preview users get, its lags, something nasty, on both opening and closing. My suggestion, learn some shortcuts and avoid the menu. Its painful to use. Another not so pretty purple tinted picture. that the other thing, all programs now have a color tint. Onenote is Purple, disgusting.

Now for the goodies. when I first took at a look at it, I was worried about finding any new good stuff at all. Fortunately, a found a few. One is the much improved back up system. In OneNote 03, and 07, notebooks were backed up, usually once a day, for a week, and then old backups were deleted at the end of the week. But most people never used this feature because they didn’t know it existed, or they didn’t know where the backups where stored. Backups where hidden, nicely somewhere in Appdata. I had to dig around in there once to retrieve notes for a student who replaced her notes with her friend’s mostly blank notebook. I found them, but it took a while. After that a wrote a small script in NSIS to automatically backup OneNote Notebooks, when a USE drive was inserted into a computer, by simply running this .exe. Onenote ‘10 made it obsolete.

As the screenshots shows, you can set a location for the backups, set the time to backup, and how many backups to keep. Its quite nice. And I think its best used by setting the backup location to a app like dropbox. Working along with that is a recycle bin, added to onenote, which can be disabled, but is enabled by default, allows you to retrieve accidentally deleted, or modified files. Could be pretty useful.

The last improvement I found was the much improved the attach file dialogue. While this was around in OneNote 07, it was not a dialogue box and you basically had to drag and drop files in. You can now easily drop any file into a one note page, but its not like you can edit it yet. Its a small improvement over the drag and drop only system, and the screenshot of the toolbars above shows the button and how its used.

Overall, I would rather keep my toolbars with OneNote 07, but some students who are likely to lose, or delete data, I would definitely recommend upgrading to Office 2010 once it comes out.

Touch Tomorrow, by Reaching out Today

Yesterday, I went to a program at my college called Touch Tomorrow. There were several software and hardware venders, all of which my college uses, among them Dell, HP, CampusHP, Novell, AT&T, Verizon, the local AV club, and a few other companies, including a college student’s second to worst nightmare, Blackboard.

I first talked to the Novell guys, They had information about their systems that my college was using, and information about similar products, in specific a lot of their Virtual machines and Virtual servers. They were promoting the Mono Project among other things. They also had free disks of Suse Linux Enterprise Edition (SLED) 11, but I’m already hooked on openSUSE, also a product of Novell.

Mono Project is a open source, cross platform initiative backed by the full money and power of Novell, to bring .net apps from windows to Linux and mac, without changing the code base.  This goes with SLED because its targeted at businesses that are using many proprietary, formerly Windows only, .NET apps. Now with SLED and Mono, any .NET app can be run on Linux, or Mac, but clearly Novell is targeting it for use on their own system, SLED, a completely stable business ready Linux operating system. Cool Beans, or maybe, if I want to go as far as a horrible programming pun, Cool NetBeans.

Next, I went over the dell table, they had 4 laptops setup, a 13.3 and a 15.4 aimed a college students, severely discounted with an Edu email address, all running Windows 7 final. Including a Delll XT tablet Pc running windows 7, with full tablet features and multitouch. Quite impressive, and I saw drool from several people, who were playing with it.

I spent the remainder of my time until the Touch Tomorrow presentation/workshop at the CampusHP table.  Sporting a HP tx2 multitouch tablet pc running Windows 7 final, similar to my single touch HP tx2510us.

Windows 7 itself was not that impressive, I have tried the beta and RCs on my tablet, with disappointment at first for the lack of some features like ability to reduce the screen’s brightness, but by the RC, it was working, well oiled virtual machine.

What kept my attention at the CampusHP table, was the Microsoft Surface apps. Of course they ship on Microsoft Surface tables, which my school is getting one for the NASA department, which is due in next week, but what I found out was that these apps will be available for multitouch tablet pcs. They will work on any multitouch tablet pcs, But I am not sure weather or not they will work on regular stylus or single touch tablet pcs. I will find out tomorrow.  Called the Windows 7 Touch Pack it includes several useless, fun, multitouch ready apps. I got my hands on this, but must wait until I get windows 7 tomorrow to try it out.  Edit: they will not launch on a single or no-touch pc. I cannot say where I got them, but if your any kind of geek, you know the usual suspects. If you somehow find a way of getting in contact with me,  I can point you in the right direction.

Among the apps included in this Touch Pack are a Lagoon screenaver, with fish, and the ability to make it a custom background. Nothing special right? Wrong. With your touch, you can press and hold (same as right click) to feed the fish, and they gather around your finger. Now you want the little scaly bastards to run away, so just swipe your fingers across the screen to scare them away.

Another app is Microsoft Globe, a Google Earth clone, but without the somewhat annoying sidebar buttons. Matter of fact, there are no buttons. Its completely controlled by touch. You can have the world in your hands, and you use your fingers to manipulate it.

While there I talked to the President of the University and the director of Distance Learning. They were interested in tablet PCs for teachers, and trying to cut a good deal for students. I introduced them to ITALC and Told them about using either hardware or software to make the tablet project to the room’s projectors wirelessly, so the teacher can move around the room while teaching the lesson. I got 2 business cards after telling them about that.

After probably 45 minutes, the HP guy had to leave to setup for his presentation. I looked around for a bit before heading to the Touch Tomorrow workshop.  The first main thing was a teleconference with some college from Texas who was one of the first to provide  online classes, and one of the first to use Blackboard. Next up was a rep from Tandberg, some kick ass video conferencing, storage and streaming. Among other things, you could teach a class live, stream it live and store it online for classes to watch it later. We had multiple cameras in our room, broadcasting to some Tandberg big wig, who was broadcasting back, as well as watching and listening to us. Also live screen casts going both ways. Damn cool stuff, and it can interface with many other programs, including Second life, where we can a live test of it. We had a 2 way conference going back and forth, on our side, just watching the audience, and on his side, his screen and a live video of him, giving a total of 3 screens. All of which were feed into Second life on his screen (which was being feed back to us). So with about a 5 second delay, we could see the live feed of our classroom appear on his screen, inside Second Life. They didn’t say this, because they were cut short, but In theory, you could have a live class, broadcasting live to a virtual classroom in Second Life, with a virtual class of students sitting and watching the live stream and interacting with each other in real time, with life like avatars.

The next part of the presentation was CampusHP showing off their shinny new Tx2 series tablet Pc with Windows 7 and the Touch Pack. Same stuff I saw before at the CampusHP table.

Next up was The college’s distance Learning department, consisting mostly of the infamous Blackboard, with  its newly acquired mobile friendly versions and even iphone apps. They acquired a small Standford Startup, created by a few students and are merging it into Blackboard, to provide everything from sports events to the mess hall menu on your blackberry, or Iphone, as well and some other platforms. Android support coming soon. Even with all this Blackboard still sucks (Some Reasons provided by Hack College) But it might become a little less painful. Blackboards bullshit chased most of the remaining people out, as they kept trying to persuade my college to upgrade from blackboard 8 to Bb9. This ended the workshop rather fast.

Sadly Blackboard is the standard, but its also a pain in the ass for college students, but who cares, since they only have to use it for 4 years right? Ahh I love the smell of fresh bullshit in the morning.

As I plan to specialize in tech for Edu, I realize tablets and touch are the technology of the classrooms of tomorrow, but for it to work in the future, we must start to setup now. The major part of that is introducing all students to these technologies and getting them friendly with using them. And in order to make these technologies work inside and outside of school, a good backboard has to be provided in the way of a LMS. Something Good, I said, not blackboard.

Windows 7 will be the first major step in using touch technology on a widespread basis, such as a college campus,  and with the proper support with apps like Moodle and services like Tandberg. And with a combination of all that, possible technology like Second Life to preform virtual online science labs with your fingers, as well as streaming and stored videos of classes, and the ability to take all your notes and have all your books in one place on a tablet pc, you can get the full college experience from online classes.

Comments are welcome on this site, or my personal blog post

What A Perfect SNS Needs

Social networking sites are the big craze sweeping through the internet. They have been around for a number of years but have had a surge in popularity in recent time, notably the sites Twitter and Facebook, while Myspace still has its own active following.  These sites allow people all across the world to connect with each other, for people to meet future spouses, for family members to become reconnected, and to allow kids to keep in touch with graduating classmates.  These three sites in particular are predominant on the internet as the top social networking sites, but all three have problems, bugs, and glitches that need to be worked on.  If a perfect social networking site existed, all three of these sites would be obsolete.
Facebook is the most popular SNS according to a complete.com survey, but despite the mass amount of users on this site it has many bugs and problems.  Any time a user wants to add an application for its site it must be clicked several times with the “are you sure you want to do this” line.  There have been applications made which have hacked into face book accounts or tried to steal personal information.  If sites really care about these issues the solution is very simple.  Keep the applications that everybody loves, but don’t allow for random people to create them.  Sites should hire people to specifically develop applications that fit their users’ wants or needs.  If restrictions were set and the sites made the applications themselves based on suggestions from the users, then a majority of complaints about the use of applications would be nonexistent.
Privacy is a major issue when it comes to Facebook and Myspace.  When users connect with each other they go to others’ personal profiles.  People may render their profile as private and block them from being viewed unless an accepted friend is viewing them.  This doesn’t always work, however, as Myspace and Facebook still allow for people to see the default picture of whomever’s site their viewing.  Myspace even allows for some basic information to be viewed such as age, location, and a personal headline.  Myspace has done work in trying to prevent internet crimes caused through people connecting through its own site and through other social networking sites but it is not enough.  Instead of a just needing a person’s name to add their profile, why not just set it so that knowledge of an email address is REQUIRED instead of an optional setting to add someone as a friend.  SNS’ require an email address to create an account and profile, so why not require them to be known by others before allowing them to be added.  This way online predators wouldn’t be able to simply add random, stupid kids who accept every friend request, because they’d actually have to know personal information already that they don’t have access to.  Also, if the sites want to be very active, they should require any sex offender who has a profile on their site to register, similarly to how they must do so in their community for others to know.  The offenders’ sites would then be marked by some sort of logo or sign to allow people to know of a threat.
Another thing Twitter could do to make itself better would be a slight extension of the character limit used in posting.  Anything posted on twitter must be within 140 characters, which makes it a pain to use a tinyurl site or program to share web links, and also to get a complete thought out sometimes.  An extension of characters to 200 from 140 would allow for an extra sentence or two to be formulated to help cut down on unnecessarily long conversations.  Twitter could retain its basic form but just give people a little more space to vent or associate with others.
A massive problem for every SNS is the amount of spammers who flock to them.  Twitter has a ridiculous amount of spam accounts filled with links to harmful sites or porn.  Twitter’s registration process is simply an email address, password, and a name.  Though the site is getting better in stopping people from impersonating as celebrities, it’s doing a horrible job in preventing spam.  Any one who makes their profile public and unprotected can be followed by anyone, including spammers.  Twitter needs to expand the requirements in making an account if it wants to give people so much independence in what they write.  It may sound a little extreme, but if a name and email are all that are required to sign up, Twitter should ban email addresses from notorious spammer-filled web-mail hosts.  Twitter should also require more personal information in creating an account that could be looked up by a background check, or it should at least have a strict age limitation so that youth are not subjected to the spam, malware, and porn.

Basically, it is not very hard to create an ideal SNS.  These sites are close to achieving ideal status in their accessibility, mainstream use (through advertisements, I-pod applications, phone applications), and work towards privacy and protection.  Just by following these simple suggestions alone they would be significantly closer to that goal of being an ideal site.  There are many other problems with the sites of course, that I have not gone into detail about, (such as how easy it is to use easter eggs on Facebook, or the constant oops something’s wrong server crashes of Myspace and Twitter) but you can leave it up to yourselves to rant about those.  The fact remains, these websites have been around for several years, and are finally profiting, (In September, 2009 Facebook reported the first positive cash flow in its history) so work must be done to make them safer, more accessible, and easier to use.

How to Turn Google Voice into a True Windows app

A while back, Lifehacker posted this post, and one of my friends had been asking about doing just this, on windows. Agreed with him, it was better than checking the page every few minutes or so yourself, or using your phone as an alert system. Or some other hair-brained scheme involving a phone, on vibrate, and a motion sensor.

Well It works for windows in almost the same way. First off get what you need, if you wanna use it as a tab inside Firefox, that work, if you want a separate app, Cometbird or any other Firefox clone will work, songbird probably works too. Prism does not yet, as it does not allow you to install addons, but I bet someday it will work.

Needed:

Firefox or a firefox clone

Growl/GNTP addon for Firefox

Grease monkey addon

Growl For windows

Reload Every Addon

Now, restart Firefox, install Growl for Windows, but use the Windows Deployment.msi not the setup.exe to install. Start Growl. Right Click the Growl Icon and Select open Growl. Set it to start with Windows.

Now, in Firefox, install these 2 scripts into Greasemonkey

Google Voice Growl

Google Voice notifications not needed-fluid app only

GV Favicon Alert – not needed , just an extra place to see you have new messages. But it adds the same trick as the gmail scripts, puts the unread count in the favicon on the tab, and on the URL bar.

Restart Firefox, just to be safe. When it restarts, Open up Google Voice

Then Click the Little Arrow by the Reload button, to bring up the Reload Every Menu. Enable that page, and set your time. You can also do tat by right clicking on a blank area on the page. See image for further details.

Now, in Firefox, open the addons window, find the Growl/GNTP addon, and open its options. Hit the register growl button. You should see a pop up from growl now.

Again, right click the growl icon in your system tray. Go to the Security tab. Make sure you check off the “Allow Notifications from websites” Without that none of this well work. Restart Firefox again, and send yourself a test message. Within the time you set Reload Every to refresh the page, you should get a notification from Growl.

This picture should help if you have any issues. If it doesn’t please create an account, or use an openID to comment. Or email me by using this page.

UPDATES

You can also comment on the WordPress Mirror of this post

If you are using windows 7, you might want to Read up on Kevin Purdy’s fix for the Growl installer, here.

IF YOU INSTALLED THE GOOGLE VOICE GROWL SCRIPT BEFORE SEPTEMBER 1st UPDATE IT HERE Thanks to Mopquill, from emulysianfields.com for the fix!

Google Voice has now added SMS alerts for texts (For Voicemail was built in to start with) So, personally, I would suggest not to use this, but rather use the gmail checker, and turn on email alerts (which are reply-able as well) But for some people this may still be useful (I use both) so I will keep this post up.

Updated last: September 9nd. 9pm.

Bumptop and Trillian Come out of beta

Within hours of each other, both bumptop and Trillian released shinny new betas. Bumptop and Trillian were invite only for a long time now, both release many beta invites in the past few days. Bumptop is a desktop enhancement, designed for users of tablet pcs, and other touch and pen based media, with easy organization of your desktop, by flinging icons and grouping them as you like. Trillian is a pretty awesome Instant messenger, that supports almost all protocols now, and has just opened up it’s long time closed private beta.

Trillian:
Trillian now supports many new protocols, some which you had to pay for in trillian 3, like Google talk. It is not finished yet by any means, still an alpha release, but it has many nice themes and features, including docking the buddy list, in the same container as your IM tabs. Still many bugs, like the in-ability to add and keep an IRC room in the buddy list, but I’m sure that all will get fixed. Right now you can only connect to a IRC room. It does support MSN now playing, and some different and new ways or sorting a buddy list.

You cannot hide offline buddies yet, but you can group them all together and minimize the group.

Quick Tip-inside the preferences, go to Chat then Instant Loopup and Remove the RSS feeds there, or replace them with your own. This removed the so called ‘ad’ at the top of all chats (not rooms). Why not add our RSS feed there?

Bumptop:
Bumptop released its public beta around 11, only to be mobbed and have several of it’s servers crash within 20 minutes. It was a very anticipated release for many users, who started getting their beta invites last last week.
Bumptop is a ‘desktop enhancement’ not a shell replacement. It works on top of your existing desktop, (and does not mess up your icons there) and does not kill explorer.exe, but rather created a 3D desktop, with a lot of emphasis on physics. For example, you can fling icons around the desktop (works much better with a stylus or mutlitouch, then with a mouse or tracpad)and those icons or folders bounce around a bit, rebound off walls, and come crashing into other icons. You can throw your IE icon as much as you want! I did that quite a bit when I first tried it as a public beta.
By double-clicking the corners or walls, you can bring up other views, like this below.

To group or otherwise do anything with more than one icon, you hold down the left mouse button and drag a lasso around the icons, then with a right click, a circular menu appears from which you can do anything in bumptop, or get to the normal windows context menu.

There is also a scrolling feature for large piles (I’m pretty sure this is only for people who are/were beta testers, but I shall confirm that later) In this case this pile is 127 PDF files and a few Jpegs. The best part is, I don’t have to have them all on the desktop, they’re inside a folder on the desktop and through an option called Expand to Pile, I can keep them inside the folder(on my Real windows desktop, not bumptop, for easy moving, but bumptop see it, as if they were on all on my desktop. Pretty. Awesome.

When you close the scrolled pile, this happens, and it’s awesome eyecandy.

You see the Twitter Icon? Well Bumptop will also automatically post, whatever you drag onto that icon, onto your twitter. There is also a similar icon for Facebook, in addition to flickr and other photo galleries (local and internet) that show slideshows as you work.

These two shinny new beta provide a lot of functionality and eye candy for anyone’s desktop, I would recommend testing them out, so far, everyone I talked to loves them, but remember they’re still betas, and aren’t fit for widespread use, although I have had no issues with either one.

Within hours of each other, both bumptop and Trillian released shinny new betas. Bumptop and Trillian were invite only for a long time now, both release many beta invites in the past few days. Bumptop is a desktop enhancement, designed for users of tablet pcs, and other touch and pen based media, with easy organization of your desktop, by flinging icons and grouping them as you like. Trillian is a pretty awesome Instant messenger, that supports almost all protocols now, and has just opened up it’s long time closed private beta.

Trillian:
Trillian now supports many new protocols, some which you had to pay for in trillian 3, like Google talk. It is not finished yet by any means, still an alpha release, but it has many nice themes and features, including docking the buddy list, in the same container as your IM tabs. Still many bugs, like the in-ability to add and keep an IRC room in the buddy list, but I’m sure that all will get fixed. Right now you can only connect to a IRC room. It does support MSN now playing, and some different and new ways or sorting a buddy list.

You cannot hide offline buddies yet, but you can group them all together and minimize the group.

Quick Tip-inside the preferences, go to Chat then Instant Loopup and Remove the RSS feeds there, or replace them with your own. This removed the so called ‘ad’ at the top of all chats (not rooms). Why not add our RSS feed there?

Bumptop:
Bumptop released its public beta around 11, only to be mobbed and have several of it’s servers crash within 20 minutes. It was a very anticipated release for many users, who started getting their beta invites last last week.
Bumptop is a ‘desktop enhancement’ not a shell replacement. It works on top of your existing desktop, (and does not mess up your icons there) and does not kill explorer.exe, but rather created a 3D desktop, with a lot of emphasis on physics. For example, you can fling icons around the desktop (works much better with a stylus or mutlitouch, then with a mouse or tracpad)and those icons or folders bounce around a bit, rebound off walls, and come crashing into other icons. You can throw your IE icon as much as you want! I did that quite a bit when I first tried it as a public beta.
By double-clicking the corners or walls, you can bring up other views, like this below.

To group or otherwise do anything with more than one icon, you hold down the left mouse button and drag a lasso around the icons, then with a right click, a circular menu appears from which you can do anything in bumptop, or get to the normal windows context menu.

There is also a scrolling feature for large piles (I’m pretty sure this is only for people who are/were beta testers, but I shall confirm that later) In this case this pile is 127 PDF files and a few Jpegs. The best part is, I don’t have to have them all on the desktop, they’re inside a folder on the desktop and through an option called Expand to Pile, I can keep them inside the folder(on my Real windows desktop, not bumptop, for easy moving, but bumptop see it, as if they were on all on my desktop. Pretty. Awesome.

When you close the scrolled pile, this happens, and it’s awesome eyecandy.

You see the Twitter Icon? Well Bumptop will also automatically post, whatever you drag onto that icon, onto your twitter. There is also a similar icon for Facebook, in addition to flickr and other photo galleries (local and internet) that show slideshows as you work.

These two shinny new beta provide a lot of functionality and eye candy for anyone’s desktop, I would recommend testing them out, so far, everyone I talked to loves them, but remember they’re still betas, and aren’t fit for widespread use, although I have had no issues with either one.