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.

Tablet PC input panel upgrades in Windows 7 build 7100

One of Windows 7’s boasts is that it will improve tablet PCs and make touchscreens more widespread and more usable. With the latest leaked release it added several more features to it’s tablet PC input panel, including a auto-complete, and insertion of special characters,a Function key (unknown if this is for laptops only, yet) without further ado, screenshots!

Tip: Firefox on Windows 7

When using Firefox on Windows 7, some sites, may not work, because of he maximum windows version, which is usually set to 6. Windows 6 is Vista, Windows 7 is 6.1 with a build number after it. Well today I tries to stream the new Green Day album from http://www.rhapsody.com and I got just such an error. Unknown OS, cannot play. You can easily fix such errors with an addon, Configuration Mania. (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4420) Simply go into the preferences for Configuration Mania, and go to the User Agent settings, and pick a previous operating system. for my issues, I picked windows XP, and instantly rhapsody worked. You can also pick IE or safari for some issues you may have with sites. This does not change the rendering engine, but rather changes the information sent to websites, about your computer and browser.

When I was little, I had only briefl …

When I was little, I had only briefly heard about linux, from my dad, who was a bit of a techie in his day. I was the kid who asked to see linux, when I heard about it,well he said he’d show me and never got around to it, until after i discovered it for myself. I use to be something set up for servers and use only by IT and other highly paid dwebs who lived in their mother’s basement and considered coding to be a perfectly fine way to spend a Friday night. Now, due in part to Microsoft Vista, and the lousy economic conditions, linux has become mainstream.

Microsoft Vista was the worse thing ever to happen to computers, worse than most super-viruses. It redefined computing, and also redefined what users would allow companies to get away with.
With the introduction of Vista, users gave up their rights to do whatever they want with their own computers, brought to use like a assistant bringing an arrow to a bowman, by UAC, User Account Control.
The name even sounds menacing, user account control, and what it does is even worse. Effectively it prevents users from controlling their own computers, no through controlling it, with a VNC like feature, but rather, by locking users from doing normal tasks without special permission, even for a computer administrator. Hell, I can’t even delete a shortcut ( In the Start Menu) to Pandora that comes on my computer, without permission. That’s pretty messed up, I can’t even delete a shortcut without permission?! It’s just another way to take away control from users. Installs all need administrator privileges, even single .exe programs need the user to be an administrator to run them. vista was never widely adopted by businesses because of the several restrictions set on it, and the lack of comparability with many specialized programs often used for businesses, which just won’t run with UAC on, or won’t run at all. Even turning UAC off causes annoyances, like a ubiquitous pop-up that will never cease annoying you, reminding you to reactive UAC to further “protect your computer” The small protection is offers is not worth the annoyances it causes, for even the simplest of tasks.

Enough ranting on vista, there’s other reasons why the average person is now using linux.

With the bad economy, netbooks are becoming popular for everyday users, but also for students who need a fast light notebook with a long battery life, to take to class. These so called netbooks are just that, small enough to fit in a handbag, and some of them in your pocket, light enough that you don’t mind taking it to class along with your books, and with of them having a near 10 hour battery life. But to have all this, something has to give, that is processing power. Most of these netbooks have a Intel Atom processor, which runs around 1.6ghz.
Now that isn’t slow by any means, but it’s not a kick ass multimedia box. Windows by itself takes up a decent amount of that 1.6ghz and usually 1 gig or ram, sometimes paired with a solid state drive, doesn’t leave windows with much room to work. That opened up the door for linux netbook, and they took the opportunity and ran with it.

Linux inherently runs lighter and faster than windows. It was built on security and then given the GUI and other features for a desktop user, later in it’s life. It’s also made for multitasking, and uses less power than windows computers, even running the same software and power settings. This makes linux perfect for netbooks, and once a user gets over their initial fear of linux, most don’t have any problems running and using linux in their everyday life.
The hardest part is the initial switch, and getting the consumer to buy the linux netbooks. A lot of consumers switch, just because of the price difference, usually well over 100 USD. Others see the power saving or better processor use and are willing to give it a try. And most like it, Linux netbooks have about 2/3 of the return rate, of the windows netbooks. Hmm now that’s saying something, possible that linux is not just for dwebs anymore.

Just about an hour ago I took a list …

Just about an hour ago I took a listen to some of the finalized version of songs from Green Day’s new album, 21st Century Breakdown.. http://www.greenday.com/streammp3/player.php I’ve also been keeping up with the New Taking Back Sunday Album, New Again, and grabbing the singles as soon as they come out. I also grabbed the leaked version of 21st Century Breakdown, the song. Tonight I heard most of the finalized version and WOW it is just amazing. They also changed up a lot, if not most of the lyrics, partially, I think, to make it more offensive, in order to attract more attention, something Green Day has been known for doing, since it’s early days.

If you know me, you know I am be a bit pushy about my music. I also like mostly alternative/neo-punk, fast chugging guitars and symbolic lyrics. So far, this is exactly what 21st Century Breakdown is. The title track, now in it’s final version, not the demo that was floating around,has a increase in tempo, more prominent guitar, and revised lyrics to keep up the pace and make it more borderline offensive, to grab the attention of anyone, fans or critics. The guitars literally makes you want to hop out of your seat and jam to to, and if you knew the new lyrics, you’d be singing along.

East Jesus Nowhere, formerly March of the dogs, is probably my personal favorite, with a great bass opening, that makes up for it’s in my opinion, shitty title, it flows into a more angry and fast paced, guitar throbbing, call for attention, and shouting about sodomized dogs, which flows into a very rhythmic chourus, bringing back a sense of Green Day’s Warning Era. Following a lyric pattern like Holiday,from American Idiot, it has a nice long guitar/bass solo, with some low but audible lyrics, followed by a tirade, and ending with a rather sudden and unexcpeted monotone.

American Eulogy opens with “sing us a song of the century” which is supposed to be the lead line to a song Song of the Century then goes to the first of it’s 2 basic beats, which is basically the same beat as Deadbeat Holiday and continues with that rather fast paced beat for a good while, before going into a new beat, and a rant about the modern world and mass hyseria.

There are a totel of 6 mostly full song clips on that site, I revied my three favorite. Please check them out for yourself. They have stayyed away from lyrics and most beats like their earliest albums, and have stuck with lyrics that could fit into Amerian Idiot very easily, and some beats that would go hand in hand with any song from Warning espcally Waiting. Sticking with the Amerian Idiot style lyrics, Green Day has produced another album that’s just to spark protests, as I suspect was their intent, and grab people’s attention.