Hmmm. I may have to take a closer look at MSN Desktop Search based on Michael Sippey’s updated review:
A couple of months back I posted a shoot-from-the-hip review of MSN’s Desktop Search beta. I’m here to recant. Eat my words. Take it all back. Because I now love the thing.
Lots of great hands-on suggestions for tweaking the interface so it’s more useful and productive, too.
(Via FirstAdopter.com.)
DEMO’s ringmaster, Chris Shipley, likes to organize related products into clusters of two or three. That makes it easy for people who are interested in a particular technology or type of product to arrange their schedules. It also turns some sessions into mini-shootouts.
That’s what happened yesterday when Pluck and Onfolio had back-to-back slots on the schedule. On the surface, both are fairly similar products that create custom Explorer bars for reading RSS feeds and saving snippets of a Web page. I’m intensely interested in this type of product, because this is what I do all the time. If I can find a single product that can help me keep track of bits of useful information, I’ll be a happy camper.
Last year, I tried early versions of both products and quickly determined that neither one would work for me. At DEMO, both companies were announcing new versions (Onfolio is still in a preview release), so I decided to take a closer look. In a nutshell, I’m drawn to Onfolio and not immediately impressed by Pluck.
Pluck feels like a simple feed reader and search tool that has a few research functions grafted on. It does a good job of helping me put together canned searches (what it calls Perches) on eBay and Amazon, and it does a pretty good job of helping me find feeds. I had to use the online help to figure out how to import my feeds into Pluck. When I found a page I wanted to save, I “plucked” it and Pluck saved a 50–word excerpt from the beginning of the page (or from the text I had selected) along with a link to the entire page. To see more, I had to visit the original page. I could right-click on a saved item and change the name or description, but that’s it. In essence, this is a fairly slick bookmark manager.
By contrast, Onfolio feels like a research tool that has RSS functions tightly integrated into it. I can right-click on a Web page or a feed item, and I get the option to save the selected text, image, or entire page – or for that matter, the entire site – to what Onfolio calls a collection. When I save a snippet, it appears in a dialog box where I can add my own notes about why I saved it. Feeds and saved snippets appear in an elegant newspaper view that I can sort, filter, and customize. I can export the saved snippets to an XML file, to my blog, or to any application. Onfolio looks slicker than Pluck, too, probably because it’s built using the .NET Framework.
I’ll keep evaluating both products for a few weeks, but I have much higher hopes for Onfolio.
Here are a few interesting products I saw yesterday at DEMO.
Cloudmark (formerly SpamNet) showed off a browser add-on called SafetyBar for Internet Explorer. It’s a logical extension of their SafetyBar for Outlook and Outlook Express, which uses a community-based filtering system to very effectively block spam and viruses. The idea behind the SafetyBar for IE is simple: You install the add-in, which puts a new toolbar in the IE window (sorry, this product doesn’t work with Firefox). Every time you visit a Web site you can rate it as safe or unsafe. Meanwhile, an entire community of other Cloudmark users are doing the same. If you receive an e-mail with a link to a Web site that’s “phishing” for personal information, chances are the site has already been rated unsafe, which means you’ll see a warning message when you click the link. My take? It’s still a reactive process. This sort of checking should be done at the ISP level, and it shouldn’t be up to the user to install yet another piece of security software. I’m also concerned that the overhead of checking URLs against the Cloudmark database will slow down browsing.
Photoleap showed off a very interesting free application that solves some of the inherent problems with sharing digital photos. E-mail is a terrible way to share photos, especially hi-res copies of multiple images. Online services add an unnecessary layer of complexity. Photoleap (available in Windows and Mac versions) lets you open what looks like an ordinary e-mail window and drag in a bunch of photos. You add the recipients’ addresses and your message and click Send. The program converts the photos into thumbnails and sends a link to the recipient, who can then install Photoleap to pick up the full assortment of pictures you sent. I definitely want to try this one out. The free version limits photos to 2 megapixels and 25 photos per message and also displays ads in a sidebar. If you want to send or receive larger photos or send more than 25 at a time (and get rid of those pesky ads), pay $29 for the Plus version. You can try the Plus version free for 30 days.
Teleo has a new voice-over-IP service that gives you a personal phone number for $4.95 a month and the opportunity to make free PC-to-PC calls and receive unlimited calls from anyone (with or without a PC) or send calls to any number (including land lines) for a pretty low cost. Generally, the cost was very low – in the 2–cents-a-minute range for outbound calls from the U.S. to land lines in Europe. I haven’t been tempted by the Skype hype, but this one sounds like a tremendous deal. (Update: Stuart Henshall has a longer evaluation of Teleo and calls it “a real winner.” I found the link via his Skype Journal.)
I’ll have more later today.
Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle has resurrected his blog at the Houston Chronicle. That’s good news! (Dwight, where’s the RSS feed?) In one of his first posts, he points out that I was at Demo yesterday but not updating as frequently as he wishes I would have.
I plead not guilty by reason of strategy. Yes, I could have sat in the front row with Jason and Marc and Scoble and Buzz and the rest of the live-blogging crew, but frankly they were doing a better job than I could dream of doing. If you wanted the play by play, Blogging Demo was the place to go, which was why I pointed to it. (And now, I presume, the domain gathers dust until the next DEMO conference, in the fall?)
Anyway, the point of this site is to try to wrap some context around what I saw the past few days. I’ll pass along my impressions of a few products that caught my eye, but I’ll also try to pull together the larger lessons of the conference.
Wired News has a solid story on the DEMO conference: Six Minutes to Stand Out.
Reporter Daniel Terdiman singled out one company that also impressed me with its six-minute presentation:
…cable TV companies may find themselves threatened by Mediabolic, whose network media player is designed to give TV viewers a previously unavailable level of personal control.
The media player allows users to run custom-designed web-based applications on their TV. For example, users can get instant eBay auction alerts, view their Netflix queues, play their Live365 music collections or any of hundreds of other applications — all on their TV.
Amazingly, all of their applications looked exactly like Windows XP Media Center Edition. In fact, several portions of their demo used add-ins that are running on my Media Center PC. It’s not a program you can buy and use to build your own Media Center. Instead, they’re selling a development platform that hardware companies can adopt. We’ll see how much interest they can muster.
Jason, Marc, and the rest of the Weblogs,Inc. team are Blogging DEMO. I spent half of Monday at the show and will spend all of Tuesday. It’s an eclectic mix of products, most of them still under development and some of which might never see the light of day. But there’s no doubt that a few of the products I saw today will be huge hits in the next year or two.
I loved Vlog It.from Serious Magic. This is a video production tool that lets you create your own teleprompter, add special effects, and even use blue screen SFX to create the illusion that you’re broadcasting live from somewhere other than your cramped and cluttered home office. I usually scoff at the idea of homemade videos on the Internet, but this one convinced me that even I could do it and that you might actually want to watch it!
Motorola could have done without the model Hummer for their demo of iRadio, but the idea of having access to hundreds of channels of digital radio accessible in my car or on the phone sounds cool. I have no idea how this works, and I wonder how this differs from the iRadio announcements the same company made in 2000 and 2001.
In the Demo Pavilion, I saw an Outlook add-in called Outboxer that looked pretty sharp. If I ran a big corporation (or a little investment company), I’d look seriously at this utility, which helps prevent employees from sending out e-mail messages that contain inappropriate content or break Federal regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley.
And I would dearly love to replace my external USB drives with a Mirra storage device, which would simplify the task of getting all my data backed up effortlessly.
I’ll be gone all day Tuesday, so look for more on Wednesday.
For the past four months, I’ve been evaluating two desktop search programs: X1 and Copernic Desktop Search. I’ve given each one a fair test, and the contest is over. Copernic wins.
Both programs do a thoroughly acceptable job of very quickly locating the exact message, file, picture, or contact that I need. Both have toolbars that tuck neatly into the Windows XP taskbar so I can begin a search without having to open a special window. Both give me control over exactly what gets indexed and give me excellent controls to minimize the hit that indexing puts on my system performance. Each program has a few strengths and weaknesses: X1 integrates much more fully with Outlook 2003 than does Copernic. Copernic, on the other hand, indexes my browser’s bookmarks and cache (IE or Firefox), which X1 doesn’t do. But none of the differences in the respective feature sets are crucial.
So what tipped the scales? Two things:
The developers of X1 have acknowledged that these bugs exist. To their credit, I was able to go to the X1 Discussion Forum and find some candid discussions of the issue (here, here, here, and here, for instance). But until they get these issues licked, I can’t recommend the program. Especially not when a free, fast, and extremely capable alternative exists in Copernic Desktop Search.
Slashdot posted a link to this big browser speed comparison, and now I’m seeing all sorts of people discussing it. My reaction? Ho-hum. The author starts his piece by saying, “There is a speed war on the web.” I don’t think so. Do you really care that Opera 7.54 can load a page from a warm start .11 second faster than Internet Explorer and .86 second faster than Firefox? There are so many factors that affect performance on the Web, most of which have nothing to do with the underlying browser code.
I’ll tip my hat to this guy’s patience and skill with a stopwatch, but all this proves to me is that all of the leading browsers are fast enough.
A little over a year ago, I evaluated five antivirus programs and decided to switch from Norton AntiVirus to Trend Micro’s PC-cillin. Since then I’ve been happy with its performance. It updates itself regularly, identifies and quarantines those virus-infected attachments that make it past my e-mail gateway, and is generally unobtrusive.
The latest version of the software, PC-cillin Internet Security 2005, includes a firewall, a spam-blocking module, and newly added detection capabilities for spyware and adware. Based on my experiences today, the program’s developers need to go back to the drawing board.
I clicked the Scan for Spyware button to see what would turn up. I know this system is completely clean, so imagine my surprise when it informed me that it had found “3 potential threat(s).”
My goodness, how could I have missed these horrible programs? How did they sneak past my defenses and infiltrate my computer? What are these threats, anyway? I selected the first item in the list and clicked the More Information button, which took me to Trend Micro’s Web site. There I read about ADW_IEHELPER.A:
This adware is usually dropped and installed by a Trojan as BHO.DLL. Trend Micro detects the said Trojan as TROJ_LINST.A.
Once installed, it waits for the user to browse the Internet, specifically using Internet Explorer. This adware then scans the Web pages accessed by the user and highlights certain words, usually commercial items. When the mouse runs over one of these highlighted words, it displays a link to an advertising Web page that sells the said highlighted item.
Unfortunately, nothing in the Trend Micro interface actually told me which file it had detected or where it was located. That’s especially troublesome given that the removal instructions required me to manually unregister the DLL by entering its full path. The Web page also listed 13 registry keys where this evil program would insinuate itself. Only one of those keys was actually on my computer – a reference to Bho.dll. That file wasn’t on my computer, but a file called SnagItBHO.dll was. It’s a perfectly legitimate add-in for the SnagIt screen-capture program (which I used to capture the screens in this article and have used for every book I’ve written in the last seven years). SnagIt added that registry key and then created values that pointed to its add-in file. Had I followed Trend Micro’s instructions to remove this file, it would have disabled a key feature of my screen-capture program.
What about the next item on the list? The Web page for ADW_BADBITOR.A included no description, only a list of aliases and a long list of IE Favorites, program files, and Registry keys associated with it. The list of aliases made it pretty clear that Trend Micro thought I had installed a version of the ugly Lop parasite or Ezula adware. Once again, most of the files and registry keys ostensibly associated with this threat were simply not on my system. The only ones that matched turned out to be perfectly legitimate components of the BitTorrent program. Presumably, Trend Micro would have zapped BitTorrent had I allowed it to remove this threat.
The final item on the list was easy to identify. I have installed the password-revealing program Snadboy’s Revelation on this system. Fortunately, I know what that program does and also know that I installed it. Unfortunately, the More Information link led to a non-existent page at Trend Micro’s Web site.
OK, now let’s imagine that I’m not a computer professional but instead I’m a concerned Windows user. How am I supposed to react to this report? If I simply trust the software and let it remove these supposed threats, I’ve disabled three perfectly legitimate programs. When they stop working, will I connect the dots? Or will I think that the spyware I removed from my system had done even more damage than I thought?
Everyone wants an all-in-one Windows security solution – a single shrink-wrapped magic software bullet that can snuff out viruses, spyware, adware, Trojan horses, and every other conceivable form of malware. Unfortunately, my experience with Trend Micro’s software provides at least one data point to suggest that there’s no such animal yet.
By coincidence, I ran across two recent reviews of Trend Micro’s software online, both by way of the Security Mentor blog. PC World has a review of Internet security suites that gave Trend Micro top marks for its spyware scanning. The reviews are cursory at best, and Trend Micro earned its ranking because “in our tests only Trend Micro’s suite spotted spyware infections in the Registry.” Well, on my system those scans bore no relation to the actual presence of spyware, so I can’t give the same thumbs-up. This comparative review of antivirus software in Information Security from last October doesn’t mention spyware at all, but it does provide some interesting real-world experiences on how leading security software companies deal with customers.
I’ll continue using and recommending Trend Micro’s software as an antivirus tool. But for preventing and removing adware and spyware, don’t count on it.
Kent Pribbernow is trying to stir up trouble at Digital Media Thoughts:
In a recent interview with Forbes Magazine, Steve Jobs makes the surprising claim that three of the top PC makers are asking him to license OSX for use on their PCs.
Hmmm. That might have been a smart move to make five or 10 years ago, but not now. Anyway, it’s never going to happen. Who’s going to write all those device drivers?
On the other hand, I would love to be able to run OS X on my PC, in a virtual machine powered by VMWare or Virtual PC (which would them have to be renamed Virtual Mac, presumably). I suspect that it could be done with relative ease if you could get permission to clone the Mac firmware.
Ed Bott 