currybetdotnet Microsoft archive

The future of Excel - according to Doctor Who
Spoilers don't respect borders, and so even in Greece I know that tonight's Doctor Who sees the long awaited <SPOILER ALERT!>. It was nice to see something familiar in last week's episode too - although not the landscape of Midnight, which, thanks to the deadly Xtonic rays, had never been seen by human (or Time Lord) eyes before. No, what was reassuringly 21st century was the fact that however far into the future we are in the Whoniverse, it doesn't...

Read the full post - Published June 21, 2008 in Doctor Who, Microsoft

Newspaper "Site Search Smackdown": Round 6 - Google vs The Search Engine All-Stars
I've been running a series of Newspaper Site Search Engine Smackdowns to see which papers were able to index their own content faster than Google could. It turned out that the answer was not many, with only The Daily Express, Daily Mail and The Independent getting close to indexing news stories faster than Google's web search did. Although it is the dominant player in the market, Google is not the only search engine, so I also carried out the...

Read the full post - Published April 13, 2008 in Google, Microsoft, Newspapers, Search, Yahoo

'Spyware!' or 'How I ditched Windows and learned to love the Mac'
I'm one of those people who have been happily running Windows on PCs since the early nineties, and have never had any problems with virus infections, adware, spyware, or other malicious programs. In fact, I'd quite got myself into the self-righteous position of thinking that anybody who did have problems clearly didn't know what they were doing with computers. So, it was somewhat dispiriting last month to discover that my laptop was riddled with a horrible infection. I know exactly...

Read the full post - Published March 21, 2008 in Apple, Microsoft

Flickr users protest about Yahoo! takeover. Again.
The interweb's tubes have been buzzing that Flickr users are already in open revolt over Microsoft's offer to take-over Yahoo!, Flickr's parent company. Image by sebestyenistvan "A splinter faction of Flickr photo-sharing community members is threatening a symbolic 'mass suicide'" - Wired "I'm not cross and I'm not bitter - I'm just a little sad because I have a belief that things can be good/great without taking the obvious route". - grange85 "My fear is that over time they won't...

Read the full post - Published February 6, 2008 in Flickr, Microsoft, Yahoo

Greece cosies up to Microsoft
Bill Gates was in Athens yesterday, meeting Greek Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis. They were no doubt discussing the fact that a few days earlier the Greek Parliament ratified an agreement between the Greek State and Microsoft. Well, when I say the Greek Parliament ratified it, what I meant was that the Νέα Δημοκρατία party ratified it. All the opposition MPs universally opposed the deal - one even went as far as to call it 'colonial', whilst others claimed it was...

Read the full post - Published January 29, 2008 in Greece, Microsoft

T-Mobile MMS addicted to Internet Explorer on the web
A friend sent me a picture message from the UK the other day. It originated from the T-Mobile network, and made its way across Europe to arrive on my non-MMS enabled Vodafone network phone in Greece. It appeared as a text message with a link and a password. I was very impressed with the whole cross-platform, cross-network, cross-national boundary operation. Until I got to the web bit of it course. The first thing that greeted me when I tried to...

Read the full post - Published August 10, 2007 in Microsoft, Mobiles

Why doesn't the BBC iPlayer system tray icon use native Windows UI elements?
Well, it's been mostly iPlayer this and iPlayer that around here recently, and today is no different - and this time I have a bit of a user experience gripe. The iPlayer library software does something that really annoys me on Windows machines - not taking advantage fully of the common native UI elements. One of the reasons that any OS like Windows or a Mac OS has a standard set of UI elements is so that they can...

Read the full post - Published August 7, 2007 in Accessibility, BBC, Microsoft, Usability, iPlayer

BBCi Toolbar for Internet Explorer - 2002 style
One of the things that has interested me in recently putting together OpenSearch plugins and Google Toolbar custom buttons for BBC and newspaper related searches, is the change in the nature of web development they represent over the last few years. I've been able to make all of these, with no official permission, in just a few hours, by stringing some XML together into a bunch of text files. They all seem to work fine so far. By contrast, one...

Read the full post - Published July 20, 2007 in Application design, BBC, Microsoft

'Cancel' just doesn't seem to mean 'Cancel' for iTunes 7.2 on Windows
I've mentioned before that I haven't exactly been seeing eye-to-eye with iTunes 7.2 on my PC. It keeps getting upset and sparking Windows error dialogue messages if I run it without my iPod attached first, and won't quit without warning me every single time that iSproggler is using the iTunes scripting interface, am I sure I want to quit? More seriously though, I don't like the way that Apple do not follow the standard Windows OS conventions with some of...

Read the full post - Published July 13, 2007 in Apple, Application design, Microsoft, Music, Usability

The curse of annoying Windows XP speech bubble system alert pop-ups
Whenever I write complaining about some aspect of Microsoft's Windows OS, I usually get a couple of people pointing out that I should use something a bit more Linux-y. I have tried out a couple of flavours of Linux desktop, but so far I haven't found anything that does the trick for me. More importantly, the ubiquity of Windows in the business world means I'm pretty much stuck with it in order to do my work. Which doesn't stop me...

Read the full post - Published June 14, 2007 in Application design, Microsoft

Free the BBC from the same old tired DRM debate

Published June 13, 2007 in BBC, DRM, Linux, Media, Microsoft, Popular, Radio, Television, Web, iPlayer

Too many statistics? The National Statistics site runs out of memory

Published March 27, 2007 in Microsoft, Usability, Web

The depressing DRM debates on the BBC's backstage.bbc.co.uk mailing list

Published March 6, 2007 in Apple, BBC, DRM, Linux, Microsoft, iPlayer

The software used to access the BBC homepage: Beta software, edge products and conclusions - part 6

Published October 22, 2005 in Apple, BBC, Linux, Microsoft

The software used to access the BBC homepage: Browser share - part 5

Published October 22, 2005 in Apple, BBC, Linux, Microsoft

The software used to access the BBC homepage: Browser share - part 4

Published October 22, 2005 in Apple, BBC, Linux, Microsoft

The software used to access the BBC homepage: Windows, Mac, Linux and legacy OS share - part 3

Published October 22, 2005 in Apple, BBC, Linux, Microsoft

The software used to access the BBC homepage: Operating systems - part 2

Published October 22, 2005 in Apple, BBC, Linux, Microsoft

The software used to access the BBC homepage

Published October 22, 2005 in Apple, Articles, BBC, Linux, Microsoft, Popular

10 Out Of 100 Sample UK Websites Fail To Work Properly With Firefox

Published June 23, 2005 in Microsoft, Web

Dell and McAfee Require Internet Explorer 5.x or higher

Published April 30, 2005 in Microsoft

English Heritage forced redirect for Firefox users

Published April 17, 2005 in Microsoft, Usability, Web

Microsoft Research Paper on software re-design

Published October 3, 2004 in Application design, Microsoft

Marc Smith from Microsoft Research at the BBC

Published September 26, 2004 in Microsoft

Yahoo! and MSN both tweaking their search

Published July 4, 2004 in Microsoft, Search, Yahoo

When lack of standards compliance makes the news

Published January 20, 2004 in Microsoft, The Independent, Web

"I hate Macs" says salesperson

Published November 21, 2003 in Apple, Microsoft

Amazing MSN Messenger marketing co-incidence

Published September 26, 2003 in Microsoft

MSN will protect your children

Published September 24, 2003 in Children and Teenagers, Microsoft

MSN ditches chat - Gillian Kent urges everybody to adopt Instant Messenger

Published September 24, 2003 in Children and Teenagers, Microsoft

Why Boycott MSN?

Published July 3, 2003 in Microsoft, Search

Microsoft using MSNBOT to build its own search engine

Published June 18, 2003 in Microsoft, Search

Bizarre search terms on MSN - and BBCi

Published May 5, 2003 in BBC, Microsoft, Search

A third of FTSE 100 websites tied to Microsoft browsers

Published January 6, 2003 in Microsoft, Web

UK conservative in its search taste

Published December 27, 2002 in Microsoft, Search