Ian Moulster's blog

All Binged Up

2009-07-04T13:46:42Z

Not sure if this is a sign I’m committed, or should be committed…but I am now sporting a Bing sticker on my car.

I think it’s looks pretty good. If anyone else wants to be committed drop me an email and I’ll send you a sticker as long as you promise to stick it somewhere prominent (I realise I’m tempting fate here). I only have a handful and when they’re gone they’re gone, first come first served! No pushing.

Bing set to ramp up in the UK

2009-07-03T13:45:00Z

When bing.com was announced recently you may recall that while a full service was made available immediately in the US, a more limited beta service was provided in the UK while the team built out some UK-specific features so that the UK experience could be made as compelling as possible.

I spoke yesterday to the Core UK Product Manager for Bing, Sophie Salisbury, to ask where we were in the process of bringing Bing UK up to the level of the US service. Sophie explained that within the next few weeks we’ll start seeing some changes to the UK bing.com site:

The first change you’ll notice is some more UK-specific (or certainly less US-specific) background pictures on bing.com. For example, we’ll start seeing pictures that relate to UK activities, holidays, events or topics of national interest
The “hotspots” that appear on the US version will be introduced into the UK version, providing information and links related to aspects of the image.

A little later in the summer we’ll see some of the categorisation introduced, paving the way for the “full blown” bing experience and beta tag removal following that by a few months.

Bing is already pretty impressive even in its beta form so I’m really looking forward to be able to use it in its full glory in the UK. Stay tuned for more.

Bing “hotspot” feature soon to be making its way onto the UK homepage:

How to tell whether your machine will support Windows 7 XP Mode (for Intel chips)

2009-06-04T10:53:45Z

As you may well have heard, Windows 7 will include an XP mode which allows you to run legacy applications in a virtual machine seamlessly. You also may be aware that the virtualisation technology used for XP Mode requires that the chipset supports virtualisation at the hardware level. So if your chipset doesn’t support it, you won’t be able to use XP mode on Windows 7.

So how can you tell? Well, one way is to inspect your bios to see if it has a hardware virtualisation option but if you’re using an Intel chip then there’s an easier way. Intel have provided a little utility that you can download from their site that will tell you. Get it from here: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?ProductID=1881&DwnldID=7838

Once you have installed it, click on the “CPU Technologies” tab and take a look at the “Virtualization Technology” setting. If it’s “yes” you’re in business.

Hotmail problems solved

2009-06-03T16:14:42Z

Do you have questions on any of these topics:

Account Problems

Hotmail Sending Limits

How can I stop receiving spam?

I can't send attachments

These any many more questions answered on the Hotmail Online Solutions Centre.

Actually I didn’t know this site existed until today so I thought it worth highlighting in case you didn’t either :-)

How to build accelerators, web slices and visual searches for IE8

2009-05-08T12:41:05Z

My colleague Mike Ormond has created a handy, short (<10 min) video on how to create add-ons for IE8. See this link.

Especially handy if you’re thinking of entering the developer competition to win an Xbox Elite…

Flying Turtles and Windows 7

2009-05-06T09:27:17Z

If you’ve installed the RC of Windows 7 you may have discovered some interesting themes that you weren’t expecting. Certainly, I wasn’t expecting them. Sure you get some really wonderful landscapes, nature scenes and iconic locations as your wallpaper but you get some zany stuff too. Such as this wonderful flying turtle:

If you haven’t tried some of these yet, right-click on your desktop and choose “personalize”, then try the “scenes” theme, or “characters”. Great fun!

Microsoft Office SP2

2009-04-30T13:59:19Z

You may have heard that the second service pack (SP2) for Microsoft Office is now available. There are loads of fixes and updates but the one that leaps out at me is this one:

Data file checks
Greatly reduces the number of scenarios in which you receive the following error message when you start Outlook: “The data file 'file name' was not closed properly. This file is being checked for problems”.

Great news :-)

There is plenty more in here of course and I’m really glad to get the entire update, but that’s one specific fix that is very welcome.

Read all about it here, the download link is at the bottom of the page.

Fortune and Glory with IE8

2009-04-28T10:44:00Z

Short Round: What is Sankara?
Indiana Jones: Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory

I'm wondering whether we can edit the script so that Short Round says "What's the opportunity with IE8?".

Ok maybe I'm reaching. However, as my colleague Mike Ormond has announced there is "fortune and glory" to be had with IE8 if you're a developer in the UK. Well, by "fortune" we mean possibly winning an Xbox 360 Elite, and by "glory" we mean potentially getting picked by Future Publishing for a promotion they are running.

All for writing an accelerator, web slice or visual search. Pretty simple stuff really. I have heard plenty of reports of these kind of add-ons being written in a couple of hours so you don't need to devote that much time to it. Also, bear in mind that Oneriot.com reported an 18% increase in daily traffic to their site due to their web slice, so you're not only putting yourself in line for a prize from us, and the possibility of broad exposure by Future Publishing, but your work could also dramatically increase traffic to your site.

Read all about it over on Mike's blog and best of luck if you decide to take part.

More IE8 Accelerators

2009-04-15T14:40:00Z

I like this one from my colleague Mike Ormond: http://ieaddons.com/gb/search/?search=trafficify. It shows traffic problems for any UK address you highlight as well as speed camera locations (note this is UK only). Mike has used Azure to do his data storage and calculations.

I also quite like the Postpad accelerator allows you to clip text and send to a web-based sticky note that you can access from anywhere.

Anyone seen any others that they particularly like?

I seem to have accumulated quite a few, here’s the first page:

And here’s the second:

All of these should be available on the gallery of course.

Running browser applications in dedicated windows

2009-04-08T20:49:00Z

Like many people I use my browser all day long, not just for searching but for running applications, whether they’re intranet ones such us our internal finance systems, or external ones such as hotmail, Office Live Workspace, or mindmeister (a mind mapping tool that I’ve been using).

When you’re running any of these kind of browser applications I generally like to run in full-screen mode by pressing the F11 key in Internet Explorer, which removes the toolbars and other screen elements and gives all of the screen real-estate to the browser application.

While that’s a pretty good solution, I like the idea of having an icon for the application on my desktop or pinned to my start menu that I can click just like any normal application and have the app launch in its own window and use the full screen without me having to press F11. So, for example, if I want to work on a mindmap I’d double-click a mindmeister icon and the app would load in its own window and look pretty much like any desktop app. The fact that it’s running in a browser is not particularly interesting to me as I have a single focus in mind when I’m running the app. In other words, I’m only using the browser to run this app, nothing else.

One solution would be to create a shortcut for IE and use the “-k” option on the command line which launches IE in kiosk mode. But that hogs the entire screen and doesn’t let you minimize it (well, not easily) or resize the window.

So I decided to write a very simple little shell for IE that does what I want. Being one of the world’s laziest programmers I didn’t write much code, it just uses a webbrowser object in .NET and allows a couple of command line parameters to be passed to it.

You invoke the application (which I called “BrowserApp.exe”) with a couple of parameters, one being the URL you want to call and the other being the title for the window. This means, for example, that I can create a shortcut of ‘ “BrowserApp.exe” "www.mindmeister.com” “My mind maps from Mindmeister” ‘ which creates a simple window that loads the mindmeister URL and sets the window title to “My mind maps from Mindmeister”. That way it really does look like a normal application. I can even pin it to the start menu.

For those that are interested, I uploaded the Visual Studio solution and source files here. As you can see it’s a really, really simply application, just a thin front-end to IE. Notice that I’ve done the bare minimum of error handling, if you want to improve this please be my guest :-)

However if you just want to try the app, download from here and stick it anywhere you like on your hard drive, creating a shortcut to the BrowserApp.exe file. Remember to pass the URL (with http:// prefix) as the first parameter and the window title, if you want one, as the second parameter. NB: Runs on Vista or Windows 7 (or on XP if you have the .NET Framework installed). No warranties implied, please use at own risk!

Of course, it’s quite possible that there’s a slicker way of achieving this. If there is I’m sure someone will let me know ;-)

Currency Conversion using Live.com

2009-04-06T08:57:40Z

In some previous blog posts (here and here) I talked about some little-known features of the live.com search engine that I find really useful.

Here’s another one: currency conversion. I don’t know about you but I’m always searching for currency conversion websites but actually you can do it right from the search box. Try typing “3000 south african rands in british pounds” to get….well, SA rands converted to British pounds:

Or if you don’t want to type that much, try the currency abbreviation symbols such as GBP for sterling and USD for US Dollars:

IE8 Addons from TeSco, Ebay.co.uk, Rightmove, Directgov and ASOS

2009-04-03T13:25:58Z

Back in March, as I’m sure you know, we released the final version of Internet Explorer 8 for download.

There’s plenty to like about IE8 – not only is it faster than any previous version (and faster than any other browser on most of the top 25 websites), it’s also the most secure browser we’ve released to date (and according NSS labs, head and shoulders above any other browser in terms of detecting malware), and it has a whole host of great features built right in.

Three of the features I really like are accelerators, visual searches and web slices and we’ve been working with some big-brand companies in the UK to build an initial set for you to use. We’ll be adding to the UK list of course, keep an eye on http://ieaddons.com for more details.

However in the meantime I’d like to point you at addons from the likes of Tesco, Ebay’s UK site, Rightmove, ASOS.com and Directgov, the government portal.

Ebay.co.uk has some great add-ons for IE8:
- An accelerator that let’s you look up items on ebay.co.uk wherever you are
- A visual search that allows you to get rich search results from ebay.co.uk without leaving the page you’re on
- Web slices for every product search you do on ebay.co.uk (should be live on the UK site from tomorrow 4th April). This is excellent for keeping an eye on your auctions, whether you’re buying or selling. Instead of having to constantly check how the item you’re bidding on (or selling) is doing you can simply use the web slice from any page you’re on.
Get all of these from http://ie8.ebay.co.uk
Tesco has released an accelerator that searches for products that they sell in their stores. They plan to improve this further by allowing you to search you own local store and add products directly into your shopping basket, right from the accelerator. This is great for recipes - for example you’re looking at a recipe on a website and you can just right-click on the ingredients to have them added to your Tesco shopping basket. You can get the accelerator from the ie8 gallery or directly from Tesco.
ASOS.com is the UK’s largest independent online fashion and beauty retailer with over 5.2 million unique users per month. I found that lots of women knew the brand very well, they are very popular as a retailer of womens’ clothing (they do sell mens’ too). In case you wondered, ASOS stands for “as seen on screen”. ASOS have produced an accelerator and are a visual search provider, allowing you to search their online store easily. They also provide web slices on their search results. The accelerator and web slice are available on every page of their site, www.asos.com (see links at the bottom of each page), or from the gallery
We’re also very pleased to report that Directgov, the government’s online portal, have produced an accelerator that makes it easy to search their website. Right-click on a “driving licence” for example to get a whole host of information back about….driving licences in the UK. You can get the Directgov accelerator from the gallery
Finally there is rightmove, the UK’s biggest property website. They have two accelerators, one for properties for sale and the other for properties to rent. These are great for example for finding properties close to an address or postcode. And once you have a set of search results you can add a webslice to keep an eye on the properties you’re interested in. The accelerators are available from rightmove’s site or from the gallery.

We’re seeing an increasing number of UK-based addons appearing – if you know of others let me know. And of course if you have developed one feel free to upload it to the gallery www.ieaddons.com. If you classify it as UK I’ll be sure to highlight it.

what’s a Patina?

2009-03-30T13:36:12Z

Following my previous post that covered how to look up the status of a flight on live.com, here’s a couple of other featurette’s that you may not be aware of.

We were watching a programme on TV last night where the word “patina” was mentioned. Any idea what a patina is? Live.com can tell you easily, just type “Define patina” into the search box and you’ll get a definition.

I kind of like the calculator function too. Type “12.4 * 15 / 8” into the search box for example to get the answer 23.25.

Or you can try some formulas, for example try typing “2y + 3y = 8” into the search box and live.com tells you the value of y (1.6 of course).

My still-empty inbox

2009-03-23T17:17:26Z

Just over a year ago I wrote a blog post boasting that my inbox was empty. I got to this happy state by a combination of being really disciplined with myself about email and using a powerful Outlook addon that really made it easier to keep on top of my email.

So a year on, how’s it going? I’m really happy to say that most days I still manage to maintain an empty inbox most of the time. In fact, it’s empty right now:

Can I always maintain this state? No, sometimes it’s difficult. Of course when I get into the office in the morning – given that we’re an American company and I have many colleagues in US time zones – I have around 100 emails sitting in my inbox. But I generally get through them quickly and get back to my empty inbox state.

It’s pretty liberating. It really does help you feel like you’re in some kind of control, a feeling I never had in the days when I had an inbox creaking with thousands of messages with about 100 red flagged.

I must be honest I couldn’t be without Speedfiler now, I’d be totally lost without it. Discipline plays a part but really it’s technology that has got me to this wonderful position. Of course, technology (in the form of email) got me in the mess in the first place but that’s another story…

Changing the position of an IE8 accelerator

2009-03-23T08:40:28Z

I’ve been using the new “accelerator” feature of Internet Explorer 8 for some time and now with the final release of IE8 there are many more to choose from (if you haven’t seen accelerators before take a look at this short video to learn how to use them).

When you use an accelerator by highlighting a piece of text on a webpage, you get a short list to choose from with an option called “All Accelerators” if the one you want isn’t shown on the initial list. So what happens if there’s an accelerator you use all the time and you want it to appear on this initial “default” list? It’s pretty simple to change, here’s a quick walkthrough to explain it.

Imagine you’re looking for a new sat nav and see one that you’re interested in on a web page as shown in the right-most red circle below. When you highlight it and click on the blue accelerator icon your accelerator of choice isn’t listed. So you click on “All Accelerators” and see the “Research and shop for products” option, hover over it and get a listing pop up.

Now that’s actually pretty quick, but we can make it quicker.

Step 1: Choose “Tools” then “Manage Add-ons” from IE8:

Step 2: Click on “Accelerator” in the left hand pane, then find the one you’re interested in. Notice that it is currently shown as “enabled”. The choices here are “enabled” or “default”. Anything set as “default” will appear on the initial list of accelerators shown when you highlight text on a webpage and click the accelerator icon.

Step 3: Highlight the accelerator you want and click “set as default”. And you’re done.

Now, if you highlight the same sat nav item again, the “Research and shop for products” option comes up immediately on the list of accelerators and you can hover over it and see the prices very quickly.