Sam Davyson

Target Alert is a great extension for Firefox. It lets you know the nature of the content that you are about to click. Is it word doc? normal webpage? pdf? email address? are you leaving a secure area? or entering one? will it be in a new page? or is it an “in page” link? All these questions are beautifully answered by the brilliant extension from Michael Bolin.

Some absolutely brilliant videos on there. No time to write about it. But trust me, some of them are ace. See it. Shortly I plan to collect together my favourtie videos (which you can see at the moment on my del.icio.us) for a blog post. That should be good.

Want to get Live Mail for yourself now? Just read these instructions.

I signed up to try the Beta test of the next generation of Hotmail, dubbed as Kahuna and officially called Windows Live Mail. I had heard good things about it. This release is the first major upgrade to Hotmail is years and is in direct response to the release of Gmail by Google (although it is nearly two years behind). Yahoo also recently starting beta testing their new mail client which is supposed to be absolutely awesome. I look forward to checking that service out as soon as I’m invited.

So I log on to the new version and I immediately notice the white background. Most of the page is white. I don’t like that much. Also I notice that it defaults to this “today” page straight away which was present in the previous version of Hotmail, and is just a jump page before you get to see your mail and a place Hotmail have used for big adverts in the past. I would have thought that in a redesign the first thing to drop would be the today page. But apparently not (luckily it is removable through a user script). Next thing I see is it’s telling me I’m using the wrong browser. Internet Explorer is need to experience all the features. Ok, it is only in beta I’ll try it in IE…

(…to be continued but I can give you the bottom line now: I’m not going to lose the art of conversation just because Hotmail’s got a new white background.)

Read the full story, and see Part 2 now.

I have promised 5 reviews since late Novemeber. I assure you I am still going to post about all of those sites. But as I indicated on the Site Update blog there will be very few site modifications before February time. So you can expect some of those sites to come out then. To add to the list I also want to write some stuff about:

• Hotmail’s Mail Beta – Part 1, Part 2.
• Yahoo Mail Beta – Waiting for Invite!
• Calendar Hub
• Flickr
• Digg
• TechCrunch – Post.
• Google Pack
• Internet Explorer 7 – Post.
• and the Sand Game.

So stay tuned, there is a load of stuff to come.

Just got a Google Alert through about a list of 50 Firefox Extensions (linked via addict3d) and one of them caught my eye. A FTP Client called FireFTP. So far it is awesome, and it will probably replace SmartFTP and CoreFTP as my software for updating my site. Maybe also as my backup tool…

Since I wrote this post I have changed hosts. And I now use the Smart FTP client much more than FireFTP. It is still a good program though.