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It’s the first time I take some time to talk about this product but I’ve had access to it since last summer. I got the beta of Microsoft Office 2007 around the same time I got my Vista Beta 2. I had installed in on that system but wasn’t using it as a mainstream application. When I got an email from Microsoft saying that my beta key would expire at the end of March I said to myself I had to give it more credit and put OpenOffice aside for a few weeks. So I did it, I’ve been using Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 for a few weeks and found it quite pleasent. People feared the new Ribbon interface was going away from the classic toolbar view. At first, it was very confusing but I quickly learned to appreciate the new ease of use it provided me. I’m running the Beta 2 Technical Refresh and it’s actually 95% functional, the only problem I’m still running into is that I can’t correct the misspelled instances, it does point them out with red or green underlining but when I select the correction from the contextual menu it does not change it to my selection. So for now I have to manually correct my mistakes. This has clearly been fixed in the final version.

Microsoft is setting the score straight just like it’s doing with Vista by bringing us new features and look by keeping what made their products work in the first place. You get a good balance between the ease of use and the in-depth options you can access with their applications. I’m a student, a free version is always welcome and they provide a lower cost edition for these type of situations.

What best then a major deal to break the news to the world. It’s been a few days now that I’ve added a promo banner at the bottom left of the blog and it’s going to be there for a little while. Now joining the ranks of Opera, Skype and Ubuntu; Joost is the new name given to the formerly known The Venice Project. At first it was about sharing, then about talking for free, now you can watch for free. The new Joost platform allows content to be watched on PC or Mac with Linux coming soon. There is not much to say about it just yet, they’ve got a lot of nice programming to entertain you. Thanks to the recent buzz Joost signed a deal with Viacom, meaning there will be ties with Paramount, MTV, BET and Comedy Central. They boast themselves as providers of premium content and they are definitely delivering. Keep your eyes on the blog for invites as soon as I get some, or even more details as soon as I read back that non-disclosure agreement you have to accept each time you load the beta program. They’ve reached version 0.8 and we could expect a final version not too far out. Visit Joost.com for some more info on the program.

I’m speechless… I must regain my composure and tell you how I feel about this device. It’s a blog and I have to state my opinion on things. But that is how I felt when I saw the first shots from Steve Jobs keynote. This device as everything you can expect. It combines a cellphone, an iPod, and a PDA. I’ve never been attracted in any way to the iPhone before, I did follow the news heard a lot of rumors of what it would be. But had I known it would be something like this… I would of started to save money to buy one. First thing you can say it will be darn expensive. But that’s the price for touch screen technology. There is little more I can say about this device. You have to see it for your self. I’ve made a quick slide show, but head out to Apple – iPhone for complete animated version. For Christmas 2007, gather together and buy me one. You can find a ton of additionnal pictures on Technorati. Apple is now Apple Inc. they’re really heading somewhere. Bright and simple future for them.

A few weeks back I talked about Democracy, a application for most your video content needs. It also supported BitTorrent file transfers. In the department of file transfer via Peer-to-Peer (P2P), Azureus is well known for being available on platforms like Linux, Mac and Windows and is open source. The idea behind Zudeo is to add a portal interface to the BitTorrent software. If you click on the advanced tab of the application you get the familiar look from Azureus. The interesting part is not there though; the welcome screen shows your current downloads with their global rating. You also see thumbnails of new “hot” videos. The need of a P2P program wants to step away from the quality you can get from YouTube, flash based videos are usually in pretty low resolution and if you bring them full screen they can be pretty ugly. This program wins all points because it promotes high definition content. Larges files that they are, can be downloaded within a few minutes. Right now, the portal gives access to movie trailers, short films, and various videos at a pretty high definition. The biggest news is that the BBC as signed a deal with Zudeo to have their shows distributed under this new platform. Even if the shows themselves will probably be add suported and might even have a form of DRM it would not matter. We are stepping forward new ways to get digital video content and BitTorrent is starting being recognized as a legal way for content to be share. You can visit LegalTorrents to get loads of legal content. Download Azureus 3 (Zudeo) today to try it out.

We all know what democracy should be right? Even if some political parties don’t seem to fully follow those guide lines… but earlier this week I discovered that democracy can also be a media player. Now if it were your average player I would not even speak of it since Windows Media Player 11, Winamp 5 and Quicktime 7 are pretty popular and known out there.

What I love about Democracy is it’s emphasis on IPTV, by that I mean you now have program that can easily let you gather different videos to download onto your system. Whether it be a funny video from YouTube or a Vidcast about technology or video games. You can add “channels” using the RSS subscription feed to have Democracy download the new shows automatically as they are released. There is a expiration system that auto-deletes old episodes after a period of time (you can change the default expiry or save the file so it is never deleted). The player supports pretty much all video formats out there and has support for torrent files and can download videos from Flash video service. This means you can have all your personal videos in your library AND download movies from YouTube or Google Video to your hard drive.

The product is pretty strong and still has a way to go before version 1. The two features I feel are missing is the option to reduce to tray and let it run in the background. If you want it to download a show you need have the player open and take space on your desktop. Same would happen if you download a large torrent file. The other thing I’d like is the ability to come back and forth from a video to the different channels. Because each time it interrupts the playback. You can get it at getdemocracy.com and they are at version 0.9.2 it is available for Mac, Linux and Windows.

It’s nearly been a week now but now is a good time as any other to talk about Java applications for your cellphone. I own a Motorola v186, basic and entry phone. Never cared much about picture, video and music options but one important thing to me is functionality.

Opera Mini: I’ve been using Opera Mini for quite some time now and was glad to see that version 3 is not far away and is doing some testing with it. The Opera Mini browser allows “regular” phones to access the Internet by way of the Opera servers processing and rendering for you a small-size version of nearly any web page. You can follow the different features that were included in previous version via my posts. As far as new features go Opera Mini 3 will feature RSS feed support. You’ll be able subscribe to feeds as you browse the net thanks to an auto-discovery feature. Other features include now secure browsing (https) and photo upload. No release date as of yet but it can’t be too far since it seems to work quite nicely.

Gmail Mobile: For quite some now Google email solution adapted it self to mobile browsing. It adopted a slim redesign for better viewing on small screens but they are now going a step further by leaving the constrains of your phones WAP browser or Opera Mini and reach out to be a standalone application. I would see how it could be useful and faster than a regular WAP browser but it does not match Opera Mini ease of use. The best feature they offer is intensive shortcut support specific to Google’s universe. In Opera Mini shortcuts are associated with the applications specific features; so in the case of Gmail you can archive, star, mark unread messages with a few clicks (or the press of one key). The only reason why I will not jump to the Gmail Mobile wagon is because of the default font size of my phone. It is huge and very little information fills the screen. Opera Mini on the other hand allows small font rendering similar to what you see on those screen captures. On my phone regular menus are really huge trust me (Menu and Refresh would be side by side with very little space between the two).

I guess I never paid attention but this software has been out for some time. It lets you watch TV over the Internet. In other words you stream different stations that are captured by individuals or by the broadcaster themselves. The TVU Player uses P2P technology to spread the bandwidth. The key word to remember is that it’s FREE. If you are living in the United States you probably already get all the main stations over the air, but in Canada or around the world we would have to pay local providers for these channels (FOX, NBC, ABC, CBS). Many take it for granted but when you think that you have access to channels like the Cartoon Network it’s value becomes increased.

Additional interest comes from the fact that foreign language viewers will be pleased to know that there are Asian and French channels available. Paired with many music video channels, Animal Planet and HBO to name a few. Sports fans get their share with a few ESPN and NHL Center Ice (broadcasters here can charge around $150 for it!). Sadly there are a few down sides to this great system, since it relies on P2P to share the data amongst viewers if there are not many people watching a station it will reduce it’s quality and in some cases the picture became unviewable combined with distorted sound. The channels are broadcasted with no alterations, this means you see advertising just like on regular TV. This way the content holder increase their viewers and they stay happy because the advertisement they care so much about is still there. There is no reason to pay monthly fees mostly for a infrastucture and profit to a third party when the Internet could be used as low cost medium (bandwith use mostly on the user side).
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, than what about streaming video? It’s more like a thousand books. Just try it out and tell me what you think of it. If you live in a house of plenty and all the TVs are busy… well you just turned your computer in an aditionnal TV WITHOUT a TV Tuner card. The TVUPlayer 2.2 can be taken from Download.com [here]. Their official website: www.tvunetworks.com

I have been testing the next version of Microsoft’s operating system for a few months now and here is my review. I’ve been through five different build from pre-Beta, Beta, RC1, 5627 and now RC2. I went from a non-functional operating system from one that I can use on a daily basis (with a few bugs still).

I can hardly believe how come it took so long for Microsoft to develop a new OS considering that since Windows 95 they were releasing something almost every two years. I would consider Windows Vista RC2 (build 5744) to be almost ready for release; what really needs to be worked on are the third party software we rely on to do whatever we use the computer for. I have a lot of media on my hard drive. If I consider music and videos compressed by various codecs support for these need to be adopted quickly. On earlier builds I could not even play mp3 or videos without using Winamp. All those bugs aside are now corrected. I believe Windows Vista to be one serious OS. They look out for the security of their users by integrating tools such as Anti-Spyware, Firewall, Anti-Phising and permission management for running software. It is doubtful that this new version of Windows will be void of attacks because as anything becomes popular it will be attacked even more.

Key features of Windows Vista

The tester license I’ve been given gives me access to Windows Vista Ultimate witch has all the features the OS has to offer. We can highlight the next version of Internet Explorer ( IE7+) and Windows Media Player 11. Those are available to Windows XP users under beta. Nice add-ons include Windows Media Center and Speech Recognition. You can litteraly tell your computer what to do and what to write down. I takes some time to use to but that feature will develop nicely.

If I look at the performance of my system I am running a Pentium 4 2.4GHz, with 1791 MB of RAM, a 250 GB hard drive with an ATI Radeon 9550 256 MB video card. As you might already know Microsoft as released a tool that let’s you evaluate your PC for the Vista experience. My score was 3.3, set by the lowest score of the list because of my graphics card. I let myself impressed by the Aero interface. It’s not full transparency (that I find confusing) but a gentle glass look to all your windows. I could set the color theme and most applications I use were compatible with the Aero Glass theme.

I tend to use a lot of Beta (pre-released) software along side Vista, I got to test Office 2007 at the same time but will not review it now. I will focus on the few features I like. The Gadget sidebar is quite useful; I get to see a sleek calendar, the weather, a few RSS feeds, my pictures and a currency converter. Are those features essential ? Of course not, just like Aero this is Eye Candy. What gets my worried is that right now I use Google Desktop Search and Opera to provide my widgets/gadgets and if Windows gets it’s community to create all the appropriate items there will be no need for third party software.

We’ll have to wait for January for a complete version with a better compatibility with existing programs and a few months before you get everything up and running like you’d like it. Screenshots are via My Opera Albums!