New Google products

Google unveiled three new products this week! It's no surprise that Google is now the highest valued media stock.

Google Earth (beta) is a lot like Google Maps, but it runs as a Windows application rather than in your browser. It's much faster and it zooms in and out as you move around the globe or enter a street address. I was able to download it last night before they removed it today. I don't think they've explained why they removed the download, but it is in beta and they've posted a message to check back daily.



Personalized Search (beta) will now produce search results that are filtered based on your prior search history. There is also a calendar that shows your history color-coded by search volume per day. You can see each search phrase and which webpages you opened from the search results. It will be interesting to see how this will affect AdWords results.



Google Video (beta) was also released this week. I read a post on the Googleblog about video search in January and wasn't sure how long it would take to build up a decent index of transcripts. I think this feature might be useful for those times when you catch the last few minutes of a show, find out it wasn't recording and want to see what happened earlier in the episode.

Motorola Franklin

Brooks came over to our house on Saturday with his new Motorola RAZR. It's by far the coolest cell phone I've seen, but I think I'll wait until the RAZR Franklin is released. I still love my indestructible Motorola V60g (no color screen or camera) and will wait to trade it in along with my iPAQ for a Franklin.


Check out the specs at Engadget.com

Longhorn loves RSS

Microsoft made an announcement at Gnomedex on Friday about details of how RSS will be supported in Longhorn and Internet Explorer 7. It's no surprise that IE 7 will have an easy way to read and subscribe to RSS feeds, but what's really cool is how the feeds will be managed. Longhorn will include a common feed-list to maintain a single list of RSS feeds that can be used by other applications. This is really great, considering that none of the current news readers have a way to share feed lists easily.

The Channel 9 video below shows how RSS Bandit was quickly modified to use the common feed-list. They also set up a calendar in Outlook 2003 that is populated by iCalendar (ICS) files embedded in an RSS feed with the Gnomedex schedule and wrote a sample app that took an RSS feed from a Photoblog and created a screen saver with the text of the blog entry as the photo caption. Fast forward the video to 23:00 to get a glimpse of IE 7!


Watch the video
Download the video

Interactive websites using AJAX

I've heard a lot of buzz about this new way of using JavaScript and XML to produce some really powerful web pages with AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Before I continue, you can see AJAX in action at Google Maps (beta), Microsoft Start (preview), Google Personalized Homepage and Gmail if you haven't heard about it yet. These interactive sites are very easy to use and appear to response much faster than traditional sites since the entire page is not reloaded after each item is clicked. However, AJAX has some problems that might really annoy users. The problems listed below are very similar to problems found in websites using Flash...

1. It doesn't have an alternative view if your browser doesn't support JavaScript, similar to running a browser without the Flash plugin.
2. The back and refresh buttons don't work (by default) in your browser
3. It doesn't change the URL in the address bar. This prevents bookmarking a page. Google has addressed this issue by providing a Link to this page feature on Google Maps that redirects the browser to a URL that can be bookmarked.

By the way, I've still got a bunch of invites if anyone wants to try Gmail, the best free webmail IMO.

MSN Desktop Search

I was really excited when Google announced that they had released a desktop search application last year, but I was disappointed after installing it since it didn't support Firefox or MSN Messenger, so I never used it and eventually un-installed it.

I've now installed Microsoft's MSN Desktop Search, which doesn't appear to search your internet history. However, it does search MSN Messenger conversations, which is really cool. I am constantly trying to remember some conversation I had with someone and I have multiple archived MSN conversation log files for each of my co-workers since I am a heavy user of Messenger. The included MSN toolbar also adds tabbed browsing into IE, but I'm not comfortable switching back from Firefox to IE yet. It also installed an Outlook toolbar (add-in) that should replaces the Find funtion for most people.

Anyways, I'm optimistic that I'll actually keep and use MSN Desktop Search.

It's about time

I think this is probably the most appropriate time in my life to start an online journal (blog). So much has changed in my personal and professional life in the last few years, I graduated college, got married, bought a house and we now have a four month old son! I've had a number of websites, including a wedding site and our current home page (brianandkarla.com) for a few years now, but I haven't really recorded any details of my experiences on these sites.

I've also had some amazing experiences working as a software developer at Alterity, Inc. I think that's what I'm most interested in writing about on this site.

We hired two new employees that will be working with me and I've been training them for the last two weeks. I've been explaining different technologies that we use to develop and support our software (ACCTivate!) and I am realizing that it's time to start recording this stuff in a permanent, easy accessible format. I was asked if there were any books that I recommended for them to read to learn about the tools we use. My first instinct is to refer them to the technical books covering SQL Server, Crystal Reports and Visual Basic, but I don't think that's really necessary. Learning the tools is not the hard part. The difficulty is in learning how we actually use these tools and what functions of each of these tools that they need to learn and which functions they won't be using much (at least for now).

I've chosen to use Blogger since the interface is very easy to use and I won't be tempted to completely re-write the source code. I'm running Movable Type on IIS to manage brianandkarla.com with a lot of custom modules and some ASP code to generate photo albums. It's easy to use for creating photo albums, but it's not very portable due to the quantity of pictures on the site and my unwillingness to pay for hosting. It's also somewhat unreliable since it's now running over wifi since I lost my home office and I'm too lazy to run the network cable.

About me

I'm Brian, and I'm a software developer at Alterity, Inc. Alterity is a small software company that makes ACCTivate!, a distribution and inventory management software package that works with QuickBooks and Microsoft Small Business Accounting. I'm responsible for managing the customer support staff, adding new features and fixing bugs in our software.

I was born in Fort Worth, Texas and spent most of my life in Arlington, Texas. I graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BS in Information Systems at the University of Texas at Arlington. I met my wife Karla while working at Olive Garden and we got married in October 2002. We bought a house near Lake Arlington two months before our wedding and our son, Jake, was born in February 2005.

I began working at Alterity in January 2001, providing customer technical support and troubleshooting reported bugs in the software. I quickly became proficient in Visual Basic and now make most of the maintenance repairs in our software. We are currently using Visual Basic, Microsoft SQL Server and Crystal Reports to develop our software.

Alterity merged with our largest dealer Kerr Consulting and I spent some time traveling to customer's offices to install our software and train end-users. We later separated from Kerr Consulting and now sell our software directly to customers rather than using a dealer network. We have a good relationship with Intuit and most of our customers found our software on the QuickBooks Solution Marketplace.

Disclaimer

These postings are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. The content of this site are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway. In addition, my thoughts and opinions often change, and as a weblog is intended to provide a semi-permanent point in time snapshot you should not consider out of date posts to reflect my current thoughts and opinions.

Courtesy of Josh Ledgard