I’ve recently switched to JetBrains Omea Reader and have been using the EAP version almost since day one. While the EAP is pretty stable it has a tendency to crash from time to time as can be expected from a beta product. Now JetBrains has been very good at delivering new and improved versions of the beta but lately they have been pretty quiet.

Looking in my referrer logs I see build numbers of Omea which aren’t public yet, so I can only summize that they (you know, “them”, the aliens and such) visit my site using the latest build without letting the general public in on the action.

Give me the final version yesterday I say!  In case you were wondering JetBrains seems to be up to build 580 internally with 568 being the latest public build. Also new versions are being cranked out almost on a weekly basis.

Maybe they are finalizing the release version and don’t want to spend too much time putting together stable beta? Anyways this, of course, is all speculation at this time.

Even more issues with Google Web Accelerator are turning up. The latest: Users sharing sessions. This alone is reason enough for me to remove the tool. As nice as it is in theory this really unnerves me. I think some months are needed for the tool to mature.

“Google Web Accelerator is currently in beta and automatically stores and updates the content of pages accessed through it. However, ZDNet reports at least one user having problems as he suddenly discovered he was logged in as someone else.”

[Security Fears Over Google Accelerator]

 

As with all things Google you should read the privacy policy before installing. Basically everything viewed over a non-secure connection, i.e. HTTP, will be sent to Google thus raising concerns over privacy.

Google does not require any personal information when you download Google Web Accelerator, although we do collect standard information about your computer, such as the type of browser you use, etc.

When you use Google Web Accelerator, Google servers receive and log your page requests. Page requests and data sent in encrypted form using an HTTPS connection will not go through Google. It is possible that some personally identifiable information could be sent to Google, if the information is sent without using an encrypted (HTTPS) connection.

[HAACKED - Google Web Accelerator - Let Google Watch You Do Everything]

Synop is back with a new version of Sauce Reader. The biggest news is that they’ve dropped the .NET framework in favor of a native approach due to performance considerations. Now it’s commonly known that Sauce Reader was a dog when it came to performance, but blaming on the .NET framework is a little too easy. I know that RSS readers have to deal with large amounts of data coming in but still other .NET based aggregators like SharpReader have been able to cope without too much trouble.

In any case version 2.0 of Sauce Reader sports the same Outlook 2003–like interface and the performance is up to par with some of the fastest reader out there. You should definitely check out the latest version if you need a fast and easy to use RSS reader. This version is definitely going on my parent’s computer first thing

Sauce Reader 2.0 is a complete rewrite and no longer requires the .NET framework. Using .NET for Sauce Reader v1 we were never able to achieve the level of performance we considered appropriate for a heavily used productivity application. .NET is a compelling and powerful platform, but currently unsuitable for widely adopted client side applications.

[Sauce Reader v2.0 (BETA)]

Seems that not everything is well with the Google Web Accelerator. So now the fine architecture behind our sites which makes the fix easy to implement comes in handy. I may have to additional work to do come monday morning.

The accelerator scours a page and prefetches the content behind each link. This gives the illusion of pages loading faster (since they’ve already been pre-loaded behind the scenes). Here’s the problem: Google is essentially clicking every link on the page — including links like “delete this” or “cancel that.” And to make matters worse, Google ignores the Javascript confirmations. So, if you have a “Are you sure you want to delete this?” Javascript confirmation behind that “delete” link, Google ignores it and performs the action anyway.

[Google Web Accelerator: Hey, not so fast - an alert for web app designers]

Speaking of using your time more efficiently thus gaining more time for yourself, Keith Hammonds has an article about the very subject. A pretty good read.

You know the drill. It's Monday morning. You arrive at work exhausted from a weekend spent entertaining the kids, paying bills, and running errands. You flick on your PC -- and 70 new emails greet you. Your phone's voice-mail light is already blinking, and before you can make it stop, another call comes in. With each ring, with each colleague who drops by your office uninvited, comes a new demand -- for attention, for a reaction, for a decision, for your time. By noon, when you take 10 minutes to gulp down a sandwich at your desk, you already feel overworked, overcommitted -- overwhelmed.

[You can do anything - but not everything]

This latest tool from Google adds a little tray icon which will prefetch links on the sites you visit in your IE or Firefox browser promising to provide a better web browsing experience. I’ve actually been wanting a tool like this for some time as clicking through all those next links and waiting for the pages to load is just plain old annoying.

One of my pet peeves is using IT to provide more spare time in a world with increasing demands on our personal time. The Google Web Accelerator application is one such tool and it’ll have a permanent home on my machine if it indeed delivers what it promises.

Update: A link to Google Web Accelerator would be nice, no? :)

My first RSS aggregator was NewsGator for Outlook which I enjoyed immensely but I’ve always felt that it held me back to some extent especially with synchronization and the speed at which I’m able to sift through all the incoming information. For those reasons I started looking at an alternative.

Now, however, the beta for the next version of NewsGator has started, and of course I couldn’t resist partaking. The feature list for the next version is really cool, almost every feature I want from an aggregator is in there. Here’s the word from Katriana Hutchison, QA lead for NewsGator 2.5:

The primary new feature for version 2.5 is the all-new synchronization mechanism.  With the previous (2.0) sync system, items would be marked read in NewsGator Online as soon as they were downloaded; however, this is of course not exactly what you really wanted.

In 2.5, read/deleted state is synchronized between Outlook and NewsGator Online, as is folder hierarchy and all other relevant information.  It pretty much works as you'd expect - read/unread counts and feed organization will be mirrored between Outlook and Online (and other copies of Outlook, of course).

Sadly my first bout with the beta has not been successful. Outlook constantly crashes for me with it installed so I’m eagerly looking forward for the next beta.

From the creators of Coderush comes Refactor! a refactoring tool for every version of Visual Studio .NET. If you haven’t seen this thing in action yet you need to check out Carl Franklin and Mark Miller show off Refactor support in VB 2005 posted by Carl Franklin.

Many of the same cool visual effects found in Coderush are present and best of all the product is free for Visual Basic 2005. Of course I’ve found a friend in Resharper but I may have to give the Coderush / Refactor! a spin in the near future. One thing I was missing from Coderush when I first tried it out is the background compile-like feature found in Resharper. This is the one feature I miss the most when switching from VB to C#.

Also be sure to check out the official Visual Basic 2005 Refactor page on MSDN and the product page at DevExpress for the pro version with C# support.

I was looking for a Bittorrent framework targeting the .NET platform a while back, however I couldn’t come up with anything searching around. Carl Franklin to the rescue with a post entitled Pwop gets new life where he mentions an application he’s writing which takes advantage of a C# Bittorrent library.

The framework is not in an advanced state at the moment but it looks like it’s getting there. I’ll be following the progress from here on in, maybe even donate some of my time.

Go check put Btsharp (registration required).

If you work with Commerce Server you will find the following tools invaluable. These tools were created by Max Akbar, who recently joined our Program Management team, but has been working on Commerce Server for a long time and has a very detailed knowledge of everything Commerce Server. Kudos to Max for sharing these out (for all these years!) with the community.

[Nihit Kaul's WebLog – Cool Tools for Commerce Server]