Now, we understand that when you agree to install a beta product, you can expect a few glitches.
Maybe a few features won’t work, maybe a few functions won’t do what you expect, or maybe you’ll get the odd error or two.
When it’s a Google beta – a company whose innovative beta programs are often more polished than the final versions of some software products – you can usually feel pretty sure that they’re not going to foist some unfinished rubbish on you.
Well, at least that’s what we thought before trying out their dreadful Blogger beta ‘upgrade.’
Seduced by the shiny new features bigged up on the Blogger homepage, we foolishly elected to move over to the new Blogger Beta and have been struggling with it ever since.
Immediately, we were plagued with time outs, and that ruddy annoying animated exclamation mark icon that appears when Blogger’s uploading became a near permanent fixture on our screen.
Trying to upload a simple blog post seemed an impossible task, with this error being repeatedly thrown up: “Your Publish is Taking Longer than Expected. To continue waiting for it to finish, click here.”
Settings were lost. Links stopped working. The archive seemed to have disappeared altogether as all links gave ‘404’ errors (fortunately we found that the archived pages were still there, but the links had all been incorrectly set).
After several hour of fiddling about, we’ve only just got the blog working again and we’re not entirely sure how. You can see it here (or at least we hope you can).
Google’s perpetual betas
After I had a late night whinge on the urban75 bulletin board, a poster sagely observed about Google’s beta policy:
“The worst thing is that they keep their products in beta for so long. Meaning you’re never quite sure if it’s a fully working product and you can’t complain when it goes wrong. It’s a very ‘google’ thing to do too, they practically invented the idea of the never-ending beta program.”
In our experience, it felt like we were dealing with an alpha product and seeing as the process is one way, once you move to Blogger Beta you can’t switch back.
We’re sure that in the end Google will produce a nicely polished update to Blogger that consumers will love, but for now we strongly advise users to stick to the old version.
After all, life’s too short to be staring at a “Your Publish is Taking Longer than Expected” screen.
Blogger Help Group (you’ll need this)
Smaller than a pixie’s pocket plaything, the ridiculously tiny Ultra Portable Personal Media Player and Recorder is quite the teensiest thing we’ve seen for a while.
Lord knows how they’ve managed to fit it in, but there’s also a speaker onboard too, although we imagine the output must be quieter than a gnat having a snooze.
It’s as cheap as chips too, with Gadget Universe offering it for just $80 (£42, €62).
The US is responsible for a fifth of the world’s spam, according to security firm Sophos.
Most unsolicited emails are churned out by zombie PCs. These don’t walk towards you, arms outstretched and making funny groaning noises, but are computers that have been silently infected with Trojans, worms and viruses that turn your lovely PC into a spam-spewing beast.
Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt, has chatted to Reuters about his thoughts on mobile phones, and how their ownership and usage should be free, supported of course by advertising. In his words “It just makes sense that subsidies should increase” as advertising rises on mobile phones.
Google Maps for Mobile now officially supports GPS location information when used with mobile phones … well at least one of them at the moment, the Helio Drift.
A UK company specialising in waterproof bags, OverBoard, have widened their selection of waterproof cases to include electronic gear.
Not content with just providing their leisure range, they’ve decided to tackle the design problem of a waterproof iPod case for extreme water sports, a range they call pro-Sports. Not only are they more rugged, but float, so your rather expensive music player doesn’t start playing its tunes to the fishes.
The time I had with it gave me the impression that the case is very tough. There’s two leads supplied, a neoprene velcro sports arm strap (for attaching to your arm – in the photo) and a safety break neck lanyard.
Microsoft is giving the Universal Music Group (UMG) a per-unit fee for each Zune that they sell, in addition to the money that they’ll make out sell music tracks on it too.
If you’re finding that the built-in flash on your compact camera has the illuminating power of a Woodbine in a gale force breeze, it might be worth investing in the Metz 28 CS-2 Digital slave flash.
To ensure that the Metz fires at the same time as the camera’s onboard flash, the unit can be put in a learning mode which calculates and stores the correct flash trigger.
It took a matter of seconds to ‘train’ the Metz to fire at the same time as the Ricoh’s onboard flash and we had no problems getting it to respond to each and every subsequent shot.
Rating
Users of Palm Treo smartphones will already appreciate the pop up that appears onscreen after a call from a new caller, making it easy to add fresh contacts to the address book.
Depending on whether the contact is a new one or not, these buttons let you view the contact’s full profile, create a new contact from the received phone number, add the number to a current contact or add the contact/phone number to the Palm’s daily journal application.
Using YourCall
The program was easy to set up and use, we liked the friendly interface and integration with other Palm apps, and for power users who rely on their phone for their working life, we could see that YourCall could prove an invalble addition.
BT has signed a deal with The Walt Disney Company, to deliver their programming over the soon to be launched BT Vision IPTV service.
Names of some of the films will be bound to get some people excited with box-office hits ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,’ the Academy Award®-winning ‘Memoirs of a Geisha,’ plus comedies ‘The Shaggy Dog’ and ‘Scary Movie 4.’
BT Vision has been under development for