Archive for the ‘Application’ Category

Quintura

Friday, August 11th, 2006

Quintura is an interesting search tool. You enter in a word or phrase and it then clusters related words around it. e.g. Enter in Ruby and you get Rails (as in Ruby on Rails) as well as ruby the precious gem. In this case I wanted Ruby on Rails so I clicked Rails and now my phrase is Ruby Rails and any related words to that phrase are then shown. You can then hover over these words and further relations are shown.

The bit that I really liked was that Quintura doesn’t reinvent the search engine. It works off of your favourite one, be it Google, Yahoo! or a host of others.

The UI is slick and easy to use. Results are returned quickly. Installation was a breeze and overall it feels like a professional application.

I’d like to see a web-based version of this, something that sits inside my browser which would make following result links easier.

On buying WinZip

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

I must say that after ten years of “Please register” wait screens and dodgy hacks it is nice being able to open a ZIP file with WinZip without any of that. It has taken me far too long to buy a license and give back a little that the great and venerable WinZip has given to me.

AllPeers

Friday, July 28th, 2006

I got an invite to AllPeers but have nobody to share with. So if you are on AllPeers then add PaulMWatson as a contact please.

RIDE-ME

Tuesday, June 13th, 2006


RIDE-ME is a neat Windows IDE for Ruby on Rails that will be very familiar to Visual Studio users. It is a good deal faster than RadRails and works more as I expect (coming from a Visual Studio background.)

I also have to say the developers are very responsive. I posted two tickets and within an hour they had been resolved and the code made available. This is the first time I have commented on an open-source project, had a response, downloaded the patched code and then used it properly as an app. Normally I wait for official releases and avoid the bleeding-edge trunk. This way works nicely though.

So well done to the RIDE-ME lads so far. Looking forward to the features they have planned and I hope I can contribute some more to the project.

Google Spreadsheets

Wednesday, June 7th, 2006

Google Spreadsheets is out in invite-only beta. While Techcrunch may not think much of it I think it is another example of Google hitting the right mark. I don’t use spreadsheets much but the ones I have tried online have been a bit clunky at best. Some are too complex while others are a bunch of table tags and a save button. GSpread (my name, awful isn’t it :-D) is much like Google Calendar in that it offers up the core features, some clever background functionality and a usable interface. You don’t have to be a whiz to use it but you won’t be limited either.

Office 2007

Wednesday, May 24th, 2006

Word 2007

Powerpoint 2007

Excel 2007

Outlook 2007

Some screenshots from the Office 2007 beta. Overall I like what they have done though I am not happy they override my Windows XP theme choice (Windows Classic.)