The New Windows Live Messenger App

The Good

The new Windows Live Messenger application from Microsoft integrates online social networking with instant messaging. With a sleek Metro like interface the messenger application allows you to share what you’re doing right now (sort of like twitter) with your friends who are also using windows live, and stay up to date with your Facebook and Myspace profiles at the same time. To use Facebook or Myspace all you need to do is give it your credentials while you sign in for the first time.

The “Social” window allows you to sort recent “highlights” and other things just photos posted by our friends on Windows Live (MSN) or on Facebook. At the same time you can also add regular Windows Live friends like you could in older versions.

Also, the messaging service provides a way to set privacy while you sign in for the first time. You can also have custom privacy settings for every new person that you add to your friends list. It’s nice to see that Microsoft is paying close attention to the Facebook privacy debates.

While things are still in Beta, I think that Microsoft has done a good job of trying to acknowledge the fact that Windows Live is not the only social networking service out there.

Other Thoughts

As usual I’m pretty sure that all of the Windows Live apps are for Windows only, not a good thing if you use a Mac. Of course, Apple software is also Mac only, but it would be nice to see some platform independent apps for once so that more people will actually use the Windows Live service.

Twitter support would also be a cool thing. Anything you type in the status message window could be automatically posted to your twitter profile, which would make things even easier. While I don’t personally use twitter since I don’t really have the self discipline to update anything, combining status messages with twitter may be a cool idea.

Overall I think Microsoft is on the right track with their “Windows Live Messenger” app that integrates other services with Messenger , although I would be much happier with a “Live” suite that I could use on any operating system of my choice.

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Download the Microsoft Word 2007 alternative for Free - OpenOffice 3.0

Everybody knows that Microsoft Office is the standard wordprocessing suite used in the world out there. Everyone has it, and every workplace uses it. Naturally, it's best for you to have a copy too. However, if you haven't paid for Microsoft Office (for example if you're running Office 2007 Enterprise edition at home) and you've installed the Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and other application form a CD that was labelled with a sharpie, you're probably using a PIRATED Copy of the application.

Whether or not you've installed a pirated copy of the office suite intentionally is not what I'm going to talk about in this post. I realized that it's bad karma to steal things (how would you like it if someone would steal something you made...) but it doesn't always have to be that way.

If you can, buy the software or find a place from which you can get it from free. For example, your University/College might provide you with a free copy of Vista/XP/Office/Visual Studio if they are partners with Microsoft. If you can't afford it, don't steal it.

Why not, you ask? Because there is a completely free alternative to Microsoft Office [YES FREE!] that anyone with an internet connection can download. It works on a Mac, Windows, Linux, Unix, Solaris... everything (except may be MS-DOS)! It's called OpenOffice (technically it's called OpenOffice.org, but I like to call it OpenOffice) (or Oo for short... especially for Microsoft, it's a big Oo (Oo can also mean uh-oh, if you're not up to snuff with your internet lingo). =), and unless you're living under a rock you've probably heard this name. It's just that you already had Microsoft Office and didn't think you'd need it.

OpenOffice has all the features that Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel have. Except it's called Writer, Impress and Calc. You can import files from MSWord, and export to MSWord. You can do pretty much everything you can with MSWord.

How to Download the Microsoft Office alternative, OpenOffice, for Free

1. Go to the OpenOffice.org Website
2. Download the software (you might want to get Version 3 if it's available for your platform/language)
3. Install it
4. Enjoy your guilt free office suite

This is how the main screen looks on a Mac:

Pretty spiffy huh?

A few caveats though:

OpenOffice does support .doc, .ppt, .xls and even .docx, .pptx, and .xlsx files. However, the formatting (especially little things like headers, footers and images) might not appear properly. Nonetless, if you're downloading things like lecture notes, they'll probably be available in a format like PDF for easy accessibility.

Some additional things like pivot tables might also not work as well as they do in MS Office, but if you use such things, you most likely can afford to buy Microsoft Office anyway. If things don't work as well in OpenOffice, you'll probably have to talk to your colleagues/friends to encourage them to use OpenOffice as well. Also, if you want better formatting, that's even better than the formatting in Microsoft Word and so on, you might want to check out a page layout product to help you make the text "look" good.

You'll still be able to create the stunning tables, the interesting graphs, fascinating presentations and the cool looking documents without the help of Microsoft Word/Microsoft PowerPoint/Excel templates. But you'll never know what it is until you try it out. So please, in the name of Open source goodness, try it out. It's free and chances are, you'll like it.

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How to use Hotmail with Apple Mail

Update: If you're using HTTPMail with Leopard 10.5.6 - You'll have to upgrade to HTTPMail 1.53 for it to work! Click here to download HTTPMail 1.53. No wonder, my hotmail stopped working on Apple Mail after I upgraded to 10.5.6 =( ... But its all fixed now... =)

I absolutely love Apple Mail because of its simplicity and to an extent it's robustness (the To-Dos and Notes) and use it all the time when possible. I find that Entourage is a bit too bloated, and the same goes for Thunderbird. Plus, other applications don't have iCal integration, which is another application I have come to love. However, one big problem is that by default Apple Mail does not support Http accounts, so it's impossible to use mail if you use Hotmail or MSN (now apparently called Windows Live Mail). The solution was created by Daniel Parnell fit the bill. It's called HTTPMail. You can find it over at the Automagic Software downloads page.

Once you download and install the plugin, you should be good to go. Simple enough? Not really, it's Microsoft stuff, and as I've come to find out, Microsoft stuff isn't exactly simple. Yet. When I tried to send an e-mail through my Hotmail account in Leopard, I got an " *** -[NSURL initWithString:relativeToURL:]: nil string parameter" error. But, using Microsoft software for so long has taught me something - never give up. So I set out to find a solution, and finally after a couple of minutes of thinking I figured, it must be the URL, since the error had URL in it. Turns out, that you need to use some other URL to send the mail. The steps I took to solve the problem were as follows:

How to stop *** -[NSURL initWithString:relativeToURL:]: nil string parameter error

1. Open Mail
2. Click on Mail (in the menubar) > Preferences. Alternatively, you can press Cmd + , to open the preferences dialog
3. Click on Accounts and select your Hotmail Account
   
4. Where it says Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) click on the drop down menu. Then click Edit Server List...
5. Create a new entry as shown in the picture below. Make sure to use the server name oe.msn.msnmail.hotmail.com

1. Switch to the Advanced tab for a sec and make sure it says port 25
2. Then Click on OK
3. I recommend you check the box that says Use only this server under the Outgoing Mail Server drop down Box
4. Close the preferences dialog box. If you asks you if you want to save your settings, make sure you say save
5. Send your Mail (I'm guessing you already have mail in your outbox, or else you wouldn't know about the error) through the Hotmail (or whatever description you put in) server you just created.

Hopefully, you'll now be able to send your e-mails through Apple Mail. Now you'll be able to send and receive e-mails through your Hotmail account without having to use the inelegant web-mail interface.

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