I have used a number of Antivirus programs over the years. I was a big fan of Mcafee back in the DOS days, moved onto Nortons when it came with my PC (Threw it away when it got too bloated). Tried a number of others and then settled on AVG.

AVG was great. It was free, wasn’t bloated like Norton was (I have been assured that the 2009 and 2010 versions are much better) and seemed to do everything, except custom scheduled scans, you needed to pay for that.

Over the last few years it has worked great for me and I have been through a number of versions, till the recent v8.

However, I noticed it too was getting a bit bloated, using memory and system resources that seemed a bit big while idle.

I thought I would try Avast.

It too is a free anti virus program, for non commercial use and has all of the current drop of shields including Instant Messaging, Web,Mail, Network and more.

Resource wise it was better, not to much between them, but it definitely used less memory than AVG. This was ideal for my laptop that only has 256mb of RAM.

After some toing and froing between versions, the newest version of Avast has been released, so installed this on the resource challenged laptop.

Well some of the initial tests have been quite stunning.

While the proof will be in the protection it provides (The previous versions seem to be good in that regard), the resource usage of this new system is quite staggering.

With AVG installed, the laptop idled once fully loaded at around 260mb (remember this only has 256mb of RAM)

With Avast this reduced to 195mb, around 65mb less. On such a tight resource budget this is huge. Updates and scans obviously take more cpu and RAM, but that is to be expected. Why waste resources when they are not needed.

Well done to Avast, they have made a good product even better, enough to get a WOW out of me!

You can download it here

Kick it to the Kerb?

That would be nice, as most web designers have come unstuck when a nice design fails spectacularly in IE6.

But unfortunately, there are still lots of people (over 30% in most cases) that are still using it, that is too large a number to upset with messages about compatibility and the like.

Some new designs from template makers will not work properly in Internet Explorer 6 and they provide warnings and encourage users to upgrade.

If you target corporate users, this is not a wise choice as some will still use IE6 across their organisation and IT are not keen to roll out IE7 or 8.

I have even recently visited a primary school that is still using IE6 in all of it’s classrooms.

For designers, testing in multiple browser brands involves installing the different browsers and testing as you go, however, my suite of browsers include:

• IE8
• Firefox 3
• Firefox 2
• Google Chrome
• Opera 9
• Opera 10

Notice that some browsers allow multiple versions to be installed simultaneously. This is a great thing for testing.

However, you can only install one version of IE, (there is a hacked version that allows older ones as well, but that seems a bit scary)

Recently, I found out about BrowserLab from Adobe, (Thanks @kalena) it is a great tool that lets you test browsers online without having to install them on your machine.

You enter the address of the site you want to test and the browsers you want to test on, and let it do it’s magic, you get presented with an image of what the result is for each browser.

Here is a list of all browsers:

• Firefox 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 under XP
• Internet Explorer 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0 under XP
• Chrome 3.0 under XP
• Safari 3.0 and 4.0 under OSX
• Firefox 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 under OSX

Having Safari and Firefox under OSX is great too. No Opera yet, but I assume they will appear in time.

Good to see a useful resource hitting the web.

Do you have any web resources that you “must have”, let me know in the comments.

In my last corporate job we had Lotus Notes as our email / group-ware platform.

It was good for some things but was very poor at things that Outlook express did very well. It was really the group-ware and the integration with work-flow systems that really saved it’s bacon.

This was a few years ago now, I haven’t seen the latest versions, but the news that IBM are now pitching iNotes, their online email client, to people disgruntled with the GMail service.

One of the issues pointed out as why IBM are choosing now to make their move is due to outages of the Gmail service.

For those people paying for Gmail as a corporate service, they have more reason to complain (unlike those of us who use it as a free service)

But this quote from an article made me think…hang on a bit

Last month millions of business users could not access email for almost two hours.

Wow, an outage of 2 hours in a month, that’s about 2% of the working month, or in IT terms, an uptime of about 98%

With promised up-times quoted as over 99.5% for many online service this is obviously completely unacceptable! (Tongue firmly in cheek)

No one has mentioned whether this is a normal incident or a one off.

But come on, most computer networks have outages, I know that in that same corporate job, using IBM’s notyes platform we had some very lengthy outages, some even more than 2 hours!

So what did we do? We did something else and waited for the network people to sort it out, which they always did.

Far too much jerking of knees I think.

We provide Adobe Contribute to quite a number of our clients. (From the Macromedia days too)

With the semi announcement (only semi, since Adobe haven’t released anything yet) it posed a question about where is Business Catalyst going to fit within the product offerings of Adobe.

Looking at what there currently is, the only thing I see is the relationship between Dreamweaver and Contribute. That developer / publisher relationship is what CMS is all about infrastructure-wise, the snippets of information released by Business Catalyst, show that GoodBarry, blogged about here, will cease to exists as a retail offering and the more “serious” Business Catalyst will be the sole offering.

This is not going to be an issue for a while, current users of Contribute won’t be disadvantaged for a few years at least if there is a discontinuation of Contribute.

I am wondering if Adobe is seeing “Software as a Service” being a new stream of revenue.

I liked their subscription service for their products, and with GoodBarry they were charging $47 (AUD I suppose) per month.

Possibly a way of generating additional revenue from a product like Contribute is to move to a web based system.

Whatever happens, it will be interesting to see how Adobe will get behind the product.

Had this problem for  a while, but since I use Firefox mostly, it hasn’t been too bad.

Anyway, I decided to find a dsolution and Google Help came to the rescue

The link is here http://bit.ly/d4mC2

Here is the solution

Go to Tools, Internet Options and select the Advanced tab.  Under the Browsing section remove the tick from “Enable visual styles on buttons and controls in webpages” and click on OK, the change should be instant.

So, a nice and easy fix, Thx to mooredc54 for this.

HTML 4 has been around for many years, and it looks like the newest incarnation HTML5 is going to make some serious changes to the way the web works.

Here is a video for those who are interested (it is over an hour long, and targetted at a technical audience, but very informative)

Here are some Highlights:

• Offline Storage including offline database storage
• Adding video will be as simple as adding an image to a webpage
• Forms will be much simpler, yet complete (things like calendars for dates etc)
• Geolocation API’s so you can get the location of a mobile device via the browser
• Drag and Drop
• Better interaction with the Operating System
• Canvas, being able to generate images dynamically

So there are plenty of cool things coming. Alreadt Google Chrome, Safari and a few other browsers (including iphone and android mobile devices) are already handling HTML5. However, there are not many websites that are written in HTML5 to take advantage of this.

Older versions of Internet Explorer (version 6 and older) won’t work as it is too old and one fight will be getting people to upgrade their browser so they can access these new features

We may be building dual websites for a while!

Well I am not a fan of the Browser, but these ads are pretty good. I have found 4 so far, here is one

S.H.Y.N.E.S.S. – Internet Explorer 8

And another…

F O M S Internet Explorer 8

Can’t remember the last time Microsoft had to advertise IE, must be a Firefox getting near!

Twitter is becoming clearer.

Now I have TweetDeck, Twitter becomes a much better experience, I now know when someone I am following has posted something up, and it even allows me to reply from within TweetDeck.

Now the thing with TweetDeck, is that it is a program you install on your PC, think of it like Outlook for Twitter (Though much better and definitely not a Microsoft thing)

I means you do not have to refresh twitter to see what people are saying. It also means you can get notifications when there are new tweets in your stream.

I can see when I have been mentioned (@deepwebdesign) and also a list of my direct messages to other Twitter users.

But the real benefit, it to create groups of users so you can filter out the people you really want to hear from and leave some of the noise behind.

I can’t believe how much it has changed my Twitter experience.

The only downside is that it is a bit memory hungry (over 100mb of user memory when running, written in Adobe AIR)

But overall one of the few apps I am really happy about.

Click here to download TweetDeck

They also have TweetDeck for iPhone

In the world of Twitter, ReTweets are becoming the defacto method of recommending content.

While you can create your own Tweets and use a URL shortener like Bit.ly (my favourite) to point someone to a web page you like, ReTweets are the simple way to do it.

However, the page you want to retweet needs to have the required buttons to do it.

The best one I have come across is Tweetmeme, it is a great site in itself, showing the most retweeted items, but even better, it has widgets available to add the retweet function to your website.

From a full API to widgets and buttons, it has a full suite of tools to incorporate the Retweet into your site.

To add a ReTweet button to your site, go to the Buttons page on Tweetmeme and either incorporate the Javascript code into your page, or if you are using Wordpress, there is a plugin you can install that will add it automatically to your posts.

You will see it below this post.

For those of you who do not use Internet Explorer, Firefox have released version 3.5 of their browser.

You can download it from here if you don’t have Firefox or if you are viewing this from Firefox, you can request it by going the the Help menu and choosing “Check for Updates”

Supposedly with a raft of new features and increased speed too.

I have just installed it and we shall see how it goes.

My only gripe is that Firebug hasn’t been updated, so this great tool isn’t available yet. Hopefully it wont be too far away.

I have also upgraded Internet Explorer to version 8, I’ll try them out for a week and see how they go.