The funny depressing thing about Internet Explorer is that you can not install more than one version on your computer at a time. Since all versions render websites differently, and there are users out there still on version 6 even though the latest is version 8, web developers are left wasting countless hours making websites compatible with 3 separate browsers – and that’s just the IE Trident engine! That doesn’t take into account the Konqueror engine browsers like Safari and Chrome, the Gecko engine Firefox is based upon, or Opera’s Presto engine.

While I cannot help you with the amount of browsers you have to develop for at this point, I can ease your suffering a bit. Just go drink some whiskey! Actually here’s a better solution (I guess that’s debatable).

As I said, you can’t have more than one version of IE running on your machine natively in Windows. Most developers use unreliable emulators like IE Tester (my emulator of choice) to test websites. They work for the most part, but you can never be sure exactly how IE6 is going to display your site until you open your site on a computer that has IE6 and only IE6 installed. The way I do this is to RDP into a server that has IE6 installed. That’s a clunky, slow, cumbersome process, and usually the development web servers I use have high security and don’t display some of the page components I want to test.

Enter IE Collection. Finally, you can run all versions of Internet Explorer at the same time on your machine, each of them standalone. I’m not talking about versions 6 and up, I’m talking all the way from 1.5 to 8. Most of us wouldn’t need older than 6, but it’s still interesting to see what version 1.5 was like.

I can’t tell you how much time this is going to save me. I’ve literally been waiting for this for 4 years. Four. That’s how long you’re in high school. I don’t know how they did it, but I assume it has something to do with modifying DLLs so they don’t overwrite each other. That sounded knowledgeable, but I really don’t know the first thing about operating systems, so that’s as far as I’ll go.

So, download it, use it, enjoy it, and you know what? – go ahead and drink some whiskey anyway as a celebration. Cheers!

(Comic by Brad Colbow)

There has been a lot of buzz around Google recently, what with their first ever TV commercial during the Super Bowl (which was actually really good), introducing the email-killer Google Wave to limited beta release a few months ago, and now literally pushing out buzz – Google Buzz, a social media plugin for Gmail. You do have Gmail, don’t you?

First, have a look at the commercial, entitled Parisian Love, which is actually part of a series of commercials called “Search Stories”:

The commercial is simple and effective, just like all of Google’s products. Buzz is another application in the seemingly endless line of superior products that Google has created. Think of Buzz as sort of a blend of Wave, Twitter, and Plurk. It lets you post status updates like Twitter, videos and photos like Plurk, and integrates with your current contacts seamlessly like Wave. It plugs in directly below your Gmail inbox without any setup whatsoever, since it automatically sets you as a follower of people you chat/email the most. Your Google Reader shared items, Picasa albums, and Google Chat status message are all automatically posted to your Google Buzz feed.

Personally, I probably won’t use Google Buzz, as I don’t use any of the other three services I mentioned. However, I can see a lot of people really getting into this, and if you’re the type to update your status and share things on the web with your friends/followers, Google Buzz is probably your best bet since it consolidates everything into your Gmail inbox. What, you don’t have Gmail? That’s a whole other topic…

Subscriptions are another genius idea from Google. You can add pre-made calendars to your own calendar so you always know what’s going on while viewing your private calendar. For instance, you can now subscribe to your favorite sports team! Take a look in your Google Calendar at the top right toolbar and you will see a link that will take you to subscriptions:

You can also click Settings to get to this area. Once there, you will notice that you will see the different types of calendars you can subscribe to. The current default category is Holidays, and you can see that there are plenty of different nationalities represented:

To follow your favorite sports team, click on the Sports tab and choose one of the seven currently available professional sports (including Cricket and Rugby!) to find the team(s) you want to follow. Obviously I chose one of the greatest sports organizations ever created by mankind:

That’s it! Navigate back to your calendar and it will magically be populated with all of your sports team’s games so you can make sure you don’t plan anything else at the same time. Let’s check this coming Sunday – looks like the Colts are playing the Rams. Better make sure I don’t have any conflicts:

Doh!

Launchy

Website:  http://www.launchy.net
Me: A cool, relatively lightweight program that lets you launch programs with just a few keystrokes. Alt-Space- then type ‘no’- then hit enter and notebook will open up. You can customize keystrokes and teach it all your apps. Very cool and useful if you’re doing repetitive things.
About page: Launchy is a free windows and linux utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager. Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!
Download: sourceforge

7zip

Website: http://www.7-zip.org
Me: Open source zip program with great compression.
About page: Usually, 7-Zip compresses to 7z format 30-70% better than to zip format. And 7-Zip compresses to zip format 2-10% better than most of other zip compatible programs.
Download: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sevenzip/7z465.exe

Audacity

Website: http://audacity.sourceforge.net
Me: powerful open source audio editing software
About page: Audacity is a free, easy-to-use and multilingual audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to- Record live audio/Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs/Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files/Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together/Change the speed or pitch of a recording/and lots more.
Download: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/windows

Auslogics disk defrag

Website: http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag
Me: Free defrag that takes about 1/10 the time of regular defrag AND doesn’t restart when your PC goes to sleep.
About page: Auslogics Disk Defrag is extremely simple to use, does not require any analysis phase and is faster than most of the other disk defragmentation software. It will help you get the maximum performance out of your expensive hardware investments. And, what’s most important, it’s absolutely free.
Download: http://download.cnet.com/Auslogics-Disk-Defrag/3000-2094_4-10567503.html?part=dl-6267754&subj=dl&tag=button

Aviary

Website: http://aviary.com
Me: Free online graphics editor.
About page: Aviary is a suite of powerful creative applications that you can use right in your web browser. We’re on a mission to make creation accessible to artists of all genres, from graphic design to audio editing.
Download: http://aviary.com/tools

Qik

Website: http://www.qik.com
Me:  Awesome android app that lets you stream live video to the web via your android phone.
About page:  Qik enables you to share your moments live with your friends, family and the world—right from your mobile phone!
Download: Various phone marketplaces

Screenr

Website: http://www.screenr.com
Me: create web based screencasts for free.
About page: Engage Your Audience By Embedding Screencasts In Your Site. Embedding Screenr screencasts is a great way to add life to your site, add context to an instructional post, or give your site some personality. Here’s some embedded screencasts we’ve seen in action.
Download: http://www.screenr.com

IntenseDebate

Website: http://intensedebate.com
Me: Commenting system application for blogs, etc.  There are actually too many awesome things about intense debate to put down in a concise manner.
About page:  Just go here and read the features http://intensedebate.com/features
Download: http://intensedebate.com/

you convert it

Website: http://www.youconvertit.com
Me:  Lightweight, quick conversion app.
About page: Free! Convert any media file format (Documents, Images, Audio, Video & Archives) without buying or installing anything on your PC.
Download: http://www.youconvertit.com

Irfanview

Website: http://www.irfanview.com
Me: Image converting, resizing, optimizing application.
About page: IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 , 2008, Vista, Windows 7.
Download: http://www.irfanview.com/main_download_engl.htm

iTunes 9 just hit “shelves” today and as with all other iTunes major releases it looks like it has some nice new added features. I know there are a lot of iTunes users out there who are tired of updating iTunes once a week, especially since it requires a complete reinstall of the application instead of just an update or patch, involving everything from re-signing the user agreement to having to delete your old iTunes icon from your quicklaunch toolbar and add the new one (when will they fix this?) If you are one of the people I’m talking about and you have been putting off updating iTunes, now is the time to do so.

The first thing I noticed was the new look, which you can see in the screenshot above. It is a very subtle change, but you can see it in the gradient in the top toolbar, the volume control, and lots of other not-so-obvious places. The average user won’t notice that anything has changed, they will simply experience the great usability of the application and accomplish the tasks they need. I find that’s how Apple designs all of their products, and as a design guru and user-interface designer, I greatly appreciate it.

When you first load iTunes 9 you are presented with a “Welcome to iTunes” companion application that clearly details all of the new features using video tutorials (quite good ones). Take time to watch at least the first one called “Getting Started with iTunes 9″ because it describes the features mentioned in this post in further detail and shows you how to access them.

One major addition is “Home Share”, which allows you to share your library with other computers on your home network. Really share it, not just play it. Even though I’m adamantly against DRM, namely the way Apple utilizes it with their m4p music files, I continue to use iTunes due to the usability (iTunes), hardware (iPods & iTouches), and expansive song collection (iTunes Store). I don’t often download songs from the iTunes Store because I prefer to have the physical album in my hand – liner notes and all – but I do import all of my albums into iTunes and load them onto my 120gb iPod. The Home Share feature will make it easier to do it because I can be on my laptop or my desktop and have access to all my songs, rather than having to transfer my entire library onto an external harddrive, tote the harddrive to the other computer, and transfer them all onto the computer’s harddrive.

There are various other enhancements, such as the Genius Mixes feature, some new display options (like quickly showing album artwork in list view), and a brand new layout for the iTunes Store:

I remember the days of Windows Media Player. I tried to hang onto that beast as long as I could, but in the end iTunes just completely blew it away functionality-wise. I don’t even remember how to load Windows Media Player. What version is it on? Is it even still installed on my computer?