This has been a fine week for new software products. I have just installed the new version of Kaspersky Anti-Virus (version 6.0) as well as the new Symantec backup product called Norton Save & Restore. In addition, I have installed the new version of WinZip (WinZip 10.0). Microsoft has released three products into public Beta: Internet Explorer 7.0, Windows Media Player 11, and Office 2007. This is in addition to their recent release of Windows Defender into public Beta. All of these products have been well worth the effort, and below I offer some initial thoughts about each.
Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0
About a year ago, I discovered Kaspersky Anti-Virus (KAV) and was immediately satisfied having gone through several other products both purchased and in trial. KAV is the best anti-virus product that I have ever used, and the new version 6.0 substantially improves on it. In addition to a nice new user interface, KAV 6.0 has improved performance in two ways: 1) adding a new streaming scan technology, and 2) checking file modification to scan only files that have changed. It also adds new proactive protection for various threats and also suspends scans if system activity passes a defined threshold.
Kaspersky Anti-Virus is NOT a firewall or internet security application. There is Kaspersky Internet Security (KIS) for that purpose, but I should say that it is not as good at what it does as KAV is. Specifically, it is not easy to customize for standard internet applications. It took me quite a while to figure out why Outlook Express 6 could connect to my POP server but not download any messages. KIS is not in the least intuitive, nor does it work like a conventional firewall. While KAV is an excellent product that I strongly recommend, KIS is one to pass up.
One negative about Kaspersky in general is that their product support options are rather limited. It is my view that the first and most important line of support that any company can provide is an online knowledge base. While Kaspersky has one, it is not very well done. It should be possible to resolve most problems without reference to a live person. While I was eventually able to resolve my problems without calling technical support, this was in spite of and not because of their online troubleshooting tools.
All-in-all, I strongly recommend Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0.
Windows Defender (Beta)
Windows Defender is Microsoft’s latest installment of their anti-spyware product. Now that it is in final public Beta, the product name has been changed from Microsoft Anti-spyware to Windows Defender. One would think that with such a name it would be an all-purpose security product, but it is not. It is an anti-spyware product and nothing more. As such, it does very well, but the name implies that it is much more. I recommend this product to anyone who has problems with spyware as it not only provides the usual find and kill functionality of anti-spyware products, but it also monitors numerous Windows configuration points that are often modified by spyware products and actively defends them.
Norton Save & Restore
I became aware of this product through my use of a Symantec enterprise backup solution called LiveState. LiveState is such an excellent program for disk image backups that I wanted to purchase a copy for home use, but it is marketed solely for use in business networks. This is done by imposing of a minimum order of ten licenses, which drives the cost into several hundreds of dollars. The most I would ever want is three. Recently, Save & Restore was released by Symantec's Norton business unit, which markets software for home use, but it differs from LiveState in that it does not provide a Restore Anywhere option, which is an add-on to LiveState, and adds file and folder backup.
The disk image capability of Norton Save & Restore is superb. The program creates a disk image while running in Windows. It is not necessary to reboot to DOS mode before doing so. This image can be used to perform a bare metal restore by booting the Save & Restore CD and performing a restore operation. This works perfectly and is an excellent method for creating system backups. (I would not recommend using Windows Backup for system backups because it is not the same and does not restore the system as thoroughly.) It is only necessary to create a disk image before and after major changes are made to the system such as the installation of a new service pack or a major new application. File and folder backups would normally be used to fill in the gaps between the creation of disk images.
Unfortunately, the file and folder backup feature in Norton Save & Restore is buggy and problematic, and even if it did not generate errors during backup attempts, I would still not use it because of the inefficient approach that it uses for storing backup files. Instead of combining the files into a single backup set, it creates a file and folder structure in the target location, but this structure cannot be browsed using Windows Explorer. It can only be browsed using the clunky browser tool in the Save & Restore product. This approach is also inefficient in disk space usage because the files are stored individually and not within a larger archive. What this means is that slack space is used by every file in the backup, which can be thousands, instead of just by one big archive file.
I recommend Norton Save & Restore for its disk imaging capability, but forget about the file and folder backup feature. It just is not what it ought to be. For this capability, I recommend the following program instead.
WinZip 10.0
For years, WinZip has been the best file archive tool for Windows on the market, and with the release of version 10.0, great new functionality has been added. The standard version has added a couple important new features: 1) two new compression algorithms that provide improved archive compression capabilities, and 2) a new explorer-like user interface that adds a treeview to the left of the traditional list of zip file contents. This treeview is a feature that WinZip has been needing for years, and it substantially improves the usefulness of the program in the area of browsing zip files. The "Pro" version of WinZip 10 provides additional features including Zip and Burn to CD and DVD (in Windows XP only), an optional and free (with license) command-line utility, and a powerful new backup capability that is everything that Norton Save & Restore file & folder backups should have been.
The new compression algorithms provide marginal improvement in the size of the resulting zip file. My informal tests showed that it was possible to squeeze an extra 10% out of the zip file using the best of them but at the cost of more than a 100% increase (over Normal compression) in the time it took to create the archive. You would probably not want to use these new algorithms except when getting the smallest possible zip file was absolutely necessary.
The new explorer-like user interface is a capability that WinZip has always needed and never had. In the past, the only way the program informed you of the folder tree structure of files in a Zip was the “Path” column of the list view, and this was too awkward. When Windows XP introduced browser navigation support for Zip files, it was no longer necessary or desirable to use WinZip to browse archives. Now, that is all changed. WinZip’s new UI offers great new capabilities for archive browsing, but because Windows XP already has native support for Zip file browsing, it remains to be seen whether WinZip’s own new capability will change our habits. I have found that while Windows can open and read archives created with the new compression algorithms, it is extremely slow in doing so and even sometimes appears to hang. For archives that use the new compression algorithms, it seems to me that it is better to use WinZip to browse them.
The best new feature of WinZip 10.0, which is only available in the “Pro” version of the product, is its file and folder backup function that even includes scheduling. File and folder backup is a natural extension to the basic function of WinZip, and its inclusion in WinZip 10.0 Pro, along with explorer-like archive browsing, rounds out the functionality of the product. Indeed, the file and folder backup feature has made the purchase of the “Pro” version essential. With this capability, WinZip can be used for the scheduled creation of data backups into Zip archives. As a result, I recommend it in place of the file and folder backup feature of Norton Save & Restore with that tool being used solely for its disk image capability.
Internet Explorer 7.0 (Beta)
Microsoft has recently released a new version of Internet Explorer for public Beta. It is version 7.0, and it offers many new features that substantially improve the IE product. The most obvious of these is tabbed browsing, but other new features include a phishing filter, a new search tool, significantly improved printing functionality, page zoom, page thumbnail previews, and support for RSS feeds.
Tabbed browsing reduces the overhead of having multiple independent instances of Internet Explorer running—one for each site—with all of their associated overhead. Running only one instance of IE can substantially reduce the overhead of the application when browsing different sites using tabs. This is at the risk, however, of losing all browsing sessions in the rare case when one locks up the entire application, which has not yet occurred in my own use. Tabbed browsing also makes it necessary for us to learn a new approach to page flipping. Instead of ALT-TAB to switch between browser windows, we must adapt to CTRL-TAB to flip between tabs. This is useful, however, in that it isolates the browser pages from other running programs, but it can take time to make the adjustment.
The phishing filter is designed to warn users of websites that are known or suspected of engaging in fraudulent activity particularly in deceiving users into revealing personal information that can be used for identity theft. While safe internet practices can obviate the need for such a feature, this can help those whose caution is less than their competence.
The new search tool takes the form of a box in the upper-right of the application window in which key words can be entered and sent to popular search engines including MSN, Google, and Yahoo. It also offers the capability of searching Amazon and Wikipedia. The field for entering key words is very small, however, and it cannot be enlarged, moved, or replaced. You can, however, choose a search engine from a drop-down list, which can be updated with more providers. Many popular web search sites as well as commercial sites such as Best Buy and eBay are available.
Printing has been vastly improved. In all previous versions of Internet Explorer, the printing of a web page very often resulted in the loss of information on one side of the page or between pages. Now, IE7 reduces the size of the page when printing so as to fit everything on the page. Page zoom permits you to change the visual size of a page to make small print larger or oversized pages fit. Thumbnail previews provide an easy way to see what is on all the tabs and switch to a desired tab or even to close tabs. It is especially useful when a large number of tabs are open.
In addition to all of this, IE7 offers the first native support for RSS feeds in the browser. RSS is a relatively new technology that arose since the last major release of Internet Explorer, and this is the first chance for support to be added. RSS, which stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, is a technology that feeds web site changes to users. For the user, RSS is a great tool for acquiring, aggregating, and consuming information from many sites. Any site that offers an RSS feed can be added to the user’s “subscriptions” and then information can be pulled down automatically or manually, and it can then be viewed at the user’s convenience. RSS is most often associated with weblogs, but it can be used by any site that wishes to provide updates to users whenever changes are made. IE7 now adds RSS support right in the browser.
Windows Media Player 11 (Beta)
It has been a couple years since Microsoft has released a major update to its media player product. Version 10 of Windows Media Player has been an excellent and widely used tool for creating and playing media of all kinds, and now version 11 offers a new range of capabilities.
The most obvious new feature is the improved Media Library. In the past, the library was just a list view of the selected author, album, or playlist. Now, album art is added to give the library a much needed boost in visual appeal. When tracks are sorted by album, the album art of the various albums in the list is displayed next to the group of tracks from that album. When displaying other views such as the entire library sorted by Artist, the album art is stacked to show that each entry includes multiple albums.
WMP 11 adds the capability of loading images into media files that can then be displayed as album art in the various views that use it. For DVD playback, a new capture tool has been added that is not available on the free version of WinDVD. The playlist shuffle tool now shuffles the playlist in place instead of just playing in random order. There is also a new Pictures list that shows the contents of the My Pictures folder. You can even play a list of pictures with media player as a slide show.
WMP11 includes support for playing TV shows on computers with installed TV tuners and can even record programming. It also provides a nice new visual appearance that is much improved over previous versions.
Office 2007 (Beta)
A major new version of Microsoft Office has also recently been released into public Beta, and the improvements that it offers are amazing. The sheer size of the Office application with its many programs and myriad features makes it impossible to give an overview of them in an article such as this. All I can offer is a brief statement about general changes that have been made.
In Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the menu and toolbars have been replaced by what is called the Ribbon. The ribbon is a toolbar on steroids in which all of the major functionality of an application is presented in a tabbed, categorized toolbar. The key visual difference between the old toolbars and the ribbon is that the latter has a vertical as well as horizontal dimension providing a much greater layout and organization to the whole. In order to present as much of the functionality as possible to the user, the ribbon is tabbed with seven different tabs in all of the major applications that use it—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. (Note: Outlook and Publisher do not use the Ribbon, but when Word is used as the message editor in Outlook, the message window does use the Word ribbon. The ribbon content and organization is standardized across the major applications that use it, but there is some variation as well. Four of the tabs appear in all three applications and three others are application-specific.
Another major change to Office is the underlying formats of the document files. For Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the proprietary document format has been replaced by an XML-based structure. Because of the overhead associated with XML text documents, each document is compressed into a zip format on disk with each new type file being indicated with the addition of a letter ‘x’ onto the end of the original file type. For Word, ‘.doc’ becomes ‘.docx’, Excel files go from ‘.xls’ to ‘.xlsx’, and PowerPoint files have changed from ‘.ppt’ to ‘.pptx’. The additional ‘x’ on the end of the type is a sure indicator that the file is in the new format. Because the new format is simply text-based XML files compressed into a zip archive, it is possible, though not advisable unless you know what you are doing, to unzip the archive and open the inner XMLs using a straight text editor such as Notepad. Even if one is not going to attempt to manipulate the internals of a file in this way—and it is usually not necessary or desirable to do so—it is still instructive to view the internal structure. It is my view that basing the files on open technologies such as XML makes the creation of third-party products to interact with those files easier and may potentially add greater usefulness to the end user in the long run.
Another important change that is common to all applications that use the ribbon is the Quick Access Toolbar. The ribbon is not customizable, so it was necessary for Microsoft to provide a customizable toolbar that offers this sort of flexibility to users. It is probable that very few users customized their Office toolbars in the past, and those who did, such as myself, probably just added in a few favorite commands. As a result, it would not make sense for Microsoft to make the ribbon customizable, but it would still be a good idea to have some form of customization. Enter the Quick Access Toolbar.
The Quick Access Toolbar fully customizable both in content and position. It starts at the top of the application Window next to the File menu button, which incidentally is now a round button with a little Office graphic at the top-left. By residing at this location above the ribbon, the Quick Access Toolbar occupies an otherwise unused area of the Window. It is possible, however, to move the toolbar to a position below the ribbon. In its default location, which overlays the Title Bar, I was able to get 78 icons onto the Quick Access Toolbar before it created a drop-down list for the excess. This was on a notebook computer with a wide screen at a high resolution, so your mileage may vary. Moving the toolbar to a position below the ribbon may increase the number of icon slots by fifteen to twenty, but this is at the cost of the loss of a bit of vertical height to the document window. Such a large toolbar, however, would probably defeat the purpose of the ribbon, so it is probably advisable to add only those commands that are most often used and use the ribbon for everything else.
There are other aspects of Office 2007 specific to each application in which vast improvements have been made. In Word, document styles are pushed to the forefront making them much easier to access, use, and customize. There is also a new “try it out” capability for styles that can show you how a single style or a group of styles will alter the appearance of your document. There is also the now built-in capability of saving to PDF format without having to purchase Adobe Acrobat. In Excel, styles and conditional formatting are improved and extended, and formula tools are made much more accessible. All of the applications offer collaborative workspace capabilities that are linked to the use of a Document Management Server.
Microsoft Word is much improved over the 2003 version. Although that version of the program did not seem to need improving, Microsoft has done a great deal to do so. The most obvious change when one first opens the program is the striking new user interface. Gone are the menus and toolbars having been replaced by the “ribbon”. The ribbon is a very usable presentation of the many functions of Word in tabbed form. Moreover, the greater width you can devote to the program, the more is displayed in the ribbon. If, for example, you reduce the window from full screen, less used parts of the selected tab disappear.
The ribbon presents the various functions grouped according to function on seven tabs—Home, Insert, Page Layout, References, Mailings, Review, and View. Home offers all of the formatting functions including a large area devoted to styles. Insert presents the various things that can be inserted into a document from illustrations to links and symbols. Page Layout provides the many layout options in a convenient presentation from paragraph formatting to page setup and themes. References makes available all of the various options for creating cross-references, bibliographies, footnotes, indexes, and tables of contents. Mailings provides all of the mail-merge features. Review includes document markup, proofing, tracking, commenting, and protection capabilities. View offers the various options for changing the way documents are presented on screen.
In addition to the ribbon, there is one toolbar that remains. The Quick Access Toolbar provides a place for the various commands that provides a place to put icons for frequently used commands. While the ribbon cannot be customized, the Quick Access toolbar can be in two ways. First, any command from a list of hundreds can be added so that those things that you do most can be a click away. Second, the toolbar, which resides at the top left next to the File Menu button, can be moved to a position immediately below the ribbon. This is at the cost of some vertical document real estate. In its default location, it is simply taking up unused space.
Conclusion
As an IT professional, I use many different technologies both hardware and software, and I do not shy away from using experimental components, which in software means installing Beta products. It is important for me to know and use common technologies and architectures, and as a result, I am always on the lookout for new and interesting software applications. Here, I have given an overview of my initial impressions of several new versions of applications that have been released or are in public Beta. This is intended to help others see what is out there and how it may help them in their daily grind.
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