Category Archives: Software

Excellent Customer Service Means A Lot

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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At a time when the human touch comes at a premium, it’s always a relief to find a company or two that reply quickly, politely, and efficiently to customer support requests.

And the two companies that have impressed us with their support? Pubmatic and Assembla – both excellent startups that we highly recommend in their individual fields. Pubmatic is an ad-revenue optimization service that intelligently chooses between different ad providers to maximize your ad impressions and CPM rates. Assembla provides quality hosting of SVN and other services that cover all aspects of the software development cycles for teams & small companies.

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Windows 7 Wallpapers Now Available for Download

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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NeoSmart Technologies’ gallery of Windows Vista wallpapers has been a huge hit over the past several years – despite what anyone might say about Vista itself, its collection of wallpapers and fonts is top-notch. And now it seems that Windows 7 isn’t going to be any different – from what we’ve seen, the wallpapers shipping with Windows 7 are pretty darn good.

The Official Windows 7 Wallpapers are now available for download from the NeoSmart Image Gallery. Only several wallpapers have been released accompanying various Windows 7 builds thus far, but we’ll keep adding new ones to the gallery as they’re shipped.

Here are some of our favorite new wallpapers:

 

  

You can see these and more at the gallery here, along with the old Windows Vista ones here and here.

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Google Abandons Standards, Forks OpenID

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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A couple of hours ago, the Google Security Team posted an article claiming that Google’s made the switch to OpenID, joining Yahoo! and Microsoft in the ranks OpenID providers.

But it looks like someone may have been a bit to hasty to pull that switch (perhaps itching to get some of the limelight Microsoft has been receiving for adding OpenID to all Live ID accounts just the day before yesterday)… because whatever it is that Google has released support for, it sure as hell isn’t OpenID, as they even so kindly point out in their OpenID developer documentation (that media outlets certainly won’t be reading):

  1. The web application asks the end user to log in by offering a set of log-in options, including Google.
  2. The user selects the "Sign in with Google" option.
  3. The web application sends a "discovery" request to Google to get information on the Google authentication endpoint. This is a departure from the process outlined in OpenID 1.0. [Emphasis added]
  4. Google returns an XRDS document, which contains endpoint address.
  5. The web application sends a login authentication request to the Google endpoint address.
  6. This action redirects the user to a Google Federated Login page.

As Google points out, this isn’t OpenID. This is something that Google cooked up that resembles OpenID masquerading as OpenID since that’s what people want to see – and that’s what Microsoft announced just the day before.

It’s not just a “departure” from OpenID, it’s a whole new standard.

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ToolTipFixer 2.0 Released!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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NeoSmart Technologies first released ToolTipFixer to great acclaim last June, over a year ago now. Since then, the downloads have kept on pouring in – along with a number of suggestions that we’ve taken to heart and hopefully implemented in a way that will please our users.

You can now download ToolTipFixer 2.0 which has a number of changes and improvements based on the feedback we’ve received during the past year. First, for those of you that aren’t familiar with ToolTipFixer, it’s a nifty “patch” for a very frustrating bug in Windows which winds up rendering tooltips behind the taskbar, leaving them unreadable and generally annoying the user to no end:

ToolTipFixer sits silently and invisibly in the background, intercepting this problem and fixing it as it happens – letting you read those tooltips and use your PC the way you should be able to.

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Windows Isn’t For Gamers Anymore

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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For the past decade-and-a-half, “Windows” has been synonymous with “PC Gaming” – after all, no other PC platform has managed to satiate the undying hunger gamers are quite famous for. But now it seems that Windows is on the verge of losing its distinction as the gaming platform of choice – with nothing but Microsoft’s own machinations to blame.

Despite PC users’ widely-varying taste and preference in operating systems and platforms, gamers need Windows. In fact, one of the biggest reason people around the globe tend to dual-boot is their undying love for gaming and the fact that no other OS out there can boast the wide range of gaming titles and genres available for their platform like Windows can. The traditional choice faced by most non-Windows users has been to either install and dual-boot Windows or bite the built and buy a gaming console – ask us, we would know.

But this is all about to change, thanks to Microsoft’s reckless abandon for one of its few truly-loyal userbases.

When Microsoft first began its frenzied Vista marketing campaign in 2006, one of the points it focused on most and repeated over and over again was just how big of a gaming revolution Windows Vista was. Gaming was a large part of the Vista WOW campaign, but it has since failed to disappoint. But this isn’t an article about Vista, it’s about how Windows is poised to lose its gaming advantage if Microsoft doesn’t get its act together sometime soon.

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What the TechCrunch Tablet Should Really Look Like

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Michael Arrington is understandably pretty excited about how the TechCrunch Tablet is shaping up so far, but to use it seems they’re going about it the wrong way.

For a device that’s supposed to do Firefox, Skype and not much more, an underpowered PC with a touchscreen isn’t going to accomplish much. For one thing, Firefox is a huge performance drain and a memory hog to boot that underpowered hardware (even on-par with an Eee) simply won’t support and for another, there’s no way to get PC hardware down to the sub-$200 price range.

What TechCrunch wants – whether they know it or not – is an oversized PDA, not an underpowered PC. And it’s not just a question of semantics, it’s a question of foundations and principles – and it makes a huge difference in terms of end-user experience and the bottom line.

For the functionality that TechCrunch is trying to pack into this opensource, mass-market web gadget, there’s nothing that wouldn’t work better, faster, and cheaper on specialized hardware rather than on generic PC components.

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Request_URI For IIS Updated with ISAPI_Rewrite 3 Support

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Request_URI for IIS, NeoSmart Technologies’ compatibility toolkit for IIS on Windows, has been updated to version 1.1, with support for Helicon’s ISAPI_Rewrite 3.x

With this update the installation process has been simplified somewhat, in particular the need modify HTTPD.INI to set the server variables has been eliminated – you just need to install ISAPI_Rewrite 3, configure php.ini to load up request_uri.inc, and you’re set.

Request_URI for Windows 1.1 retains backwards compatibility with ISAPI_Rewrite 2.x for those of you who’d rather not switch to the new (and much-improved) version 3.x.

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Don’t Forget About the Dual-Booters!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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InfoWorld has an article out today wherein Randall Kenney of the “Windows Sentinel” team (a program used to monitor system settings and performance to provide aggregate data for analysis) trashes end-user uptake of Windows Vista by revealing that 35% of surveyed PCs that ship with Vista have downgraded to Windows XP.

While that’s a stunning number of Vista-only OEM machines running Windows XP, Mr. Kenney seems to have forgotten about those of us that dual-boot. As champions of dual-booters everywhere, we’ve got to put our two cents in here.

If you keep in mind the type of people who would install the Windows Sentinel tool and take part in such a geeky program you’ll realize that it’s not too out there for a good number of these people to be the kind that run multiple operating systems on their machines.

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Disturbing Stats About Facebook Users & Security

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
14

There’s a screenshot that’s been sitting on my desktop for a rather long time now, and it’s as scary as it is interesting.

Facebook recently conducted a poll which showed up on the homepage newsfeed, and asked Facebook members just how exactly did they think Facebook’s “friend finder” worked when it prompted them for their email address & password in order to get a list of contacts. The numbers pretty much speak for themselves, here’s what they looked like near the end of the campaign:

Facebook Poll

Now ignore the dark blue bar: it’s a red herring and doesn’t contain any interesting info. The real juicy bit is the “Yes” option, and its 20% response.

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