IT Support staff used the screen-sharing capabilities to take control of a user’s screen. Trainers used it to deliver 1:1 training sessions and demos and managers and others used it to deliver presentations to colleagues in far-away places.

I’m still at that company, now working for the IT Training team. The company has just finished a 6-month upgrade from Windows 2000/Office 2000 to Vista and Office 2007. Prior to the start of the rollout, our team delivered a number of pre-migration seminars, the purpose of which was to let users know about the rollout process and advise and educate them regarding new functionality on offer.

“Live Meeting and Office Communicator will be replacing Netmeeting”

They were OK with the Live Meeting bit – “Netmeeting on steroids” is how I explained it, but when it came to talking about Office Communicator, the instant messenger client, I would get comments such as

“I’m not using that”

“Can I turn it off?”

“I’ll never get any work done”

Yet, these same people are quite happy to use Yahoo IM, MSN and even SMS on their phone (during work time). Don’t they realise that Office Communicator is just another IM system?

Fast forward 6 months and guess what? Everyone loves OC! It’s being used in a responsible manner, users respect other user’s status setting (i.e. if you set your status to Do Not Disturb then chances are you won’t get disturbed unless it’s a dire emergency).

From a training and education point, one of the key areas is ensuring that users understand when to use email v when to use IM.

So what’s next? Well there’s a pilot running, which I’m part of, which will really bring us into the 21st century with webcams and VOIP.

Now where did I put my razor and hairbrush?

• The Ribbon is still there but can now be customized.
• The Office Button has been replaced by The File Tab and Backstage View.
• BackStage View provides quick access to your 50 most recently used documents.
• You can retrieve a file even after you have closed it WITHOUT saving.
• There’s an amazingly cool way to take screenshots and insert them into your document.
• You can now create Sparkline charts in Excel.
• Using Slicers, you can analyse Pivot Table data in new and exciting ways.
• Repetitive tasks in Outlook can be automated without programming.
• New tools in Outlook means a faster way to Inbox Zero.
• You can broadcast your PowerPoint presentation to the world without the need for additional software.
• PowerPoint now includes video editing tools and some image editing tools previously only available in dedicated image editing applications.

The recording of the presentation has been split into 7 videos which can be accessed via the links below (YouTube links):

• The Ribbon
• BackStage View
• Word 2010
• Excel 2010
• Outlook 2010
• PowerPoint 2010 – Part 1
• PowerPoint 2010 – Part 2

For a detailed explanation of the background to this have a look at MicrosoftOnTheIssues.com

Although I’ve been a Mac user for 4 years, I still use Windows at work (where I’m forced to use IE7) and at home, where I have virtual machines set up on the Mac to run Windows, I run Firefox. Even when I was a “real” (as opposed to virtual) Windows user, I still preferred Firefox or Opera. Not only were these browsers more secure, but they were amongst the first to introduce features such as tabbed browsing and saved sessions.

“But hang on”, I hear you say, “I’ve always been able to install other browsers on Windows”. Yes but this is different. I can drive a car but I’m no mechanic. In the same way, there are millions of PC users who want to be able to turn on their machine and “get on”, whether it be emailing, surfing, writing a letter, or whatever. For “technical tasks” like installing software, they want to be prompted, rather than having to go to a website, download an exe file, be advised that they should only run exe files from trusted sources, etc etc.

Enter Browser Choice…

Tonight, when I fired up my Windows 7 virtual machine, Microsoft’s Browser Choice software ran automatically. A large message box proclaimed “An important choice to make: your browser.” It went on to advise that it had unpinned Internet Explorer from the Taskbar and removed the shortcut to it from the top of the Start Menu.

When I clicked OK, I was presented with another large dialog box that contained as list of browsers. For each browser I can “install” and “learn more”.

The full list of browsers is:

Opera
Firefox
Internet Explorer 8
Google Chrome
Safari
Flock
Sleipnir
FlashPeak
K-Meleon
GreenBrowser
Maxthon
Avant

I opted to keep it simple and just install Firefox.

If you want to install any of these browsers at a later date, or you don’t want to wait for your system to “offer” you the option, you can download them directly from http://www.browserchoice.eu.

I solved this problem by creating a very simple script and then using iCal to schedule it. To do this I created a new calendar called “Scripts” and created a recurring event to run at 11:00 every night. I set the Alarm to “Run Script” and selected the name of the script to run. This worked like a dream.

However, I have recently been beta-testing (and will be using once it is released) a new app called BusyCal from BusyMac. In a nutshell, BusyCal is like iCal (in fact it uses the same data) but it allows you to share calendars over a LAN plus it has loads of other cool features.

One thing that BusyCal doesn’t have is the ability to have a script run as an alarm (though there is a workaround – save the script as an app and use the “Open File” option when setting an alarm). Not a show-stopper by any means but it meant that I either had to use the workaround (as supplied by the guys at BusyMac) or find an alternative…

Script Timer X lets you schedule the execution of AppleScript, perl, and shell scripts, as well as Automator workflows and applications. Scheduling options include specific times of the day, week, month, or year, regular intervals ranging from one second to any number of weeks, when the computer enters or leaves an idle state, just before the computer goes to sleep or just after it wakes up, when you log into or out of your account, and when a specified application launches or quits. The application ships with several sample scripts – including one for scheduling the downloading of subscribed podcasts into iTunes.
You can download a fully functional 30-day trial of Script Timer X from http://www.appsandmore.com. If you want to keep using the app after 30 days, it’ll cost you just $12

iFooty is free but is ad-supported, whilst iFootyPlus costs £1.19, is ad-free and, using Push technology, can provide you with an audible and visual notification of when a goal is scored. You select the team(s) that you want to be notified about and whenever a goal is scored in a match involving those teams, the phone will make a sound and display a visual alert – depending on how you configured it.

A full review of iFooty can be found here.

iFootyWorld and iFootyWorld Plus are similar apps from the same developer but these provide scores and news from teams around the world.

For more information see iFooty in the iTunes Store

This comes in very handy when copying/moving a large amount of files between folders or drives, or if you simply want to compare the contents of 2 folders side by side. Yes, I know that you can open multiple Finder windows using the CMD key, but you end up with multiple windows scattered around the screen, whilst with Forklift, everything is inside the application’s interface.

Sidebar

In addition to the dual-pane view (note: you can switch to single pane view by using a command on the View menu), as you can see from the screenshot above, the Sidebar is also configurable. The Favorites section provides quick access to files, folders, servers and even FTP connections (in addition to it’s powerful file management features, Forklift will also connect to any remote FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3 or WebDav server). To add a file or folder to the Favorites, you just drag and drop it to the Favorites section of the Sidebar. To add a connection, you tick the Add to Favorites box when creating the connection.

In the Favorites section you can create Groups for better organisation. I have created two groups – “Regular Stuff” which holds shortcuts to my Home Finance spreadsheets and Backup Definitions and “Television”. I am currently converting a mass of EyeTV programmes to iPhone format (using my Elgato H264) so I have created shortcuts to the various folders used in the conversion workflow process.

Copy and Move Files

To copy or move files/folders from one folder to another, ensure that the files/folders to be copied are displayed in one pane and the destination folder is in the other pane. With the source files/folders selected, either drag and drop to the other pane or click the “Copy to” or “Move to” button on the toolbar (if you are using drag and drop between folders on the same drive, the files are moved – unless you hold the Option key down – in which case, the items are copied).

Deleting Applications

Forklift can be used to remove an application from your Mac – not just the .app file but also any other associated files (such as plist files). Navigate to the Applications folder, click on the appropriate application and click the Delete App button. Forklift will display a list of all the files that belong to the selected application. Select the file(s) to be deleted and click “Move to Trash”. I have used this feature in several situations:

• To delete an application (I do have AppZapper) but if Forklift is running, it saves me running another application.
• To delete an application’s plist file (where an application has stopped working and the suggested fix is to delete the plist file).
• To find the location of a plist file (in this instance, I wanted to copy the Forklift Toolbar and Sidebar customisations from my iMac to my MacBook. The information is stored in the plist file so I had to locate the file to copy it to the MacBook).

Batch Rename

The Batch Rename tool allows you to rename a large number of files at once. You can replace a string of characters in filenames, add text to a specified position in filenames, add metadata (file creation date, owner, etc) to a specified position in filenames, generate a numbered sequence at a specified position in filenames and change upper/lower case of characters in filenames.

Folder Synchronization

Folder synchronization will compare (and then synchronize) the contents of two folders. However, synchronization in ForkLift works in one direction, meaning that you have a source folder, from where you copy items, and a target folder, where you want to copy your new files.

Set up your panes so that the source folder appears in one pane and the target folder is displayed in the other pane. Ensure that the Source pane is active (click anywhere in the pane) and then click the “Sync to” button. You can set a number of options before carrying out the sync operation. Forklift can sync any two folders, should they be located on your local machine, your local network shares, an FTP/SFTP or WebDAV storage, or Amazon S3 account.

Remote Connections

With Forklift you can connect to any remote FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3 or WebDav server. Once you have configured a connection, you can add it to the Favorites in the Sidebar so that connecting is only a double-click away. The FXP Copy command (found on the Tools menu) allows you to copy a file from a folder on a remote server directly to another folder on another rremote server (i.e. – you don’t have to download the file to your Mac first and then upload it to the other server).

Split and Combine

Suppose that you have a 2GB file that you need to burn onto CD’s. Using Forklift you can split the file into smaller fragments. The Split command allows you to define the size of the files – you can either set a custom size or select from one of the pre-sets (which includes CD and DVD). The Combine command will recombine the fragmented file back into a single file so that it can be used.

Learn More

There are other features that I’ve not been able to cover in this review – the ability to flip panes, clone panes, display invisible items (that’s something that Finder cannot do). The best way to learn about the power of Forklift is to try it for yourself. Download a trial from the Binarynights website. If you want to buy it, it costs just $19.95.

Email ‘n Walk, a recently-released app for the iPhone, caught my attention the other day. It works by overlaying an email composition screen on top of the view from the iPhone’s camera. By pointing the iPhone towards the ground, I can type out an email and make sure that I don’t trip over any errant objects or step into any doggie-poop (not my doggie’s poop BTW). When you’ve finished composing the email, click send to open up a proper email window in Mail, select the recipient and send it.

What I need now is Twitter ‘n Walk – maybe that will stop me being attacked by overhanging branches!

The app was free when I got it but it now costs 59p from the iTunes App Store.

My most commonly used apps are on the first screen and these are featured below…

3 Twitter clients – Twitterific, Twinkle and Tweetie. I’ve listed them in that order because that’s the order of installation. Tweetie is the one I currently use – why? No idea – I suppose because it’s the most recently installed one. Each time I install a client, that becomes my “No 1 choice”. However the others remain as alternatives. I had a problem with Tweetie and Twitpic recently (any photo I uploaded to Twitpic from Tweetie would not display – instead it displayed a [?]) so I used Twinkle for uploading posts with photos (however, I’ve now reconfigured Tweetie to use yFrog and it seems OK). I’ve just been having a play with the latest version of Twitterific and I must say that I’m impressed.

MobileLinked – a multi-services instant messenger, which supports MSN (Windows Live Messenger), Yahoo IM, AIM, Google Talk and Jabber.

AudioBoo – a tool for audio blogging. You can record up to 5 minutes of audio and publish the recording to a timeline on the AudioBoo website, complete with your GPS co-ordinates and a photo. There’s even the option to have AudioBoo auto-tweet – so when you publish a recording it also adds it to your Twitter timeline.

Facebook – an app for accessing Facebook.

Evernote – an iPhone client for Evernote.

SplashShopper – a shopping list manager. More information available on the Splashdata website

iTalk – an audio recording app. This is different to AudioBoo in that you don’t upload your recordings – but you can use iTalk Sync (which is free) – a program that runs on your computer (PC or Mac) to enable you to transfer your recordings from your iPhone via Wi-Fi. Your recordings are saved as AIFF files. There are 2 versions of iTalk – a free, ad-supported one and a Premium (ad-free) version for $4.99.

So what other apps do I have? Well I’ll save that for another blog post.

iFooty is described as a must-have for any fan of the beautiful game. Simply put, it provides a user-friendly way to navigate the plethora of information that is stored on the BBC’s website relating to English and Scottish teams (it currently supports English Premiership, Championship and League 1 and 2 along with Scottish Premier League).

The first time the app is run, the user is presented with a list of leagues:

Clicking on a league displays the current table for that league:

Clicking on a team provides access to results, minute-by-minute match reports, latest news and fixtures for the selected team:

Although iFooty is a great little app, there are a couple of enhancements that I’d like to see:

An alphabetical list of teams would enable the user to quickly select a team, rather than having to know which league/division the team is in and their current league position (assuming you are looking for a team other than the one you support).

The ability to display all the results for the current day – last Saturday, as the final whistles went around the country, I had to load up the BBC Sports website in Safari to find out all the scores.

Then why not do as I did and treat yourself to an Elgato Turbo 264 Video Encoder. This little USB device (not much bigger than a pen drive) converts videos for playing on iPod, iPhone, AppleTV, and Sony PSP. While a Mac’s CPU is a great general purpose number cruncher, the chip on the Turbo 264 was designed to do nothing but churn out H.264 video. Videos can take a long time to encode to the H.264 format – sometimes longer than the actual playing time. What’s more, H.264 video encoding can demand a sizeable chunk of system resources.

Elgato Turbo H264

My primary reason for purchasing the Turbo 264 is to convert .eyetv files (generated by Elgato’s EyeTV Hybrid Digital TV Tuner) into video that I can play on my iPod or iPhone (of course watching these videos would be done whilst walking the dog or lying in bed – certainly not whilst driving to work!!)

The Turbo 264 accelerates video encoding up to four times faster on Macs with Intel Core processors. On an older Mac like a PowerPC G4 or PowerPC G5, the acceleration is exponentially faster – some users report up to 10 and 15 times faster. I converted a 1-hour episode of The Apprentice (original file size 2.6GB) to an m4v file in a little over 40 minutes. The size of the m4v file was 575MB. I then converted the same file without the Turbo 264 plugged in. One hour later, the export was complete and the size of the m4v file was almost 700MB.

So how do you instruct the EyeTV to use the Turbo 264? Simple – you plug it in and then click the “Export to iPod” or “Export to AppleTV” button on the EyeTV toolbar. If the Turbo 264 is plugged in, the EyeTv will automatically use the Turbo 264′s processor to do the file conversion.

Turbo 264 can do more than convert eyetv files to H264. It comes with an easy “drag and drop” application that allows you to convert any video to H.264 (MPEG-4) format – either one at a time or in a batch

More information is available from Elgato’s website.