The functionality on the site is fairly extensive and rivals commercial photo editing software such as Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop. Certainly it does have its limitations, but on a price comparison you really can’t beat it.

It is a fairly technical and not overly intuitive site however there is an extensive list of tutorials and some instruction videos to get you started.

Happy photo-editing everyone!

http://www.aviary.com

I kid you not!

Ok, probably a lot of things….but this is a tech blog and this is certainly a tech subject so it does seem appropriate.

I don’t have a strong background in web development. I have had passing familiarity with various technologies over the years, but nothing really in depth; ie, I can put together a pretty mean HTML web page (never used the <blink> tag…..honestly!)

Getting Started
The first step in this process is to set up your environment which is no small task (made much harder by my ISP who has shaped me back to 64Kbps after I expended my paltry GB allowance for the month……but that is another blog post entirely so we won’t go into that).

Setting up the environment requires a few applications which are mostly open source. These include:

The Ruby Interpreter
Pretty simple, visit the following website and then following the bouncing ball (be sure to install all available options): http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyinstaller

The Rails Framework
After the Ruby Interpreter has done its bit you can open a Windows Command prompt and type the following to install the Rails Framework

gem install rails -r -y

A valid Internet connection is all that is needed and the rest is done for you. If you are familiar with Linux type package managers such as RPM, that is pretty much what is happening here.

Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
The book I am using to learn this subject uses a product called RadRails. To make life as simple as possible I will stick to that environment until I find my way around a little more. However, in the interests of vendor neutrality, there are many different IDE applications available. This article will give you a few options or your good friend Google might also help.

MySQL and all its bits
Haven’t got to this stage yet (thank you once again ISP with small download limit), but here is the link for sake of completion. Having worked with MySQL previously, it takes some configuration so I will devote a post to the nuances of the install later, http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql

So that is pretty much where I stand at the moment. Sitting here waiting for my IDE to finish downloading. Stay tuned for more RoR run and games later.

That said, a feature announced in the pre-beta Version 2.0 release that will force HTTPS only browsing seems an interesting approach to the security issue. Any site with an invalid SSL certificate will simply not load.

I can imagine for the general user this will likely be received about as well as Windows Vista User Account Control (UAC) with many users searching frantically to find out how to turn it off (given the choice between dancing bunnies and security most users still unfortunately choose dancing bunnies). For the corporate environment however, this could be a big plus to protecting their users.

I don’t imagine that Chrome will see a foot in the door anytime in the short term, but it would seem they are trying to knock at least.

Want to know more:

Google adds HTTPS-only browsing to Chrome

Chromium Developer Documentation

One such useful site is Online Converter http://www.peters1.dk/webtools/conversion.php?sprog=en. This page contains pretty much every conversion utility you will ever need or even considering needing at some time in the future.

Windows 7 Desktop

I am not really a great stranger to Windows Beta product. I courageously (and sometimes foolishly) plunge myself into new products as they are released to see what the next big thing that is on offer from the “Church of Redmond”.

Over the years I have approached this task with a little more sophistication than previous attempts (thank you VMWARE, VirtualBox and similar products). No longer do I risk my digital lifelines attempting to jam sometimes less than perfect code into my hard drive. A buggy operating system beta no longer means loss of computing capability, merely a virtual hard drive to discard.

Even with these life saving facilities of virtualisation, I probably still wouldn’t recommend this type of activity for the computer novice. Beta software is just that, beta software. No guarantees or support. You are on your own! However, if you are an adventurous type, have hard drives to spare or boxes to sacrifice, venture forth into the computer future and see exactly how it will shape up.

The Download
After seeing the less than stellar way that this promised product was brought into existance (Windows 7 Beta delay), I was wondering if this was a shape of things to come. The initial reports about the Beta release were positive (Windows 7 Review, Windows 7 Will Kill Desktop Linux), so I wasn’t too worried.

Initially I made several attempts to gain access to the download using my browser of choice, FireFox, and found that the download simply wouldn’t start. My first reaction was that this was due to excessive server load and millions of people trying to get in during the two week free for all offered by Steve Balmer. So I persisted…and persisted…..and persisted. Now I am not a great fan of Internet Explorer, since Firefox 3 I really haven’t looked back, but it is still there (of course), so I thought I would give it a try. Nice one Microsoft, limit access to the download only through your own browser will you! Very funny!.

Once the correct Microsoft approved browser was selected, the download was fairly straightforward and went essentially without a hitch. Approximately 2.44 GB later, a shiny new copy of Windows 7 Beta was sitting on my hard drive.

The Installation
I installed the Beta as a Virtual Machine on a Vista capable laptop (2GB RAM, Dual Intel 2.2GHz processors). I chose the VM profile for that of Vista as a start to see how it would run.

The installation process was mostly flawless. The only “gotcha” I encountered was that the installer didn’t recognise the fact that it was being installed onto a fresh clean virtual disk and gave me an option to upgrade which obviously wouldn’t work given the circumstances and merely sent me back to the beginning of the process.

A great feature on each of the different installation screens was a help link taking the user to a help topic about the particular stage of the installation. Some of these pages were blank but I would expect that will be fix by the time the final release is distributed.

Aside from that one “gotcha” (which may well be just a beta issue) the installation was simple and straightforward and most importantly without error.

Initial Use
This is my first entry in this series where I will discuss Windows 7 Beta in more depth and review some of the  great new (and less than great new) features.

A few features out of the gate that really stick in my mind with the process I have undertaken so far.

Activation
Without getting into a religious argument over the rights and wrongs of this particular functionality (I personally hate it myself), they have made the activation process fairly transparent. The use is presented with an option to have activation undertaken automatically once connected to the Internet. Should be noted however that this was not actually what happened. I did need to manually activate the product myself. At this point (and given I have only undertaken one installation), I will give the benefit of the doubt to Microsoft and assume that some issue occurred with the virtual network. Stay tuned on this one

Security Settings
You are presented with three security setting options; recommended updates, critical security updates only or ask me later. Bring this decision into the installation process I think is a good idea, and I guess for the purposes of flexibility, an “ask me later” option needed to be included. Microsoft still have some way to go to remove their security-hole-riddled image, but this is a positive sign at least.

Help and Support Links
On every window near the minimise/maximise buttons is a link to report a bug. Most likely a way of easily getting feedback on the beta version and possibly something that will be removed for the final production

Homegroup
One striking new feature is the Windows 7 homegroup. This is networking for the home user who simply wants to share all their resources amongst their home network. The options for sharing can include everything from files to hardware resources such as printers. While on the plus side, following the option to create your homegroup does come with a system generated complex password; on the minus side, I can see this being a very interesting avenue of potential attack. Providing the ability to mass share anything is rarely a good thing. However time will tell I guess.

Overall Opinion
Initial impressions are positive. As mentioned above, I will explore further this shiny new offering and see if that impression holds up.

A point of interest that I will be keenly looking at as we move towards a production release is exactly how Microsoft will deploy it. There is much resentment over Vista and what it never really achieved as a replacement to XP. With Windows 7 shaping up to be very Vista-like, will this just be seen as a very expensive service pack for Vista?

Watch this space.