Tabbed user interfaces

I’ve been using Firefox for web browsing since it’s first release, so I’m quite used to tabbed-browsing.

The new version of Firefox (and IE7 too) has made a small change to how tabbed browsing works - the ‘close tab’ button is now part of each tab.

What I’ve realised is that there’s a difference now with how Visual Studio works - it’s tabbed editing environment is like the old Firefox method - there’s just one ‘close’ button over on the right-hand side.

I’m not sure which way I prefer - I can see advantages to both, but I just wish that I could make all the apps do it the same way and not be inconsistent now.

I haven’t tried any of the CTPs of the next version of Visual Studio yet, but I would guess that they’ll change Visual Studio to mirror tabbing in IE7 (and Firefox 2).

Sitemaps

Looks like Microsoft, Google and and Yahoo! have been collaborating on creating a standard for a sitemap file - used by search engines to get a better idea what pages are available to be crawled and if they’ve been updated recently.

Vista RC2 64bit on my desktop

I’ve taken the plunge and have started using my new Dell box with Vista 64bit RC2.

Hopefully I’ll get access to Vista RTM in the next week or so, then I can either install everything again, or just upgrade.

So far most things are working fine. There was a small hiccup this morning when I arranged for the IP address to be swapped over to the new box, but that seems to be resolved now.

Problems I have noticed so far are:

• Our print server doesn’t have 64bit printer drivers, so I’ve had to use a workaround I read about in the beta newsgroup - Create a local printer with a local port and set the port name to be the printer share name. This did the trick.
• VMware Server refused to install. I’ve downloaded the beta of Virtual PC 2007 and installed that instead.
• Symantec AntiVirus won’t install on Vista 64bit. I even arranged to get hold of their beta of the next version, but it doesn’t work. Hopefully they’ll come out with a new beta that does work soon. I also tried the beta of Microsoft OneCare, but that doesn’t support 64bit either :-( I’ll just have to rely on Vista’s inbuilt security for now (and be careful with email attachments)
• I can charge my iPAQ with the USB cable, but the current release of Windows Mobile Device Center doesn’t allow it to connect properly. I gather they’re overdue for a newer release so maybe that will be fixed then.

At the moment, I quite like the Sidebar, but it would be nice to have a weather forecast gadget along the lines of the Firefox ForecastFox extension.

Otherwise relatively smooth sailing so far.