Update

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Its been a white since I’ve blogged due to various reasons. Most of these reasons are due to various hosting providers misbehaving.

I have still been doing other things.

RedKite v 0.1 was released and although it still needs some UI adjustments, but v 0.2 is well on its way.

RedKite v 0.1

I got my phone upgraded to a HTC Hero, which is a truly awesome device, even though i do miss Windows Mobile, Android is actually pretty good, although it does suffer from some rather lame parts of Google Apps, like Calendar which is just absolutely crap.

Windows 7 has been released to manufacturing, and i have been running it on my machines since it was given to MSDN, its brilliant and faster than ever.

I’m currently working on a post about what i would like to see in Windows 8, which should be coming up soon.

RedKite – New UI Design

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A few weeks ago one of my misguided friends showed me his favourite twitter client – tweetie, and it has a very good UI layout idea. Rather than having a selection of tabs or filters across the top, it has them down the side. This solves the problem i was trying to solve in the UI of custom created tabs and filters.

So the initial problem was that i wanted a single column of tweets, and from my experience of twitter clients i automatically had the tabs on the top of the column of tweets, this lead to only having 4 tabs before i ran out of space. Anyway i saw tweetie and saw how it did it down the left side and this would solve my problem so i have taken a shot at implementing it.

In this design i have also customized and added extra features, a optional Close button so the tab can be closed, and a number which represents the the number of new tweets in that tab.

RedKite I am still working on making the code and templates for this properly, so it can be themed with minimal effort, if you want to take a look at the code, head over to my project on CodePlex and tell me what you think.

I’m about to start working on the Art for the splash screen and icons, so they should be up here soon.

Browser Benchmarks

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When you talk about browser benchmarks a lot of people refer to sites like Sunspider, but these only test raw performance with micro benchmarks, which can show major differences between browser speeds BUT they are very bad at showing real life browser usage.

A friend recently showed me a better set of benchmarks, called Peacekeeper. These tests try to emulate real world usage, and they show a very different picture.

Peacekeeper Scores (Higher is better, All run on Windows 7 RC on the same machine)

IE8 = 422

Firefox 3.0.10 = 688

Chrome 2.0 = 1207

Safari 4.0 = 1423

This shows that Safari 4 is only 3.5 times faster than IE8. This is dramatically different, from Sunspider which shows Safari 4 to be 37x faster. The difference between Firefox 3.0 and IE8 is even less. Firefox 3.0 is only 50% faster than IE8.

Now all of this still probably only milliseconds worth of differences between browsers and a browser is much more than its performance, for example i think IE8’s RSS manager is a lot better than Safari 4’s, then there’s the UI to consider, and most importantly how long it takes to start the browser.

Windows 7229 – FAST!!!!

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I installed Windows 7 7229 today on my netbook, its fast, i mean very fast for my netbook(1.2ghz, Hp 2133). 

1. The installer was a lot faster, no waiting for it to load(this used to take 10minutes alone now <1minute).

2. <40 second boot.

3. 10 second shutdown

4. 5GB HDD space used (not including page file / hibernation disabled). 

This build also gets a working Graphics driver off Windows Update, that allows Sleep, Aero, and Windows Performance tools to work (previous drivers blocked Sleep mode)