Tze Chuen’s Weblog

Bored of the plain white Gmail theme? Then you should try Gmail Redesigned. With a black and stylish theme, Gmail will never be the same again.

Interested?

1) Install Stylish

2) Install Gmail Redesigned Stylish theme

3) ???????

4) Profit!

In other news, my Gmail account is celebrating its 666th spam mail. Hooray!

So I’ve been playing around a bit with IE8 Beta 1 since yesterday. I’m not much of an IE fan but being a curious cat got me to install it. Part of the installation requires scanning your pc for malicious software, no idea how effective was that because it was quicker than a commercial break.

IE8 came with many new features, but only ‘Activities’ managed to impress me. As seen on the screenshot below, I was able to translate my blog from English to Chinese with just a click of a button (ok, maybe not one click but two). There are many other languages available for translation as well such as Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Korean and who knows maybe in the future they’ll add translations for Klingon as well.

IE8 also came with what’s called WebSlices, from what I gather this is just RSS with more advanced features. It allows webmasters to put content such as Video as a ‘WebSlice’. This is nothing new actually, IE8 only made it easier with a one-click-view-all interface. Haven’t really tested this feature BECAUSE…. There wasn’t really any site that came with WebSlices. Maybe they should have just mimic’d Mac’s Web Widget feature, that requires no implementation on the website’s end.

Also, the zoom feature in IE8 is improved just like the ones in Firefox 3, allowing both Image and Text to be scaled. However, it is way too buggy and laggy for usage. As seen below is how the website Digg f**ks up when I zoom it up. Even though the zoom actually worked on sites such as this one, the zoom process is not smooth yet as it felt like playing quake at 3 fps.

IE8 also crashed on me when I attempt to hover links on my site to bring up the SNAP window.

So, is IE8 poised to defeat the upcoming Firefox 3? Probably not. Much work has to be done before that can happen, we won’t be seeing an IE8 fan base anytime soon. In the meantime, keep wagging your foxy tail.

If you’re interested in trying out IE8 beta yourself, head on to:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm

I’ll let the screenshot do the talking.

Download the latest beta here:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html