The wallpapers have been sourced from various places & all credit to them & the cursor pack is by UKIntel.

(Click to download. Size: 2.91MB)

To install double click the downloaded file. And refer to this post if you need to know how to change individual theme components.

Windows 7 Bliss Themepack Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

The discussion started with a brief on Lenovo’s upcoming range of products & how they’re focusing towards All-in-one PCs for the future & they’re offerings sure do look good. On display were a range of notebooks, netbooks & 2 All-in-ones. The A600 is their key product for the season, there was just one cord coming out of the unit which was the power cord & it had a remote. The remote is no ordinary remote. It lets you actually be remote. It connects remotely using bluetooth. And:

• doubles as a VOIP handset, allowing you to roam around the house & talk;
• triples as an air-mouse;
• quadruples as a Wii remote to let you play bundled games!

The A600 came with a built-in TV tuner card and is priced at ~70k INR (retail Croma). Images:

The more economical model – C300 has a display that I personally find more attractive compared to that of the A600 but it lacks a TV tuner and is priced ~45k INR. Images:

Another machine that caught my attention was the IdeaPad U350, the notebook was slim. Dubbed as the ‘Premium Notebook’ it has a LED backlight screen, weight of 1.6kg, thickest part of 1”. The notebook sure looked good if you’re not the netbook kind & need a full-blown proper laptop to carry around. I liked the minimalistic yet elegant design on the cover. This is a notebook that I will certainly recommend to people who have a daily travel schedule. Images:

The netbook range looked attractive but ever since I’ve used dad’s HP notebook & shifted to my Dell XPS16 I have a belief that back-lit keyboards need to become industry standard & lack thereof is something I’m not going to buy. So till netbooks start coming with back-lit keyboards I can’t be working on those tiny screens that’ll potentially make me blind. The other discussion on netbooks was of 3-cell or 6-cell. I personally feel that if you’re giving me something that’s portable, I’d rather have a longer life battery, enough for at least 6-7 hours. On display were the IdeaPad S10 series. Image:

If you notice that some Lenovo computers have some hint of orange, a line going through either the edges, on the keyboard. I asked whether there was any significance to the color orange & I was not surprised that there is. All of Lenovo’s offerings towards home-users will have this orange streak, for them the color stands for energy & complements as a vibrant life. Orange is in terms, Lenovo’s color much like red is Coke’s. The products on display were:

• Lenovo IdeaPad Y450, Y550 & Y650
• Lenovo G550 & G430 (Value notebooks)

We were given press material with snaps, spec sheets & a disc containing soft-copies of the spec sheets & images of the products. I loved the part where we were offered pizzas, hot chocolate & soft drinks.

Lenovo Reaches Out To Indian Bloggers Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

While the Americans & Australians get free laptops, Microsoft India has teamed up with news & entertainment network CNN-IBN for a promotional campaign called – “Windows Nex Gen Families”. There will be 15 families chosen who will get an opportunity to try out Windows 7 & Windows Mobile 6.5 before the international availability. The campaign is quite simple, all one needs to do is fill out a survey form comprising of 4 questions about the gadgets owned within the family & 15 “lucky” families will get the opportunity to be crowned as “Windows Nex Gen Family”.

To participate, visit ibnlive.com/windows

The idea behind Windows 7 & Windows Mobile 6.5 is a follow up to their previous television campaign on the Life Without Walls concept. One of the two adverts that were part of the same:

PS: Nice to see Microsoft India doing something to promote Windows 7

Microsoft India Launches Win 7 & WinMo 6.5 Promotional Campaign Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

If that’s not all, the guys at MSN have a Deep Zoom of the life of the late superstar, zoom into the image & have a look at tons of MJ’s photographs. It’s a treat, trust me. Here’s a screenshot:

Watch it here, unfortunately the fags won’t let anyone embed the Deep Zoom.

R.I.P. MJ, you’re a class act.

Microsoft Pays Tribute To MJ Published at: I'm Just Being Manan | Subscribe

As I said I don’t give a squat about javascript rendering times, Acid test & Base-Alkaline tests, what matters to me how well the browser responds & what it offers to make the browsing experience better. Let’s talk about the browsers:

• Internet Explorer 8

No matter how much people might hate the brand IE, IE 8 is a good browser, it’s not right up there IMO but it is by no means a bad browser, pretty much all commercial & business websites are supported by IE, it is the browser that is available out-of-the-box in the most widely used OS (sorry Europeans). It CANNOT be avoided by developers.

The Good:

Accelerators: I love them. They make browsing so much more easier, the most used Accelerator by me is the ‘Search’.

Web Slices: Mentioned a lot, implemented by a few, this is a neat feature to have. Don’t really know why it didn’t take off.

Tab Isolation & Session Management: The tab isolation & Session Management in IE works better than Chrome. This comes after using both these browsers for a sufficient amount of time.

Incorporates Windows 7 Superbar features: This is a neat feature, wherein if you have multiple tabs open, you can browse through them as if they were multiple windows.

Easy on resources

Syncs with Live Mail (desktop): Being a user of Live Mail for my RSS dose this is amazing.

The Bad:

No Download Manager: 8 versions done, yet somehow a download manager hasn’t made it into IE.

No rounded corners: From what I’ve heard this is because of Redmond not implementing some CSS/HTML feature or whatever. But it sucks not to have rounded corners.

A bit slow: This is true, IE is slow when it comes to loading pages. Note that I mentioned loading pages, IE does extremely good in responding to Ajax components like Videos & notifications in Facebook. Also, when opening a new tab, the ‘loading’ that comes for a noticeable time is irritating.

Plugins: Unfortunately as widespread as it maybe developers haven’t really bothered with creating useful plugins for it which is definitely a dampener.

• Chrome

Chrome is a nice browser in a lot of aspects & responsiveness is not one of them, for me it lags a lot when browsing Ajax heavy websites. It freezes itself for a couple of seconds & then comes back to life, which essentially makes for a horrible browsing experience. I love the way Chrome shows the status bar.

The Good:

Clean interface: This probably is Chrome’s USP.

Easy on resources

Task Manager

The Bad:

Tabs on top: It’s not that you can’t get used to it, tabs on top make navigating tabs a bit more of a work (On a laptop with such small trackpads it is an annoyance.) Not to mention its difficult to drag & snap your Chrome windows in Windows 7 because of this. In general you can conclude that I hate tabs on top.

Can’t re-open recently closed tab

Response time: Here is where benchmarks don’t matter. Chrome decides to take small 10 second breaks every time I want to right click a link or I open a new tab. It does so on it’s own with no specific pattern. It just keeps on doing this. AND IT’S ANNOYING! Its what I would call Browsing #FAIL! This might not be happening to every Chrome-user & that’s why I said, benchmarks don’t make or break browsers.

Plugins: As far as I’m concerned, they don’t exist. On a recommendation I tried installing a plugin it wanted me to switch to the Dev-Mode, Chrome kept on crashing every 15 minutes. IE’s got better plugin support than this!

No RSS Support

• Safari

Being an iTunes user not by choice but by compulsion, I thought Apple can’t code for Windows or they simply don’t want to write efficient code on Windows, but with Safari 4, I’m impressed. I love Safari 4 as a matter of fact it’s my default browser these days.

The Good:

Top Sites & History: The Cover-Flow display of Top Sites & History is so much more elegant as compared to Opera or Chrome. I simply browse my History for kicks in Safari 4.

Response Time: Much better than Chrome & Firefox on par with IE (this is ajax component loading on various sites.)

Incorporates Windows 7 Superbar features: Neither Chrome nor Firefox (add-on needed) make use of Windows 7’s Superbar features where you can browse through tabs like windows. Though I miss Jumplists, it’s still a lot better.

RSS Support

The Bad:

Address bar won’t search

No Tab Isolation

No crash recovery: I can’t believe this one, I crashed Safari yesterday only not to be able to recover my last session! (there is an option to open the last closed ‘window’ or ‘windows’)

Can’t re-open recently closed tab: Sucks all the way.

Weird behavior with links: For some reason Safari 4 has an advanced annoying algo which opens some links in a new window & some in new tabs even though I’ve set the default to open new tabs.

• Firefox

Ah! Firefox the loved-by-all-but-is-still-a-crappy-browser.

Don’t be surprised I’ve been a Firefox user from 2.xx times, loved a lot of features that it has only to dump it since version 3 which is nothing less than bloatware. Hoping that 3.5 brings me back to it.

The Good:

Plugins & Themes: This is a huge reason to use Firefox, you can find plugins to do anything that you want, a huge developer community & an equally good repository backend. But then again it works against the browser as well, too many plugins spoil the broth.

Across platforms: This makes you feel at home when you’re playing with some other OS.

Crash recovery

Smart Location Bar

The Bad:

Resource hungry: The only reason I left Firefox was for the insane amount of RAM it consumed, even 2 tabs would clock over 200k which is outrageous.

Response time: Unlike Chrome’s behavior (which freezes for a couple of seconds), Firefox takes ages & I mean a really long time on first start, not to mention that if you were to minimize the windows & restore it after a couple of minutes, you can go make yourself some good juice for Firefox will freeze your machine for a good 5 minutes.

No Tab Isolation

———————–

As good as implementing Windows 7’s features in the browser is, I haven’t held it against those who don’t ‘coz I’m expecting to see that in the near future.

All said & done about the browsers that I’ve found worth using & mentioning, here’s what my ideal browser would have:

1. Memory consumption like that of IE 8
2. Cover Flow
3. Crash Recovery Console with session management & Tab Isolation
4. Windows like access to User Profiles
5. Nothing to do with Firefox or Chrome’s code thereby avoid any performance issues
6. Firefox like community support for gazillion add-ons
7. Chrome like status bar
8. Syncs with Live Mail & is a RSS reader by itself
9. A Download Manager
10. Multi-platform support
11. Sync bookmarks to cloud (yeah, that other browser does it.)

PS: Opera what?

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