Having just installed the Microsoft Expression Suite, Expression Design (ala Photoshop/Fireworks), Expression Web (please don’t be Frontpage 2007! Oh god please!) and Expression Blend (a design driven Windows UI development environment). My initial thoughts:

After installing the required dotnet framework 3.0, the installation process for all three applications was painless. Expression Web’s installer is more polished that that of the others but that is to be expected as, of the three, it is the only finished release (Design and Blend both being CTP’s). I was slightly perplexed at being given the choice of “Regular”, “Custom” and “Complete” installs as the custom install gave no configuration options just the option of installing the whole product. I would imagine that when Design and Blend reach there 1.0 releases that they will share the same slick install process that Web currently sports and installation configuration will no doubt be possible.

The fist time you start any of the applications you are prompted for a serial key and led through the required product activation. Once the activation is completed you are met by a rather different User Experience than you might have expected from a Microsoft application.

I have to say while I like the dark UI, which I presume is designed to fit better with the overall Vista look and feel than that of XP, I did find it a little hard to read on my laptop’s WSXGA+ display. The dark theme is very cool but perhaps could benefit from slightly higher contrast white on dark as opposed to grey on dark.

Overall, a very sexy looking application suite though and I’ll be very interested to see how they perform.

When Telecom announced their “Go Large” plan I was there in a heart beat… it’s what I’ve been hanging out for since the dawn of the Internet! OK, since the dawn of broadband perhaps. The promise of unlimited bandwidth, even with the fair use policy, and decent speed (outside of “Peak Periods”) seemed too good to be true…

***NEWS FLASH***

It is!!!

When the plan was conceived and cast upon the public only a couple weeks ago the fair use policy stated that you could not download more than 700MB’s during the peak hours of 4pm and 12am which is indeed “Fair”. I download reasonably heavily via Bittorrent and am more than happy to keep this downloading outside these peak hours. The policy also stated that traffic such as this may be limited which again is fair enough, I don’t mind that downloads take a little longer within reason.

Well, two weeks in and the policy has been updated, for wholesale at least and I imagine Xtra will follow suit in the next few days. The policy now states, along with the existing restrictions, that you may not download more than 200MB’s in any one hour. Is it me, or does that sound like an overall limit? Rather than having a monthly limit you now have an hourly one! Fantastic!

The new limitation doesn’t appear to be tied to peer to peer downloads either so Mums and Dads this means you too! Want to download that 400Mb game demo? better make sure your download manager keeps it slow!

Full Speed ADSL on the Telecom network, assuming you are a reasonable distance from the exchange is 300Kb/s – 400Kb/s at which speeds you could effectively download between 1.1Gb’s and 1.4Gb’s an hour. This would no doubt put an intolerableable amount of strain on the network most probably crippling other users, so some limitation is only fair. 200Mb’s an hour however, equates to a download spead of just 55Kb/s which is about one 6th of the product being sold (and that you are paying for). So what Telecom are in effect saying is that you can use the network at full spead, but only for about 10 minutes in any given hour. In reality this is all moot as the best speeds I have seen even outside the peek periods are not even close to what the network should be capable of and I’m close to the exchange!

What annoys me most about this is not so much the draconian limitations, that I at least expected, but the fact that Telecom are alowed to sell the service as being “unlimited”, making a huge song and dance in thier sales pitch when in fact the service is VERY limited. If it’s not unlimited don’t call it unlimited!

What, no redesign? Um… yes, I’m running a little late on this I know. It seems my PHP skills are a little rusty so it’s taken me longer than I expected to get to grips with the wordpress template theme engine. I hope to get the new site up in the next few days so stay tuned!

I’m in the process of doing some research around .NET AJAX enabled development frameworks and I happended to stumble upon ths gem of an article regarding the apparent LACK of compatibility between Visual Studio and Vista… You have GOT to be kidding me!?!?! Right? Microsoft is one of the largest software development outfits in the world and they can’t get their shit together enough that their primary development platform runs smoothly on their flagship operating system? I’m trying hard not to be a Microsoft basher, I really am… but seriously?

Yup, hot on the heals of IE7, Firefox 2 hit the street today. Sporting a swanky new… well cleaner UI and a bunch of productivity enhancements this is the browser I’ve been waiting for.

I’ve been running the beta version alongside version 1.5 for a couple of weeks now (which while a little clumsy, was no where near the pain-in-the ass multi-IE is) and I gotta say, I like it… a lot! It’s clean, it’s fast, and most importantly… it hasn’t broken anything yet!

Extensions and themes are now collectively referred to as “Add-ons” and managed through a unified control panel, and at time of writing a few have yet to be upgraded for compatibility with Firefox 2 (nothing that can’t be fixed with the use of the the Nightly Tester Tools add-on which allows you to force compatibility), but most of the main extensions work out of the box and the new UI theme is so nice that for the moment at least I don’t want to change it!

The options control panel has changed a bit too and it took a little while to find everything again but on the whole it looks like all the changes are for the good and I would certainly recommend the upgrade. So what are you waiting for? Go get it now!