Having tried this new excellent program for a couple of weeks now I have found some super new additions and improvements. Number one for me was that you can now create easy vertical text and borders. The optimisation of images for use on the web is also improved.

It loads a lot faster than version 8 and whilst I’m still discovering more and more additions, I think this is the best version yet.

You can also get excellent add on plugins from http://www.digitalworkshop.com

I still have Windows 98SE as my operating system and you don’t get told if you have any problems that you should really update to XP. This can be really annoying if they sell it to you saying it works in Windows 98/2000/XP etc.

Its going to take me a few more weeks to even get round just some of this program, but if you have version 8 you will have no problem with 9. Give it a try.

Hazel

Flash based sites almost never rank as well in search engines as traditional HTML/XHTML sites, and the reason is pretty simple, search engine bots are simple little programs and for the most part have no idea what to make of Flash based content. That may be about to change. Some enterprising lads are creating a framework to allow the extraction of content from flash based sites. Read about it here. I think I’ll wait until I see clear evidence that it works before I’d be converting sites to Flash.

Franki

Netscape has traditionally based it’s web browser on the full Mozilla suite, but they have apparently decided that Firefox is up to snuff now that it has reached a stable 1.0 release. Read more about it here. It seems that the browser wars are in full swing again.

Franki

After saying several times that there would be no further updates to Internet Explorer except those delivered as part of Windows Longhorn, Microsoft has indicated that it is thinking about releasing extra functionality updates that build around IE’s plug-in set-up. One can only assume that this possible turnaround is at least in part due to the excellent progress that Firefox is having converting smart Internet users to their superior browser. The only people that seem to think that IE is better then Firefox are Microsoft, everyone else I’ve seen that has reviewed Firefox has become a convert. Read more here.

Franki

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft recently told a group of government officials of Asian countries that to use Linux will result in law suits over intellectual property. He declined to mention that Microsoft might be behind many of these lawsuits, but that is the conclusion drawn by at least one journalist. After trying traditional competitive tactics against Linux and failing, Microsoft now seem to have decided that legal threats of IP suits will achieve the high level of FUD they require to compete fairly.

Franki

Three new flaws have been found in Internet Explorer 6, two of them are classed as critical flaws, and both of those will affect even uses of IE6 SP2.
Here for more details.

Franki

After calling Linux a cancer, and making many other such disparaging remarks to anyone that would listen. Microsoft have just put 10 million dollars into a company called Vintela that is known for its Unix/Linux management software.

Could this be a sign of change from Microsoft? I doubt it personally, I suspect that they are either just covering their bases, or they are planning to use parts of their software to allow the management of Unix/Linux boxes from Windows servers, or vice versa. That’s not really as unusual as it sounds, one of Microsoft’s past tactics has been to make it really easy to migrate from a competitors products to their own, and nearly impossible to migrate away from. Nothing unusual there. You can read more about the deal here.
INSERT: It appears that Vintela is a Canopy group company, Canopy is behind SCO, so this may well be a sly way to give SCO more money to continue it’s battle against Linux. Read this groklaw article for more.

In other Microsoft news, a company in Australia called EEYE Security services has complained to the media that a critical security flaw in Win2k that they found and showed Microsoft in August has not been acted upon or patched. “The flaw allows anonymous attackers to compromise default installations of the affected software, without requiring user interaction, and gain absolute access to the host machine.”

More on that story here.

Franki