How to clean up CCleaner

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

No, ‘Piriform’ isn’t the name of a rare virus. Piriform is the team behind CCleaner (renamed from ‘CrapCleaner’ so that american schools could use it…) – just about the nicest, tightest, cleanest and most frequently recommended system tidyer-upper.

It’s so well regarded that some of the less well-written printer drivers suggest that you run it to clear up their mess when in the midst of a version upgrade. It’s also the proud holder of PC Pro’s Software of the Year 2008 award.

I am blogging this because Piriform commits a couple of very minor sins in the setup of the utility. One is that it tries to sneak the Yahoo toolbar in on you, unless you know to always untick the check-box; the other is that it’s king of the ultra-tiny version update. Only Winamp is worse, in my experience – hardly a week goes by without a new release, during which a moment’s inattention will land you back with the toolbar.

This may seem obsessive but I can’t be the only person who has seen people browsing on netbooks with upwards of six toolbars in Internet Explorer, and left with a browser window able to show about ten lines of text.

Anyway, Piriform has released a major update to CCleaner. It’s now on 2.22 and there’s support for cleaning out the Google Chrome cache and the Sun Java cache; just these two tricks alone are worth the clicks to get it.

Firefox 4 looks awfully familiar…

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

Firefox 3.5 is still fresh, but Mozilla has been busy mocking up its early concepts for the big move to version 4. Now, these images come with a great big disclaimer that “These are NOT FINAL! THEY ARE ONLY FOR BRAINSTORMING/EXPLORATION!“, but it’s interesting to see which direction Firefox could be taking. Take a look for yourself and form your own opinions, but from where I’m sitting it looks like a certain other browser seems to have had an influence on Mozilla’s designs.

The first design is fairly typical Firefox, with the tabs beneath the address bar (click to enlarge):

The Aero effect looks nice, and it’s a very clean interface, with only minor changes from the Firefox 3.7 concept images which Mozilla recently released. But there’s also a mockup with the tabs – unusually for Firefox – moved above the address bar: (more…)

The real facts about Internet Explorer 8

Friday, June 19th, 2009

If there’s one thing you could never accuse Microsoft of lacking, it’s good old-fashioned Chutzpah.

The world’s favourite monopolist has launched a new “Get The Facts” campaign for Internet Explorer 8, that seems remarkably short on fact and a bit top-heavy on the codswallop.

You can see Microsoft’s version of the facts running down the left-hand side of the page, where the company has decided to compare Internet Explorer 8 against Firefox and Chrome. Yes, that’s right. Internet Explorer 8 wins in every single category, apart from a couple where it generously shares the honours with its rivals.

We could spend a couple of hours demolishing the argument for almost each and every one of those Microsoft ticks. Then again, we could spend a couple of hours shooting fish in a barrel or stealing sweets from children with only one arm, but we’ve got better things to do, so we’re just going to deal with the most blatant of Microsoft’s whoppers.

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How to get the most from your new laptop

Friday, December 26th, 2008

If Santa’s dropped off a pristine new laptop or netbook on his rounds this year, then you’ll want to make sure you get the very best from it. With many manufacturers choosing to add value to their portables by cramming them with useless crapware and enough attention-seeking free trials to paralyse the average supercomputer, it pays to give your new arrival a bit of a TLC. We’ve thought of a few straightforward steps to make your laptop run smoothly from day one.

Firstly, don’t be shy of removing all that crapware. Much as we all love to have our sparkly new laptops pre-filled with junk, it is worth going over the list of installed programs with a fine toothcomb to weed out the useless from the useful. Do you really need that Microsoft Office 60-day trial, or that 30-day demo of Norton AntiVirus? No, you don’t. And don’t forget to look through each icon in the system tray and ask yourself whether it’s ever going to come in useful. Trim the pointless items from your startup folder, or better still uninstall them completely, and your laptop will start faster than ever.

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Opera: the pacifist in the browser war

Monday, October 13th, 2008

I’ve spent the morning chatting to a few guys from Opera, and a lovelier group of folk you couldn’t hope to meet. In a wide ranging chat over Espressos, we discussed everything from who the best drinkers are among the current crop of browser developers, to the importance of web standards. However, the one thing that really caught my attention was a point raised by Opera’s product manager, Roberto Mateu. 

“There’s places in Eastern Europe, Indonesia, China where huge amounts of people are leap-frogging desktops altogether and going straight on to browsing on phones. In those places 2.5G is going to be around for a while, and it’s about giving them a choice.”

There’s something in this. I spent a year of my life living in China and the culture surrounding the desktop is very different to Europe. Chinese people get incredibly subsidised packages on mobiles, and the network charges are buttons. Computers, on the other hand, remain expensive. As a result there’s a huge swathe of people using their phones to browse, and not touching the desktop at all. When they do, it’s generally in internet cafes and for gaming, meaning the browser doesn’t get a look in. This is now a cultural thing, a way of seeing the desktop computer and its potential uses. It’s also unlikely to change in the near future.

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The NeverEnding Beta (Google, 2004)

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

Remember when Gmail first arrived? Unless you’re unlucky enough to be called John Smith you probably got the username you wanted first time, and without having to add six digits on to the end. Then you experienced the fun of sending invites to your mates so they could join you in your exclusive little club – after all, Gmail was still in beta, they couldn’t have every Tom, Dick and Harry overwhelming it before it hit its stride.

Fast-forward four and half years and guess what? Google Mail, as it’s now known, still has that little BETA label under it, and it shows no sign of buggering off.

Over at the Royal Pingdom they’ve gone through the whole Google catalog and counted the applications that are in beta today. While 22 out of 49 may sound reasonable – Google is always coming up with innovations, after all – when you realise that these include Google Mail, Docs, and Product Search, you have to wonder if Google interprets the word beta in the same way as the rest of us.

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Google says it can keep Chrome on top

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

Chrome may have impressed with its speedy rendering and JavaScript performance, but there’s more where that came from says a Google developer.

Kevin Millikin, one of the team which worked on the V8 JavaScript rendering engine that underpins Chrome, gave a talk at the Google Developers Conference today where he explained that although the code is already pretty unique, there are plenty more avenues they can explore to eke out more performance. (more…)

Why is Chrome so polished?

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

I’ve been using Chrome for a few days now, and something’s been bugging me about it. Nothing immediately obvious, just a vague sense of something being not quite right. Then, as I was tromping into work this morning, munching on bacon sandwich, I finally put my finger on it. What’s bothering me, is that I can’t believe Google made this.

Don’t get me wrong, Google’s muddy size twelves are all over it. The simplistic interface, the lashings of space, and of course, the brilliant search. What’s been bothering me are the flourishes. The transparency when you drag a tab into a window, the fading task bar, the slide away tabs, the cute animations. Chrome is by far and away the prettiest browser doing the rounds, but pretty is not something I associate with Google -which to my mind has always been the most utilitarian company out there.

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Chrome niggles, plus a few secret features…

Friday, September 5th, 2008

Well, we’re into day three and a half of the Chrome experience. And as the initial excitement dies down, we’re starting to notice a few niggles – plus some nice little features that aren’t immediately obvious.

Thankfully, most of our problems are minor bugs, which will hopefully be fixed in short order, either by Google or by website developers. For example, the button for switching between the old and new Facebook interfaces doesn’t currently work in Chrome. And despite its multi-process cleverness, the whole thing grinds to a halt when it tries to launch Adobe Reader (though in fairness, what doesn’t?). (more…)

Google Chrome: first impressions

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

Tonight, I attended a Google briefing on its hastily-launched web browser, Chrome – which is now available for download here.

At first glance, the browser looked extremely impressive. In fact, it’s the only browser I’ve seen that could seriously tempt me away from my snug-fitting default browser, Firefox. However, I must stress that I was only privy to a Google demonstration of the browser before tonight’s 8pm launch, and haven’t actually played with it hands-on myself. For that, you’ll have to wait for PC Pro’s full preview tomorrow.

Here, however, are my early thoughts on what I saw:

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