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Posts Tagged ‘Front Page’

feature: Why new hard disks might not be much fun for XP users

A rather surprising article hit the front page of the BBC on Tuesday: the next generation of hard disks could cause slowdowns for XP users. Not normally the kind of thing you’d expect to be placed so prominently, but the warning it gives is a worthy one, if timed a bit oddly. The world of hard disks is set to change, and the impact could be severe. In the remarkably conservative world of PC hardware, it’s not often that a 30-year-old convention gets discarded. Even this change has been almost a decade in the making.

The problem is hard disk sectors. A sector is the smallest unit of a hard disk that software can read or write. Even though a file might only be a single byte long, the operating system has to read or write at least 512 bytes to read or write that file.

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Ars 2010 design refresh goes live!

If you’re reading this post in a Web browser, you’ve probably already noticed that something is a little… different. This afternoon we pushed the second half of our Ars Version 5.5 that went live back in December. As you poke around and use the site over the next few days, you should notice a large number of design (and quite a few functional) updates from the way the site used to look and operate.

From the category pages, to author bios, to our comments, there’s not a nook or cranny that’s been left untouched by Aurich Lawson’s nimble Photoshop fingers. You’ve probably seen quite a few new bits already, but I thought it might be helpful if we presented some of the biggest changes side by side with their older counterparts.

Category pages

An old category page “top”

The new category page “top.” Note the cool new category headers, the restyled sidebar links, and the new treatment of articles.

An old category page.

A new category page. Note how we highlight features here like we do on the front page.

Articles

An article in the old design.

A newly styled article. Note how the content starts higher on the page, and the restyled article links in the sidebar.

How the bottom of an article looked in the old design.

The new bottom of an article. Note the new comment bar, and newly minted sharing links, now featuring Facebook and a ton more (including email) in the “Share button.”

The Ars Premier Experience

How an article looks to an Ars Premier Subscriber.

How the front page looks to an Ars Premier Subscriber.

Author pages

An author page on the old design

Author bios on the new design. Coming soon will be additional links for an author, like Twitter pages, personal blog, and more.

Footer

The old crusty footer.

New, super-fresh footer.

Comments

Comments on the old design.

Super sweet new comments. The overall design is, we feel, a lot easier on the eyes. We’re also calling out authors and staff members much better now.

Sidebar

The latest top stories sidebar box in the old design.

The latest top stories box on the new design. Much cleaner look overall. We’ve removed the ability to use this box on the front page, as the whole front page replicates this functionality (and more) now.

Forums

Fresh new icons at the bottom of the forums.

Feedback

As with all our projects and changes here, we highly value the input of our readers. If you have comments or constructive criticism, please feel free to leave them in the comments below. If you prefer to use email, you can send your feedback to civis@arstechnica.com.

Thanks

None of this project would’ve been possible without the work of our Technical Director Kurt Mackey, our Creative Director Aurich Lawson, our HTML/CSS Guru Greg Hines, our Developer and Project Manager Extraordinare Clint Ecker (that’s me), or without the support, direction, and feedback from nearly the entire editorial staff here at Ars Technica.

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NewsCred Relaunches, Looks To Become “Ning For Newspapers”

Back in 2008, we wrote about a startup called NewsCred, which looked to help identify the most trustworthy news sources using a combination of community voting and algorithms. That didn’t really take off, so the company is now heading in a new direction: it wants to help users build their own custom online newspapers in a matter of minutes, offering a professional-looking site tailored to include the content you’re interested in. And using NewsCred premium features, you could potentially create a combination news aggregator/opinion site in the same vein as The Huffington Post.

Using the site is simple: you choose the title of your new virtual paper, then specify which topics you’re interested in following. The site includes a number of categories to choose from, including tech and politics, but you can also generate one based on a keyword if you’d like. Once you’ve chosen your topics, NewsCred will generate a virtual newspaper containing the latest stories from each area. Stories are drawn from popular relevant news sites and blogs, and you can specify a RSS feed if it isn’t in the NewsCred directory. Along the left side of the screen is a list of sections that you can jump through, much as you would in a physical paper. There are a handful of sample sites you can test for yourself, like this one on Mobile News, Celebrity Gossip, and Manchester United.

We’ve seen news aggregators before, but NewsCred has a few options that are less common. For one, the site allows you to write editorials, which can be incorporated into the front page (or the topic specific sections). And the site will soon offer a premium version called NewsCred Pro, which is designed to help you further customize and even monetize the papers you’ve built. With NewsCred Pro, you can host your paper at a personal domain, run your own advertising on the page, eliminate NewsCred branding, and further customize the layout and newspaper template. Together, these features could allow you to build a Huffington Post-style news hub, complete with your own opinion pieces, focused on whatever topic you wanted.

NewsCred has done a nice job putting their custom papers together, and most of the site looks very well done (though I did find some poor results as I searched for topics to add). But the new space it is entering is going to be competitive. For one, homepage sites like iGoogle allow users to include news feed widgets. And there are sites that are more directly competitive, like Meehive, the Kosmix-powered custom news site (covered here). That said, NewsCred may be able to build a business helping users build their own niche news portals, the same way Ning appeals to users building custom social networks.

NewsCred closed a seed round of funding last year from private investors in the US, UK, and Switzerland, as well as “one of the large Silicon Valley VC firms” (the company won’t disclose the names of their investors).

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Meet the 12 Lucky Browsers European IE Users Will Be Shown Next Year

As part of the European Union’s antitrust agreement with Microsoft, the company will be required next year to show a list of alternatives to Internet Explorer to any Windows user with IE installed as their default browser.

Love or hate the government intervention, it’s notable to see which browsers are about to get a big boost in user numbers. The EU says increased viability in the browser market will lead to more competition and more innovation. Here are the companies that will get a first crack at new levels of market viability in Europe.

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On the Front Page – The Best Known 5

The first page of the Choice Screen, which users will be presented with when they first turn on their computers or when they click a link for it later, will feature whichever five browsers have the largest market share over the previous six months. Microsoft will begin showing the page to users in March, 2010.

Right now the top five will include, in the order listed on an EU page about the program:

• Apple Safari – that’s right, even for Windows!
• Google Chrome – so soon. If Chrome can grow so fast, it makes you wonder if government intervention is really needed. Of course, Chrome has been promoted prominently on Google pages. That could become part of the next antitrust issue.
• Microsoft Internet Explorer – gets better all the time, even with dominant market share. Couldn’t the EU just require people to stop using IE 6?
• Mozilla Firefox – the classic that’s most effectively challenged IE. In fact, it’s done so pretty effectively. Too bad Chrome now runs circles around its performance.
• Opera – loved by mobile users, loved by Europeans.

Below the Fold – The Smaller Challengers

Users will be able to scroll the Choice Screen horizontally and see the next 7 most popular browsers at the time. Here’s who the EU lists as those browsers today.

• AOL – chuckle if you will, but AOL is doing a lot of innovative work with social networks and lifestreaming these days.
• Maxthon – is a popular browser in China and has its sights set on beating Opera in Europe.
• K-Meleon – says it’s a super-fast Windows browser built on Gecko, the same layout engine Firefox uses.
• Flock – is a Mozilla-powered browser that integrates a whole lot of social features. It’s got such a great feature set that we recently asked Why don’t you love Flock?
• Avant Browser – says that it, in fact, is the browser that’s the fastest. It includes an in-line RSS reader and a number of other interesting features.
• Sleipnir – is a highly-customizable browser that says it’s big in Japan.

Slim Browser – a Windows browser focused on automating processes.

That’s the field, so far! Do you think this move will foster increased innovation? Do you think it’s needed?

Discuss

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Are We All Going to Die? YouTube Holds Vote on Climate Change Questions

YouTube announced today that in conjunction with CNN the site is now offering an opportunity for users to submit and vote on questions for world leaders to be asked at next week’s UN Climate Change Conference.

It’s the first use of the Digg-like Google Moderator on YouTube and the whole endeavor looks a lot like the Digg Dialogue series with leaders and celebrities. Can events like this draw a significant crowd to hear about the issues? How do crowd-voted questions stack up against questions thought up by expert journalists? Can anything YouTube and CNN do prevent the tides from rising so far that these become academic questions in short order? Stay tuned to find out.

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It’s very nice to see YouTube leveraging its audience to try to prevent the displacement of hundreds of millions of people and the degradation of all life on earth. Hopefully there will be a big ad on the front page pointing to the campaign. It’s not hard to imagine other very large websites doing something similar. It could make a difference!

Discuss

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Week in tech: Apple updates, Windows 7, video games

The week’s biggest front page stories here at Ars were a reminder that people want to know about 1) Apple, 2) Windows 7, and 3) video games. And we’re here to scratch that itch.

Apple Q4 2009 conference call liveblog and fiscal results: Apple’s fourth quarter fiscal results came out and Ars liveblogged the conference call.

The gyrobike wants to save children from scrapes, at a price: Do we need to, quite literally, reinvent the wheel? The CEO of Gyrobike thinks so, and her product could help children learn to ride two-wheel bikes without training wheels—and fewer bumps and bruises. Are parents in the market for a $100 mail-in tire with a gyro inside?

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OfficeMedium: Intranet for the Small Business User

We write a lot about the battles for the enterprise, the merits of Sharepoint and Google’s pitches into the corporate world.

But it’s always good to watch the new players who use existing open-source software to build something pretty quickly that people can use. OfficeMedium is a service that is a fit for the small business user with just enough social features to give it a decent chance of winning over companies looking to establish a community platform for their users.

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OfficeMedium is a web-based, intranet and collaboration software. It’s developed on the Drupal platform so you know it has every possible module available to it for adding on if needed.

Overall, OfficeMedium is a clean, easy to use intranet software. In the new world of the enterprise, every employee will create their own media. OfficeMedium provides an environment to fit with this emerging trend but with enough hooks to satisfy the needs of a business where keeping people in the loop is often mission critical.

This front page has a clean UI with clear demarcation for recent content added or updated; comments; a calendar; a “shoutbox,” for quick messages and a basic activity stream.

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The profiles we looked at have just a few fields for web sites but included a blog, personal and miscellaneous sites that the user may include. We’d add several more fields to this section to reflect the real media presence of the user.

The blog environment has built in notifications that may be sent to users. Comments can be turned on, off or set to read-only.

Overall, the social features are pretty decent but could use some improvement. For instance it’s difficult to find tags that are associated with the user or the company. A nice, robust cloud tag would be excellent to have front and center on every page. The navigation down the right column clearly identifies what the system can do but we wonder if this could be consolidated in some manner to provide a richer activity stream.

We’d also like to see rich media integration. Services like OfficeMedium can be fertile places for training and sharing marketing materials that may include videos. To have a place for them on the service would be quite handy.

But on a basic level – OfficeMedium works. Perhaps what we suggest is beyond what the small business user is looking for in an intranet. But overall, they do a good job of covering the basics. Here’s a summary of what they offer:

• Task and Event Management
• Personal and Group Calendars
• File Sharing, Storage, and Organization
• Contact Management
• Archiving

Further, the service provides the ability to integrate external parties with controls so the outside user can only see what is intended for them. That’s a big plus as more often than before, users work pretty closely online with outside parties.

OfficeMedium is $8 per user per month and $1 ore gigabyte. The first 512 megabytes are free.

Discuss

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Yellow sticky in the sky, are those new iMacs that I spy? Apple Store down 8:30p ET

Filed under: Retail, iMac, Apple

It’s Monday night in America, and that means one thing: football. OK, two things — time for an Apple Store update, and football. The store is down as of 8:30 pm ET (thanks for the tip, Will T.), and with the ongoing rumors of hardware refreshes, combined with a steady stream of tidbits about reduced iMac inventory around the country… well, you might just wake up to a pleasant surprise.

Let us know what you see when it comes back up, mmkay?

P.S. If you haven’t noticed the Deals of the Day ticker on our front page (powered by our friends at Dealmac.com), take a peek — maybe you can get a bargain on a previous-generation Mac.

TUAWYellow sticky in the sky, are those new iMacs that I spy? Apple Store down 8:30p ET originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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