By Jin Nan Goto

Apple announced today that the newest version of it’s Operating system, 10.6 Snow Leopard will be released Friday August 28th 2009. It will come out almost a month before Microsoft’s October 22nd Windows 7 launch. Snow Leopard does not add many new features,  Native support for Microsoft Exchange is one, but most of the changes are under the hood designed to optimize and improve the overall performance.  The upgrade price for those who have the previous version of OS X (Leopard) is only $29 which is dramatically cheaper than the previous Apple OS upgrades. The upgrade for 10.4 Tiger to 10.5 Leopard was $129.  Although for those who are still running 10.4 Tiger the upgrade will be higher ($169 and includes Snow Leopard, iWork 09 and iLife 09) and those with PowerPC processors will not be able to upgrade at all.   Still Snow Leopard seems to be a great addition for your Mac at a very good price.

By Jin Nan Goto

The difficulty with choosing a strong, secure password is remembering that password in the future. Many people overcome the difficulty and inconvenience of remembering by choosing short and easy passwords.  It’s not all that surprising that the most commonly used passwords are ‘123456’ and ‘password’.  Other bad passwords include simple patterns ‘qwerty’, names ‘michael’, common words ‘monkey’ and sports team names ‘redskins’. Before choosing a password you may want to consider checking the list linked below to make sure your password is not one of the “500 worst passwords”. Note: some people think they are very clever when picking crude and inappropriate words as their bad passwords, so don’t follow the link if you are offended by that kind of language.

http://www.whatsmypass.com/category/password-info

The second thing people do to overcome the inconvenience of remembering long passwords is to reuse the password for multiple sites. If your password is compromised on one site, then it is compromised on every other site the password is used.  One of the key vulnerablilties in the recent twitter hack was a actually not a “hack” but a Twitter employee who reused their password.

The Solution:

“It’s ok to write down your passwords”. While you can simply keep a text file with all your passwords on your computer, there is also software that can remember those super-strong passwords for you.  They range from the open source keepass (http://keepass.info/) to commercial solutions such as RoboForm (http://www.roboform.com/) and every modern browser will offer to remember passwords.

By Jin Nan Goto

The lack of way of checking your spelling without having to download a third party plugin has been my biggest beef with Internet Explorer for a long time now. Internet Explorer is the only major browser that does not include tools to help check your spelling.  Firefox, Chrome and Safari all offer inline spellchecking which presents a red line under each misspelled word and offers suggestions when you right click them. IE on the other hand doesn’t offer anything and it’s absence makes it very difficult to use IE7 after using other browsers such as Firefox or Sarari.

I wrote an earlier post about using a plugin called IE7Pro to add inline spellchecking to IE.  However IE7Pro offers a lot of other features such as an ad-blocker and there are some people who simply want to check their spelling and not add another toolbar to their browser.  I found anther plugin that has a much smaller footprint called ieSpell.  ieSpell does not give inline spellchecking but it adds a single button to your toolbar that will check the spelling of your text fields. You can choose between US, UK and Canadian dictionaries and you are able to look up the definitions of words using Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary or Wikipedia. ieSpell is free for commercial use and you can get it at http://www.iespell.com

By Jin Nan Goto

Google’s Chrome blog recently wrote a post about changes coming to Chrome. The latest beta for Google’s web browser came with tweaks to the Javescript engine, allowing it to run javascript even faster (30% improvement for the Sunspider and V8 benchmarks) and added more HTML 5 capabilities.  Also included was a way to add themes to chrome.  The new themes give Chrome’s previous no-frills Spartan look a much more visually appealing appearance.  While not available in the stable release of chrome, you can download the beta to use the new themes. The Beta can be downloaded from http://www.google.com/landing/chrome/beta/. The easiest way to access the themes gallery is to go to https://tools.google.com/chrome/intl/en/themes/index.html.  However you can also open Chrome’s options and select the “Personal Stuff” tab and click the “Get Themes” button.

Google started by releasing 29 themes and plans to add more when Themes are added to the stable version of Chrome.