Adobe Flash Player 28

As Adobe Flash Player is quite notorious for being so much vulnerable in terms of security issues, it appears that it will be discontinued sometime 2 years later so we still have some time to make use of it.
The only reasons to make use of Adobe Flash Player again is probably Flash games as many of the web video players in video sharing sites like YouTube, Nico Nico Douga, etc. are going towards HTML5 for superior security although the NND video player in HTML5 lacks the foreign comments unless you choose a different region for your account.
Last year, I had a tons of gameplay videos of some of the Flash games released in recent times but the discontinuation of Flash Player is something we shouldn't worry about.

Adobe Flash security controversy

The criticism has been pushing Adobe away in a serious chain of sadness and disgrace like they're lazy enough to solve all of that security criticism in their products. So, to me, it may look like Adobe is seriously idiotic when it comes to cyber-security importance. Of course, they can't be as stupid as some US ISPs out there for purposing invading their customers' privacy on their accord like it's a sign of betrayal for those who are seeking proper privacy.
The recent reason on why Adobe Flash would be blocked in all versions of Firefox including Facebook and YouTube was obviously involving the security exploit implemented by The Hacking Team. Maybe, there should be a serious investigation on The Hacking Team after their illegal stuffs were completely compromised like it already opened doors to more illegal spying bullshit and more cyber-criminals who want to get their hands on those leaked tools for whatever purposes they want without caring for anything else.
However, the blockage of Adobe Flash may involve another controversy like many people need to watch videos or play social games on Facebook. It may be a problem there but for videos, Facebook can straight away use the HTML 5 technology like what YouTube already uses. Hell, even Twitter needs to switch to HTML 5 for videos as well.
So, do you put the blame on Adobe, The Hacking Team or perhaps both for how extremely weak the Adobe Flash security is? It is likely that you may put the blame on Adobe for that serious weakness. So what, is our computer completely infected because of that?

Game Maker Studio for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8

Game Maker Studio may seem to be multi-platform export compatible and Windows 8, Windows Phone and Steam versions are the next. But for Windows 8, it is going to be a confusing mix when it comes to games and apps used on it.  There may be games that will work on tablet only which is one bullshit factor as they are supposed to have support for multiple controls such as touch, mouse and keyboard, not touch only. Suppose that there’s a racing game to be run on Windows 8, the control concept should support keyboard, game controller and tablet controls which may involve touch and device tilting. That’s how the fairness should be when it comes to Metro games on Windows 8. If that’s the case for Game Maker Studio, games made for tablets and smartphones should have exact controls when ported to these platforms but Windows 8 is going to be an exception, they should support other controls besides touch because it is going to be a waste of people’s money if the games support like one control type only and not the others so what’s the point of getting those anyway? For Windows Phone 8 devices, the resolutions can be identical to certain Android devices but not all Windows Phone 8 devices support that high resolution so the development may be less difficult with common resolutions and less time consuming. But for IOS devices, it is obvious that porting from IOS to Android may take you more time due to different resolutions between the two OSes. For Windows 8 games ported from Android or Windows Phone 8 with 720P as the target resolution, you may expect the graphics to be kind of blur because the tablet resolutions may be somewhat higher than 720P. At least porting HD games from Ipad to Windows 8 may be a little bit challenging due to the fact that Windows 8 tablets are in widescreen. It’s the same deal for Android tablets when porting games from Ipad to Android.

However, how about the games that are going to be developed for all of these mentioned tablet and smartphone platforms? This can make the simultaneous development more challenging and time consuming because you may have to divide the same game into multiple versions. On the computer, the resolution doesn’t matter as much but you may have to tell the resolution requirement under System Requirements for whatever games you have made. If the computer is running the game at lower resolution than the game’s resolution, I can guess that there will be signs of pixel loss but I don’t know if this can pose more problems for running the Game Maker games like that. It’s kind of worse when running in Window Mode because you’re not able to see other parts of the game screen unless the screen resolution is set to the one higher than the game’s resolution.

Even better with Game Maker Studio is that the games can also be made for HTML5 in which games can be played online just like playing Adobe Flash games on the net.

So, you’ve known that Windows 8 had hit RTM stage but the development tool for Windows 8 will soon be out on the Windows Store under Desktop Store. The best platform for developing games with Game Maker Studio will be on the computers and if you want to test your creations that are simply made for tablets, smartphones or both, you can simply export to those platforms and then test it from there.

New file formats in Office 15

Ever since Office 2k7, there have been newer file formats such as the XML version of the current Office file formats which are the file extensions as we already know of but with the letter x added at the end to call them the new file formats for Office 2k7 but with Office 15, there are newer compatibilities for other file formats as well like editing PDF files directly in new Microsoft Word 15. But before Office 15 existed with such compatibility, there are other PDF EDITOR software that allow you to do so in case Adobe Reader itself is not enough. However, there are some flaws in Microsoft Word 15 Customer Preview. First, you cannot update the existing PDF files you've edited, perhaps some things are not compatible with the PDF reader software as one of the assumed reasons but instead, you have to save the edited PDF file under the new PDF file or the new file in other format. Hell, in Office 2k7 and above, you can export your documents to PDF file format although I had never attempted such an opportunity like that before before Office 15 existed with improved opportunity and ability for you to amend the existing PDF files.
Lastly, there will be more file format compatbilities for Office 15 as well as newer functionalities for various Office programs. Amend the PDF files as you like in Word 15 but then, Microsoft Word is supposed to be the word processing software. Yes, there are hidden capabilities of Office programs but I guess that we're already figuring out ourselves.

Office Store

Wow, even more apps to try out like I'm always looking for new apps I want to obtain from Windows Store. Here comes Office Store where you can obtain the add-on apps for the respective Office programs which may be easier than finding those add-ons on the net to install them manually which is NOT easy.
For Excel's add-on apps, there are some interesting examples like the Bubbles Chart and Medal Tracker. What an opportunity for Microsoft to add the Medal Tracker just because the Olympics is still on-going until August 12th, huh. And speaking of Olympics this year, Google has implemented the interesting mini-games doodles that are the parts of it. The first game reminded us of Track & Field by Konami but the controls were kind of weird that I had to figure out and eventually, I figured out that you're supposed to tap both the left and right arrows simultaneously as fast as you can while using Space key to jump. You have to do this without knocking down any single one hurdle as doing so can slow you down and take more time. For Medal Tracker, this is one great opportunity for you to try and record down the scores which may be kind of easy but the difficulty of entering these may depend on the games. For Bubbles Chart which is like making a chart mixed with Science. It's a new chart but it's an external one. Lastly is the Bing Maps and you can use that to visualize the set of data geographically. These apps are kind of unique to use in Excel but for me, I'm gonna try out the Bubbles Chart after this blog post one day.
In the preview builds, apps for Office so far are available for Word, Excel, Project and Outlook so the final version will include support for PowerPoint. Will that give me the best opportunity for further multimedia work using those addons for PowerPoint? Who knows? Maybe in the future when I have found the apps that are suitable for me to use in the new PowerPoint.
The apps are separate in terms of process but they can take up extra resources and extra start-up time. So the more add-ons you install, the longer the Office program takes to start but it's best to use the add-ons you use regularly with the other add-ons turned off to save time. If the external apps crash like Adobe Flash crashing on the browser which may be irritating, it seems that Office programs are not affected. You can restart the apps that have already crashed but then, there must be improvements to the apps to prevent future crashes. Another thing is that, if you insert stuffs from those apps into the document, the app you use to insert will be activated. Or when you open the document that contains the app objects, the apps whose stuffs are inserted will be activated as well.
So there you have it, the new kinds of add-ons which are the Office Apps for Office 15 only. You can try to backport the stuffs inserted using those apps into Office 2k10 by firstly screen-shooting the document and then selecting the app parts you want to insert into the document that is backwards compatible. I bet that it's an imaginative trick you can try to show off in the meeting presentations like your colleagues will be like, what the hell is up with these and how did you insert those and where did you get those from. Depending on the opinion, the apps may be cool or perhaps unnecessary enhancements to the documents.

MegaTex Electronics and IT Show

IT shows are finally back at Singapore Expo and I couldn't even wait to attend it! Other than the newer computers from the respective brands, there happened to have the new Smart TV technology which will happen to be applied in the future. Last time, it was too tedious having to enter in the text without the keyboard support on TV but now, with the use of compatible wireless keyboards, you are able to interact with the TV easily. However, it seems that the Samsung TV Web Browser can't allow you to open multiple pages in multiple tabs compared to LG TV Web Browser which allows you to do so. One more thing from Samsung was that, I was told about the upcoming feature that will allow you to see two different screens from one TV if you wear the glass but I don't know if this feature is going to work although wearing 3D glasses removes the blurry sort of stereoscopic effect as if this kind of technology is like the privacy sort of thing that tries to blur the shit out of what's going on. Furthermore, there's only Flash support for LG and Samsung TV web browsers like there's nothing else. You can use search engine, social networking, watch videos on video sharing sites as long as they use Flash technology. Unfortunately, there's no way for you to patch the software on the TV because I think it is part of the TV firmware that updating it can be kind of risky. I don't know if Sony and LG Smart TVs will allow this kind of update to happen as I already talked to one of the Samsung staffs. Speaking of wireless keyboard, I tried one to interact with the Samsung TV but the trackball didn't work at first on me that I asked someone for help. However, the keyboard I tried was NOT from Samsung but rather, the third-party wireless keyboard which can work on the computer and Smart TV.
For prices of those TVs, those without 3D support are less expensive like they range from $350 to $2000. That is like buying a smartphone, tablet or a computer which is less than $1000.
Other discoveries included the Dell Alienware computers which have futuristic visuals and are optimized for gaming, more wireless keyboards as well as the Western Digital Live TV device which allows you to watch YouTube videos in addition to viewing Facebook contents for instance. That cost like $150 estimated. There's also the hand gesture for some Samsung Smart TVs similar to Kinect but because some device was not enabled yet, I wasn't able to make that feature work.
So if you're buying those TVs just because of new technology or perhaps they are damn new, you can try purchasing one to replace the non-Smart TV sitting in your home for technology upgrade.

Read Mode in Word 15

This one, there's not much to say but at least we can see more of the features such as reading one or two pages at a time which is sort of like reading PDF files in Adobe Reader in one page or multiple page modes. Previously, you can see two pages in Print Layout in Microsoft Word but then, things are already too small that they are not optimized for tablet devices.
In addition to editing stuff in Full Screen Reading Mode, you can scroll the documents horizontally or vertically depending on the number of pages to be viewed on screen at the same time. In addition, the Navigation Pane similar to Adobe Reader allows you to choose which page you want. Interestingly enough, even if the tablet is rotated to Vertical Mode, the full screen reading is still there but in vertical mode of course which is kind of useful for using Microsoft Office for tablets in vertical mode.
Plus, you can tap on the specialized objects such as tablets, charts, shapes and even groups of objects but while this is useful for reading stuffs, it is still not easy to edit like that on the tablets. And that is where the flaw comes in for Microsoft Word for tablets.
Lastly, in case you get stuck on certain words and meanings you don't even know, there's the Reference Tools where you can find out the definition of the specific word. You can also search on Bing within the application as well as to translation using Bing Translation Tool. This allows you to find out more while reading the premises of the documents. Another feature that is rarely used is the Reviewing Tools which may consist of comments and Simple Markups you've put in the documents. Be warned, there may still be stupid comments invading on popular videos like that on the internet so make sure that the documents made in Word are not invaded with these.

Office in the Cloud

Finally, Office 15 was out this month and I had the opportunity to try it. There are more features than in Office 14 and some of the features are like using Adobe products on the Mac such as zooming in and out in PowerPoint 15. In slide show view, you can zoom in and out using the zooming feature in case people can't even see what was written on the slides which may be useful but during the presentation, it may be time consuming so you need to plan the presentation properly in order to save time. Other new features include the smooth transitions and animations everywhere in Office 15 software and I was like, wow, things are impressive like that. Since Office 15 is using Cloud Technology, there will be an opportunity to store your documents to Skydrive in addition to connecting your Microsoft account to various sites such as social networking sites like I already connected my Windows Live account to. Also, you can insert online stuffs in addition to inserting the stuff stored on your hard disk. When you install Office 15, you also get to see the video as shown on YouTube I already watched. Unfortunately, it displayed the prototype Office 15 logo at the video's end which is likely to be a flaw but Microsoft is still working all along. Other than using Skydrive, you can also use SharePoint to store your Office documents and thanks to Cloud Technology, you're also able to use your Office documents stored on your Skydrive on mobile devices as long as there's an internet connection as well as the Skydrive and Office apps installed. Best of all, you can share your documents to social networking websites but then there was already an app from Facebook called Docs in which you can store your Office documents there and start sharing. Man, what's the freaking point of that? Not all people take a shit on the newer prototype technology.
If you have your Office account which is also the Hotmail account, you can access your Office documents at the Office Preview website. It's similar to viewing your Office documents at Skydrive website but I guess this is much easier than using Skydrive to locate your documents.
Lastly, there's also the Office 365 Home Premium for home use. At least, I was excited for new technology like this and it seemed that Microsoft decided to expand the Office 365 into different editions. However, those new editions are under Customer Preview as well. Unfortunately, there's one bastard here. The preview product will expire after months after the product has reached the final stage that I have to stick on using Office 2k10.

Windows 8 RP Part Two with Upgrade Offer

It seems that they are not finished yet and there is more to come after Windows 8 Release Preview release.

So check out the new stuffs and improvements such as more personalization options for the Start Screen, improved multi-monitor support, and new Family Safety features to name a few. Other improvements include Mail, Photos and People apps and we can notice Bing-powered Travel, News and Sports apps. Nah, I’m not using the Bing-powered Travel, News and Sports by the way as I’ve no interest on them so all is left is to use the Bing Search and Bing Weather. IE10 also has new capabilities like Adobe Flash Player and Do Not Track set to on by default.

Ha, it looks like we’re fucking excited and curious in using Windows 8 Release Preview and it’s the same for some of my ex-college classmates. Starting from June 2nd, Microsoft will roll out Windows Upgrade Offer in 131 markets. Consumers who have purchased eligible Windows 7 PCs that are preinstalled with Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional or Ultimate and include a matching and valid OEM COA through January 31 next year will be able to upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for $14.99 which will be redeemable when Windows 8 is generally available. When the consumers register for the Windows Upgrade Offer, they will be able to download Windows 8 Pro starting the day it’s made RTM and the upgrade comes with 90 days of support from Microsoft. I’m already trying out Windows 8 RP on my old computer.

One bonus thing is that if you have a mouse or keyboard from Microsoft Hardware, you’re suggested to try Microsoft Device Center Beta. Device Center allows you to easily customize your mouse and keyboard experience in Windows 8 and is compatible with Windows 8 RP. It also helps bring the touch experience to your mouse within Windows 8 RP as well if you have an Explorer Touch Mouse and Touch Mouse. Microsoft Hardware will have more details to share regarding their Touch Portfolio of products sometime around Windows 8 RTM.

Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 RP

They might have built the experience by extending IE’s underlying architecture to provide a fast, fully hardware-accelerated browsing engine with strong security and support for HTML5 and other web standards. The browser may provide the best protection from malicious software on the web while providing convenient control over your online privacy. How true this can be when it comes to Windows 8 tablets and on ARM devices? If they are supposed not to have desktop support, then there’s still sign of virus infection that targets the desktop mode files which may contain both the core of the Metro and desktop experiences. Perhaps, the Metro style browsing experience is the best way to browse on the touch screen devices. Metro style browsing offers you a full-screen ,immersive site experience like other browsers on the tablet devices except that this one’s completely chrome-less. Using the Charms bar, you can share and print stuff and search for various stuff you want to look for but what’s missing though, is the bookmarks for Metro edition. In other tablet OSes, their web browsers surely have the bookmark management. Sure, you can search by text as well as to share something and switch the tabs. Eventually, the fast speed is still focused on the SSD devices and other computers that are even better than mine to be frank.

The Release Preview version of IE10 Metro edition includes its own Adobe Flash Player Metro version. How the heck did Adobe collaborate with Microsoft like that? With Flash Player on IE10 Metro, this won’t be a problem accessing certain Flash stuff so it’s kind of fair enough just like using other tablet devices. So sites like YouTube may still have best experience with Flash as watching videos like that in HTML5 mode is kind of bitchy in terms of the interaction and there’s still delay whatsoever. Can IE10 Metro edition get around the problem for HTML5 mode of YouTube? In fact, the Javascript is also the pain in the ass like things refuse to work when clicking on the Javascript links on the browsers.

What about copying some stuff from IE10 Metro browser on the tablet? I haven’t seen this working like that as I’m using Windows 8 on my laptop. Can you copy the picture, whole paragraph, whole sentence, certain words or perhaps, parts of the screen on the Windows 8 tablet? If this kind of copying is there, good for the company. Otherwise, it’s a serious shame on Microsoft. There will be AutoCorrect when you enter stuff on the browser.

There are certain things like double tapping to zoom in and out and toggling full screen on and off on the browser. For toggling full screen on and off by double tapping, this is in Release Preview when focusing on HTML5 video.

The SmartScreen and InPrivate browsing are still there but the other parts of security are missing in IE10 Metro version. If those from the desktop version are put in Metro version, then the Metro version will be as secure as I can guess. What’s new in Release Preview is that there will be Paste and Go command for fast navigation to copied URLs or search terms on the clipboard. The address bar supports the progress indicator when the page is loading and includes indicators for site compatibility and tracking protection. The navigation bar includes commands for Find On Page, and Open in IE on the desktop mode which is supposed to be unnecessary for tablets. Opening IE desktop edition is for compatibility with sites that require legacy plug-in technologies, or for when you are using desktop tools and wish to continue in your existing workflows. Perhaps not all plugins are likely to work correctly on desktop web browsers.

Then there comes a disadvantage though for Release Preview version, the page flip which flips through the entire webpage which is not a good thing. It should be in the Reader app, not the web browser because the PDF files are like virtual books on the Kindle and Ipad where you can flick left and right to flip pages and flipping pages like that on the web is a lousy idea. Imagine that you’re reading articles on the news or blogs and you see some navigations on the top side, left side and right side of the web and you flip like that to see the next article. That is freaking awkward and there’s no flipping on this blog either as we’re already moving on to abstract/futuristic sort of blog design on this blog. You know, transitioning to next tabs may be worth it. After all, the article section is vertical so is the rest of the blog layout.

Like the desktop version of IE10, you can clean up the tabs in the Metro version. I guess this closes the other tabs leaving the current tab intact.

IE10 takes a clean, “low nag” approach to notifications. All alerts and user prompts come through a notification bar at the bottom of the screen. It uses the Metro style “fly-outs” when more interaction is needed. This is like the Open With Metro edition when you want to use which app to open which type of file like opening PNG files with Photos app for instance. Notification bars automatically dismiss as appropriate. Downloads in the Metro style browser protect you from malicious software via SmartScreen’s Application Reputation similar to the desktop edition. The Release Preview adds support for “pop-up” windows as background tabs in the Metro style experience.

In Release Preview, the developers can provide higher resolution PNG file site icon and specify the tile background color. With IE10, sites can provide background notifications for new messages and other account activity on the website. The site can also program additional commands that appear in IE’s navigation bar in a touch-friendly way, the same way that sites can program jumplists for desktop edition.

Oh man, if only there’s a trademark button about linking to specific Metro apps at Windows Store just like linking to specific IOS app at the ITunes App Store. What this mean is that if you’ve stumbled upon Wordpress App for Windows 8, you can click on the button that brings you to Windows Store and goes directly to Wordpress App just like clicking on the button that goes to ITunes App Store. Moreover, you’re going to need ITunes client in order to download apps using your computer. However, an inaccurate thing they did was to add Get App For This Site command from the menu that has Find On Page and View On The Desktop. That sounds kind of bullshit not because Windows 8 isn’t still finalized yet.

Now, for Charms that cooperate with IE10, the Search charm is an optional way to search stuff on the net elsewhere the Devices charm can allow you to print, project and play to external device.

Next, IE10 offers the same industry leading security, privacy and reliability features, building on IE9’s SmartScreen, XSS filtering, Application Reputation, InPrivate Browsing, Tracking Protection and Hang Detection and Recovery. Well, it seems that those features on the desktop edition still behave like those on IE9 as well like there’s no difference whatsoever when the browser crashes for example. For Metro version, I don’t know the actual difference. In addition, IE10 makes the security and privacy more convenient with Enhanced Protected Mode for better isolation of website content in each tab, and new in RP is one simple setting for sending the Do Not Track signal to websites. The Do Not Track signal may be damn useful as if nobody can mess with you like that but if you’re using other browsers or perhaps Windows 7 and below, who knows?

Summary of improvements from CP to RP version

• Support for full-screen HTML5 video, including double tap that toggles full screen on and off.
• Support for Flash in Metro IE10
• Context menu for Save Image and Paste and Go
• Support for High-Res image for pinned sites tile in Start Screen. Pinned sites on Start Screen? Well, that’s not considered bookmarks like that by the way
• Integrated network troubleshooting tools in Metro style IE
• Auto-complete drop down in Metro style IE
• Do Not Track setting for RP version

Overall, this may seem to be quite okay for desktop and laptop users but for tablet users, it’s like a freaking disappointment due to the fact that there’s not enough good work done and therefore, the browser is kind of slightly below average for tablet users. It was average for CP version for tablet users but hopefully, Microsoft should try even harder or there will be scolding for sure for not putting up enough finalized resources on the web browser. It’s okay for desktop and laptop users but it’s not for tablet users. So the Metro version of IE10 RP for tablet users will be more like IE10 Cloud Release instead.

Windows 8 Release Preview

The Consumer Preview version in my computer is already struggling with dis-functionality like hell due to some infection or perhaps some deep OS modification with the tools that allow you to customize the Start Screen and the Charms Bar. For the Start Screen customization, it’s basically the font colors, tile colors, colors for the bottom bar and the right bar which is kind of like Settings bar or something and the custom backgrounds while the Charms Bar customizer tool allows you to have custom icons in addition to custom bar colors. What a cool thing to allow custom icons but for the Start button, it’s kind of unfortunately inaccurate by the way. Another struggle is the serious delay when the incorrect password is entered. This can affect the tablet devices. It’s a shame on Microsoft for such laziness like this as it is already an annoying technical problem.

The Release Preview is the final pre-release and its Internet Explorer 10 Metro edition has the Flash support. However, the real on-going bastard is that we still can’t move the freaking tabs in Metro edition. Other features in Internet Explorer 10 Metro edition are apparently missing compared to the Desktop edition such as managing Bookmarks for example. I mean in other smartphones devices’ web browsers like Safari for IOS, you can manage bookmarks but I don’t know if you can move tabs in Ipad version. The Skydrive Metro app is sort of manageable but the automatic synchronization can surely happen in Desktop edition although the desktop version is still in beta phase by the way. In addition, there are more Metro apps in stores for us at Windows Store but certain Xbox Live games on Windows 8 are unfortunately not in Release Preview Windows Store. Instead, they are under Xbox Live for Windows 8 Marketplace which will be coming in final version of Windows 8 or something.

Now, for Xbox Live service on Windows 8 Release Preview, I finally manage to get connected but even then, I’m still able to use my Xbox 360 console to view pictures, music and videos from my computer easily through these Metro apps on the Dashboard compared to Windows Media Center whose controls on the console are way too delayed.