Productivity Portfolio

One of the other tech support bombshells came from PayPal. According to a story on the Wall Street Journal blog, PayPal will start blocking transactions for certain browsers because they don’t have anti-phishing measures. People assumed that meant Apple’s Safari browser which also works on Windows. That’s not the case. PayPal’s intent is to stop people from using old configurations like IE 4.x on a Windows 98 machine. Looking at the past 30 days of traffic for this site, this change would impact 502 readers. If your software is this old, you’re running a significant security risk and should upgrade.

If you like RSS as much as I do, but have been looking for an Outlook solution, another solutions has arrived. According to a story on ReadWriteWeb, NewsGator has released a new product called Inbox 3.0. The product page indicates this free RSS program works with Outlook 2000 and above. If you’re not familiar with NewsGator, they are a heavyweight in RSS and made a big splash when they started giving away their products. I’ve not used this product, but have used their stand-alone product called FeedDemon which is a stellar product. The one thing I don’t see mentioned is whether the feed info has a separate database. Another Outlook option to look at is Attensa.

Many people enjoy the simplicity of capsulated news from services like Google News and Yahoo! News. I’m enjoying both. There’s another contender in the field, Microsoft. I was pleasantly surprised with their news offering and suggest you check out Live Search News. I wonder if I could coax their news department into writing Vista error messages.

Mitch Wagner of Information Week had a good article on how to use Google Street View. If you’re not familiar with “street view” this is the view on Google maps where you can see photo images as opposed to the nice maps. The technology is new and the photos tend to be more current than the satellite view for metropolitan areas. There is even a special bonus at the end of the article. And if you don’t like clicking through the short pages, click the “Print this page” icon at the top of the article to read it on one page.

And speaking of streets, both Microsoft and Google upped the ante on providing traffic information. This is good news for commuters as both sites added some nice features. First, Microsoft announced “Clearflow” that provides alternate routes based on real time traffic analysis. When you select Directions, you now have another option for “Choose route based on traffic”. This option will try to steer you around congestion by using alternate paths. To the best of my knowledge these are legitimate detours unlike the time some friends of mine had a local cop direct people into their High School car wash.

Not to be outdone, Google decided to saunter in later in the week. One wonders if they just program these features in advance and release them at opportune times. When you use Google Maps, they provide another option if you click the Traffic button on the map. A “change” link now appears which allows you enter to another day and time for the traffic analysis. While you can see the color coding change for the route, it doesn’t indicate an alternate route. In other words, you can see speed changes, but I don’t see my driving directions change. I just figure I’m closer to the upper range Google shows for the drive time.

Till next week, drive safely and update your systems.