Well, Microsoft finally released it’s beta of the highly anticipated Internet Explorer v7. And the tech community rejoiced let out a collective groan. As exhibit A I’d like to introduce this this screenshot of the new browser UI. As exhibit B I’d like to introduce this screenshot of the RSS feature. Now, there are a few good things in this release.

1. Tabs. Finally.
2. RSS. Finally.
3. Search. Finally.
4. Phishing detection, which I think Microsoft should surely be commended for. Though I think the word “phishing” should be replaced with something less tech-centric that my mom would understand.
5. They’ve added the ability to manage browser add-ons, which evidently wasn’t supported in previous versions.

My problem with this list is I find myself saying “So what?”. Firefox, Opera and Safari have had all of these features, except for phishing detection, for years (NOTE: Firefox has an anti-phishing plugin, but does not ship an anti-phishing feature by default). I find myself wondering if this is too little too late. Either way, Microsoft should ahem be commended for making these changes. They’re late to the party, but at least they came. As can be expected from someone who pretty much hates Microsoft products I do have a few complaints.

1. Why the hell did the move the menu bar below the tabs? They’ve actually gone against their own UI recommendations. They should clearly put this back at the top of the window.
2. No stop or refresh buttons? I don’t need a 500 pixel-wide location bar, but I do need a stop and a refresh button.
3. What the hell is up with the phantom tab to the right of the tab? It opens new tabs, I get that, but it should be turned into a “New Tab” button next to the “X” for closing tabs.
4. I can’t aggregate feeds? I assume this will be fixed before it launches.
5. IE 7 still isn’t acid compliant and still doesn’t fix many of the CSS rendering bugs in IE 6. As someone who makes a living banging his head against various IE bugs I seriously hope they fix this before it’s finally released.

As a web developer I’m pretty pissed that the rendering bugs haven’t been fixed and the browser still isn’t compliant with even CSS1. Meanwhile, CSS3 is being proposed and CSS2 is getting wider support in Safari and Mozilla/Firefox. I would have liked nothing more than IE7 to come out and be fully CSS3 compliant. You would be reading a very different post if it had.

Overall, I give this beta a C. Why? Because Microsoft has done the bare minimum. They haven’t done anything ground breaking here and they didn’t even bother to fix the existing rendering problems. Unlike others, however, I’ll wait to pass my final judgement until the final release has hit the streets, which I think will be around when Windows Vista is released.

Maybe I’m late to the party, but I’ve finally figured out a way to build Smart Playlists in iTunes that include only my favorites from a pool of bands. Since iTunes restricts to you all or any of the search terms you can’t say something like “All of the songs that are rated three stars or more and where performed by any of the following bands: The Thrills, The Killers or Franz Ferdinand.” Well, I’ve figured out how to make this work.

1. Create a new Smarty Playlist and have it match any of the Artist names you want (ie. The Thrills, The Killers and Modest Mouse). Name your new playlist and save it (ie. “Thrilling Killer Mice”).
2. Create another new Smarty Playlist and choose all of the criteria should be met. Set Playlist is insert name of first playlist and then click the plus to add another criteria. Set this second criteria to a range of stars that suits your fancy. Save this new playlist.

It was killing me for quite some time that I couldn’t group bands by their specific sounds and also have the playlist reflect my ratings. This way the first playlist stores all of the songs by all of the like sounding bands and the second playlist reflects songs from that pool of artists that I like.

Of course, the first playlist is for reference only. When you add another album by a band in one of your various pools the first playlist will update and, when you rate songs on the new album, your second playlist will update. It’s kind of like inheritance in iTunes playlists.

I’m sure everyone has pretty much heard about the 10 year old Pakistani girl who passed the Microsoft Certified Application Developer. I’m sure this was no small feat for a 10 year old girl living in a third world country and I’m not going to comment on this. The funny part of the article is that, upon meeting Bill Gates, she read him a poem “celebrating his life.” The guys on Slashdot couldn’t resist speculating what the poem’s contents where. Here are some of their guesses.

There once was a man from Nantucket
Who told all the world to suck it
Selling insecure code
He sure was a chode
And his ethics could not fill a bucket

There once was a programmer named Gates
Who never could get any dates
So he bought MS-DOS
Became his own boss
And now he just masturbates

I stole stuff from Jobs.
And now I own Microsoft.
Holy crap I’m rich.

That’s some funny stuff for sure. By the way, the last one is haiku, so it’s not necessarily supposed to rhyme.

While many might scoff at someone passing a Microsoft developer exam, I have to point out that this girl was 9 when she passed the exam. The most complex thing I had figured out at 9 years of age was my Nintendo. Meanwhile, this girl is programming in C#, which is a strict typed language. Meaning it requires her to know the difference between an int, float, etc. Impressive.