new earth online

It's not often I buy a DVD recommended by Amazon - usually it gets it wrong or it recommends something I've already got. Recently though, it recommended a film by Makoto Shinkai called "The Place Promised in Our Early Days". I was a little dubious about the synopsis for the film, but decided to give it a try anyway.

Often hailed as the new Miyazaki, Makoto Shinkai's "The Place Promised in Our Early Days" is a visual feast that tells the tale of three friends who want to fly a plane they built to their "promised place", but overtime they lose touch with one another as their country is on the brink of a war that only they can stop in order to unite Japan as one...

So, if you're in the mood for watching a film that is more about a character driven storyline then go check out the review.

Review: The Place Promised in Our Early Days

Often hailed as the new Miyazaki, Makoto Shinkai's "The Place Promised in Our Early Days" is a visual feast that tells the tale of three friends who want to fly a plane they built to their "promised place", but overtime they lose touch with one another as their country is on the brink of a war that only they can stop in order to unite Japan as one...

It seems pretty common nowadays for a week to not go by where we don't hear something new about Internet Explorer 8, or a new search idea that someone has had (usually not Microsoft). Yesterday the latest news from the IEBlog was on what IE8 has in store for searching. Now to quote their blog, the following changes have been made:

• Search Suggestions present you with suggested queries as you type which help you compose and research your query.
• Visual Search Suggestions are suggestions which include an image and additional text. These can help you visualize what you are searching for and sometimes even get you the information you need without even leaving the search box.
• The QuickPick menu enables you to easily switch to your secondary, non-default, Search providers allowing you to search with the right provider every time.
• History results, directly accessible from the search box, show you pages you've already visited and save you a click or two.
• Automatic Search Accelerators allow you to send selected text on a webpage to any of your search providers skipping the cumbersome copy and paste step.
• Search query synchronization keeps the search box up to date with your most recent query term even if you search within a webpage instead of the search box. You can quickly edit or redirect your searches.

Not bad really - some of these are important usability fixes. "Search Suggestions" is a very Microsoft approach to auto-completing what you might be searching for, but it is kind of useful to see where it's suggested completions for the term come from I guess (not sure why yet though). What is really cool though is the way this feature works with 3rd party search plugins such as the one from Amazon they demonstrate on their page; just imagine if they'd done this for auto-complete as a thumbnail of the site - would it have been useful? Maybe, but it would be something people should have the choice of turning on or off. Switching to alternative search engines is done using their "QuickPick" menu. History results is basically just part of the search suggestions - I'm not sure they really needed a second bullet point for it, <sarcasm>but more bullet points makes it better doesn't it?!</sarcasm>

What do you think to Microsoft's changes?

When I mentioned yesterday that Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8 was coming soon I had no idea how soon! Microsoft have today released the Beta which means we get to find out how much quicker it is. They have released versions for Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008 in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavours.

According to IEBlog, this beta release is not so focused at developers like the first Beta, but is aimed at the general public as well. From the looks of it they've made changes to the navigation bar that makes it a great deal like the Firefox AwesomeBar, although in Microsoft's case they've stated where it's found the result. Does it really need to do that? If you're typing a URL do you really care where it's auto-completing it from?