After a seem­ingly never-ending tor­rent of (GCE level) maths home­work, I’ve had to turn to Microsoft Math for help. I can’t recom­mend it enough as it does everything I need it to do. And for $20 (about £10), it’s hardly going to break the bank. Unfor­tu­nately, it’s not received an update for about 18 months and it doesn’t appear to be updated any time soon but it’s still a solid piece of soft­ware and def­in­itely worth the price. You could even argue that it doesn’t need updating.

With the impend­ing release of Word­Press 2.7, I thought I’d share some of the new fea­tures and styl­ing from the betas.

First thing’s first, the admin pages have seen a big redesign which nicely brings Word­Press up to date with trendy drag-and-drop func­tion­al­ity. The new design has a very clean and simple look yet it packs in lots of inform­a­tion, styl­ishly. It’s not as col­our­ful as 2.6 which wor­ries me in a way as the col­ours they have used look gar­ish and out of place.

What strikes me most is how integ­rated Word­Press now feels. Once you’ve installed it, you may never need to use FTP again. Plug-in installs and updates can be done within the admin inter­face — very easily.

Of course, as with many big ver­sion over­hauls, most plug-ins don’t work and there are quite a few things that I don’t think have been wisely placed. For example, whilst the new nav­ig­a­tion strip is a wel­come change to the old nav­ig­a­tion bar, it is too long and there are quite a few things that I’ll never use. Of course, you can “min­im­ise” it if you wish.

There’s been a big push towards mak­ing the inter­face more cus­tom­is­able and so you are able to remove panes that you don’t like and you can even trans­form it into a single column dis­play just by drag­ging the panes into one single column. So in a sense, it feels a lot more like a desktop application.

Quick­Press allows you to quickly bash out a post — Twit­ter–style — and whilst I prob­ably won’t be using it, I can see many who will. Although, with the lack of cat­egory selec­tion, its poten­tial is ser­i­ously limited.

Added to all these new fea­tures, 2.7 also sees a huge num­ber of secur­ity fixes and gen­eral bug fixes — essen­tially mak­ing this a must-upgrade situation.

Among all the seem­ingly Web 2.0 traits, 2.7 trans­forms Word­Press into more than just a simple blog­ging plat­form. And I dare say that this new ver­sion will be one of the major evol­u­tions of Word­Press so far.

The Digg Recom­mend­a­tion Engine recom­mends new stor­ies that may be of interest to you, com­pared with what you have already Dugg. It finds Dig­gers like you and uses what they have Dugg and recom­mends them to you. When I saw the video, I didn’t think I’d be part of the selec­tion that would get the fea­ture first.

First thoughts are very prom­ising. You need to be a fairly act­ive mem­ber of Digg to keep the recom­mend­a­tions rel­ev­ant, I should add — it grows in strength with stor­ies you Digg. If the com­pat­ib­il­ity between you and other users is low, then chances are you’ll get poor res­ults. For me, though, most recom­mend­a­tions were fairly accur­ate. My com­pat­ib­il­ity per­cent­ages were between 7 % and 13%.

For some­body who rarely uses the Upcom­ing fea­ture, this brings a wel­come change and I’ve already Dugg many stor­ies that I prob­ably wouldn’t have seen oth­er­wise. When the fea­ture hits main­stream, I dare say it’ll be used heav­ily and the recom­mend­a­tions will be very accurate.

The Griffin iTrip SE was pretty much unus­able. The trans­mis­sion is incred­ibly quiet — so quiet, that even at high volumes, you still struggle to hear it. To add to insult, it turns itself off every so often due to “power sav­ing func­tion­al­ity”. If it’s a European model, things are made dif­fi­cult still with a fea­ture to deter pir­ate radio sta­tions by select­ing a ran­dom fre­quency every time the device is turned on. Sadly, it makes life worse for the major­ity that use it for good and I’d hardly say it deters pir­ate radio sta­tions (although why use it if it only has a weak sig­nal anyway?).

There can be good things said about the wide com­pat­ib­il­ity of iPods that it can con­nect to and the abil­ity to still use the head­phone jack whilst trans­mit­ting is an added bonus. How­ever, if you appre­ci­ate music (and by that, I mean listen), you should avoid it completely.