It seems that not having to login when you start your PC is pretty important to everyone. I've received quite a lot of feedback asking me to change the login model of the Gadget.

So (listening to you) in the new version (available now at Live Gallery) you will have to login just once and after that your session will be persisted even if you shut down your PC. I've also made some improvements on the way the gadget handles no Internet connection (so no JavaScript error messages from now on ;-)).

As for some problems regarding the gadget crashes mentioned earlier, these are not actually crashes. When you have a large number of Data coming down from Facebook the gadget may seem unresponsive but it's actually working, downloading and rendering data. You will have to wait a while (how much depends on the size of your data e.g. number of friends, groups etc.) to get the results rendered.

Unfortunately the Facebook API doesn't support paging, thus all the data have to be downloaded when you issue a request. So there is not much I can do with the downloading part but I can render only a portion of the data, thus saving some time from the rendering. Note that the time saved is actually going to be very small (I believe that you won't even notice the difference) as most of the time is spent for downloading data.

If this is a problem most of you have then I might even consider cutting off the set of data presented on those lists and only show the bare minimum, to make the gadget faster. In the friends list that would mean showing only the names of your friends for example (no photos etc.).

What do you think?

Microsoft announced a bunch of cool new features in Silverlight 2, in this year's Mix  conference. One of the most exciting new features is the Deep Zoom one.

Deep Zoom allows users to explore collections of super high resolution imagery, from a 2 or 3 megapixel shot from a digital camera to gigapixel scans of museum pieces, all without waiting for huge file downloads.  The simple zooming interface allows users to explore entire collections down to specific details in extreme close-up, all with fantastic performance and smooth transitions.

What you probably won't know (at least I didn't ;-) till today) is that there is a hosted Deep Zoom service where you could try out this new technology. So if you haven't tried it yet I strongly urge you to give it a try, I did and am pretty excited about it.

I like trying new software, so I usually install and try all betas I find interesting. Thus I've downloaded and installed IE8, without no second thoughts, as soon as it was announced at this year's Mix conference.

What I haven't thought was that since I had previously installed Safari beta 3 and Firefox 3 beta 3 I would end up not having an RTM browser installed on my machine. And although all of them seem to work in general, they all do have a few bugs and quirks that make me switch from one to another just to access a particular site :-(.

Some of the IE8 problems I have identified so far are:

• Popups won't show, although a new IE process is spawned when I click the corresponding link. No error message is displayed.
• When I open a new tab and type a new URL on the address bar, the site opens on yet another new tab leaving the one I've started blank.
• Rendering issues. Even with the Emulate IE7 mode enabled I still don't have the rendering I had with IE7.
• Crashing issues. Occasionally the browser crashes, leaving the process running though.

Even so, I really love the work IE team made for IE8 with the Activities, the Web Slices, the speed, standards compliance and developer tools that they introduced and I'm pretty excited that I'm able to start experimenting and developing for IE8. I really look forward for the next public release ;-).

Still I wouldn't recommend installing it (that is if you're not immediately involved to web development) just yet, as there are issues that may cause you problems.