I thought it would be a nice idea to write a quick post about some of the new features and include a few screenshots.  I have to say, I’m quite excited about the full released so let’s go straight into what’s new.

As you will see above, the Dashboard has undergone a few changes and is, in my opinion, much improved.  Highlighted in red is “Quickpress”, which allows you to write a post straight from the Dashboard homepage.  There is also an Inbox and whilst this feature is not working yet, it seems to be a mix of trackbacks, comments, announcements and potentially even a way of contacting other wordpress site owners.

Above you will see the new “Install plugin” feature – I know that this can be done via a few plugins already, but it’s awsome to have it straight out of the box and linking in to the WordPress Extend site – every install I’ve tried so far has worked but I think they need to improve the search tool slightly as I had a few problems finding what I was after.. so much easier than booting up an FTP client!

I was a little disappointed with the speed of the admin interface until I saw this beauty.. Makes the speed in uploading tons faster than in version 2.6.

The media library is a fairly new feature and this is now under “content” – it seems to allow commenting on actual images/videos/files but i’ve not played with this feature too much yet.

A few things have changed in writing a post itself – there is a new settings field that allows you to change some of the display options in the post and you can also make posts “sticky” to appear at the top of your blog, useful for people who use WordPress as a CMS or for large updates / intro text.  You can now also move the “widgets” around in the write post page, though I’m not sure why you’d really want to do this.

Comment threading (and reply to comments) will be installed as default and you can read about all the other planned changes on the wordpress site.

It’s looking good – whilst I wouldn’t recommend installing it on a live site I’ll probably keep it going on here and update it every week or so to look out for new changes.

Google announced just yesterday that they were launching their own browser and just a day later the beta is avaliable. 

I’ve been playing with it all night and I have to say, I’m quite impressed.  There is still along way to go (time for some plugins, I think), but here are a few of the features:

• Clean UI – Tabular navigation from above the address bar makes sense and the drag and drop functionality is neat
• Homepage – The homepage is neat, it allows you to see your most visited sites, latest bookmarks, recently closed tabs and other things that should help with your browsing experience
• Single Address bar – No seperate search box and fast searching on sites other than google too.
• Ability to create “apps” on your desktop, letting you open stuff like Gmail in it’s own window quickly and effecantly without having to open the browser itself
• Fast browsing – seems much quicker than Firefox and IE (perhaps due to the lack of plugins)
• New Java tools – making javascript and applets pretty quick
• Tab processes – each tab has it’s own process so if one of the sites your visiting is causing problems it doesn’t crash your whole browsing session

I’m sure there are plenty of others too – it runs using Webkit (Safari) so it would be a good idea to download it and make sure your sites render OK, which it should if it works in Firefox and IE!