News Archives - Page 30 of 39 - MIDAS - Room Booking System

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Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7… is sort of here!

4 minute read time · Updated February 12, 2025 · First published November 13, 2012

Download Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 It’s not often that Microsoft release a major new version of their Internet Explorer browser. In fact, in the past three years, there had only been two major updates to Internet Explorer (8 and 9). Compare that with other browser developers, such as Mozilla. In the same period, Mozilla released no fewer than 13 major updates to their Firefox browser (4 – 16). Also in the same period Google have introduced the world to their increasingly popular Chrome Browser. To date, Google have released 23 major updates to Chrome!

So there’s no question that Microsoft’s development of their flagship browser has been lackluster in recent years to say the least. However, that may soon be set to change with the surprise departure today of Microsoft’s Head of Windows, Steven Sinofsky. In a press release by Microsoft, CEO Steve Ballmer says:

“I am grateful for the many years of work that Steven has contributed to the company. The products and services we have delivered to the market in the past few months mark the launch of a new era at Microsoft…. To continue this success it is imperative that we continue to drive alignment across all Microsoft teams, and have more integrated and rapid development cycles for our offerings”
Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft

Rapid Development Cycles

Hopefully this commitment to “rapid development cycles” will mean that in the near future Internet Explorer will start being updated on a more regular basis. Years between updates really isn’t acceptable in this day and age. Especially when competing developers are pushing out major browser updates every few months, if not every few weeks!

Anyway, back to Internet Explorer 10; Microsoft first released an “IE10 Platform Preview” on 12 April 2011. This allowed developers and Windows 7 users alike to get a glimpse of what’s to come in Internet Explorer 10. A second platform preview for IE10 was released shortly after… and then… nothing!

Then, when the developer previews of Windows 8 began to emerge, Internet Explorer 10 made a reappearance. Sadly, again only in “preview” form, but notably this time, Windows 7 users were left out of the loop. Microsoft wouldn’t allow these subsequent “previews” of IE10 to run on anything other than Windows 8. This decision left many developers who didn’t have access to Windows 8 developer previews frustrated as they were unable to check that their web apps/sites worked correctly with IE10.

The “final” version of Internet Explorer 10 (10.0.9200.16384) then came bundled with Windows 8 when Microsoft’s new operating system was released to manufacturers (RTM) on 26th October 2012. However, several weeks later and since the launch of Windows 8, IE10 still continues to elude Windows 7 users.

…until today! …well, kind of!

Internet Explorer 10 availability

Today, Microsoft have made Internet Explorer 10 available to Windows 7 users!! Hang on, hold your horses! …it’s another “preview” only! A “Release Preview” to give it its proper title (Version: 10.0.9200.16438), which users can download and install alongside their existing IE9 installation.

You can download Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 here:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/downloads/ie-10/worldwide-languages

Internet Explorer 10 build 10.0.9200.16438 This “Release Preview” requires that you have at least Service Pack 1 (SP1) of Windows 7 installed. Alternatively, you can also install this Release Preview if running Windows Server 2008 R2 (SP1) or Windows Home Server (WHS) 2011 too!!

There’s still no word on when a “final” release of IE10 will become available to Windows 7 users (via the usual Windows Update channel). But given that this isn’t just a “preview” but a “release preview” suggests a final release isn’t too far behind! The only clue we have from Microsoft is that “final availability to follow as we collect developer and customer feedback”

Should you wait for a “final” release of IE10 to become available for Windows 7, or should you download this latest “preview” now?

If you’re an avid Internet Explorer user, and have never tried one of the other browser offerings available today, the chances are you’re somewhat stuck in the past with your browsing experience in Internet Explorer 9. In which case, we think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with just how much better your web apps and favorite websites look and function in IE10 over IE9. So even though this is a “Release Preview” we suggest you install it!

Our browser based room scheduling software, MIDAS, is supported in all major browsers. This includes Internet Explorer 8+, although if you’re an IE user, we recommend IE10!

UPDATE: February 2013

Internet Explorer 10 is now available for Windows 7.

Tags: IE10, internet explorer, microsoft, Windows 7, Windows 8

What’s new in MIDAS v4.01

5 minute read time · Updated April 19, 2023 · First published November 12, 2012

Back in August we released MIDAS v4.00. This was a major release of our room booking system, culminating in over 8 months of development. Crucially, it utilizes a different, faster, and more efficient database architecture than previous versions.

Much of the original MIDAS code was re-written from the ground up, and many new features were added. Since then, we’ve been working hard on making MIDAS even better, and we’ll soon be releasing v4.01.

The primary focus for v4.01 has been to further optimize the speed and performance of MIDAS. In our benchmark testing, on average,
MIDAS v4.01 is 15% faster than v4.00 !!

Whilst the main focus for v4.01 has been on performance, we’re also squeezing in a few new features too:

Full Screen Mode

If you’re accessing MIDAS in a browser that supports the new “Full Screen API”, you’ll see a “Full Screen” link on both the login screen and within MIDAS itself:

Clicking a “Full Screen” link will make your MIDAS run in “full screen” mode – MIDAS will fill your entire screen! No tabs, address bar, taskbar or other items cluttering up your screen. You’ll be able to see your booking grid at its largest possible size!

You’ll be able to exit full screen mode at any time by clicking the “Exit Full Screen” link or by pressing “Esc”.

At time of writing supported browsers include: Firefox 15+, Chrome 22+, Safari 5.1+, and Opera 12.1+.

Additional Export Options

In v4.01, we’ve improved the Export function within MIDAS. Now you can export Resources and Invoice Summaries in either XML, CSV, or TXT formats. This is ideal if you wish to use this data in 3rd party applications (such as Quickbooks, etc).

Set Operating Hours for all Venues at once

Setting up your venue’s “Hours of Operation” is generally something you’ll do once. Still, it can still be quite time-consuming clicking lots of green squares for each hour period during the week for each of your venues. That’s why in v4.01 we’ve added an “All Venues” checkbox.

If you select this box, when you click “Save Changes”, the Hours of Operation for the currently selected venue will be applied to all your venues!

Improved Booking Information “Client” Tab

The Client tab of the Booking Information Panel in v4.01 now also includes a list of the client’s Paid and Outstanding invoices when you “hover” over a booking for any particular client. You can further click any invoice from these lists to jump straight to that invoice!

List paid and outstanding invoices — A Client’s Paid and Outstanding Invoices

Better User Experience when making “Booking Requests” on Smartphones/Mobile Devices

If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you’ll know we recently introduced a mobile version of our main website. We’re currently in the process of developing a mobile-specific version of MIDAS too, which should make an appearance sometime next year. In the meantime, however, for MIDAS v4.01 we’ve made the Public Booking Request feature much more “mobile friendly”. It’s now easier for people to check room availability and make bookings requests through their smartphone or similar mobile device:

Public Booking Requests in v4.00 on Opera Mobile on a Smartphone — How the Public Booking Request form for MIDAS v4.00 renders on a Smartphone

Public Booking Requests in v4.01 on Opera Mobile on a Smartphone — How the Public Booking Request form for MIDAS v4.01 renders on a Smartphone

Keep Your Browser Up-to-date!

Browser Detection
We want you to have the best possible user experience when using MIDAS in your favorite web browser. We support our scheduling software in all 5 major browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera). A list of the minimum and recommended versions for each of these browsers we support may be found here.

Keeping your web browser up-to-date is so important! That’s why, starting with v4.01, MIDAS will display a notification if your browser is too old to use MIDAS, prompting you to update:

Outdated browser detection — Unsupported Browser Warning

Additionally, if your browser meets the minimum version we support, but falls short of the version of your browser we recommend, MIDAS will also show a notification:

Update your browser — Old Browser Warning

These notifications are enabled in MIDAS v4.01 by default, but may be turned off if desired.

It’s a very exciting time for web based development – there are lots of new and emerging technologies and standards (such as HTML5 and CSS3). Some of these are already used by MIDAS v4 (such as the new “drag & drop to reschedule bookings” feature).

If you’re stuck on an older web browser that doesn’t support these standards/technologies, you won’t be able to take advantage of all the features that MIDAS (and internet in general) has to offer.

Plus you’ll be potentially exposed to web based security threats that emerge all the time if your browser is not kept up-to-date.

To allow us to continue to develop new and exciting features for MIDAS, we have to “phase out” support for older browser versions, as they become too old, and newer versions are available.

For instance, we took the decision in 2010 to drop support for Internet Explorer 7.

Now that IE10 is available for Windows 8 (and soon to be available for Windows 7 users), it’s likely that in the not too distance future we’ll be dropping support for IE8 too. Internet Explorer 8 is now nearly 4 years old – which by today’s fast evolving browser landscape is very old!

Don’t worry, MIDAS v4.01, will still be supported on IE8. The introduction of this new notification system with MIDAS v4.01 will hopefully encourage users to update their older IE8 browsers. That way they’ll be prepared for when support ends for older browsers, such as IE8.

UPDATE: 1^st January 2013 – MIDAS v4.01 is now available!

Tags: beta, v4.01

Web Browser Roundup – November 2012

8 minute read time · Updated July 21, 2023 · First published November 6, 2012

Following on from October’s Web Browser Roundup, here’s what’s been happening in the world of the web browser since then…

Internet Explorer – IE10 for Windows 7 coming this month… sort of!
Chrome – v23 out now, and can increase your battery life by 25%?!
Firefox – Market share drops below 20% – tough times ahead!
Safari – Download links for Windows users buried
Opera – 12.10 out now.. and Opera Mobile 12.1 also available

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer 10
The buzz with Internet Explorer revolves right now revolves around IE10. More specifically, the growing anticipation for the eagerly awaited release for Windows 7. Microsoft stated in a recent blog post that this will be available “mid-November“.

In fact, for a short period just before the launch of Windows 8, the download page for Internet Explorer 10 actually went live (although the download links contained therein were not live). Microsoft quickly pulled the download page within a matter of hours. At time of writing the link returns a “Page not found” error. However, we understand that when IE10 does become available for download it will be at this link

Great, you might think… however, there’s a catch… the upcoming release in “mid-November” is only going to be yet another “preview” version of IE10 with “final availability to follow as [they] collect developer and customer feedback”.

Why they can’t just fully launch IE10 for Windows 7 users outright we don’t know!

As there have already been several “developer preview” releases of IE10 for Windows 7 users going back more than a year.

Remember too that IE10 is already included as standard in Windows 8. You’d think that if there were any “issues” with IE10 these would have been identified and addressed by now!

You’d also think there would be a real desire from the Internet Explorer team to get IE10 out. Given that Internet Explorer 9 is now quite literally years behind the current offerings from the other main browser developers (Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Opera Software). Come on Microsoft! Get your act together!

We’re keeping our eye on the wires, and as soon as IE10 is available for you Windows 7 users, we’ll let you know!

UPDATE: 12th November: We understand from Roger Capriotti, Product Marketing Director for IE that the “Preview” build of IE10 for Windows will be available from tomorrow (Tuesday 13th November) – Watch this space!!

UPDATE: 13th November: As predicted, Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 is now available

MIDAS is supported in Internet Explorer 8+ (v10+ recommended)

Google Chrome

Chrome more popular than IE
Today, Google have released the latest update to their Chrome browser, which has now reached v23 (v23.0.1271.64 to be precise!). According to their blog, one of the noticeable features is v23 offers longer battery life when running on your tablet/laptop. They claim it can extend your device’s battery life by up to 25%! If these claims prove true, that’s some noticeable improvement! Thanks to Google Chrome’s auto-update feature, if you’re an existing Chrome user, your browser should silently automatically update to v23 shortly!

Also, Google Chrome’s share of the browser market continues to grow at almost the same rate as Internet Explorer’s share declines. It remains to be seen what affect the wider availability of IE10 will have on this…

MIDAS is supported in Chrome 9+ (v23+ recommended)

Mozilla Firefox

Just after last month’s Web Browser Roundup, Mozilla released Firefox 16… only to withdraw it the following day due to a security vulnerability. This was promptly fixed, and Firefox 16.0.1 was released in its place.

Mozilla seem to be having a tough time of late, and their troubles continue…

Due to supposed “glitch” in the Browser Ballot screen that the EU forced Microsoft to show to users in the European Union in order to offer them a choice of browsers, it emerged that this screen wasn’t in fact shown to a large number of users.

This “glitch” had subsequently been fixed. However the EU are set to fine Microsoft for their mistake. Harvey Anderson, the Vice President of Business Affairs at Mozilla, has commented that “Firefox downloads saw a decrease of 63% to as low as 20,000 per day and increased by 150% to 50,000 per day after the fix was issued.“. In addition, he claims that Mozilla lost 6-9 million Firefox downloads during the 15 month period.

If that wasn’t bad enough for Mozilla, Back in 2007 they decided that they didn’t need to pay taxes for revenue that comes from their partnership with Google search. Why? Because according to Mozilla, $66 million (out of $77 million) dollars were a form of “contributions” and therefore, should not be taxable.

Unfortunately for Mozilla, the US government took a different view. As a result, Mozilla will now be paying a total of $1.5 million dollars. Mind you, this is considerably less than they were expecting, having set aside $15 million over this matter.

But the bad news still keeps coming for Mozilla! A report from NetApplications for October 2012 now puts Firefox at less than a 20% share of the browser market. The small, but ongoing, decline in Firefox’s user base is due mainly to its users switching to Google Chrome. Chrome has enjoyed a steady increase in market share since its launch in 2008. Many users feel that Chrome is faster and lighter on memory than Firefox. Certainly some recent builds of Firefox have been pretty memory intensive. However, Mozilla have made significant improvements in this area. Firefox v16 onwards has a much smaller memory footprint that earlier versions.

MIDAS is supported in Firefox 4+ (v16+ recommended)

Safari

Safari 5
It’s all quiet on the Safari front at the moment! Development on Apple’s web browser seems to take more a back seat to their hardware development. So when there’s an upcoming product launch, such as the new iPad mini, other Apple-related news is harder to come by!

There’s still no news as to whether Apple will ever release another update for Safari for Windows. Currently Safari 6 is only available to iOS users, with 5.1.7 being the highest version of Safari that Windows users can update to. Although, Apple have somewhat buried the download links for new Safari Windows installs deep within a KB article on their site! So, if you wish to download Safari 5.1.7 for Windows, here is the link.

MIDAS is supported in Safari 4+ (v5+ recommended)

Opera

Development over at Opera Software continues at pace! Following 4 “release candidates” within just about as many days, today, Opera announced the release of Opera 12.10. In their own words, 12.10 contains “many updates and more bugfixes than I can count“. They also state that “This release is a recommended security update.“. The Opera browser is now quite impressive! It’s always had a small, but dedicated following, that’s never really grown much. But at the same time has also never shrunk. It’s also been around for a very long time. In fact, it was first released 18 years ago in late 1994! So over the years, many people have tried it, and not really liked it for whatever reason. However, today, the Opera browser is fast, sleek, and modern. It can easily give the other major browsers a run for their money!

One notable new feature in Opera 12.10 is support for a new “Fullscreen API” support. Previously the “Fullscreen API” has only been supported in Firefox 15+, Chrome 22+, Safari 5.1+. Now it comes to Opera 12.1+ too! (There’s still no support in IE10 though at time of writing!). So what is this “Fullscreen API” and why bother mentioning it?

Basically, the “Fullscreen API” allows developers to make elements in a web page, such as a video, go completely “full screen” without having to use Flash or some other means. Whilst most browser can go a sort of “full screen” (usually by pressing F11), the address bar and some navigation buttons are usually still present. The relatively new “Fullscreen API” allows web pages to completely fill your screen with no toolbars/navigation buttons etc. We are currently implementing this API to allow you to use future versions of MIDAS in true “full screen” mode. This means more screen space for displaying bookings! …watch this space!

Did you know that Opera 12.10 is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux? So if you’ve never tried Opera before, you’ve really no excuse!

Opera Mobile 12.1 for Android Phones is now also available. If you’ve been following our blog, you’ll know that our website is now “tailored” to viewing on mobile devices. Currently, only Opera and Firefox offer mobile versions of their browsers. So if you have an Android phone with an outdated browser, be sure to download Firefox or Opera Mobile for the best possible viewing experience!

MIDAS is supported in Opera 9+ (v12+ recommended)

Tags: Apple, browser, chrome, firefox, google, internet explorer, microsoft, mozilla, opera, safari

Our new mobile site is here!

2 minute read time · Updated May 1, 2020 · First published November 1, 2012

An HTC Desire HD running Opera Mobile 12.1 and displaying //mid.as/ Today, we are pleased to announce the launch of the new mobile version of our website!

Now when you visit https://mid.as on your smartphone or similar mobile device, the content will be “tailored” to give you a better viewing experience on a smaller screen.

Less than 4% of visitors to our site in the last three months did so using their smartphones, but this is still a 1% increase on the previous three month period, and we expect this trend to continue to grow as more and more smartphones are released, and the lines between laptops, tablets, and mobile phones become ever more blurred!

For the best viewing experience of our site on your smartphone, make sure you have an up-to-date mobile browser installed on your smartphone – We recommend Opera Mobile or Firefox Mobile which are regularly updated, and both capable of using the latest web technologies/standards.

So, what about our MIDAS room scheduling software itself? Whilst this is supported on all of the 5 major browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari), and so you can use it on your smartphone with a compatible browser, we have been – and continue to work – on making our app more “mobile friendly”. For example, when we released MIDAS v4 a couple of months ago, this featured a new visual “theme” with larger icons and buttons, making it easier to use on touch-enabled devices.

Over the coming months we’ll be making further improvements to MIDAS for users of smartphones, tablets, and other touch-enabled devices… so watch this space!

Tags: firefox, mobile, opera, smartphone