Software
Google and Yahoo! Are the two main search engines in the West. The two have been around long enough for everyone to use them instinctively without much regard to competitors. Seriously, if you want to know something you either Google it or…uh, ‘Yahoo!’ it.
Now, Yahoo! have released an ad-on of their Delicious affiliate site for Google’s Chrome Internet browser. This is one of the first updates to become available since Google first released Chrome. Up until recently the browser was considered by many developers and programmers to be unstable and unsuitable to develop add-ons for.
Google call these new ad-ons ‘extensions’ are now growing in popularity. However, many are still hopeful of Google releasing more powerful ad-blockers.
Yahoo!’s Delicious extensions allows the user to log in and post their bookmarks and comments. This is considered very basics in comparison as to what’s available in Mozilla and internet Explorer but it is a step in the right direction – it’s also a very ‘tongue-in-cheek’ move by Yahoo; beating Google at their own game.
Skype have been a busy bunch recently in this dead summer heat; buzzing around releasing this and that.
A few months ago, Skype 4.0 graced our desktops throwing new updates our way. These included a new, more attractive interface and better interactivity. However, they held back. Basic features such as the contacts list and calling functions were upgraded but they decided to leave the fuzzy warm extras for later when we had all begun to forget their previous efforts.
Now Skype have made two great leaps in the world of Windows. Firstly, they have updated Skype for computers by allowing you to access multiple contact lists in applications and e-mail providers such as Outlook, AOL, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. They have also added ‘Screen Sharing’ which allows you to share a portion or all of what’s on your screen to the person you’re chatting with. They have also released a fresh Skype for Windows Mobile OS allowing you to chat for free on devices such as the Samsung i900.
Then, they marched right on over to Apple, booted in the front door and were asked to wait while the Apple big boys took a look at Skype 1.1 on the iPhone. Much to the relief of the Skype boys sitting in reception getting rather bored with the long wait, Skype was eventually approved for the iPhone and is now available to download as an app.
Now, you can access your Skype voicemail on your iPhone and sent SMS from Skype. The program was also spruced up considerably to be a easier on the eye and boasts multilingual capabilities ranging from French to Polish to Traditional Chinese.
I can’t wait to see what those worker bees at Skype will release next; with any luck they’ll take advantage of growing 3G video capabilities.
Last Friday I treated myself to a new 17″ MacBook Pro (that’s a story for another post though!) One thing that always puts me off is as soon as I buy one a new one comes out, so I thought I would be safe buying a couple of weeks after the WWDC when it was upgraded. Of course the other big news at the WWDC was the upcoming official release of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard due to be released in September.
It made me think, do I have to pay the full price to upgrade my OS even though it’s not far away and I’ve just spent a small fortune in the Apple store?
So a bit of poking around on the Apple website came up with an interesting page (one I might add that is not well linked to!)
UK – http://www.apple.com/uk/macosx/uptodate/
US – http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/
So the deal is simple if you bought a new Mac on or after June 8th you get a special upgrade price! $9.95 USD and £7.95 GBP (gotta love Apples currency conversions!) You have to claim within 60 days of purchase and before December 26th 2009 but it seems well worth it.
You can apply at the above links pay by credit/debit card and it will be shipped upon release. Makes a nice change for Apple to do something nice seeing as they charged me £20 to buy a Mini-Display Port to DVI adaptor!!!!
Finally after a lot of expectation and three release candidates (all were published within less that two weeks) Mozilla announced that the the final version for Firefox 3.5 will be available to the public on the morning of Tuesday, June 30.
Seems that development team is running against the clock, considering that on June 24 they’ve released the RC3 version for Firefox 3.5 and originally the announcement about the final version stated that “end of June” will be the date. Well they sure are keeping the promise, taking the last day of the month to release it.
Since RC1, the two other versions that were public basically focused in bug fixing, so if you installed were using any of these versions you shouldn’t expect greatest differences with the final one.
Download Firefox 3.5 RC3.
Mandriva Linux, one of the most known distributions, it’s preparing the new version and already has an alpha (previous stage for a beta): Mandriva Linux 2010 Alpha 1.
Mandriva was originally called Mandrake Linux (started in 1998), but after a litigation about the name (related, of course, with Mandrake the Magician) was forced to change it; and at the same time MandrakeSoft acquired Conectiva Linux (my first Linux installation ever), so the combination of those two did all the rest, and Madriva was created.
Related to Mandriva 2010, here are some of the improvements related with previous versions:
- Boot time improved.
- Clean and complete grub and install menu (failsafe, init3 entry, recovery entry, check tool for istallation media)
- Use of Plymouth and fallback on Splashy for non supported chipsets
- Switch to Tomoyo as security framework, provide GUI for common setup, integrated also in msec tool
- Guest account created on the fly when needed
- Packaging of Moblin, use it as default environment if stable enough when light hardware configuration is detected
- Manage end of life distribution through mdkonline applet
- Autodetection of local urpmi repositories
- Improved hybrid isos use
I know what you are thinking, Why I would even consider to install an Alpha Linux distribution? Well, there’s no direct and simple answer to that one. As I mentioned before in 40 years of Unix post, the history of Linux has a long way and it is responsible for several other projects like Mac OS X, BSD and Sun operating system. The spirit is what did all the work.
And that’s the idea, go ahead, download it, test it, give your feedback, contribute and improve the work; that’s the spirit.
Final version for Mandriva 2010 will be available in October 21st.
Microsoft Office 2010 is the next release of Microsoft” onclick=”javascript:TrackClick(”,’https%3A%2F%2Fconnect.microsoft.com%2Fofficecustomerstories’)”s popular Office suite. Microsoft is looking for participants for the Microsoft’s Office 2010 Real Life Stories program.
Eligible are families, students and small businesses that own 5 PCs or less from the United States. Each selected participant will receive a preview copy of Microsoft Office 2010, access to web versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint plus dedicated support by a program manager and various other sources.
Participants specifically get:
- Microsoft Office 2010 pre-installed on a “loaner” laptop PC – before it ships!
- 24-hour unlimited e-mail support Monday – Friday, with phone support for escalations
- Monthly webcast training and Q&A sessions
- Community site access, so you can connect with other participants and easily use resources like feature videos and announcements
- FREE copy of Microsoft Office 2010 (when available)
The Microsoft Office 2010 Real Life Stories program is available to US citizens only at this point in time. They can submit an application at the official website until June 30.
We’ve announced earlier the release for Firefox 3.5 RC1, but the Mozilla development team already prepared a new build: Firefox 3.5 RC2. This new version has no bigger differences with the RC1, mostly fixing some bugs before making it the final version.
Company’s strategy it is quite interesting actually, releasing two RC versions in one week. They sure are very confident about the beta and RC stability, I can’t imagine Microsoft releasing release candidates versions of the same product in such short period of time.
That definitive version for Mozilla Firefox 3.5 it is expected in a few days more, ending June. You can check the release notes and improvements about the RC2 version here.
And you can download it from here.
The second most used browser has released the Release Candidate version for the upcoming Firefox 3.5. If you are wondering what kind of versions are the “release candidates”, those represents the first and most acceptable beta release that are very stable and with no big issues involved; but it doesn’t mean that this version will be the exact one used as a final version. This one is the seventh milestone (meaning build) that the development team prepared for Firefox 3.5.
Some of the improvements that Firefox 3.5 will include that appear in this RC1:
- Based in Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform.
- Support for HTML 5, JavaScript query selectors, SVG transforms and others.
- Improved performance with TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
- Private Browsing Mode for private data management.
- Support native JSON and web worker threads.
- Providing Location Aware Browsing to enhance web sites to display information according your geographical location.
You can download Firefox 3.5 RC1 from this link.
Consider that installing this version will overwrite your previous version of Firefox, your bookmarks and browsing history will be maintain, but do not expect that all your add-ons working properly.
Download it, enjoy it and give them your feedback!
Previously we have wrote a bit about upgrading and downgrading your Apple products. Today we wanted to run through the steps of downgrading your iPhone 3.0 firmware to 2.2.1.
Connect your iPhone to your Mac or PC and select your iPhone from the list of devices in iTunes. If iTunes does not detect your iPhone then you will need to put it in DFU (Device Firmware Upgrade) mode.
You can follow these steps to put your iPhone in DFU mode (this is required only if iTunes does not recognize your iPhone):
* Connect your iPhone to your computer.
* Turn iPhone off.
* Hold power and home together for 10 seconds (exactly).
* Release power but keep holding home until the computers beeps (observed on a PC) as a USB device is recognized.
* A few seconds later iTunes should detect your iPhone.
Browse the Summary Tab, For Mac user Hold down Option and press the “Restore” button. For Windows user hold down Shift and press the Restore button. Now you will be able to browse the folder where you have the iPhone firmware.Select the firmware & hit the restore button and cross your fingers for 5 minutes.
If you get error message like 1011, 1013, 1015, just ignore them(Actually the firmware 2.2 is already successfully installed). Fire Quickpwn 2.2.1 and jailbreak your iPhone use this guide
But if you encountered with error message like 1601, 1602, 1600 or anything else then try putting the iPhone into DFU mode and try again.
If you have an Unlocked iPhone then use pwnage tool to make a custom firmware then enter DFU and restore / downgrade to 2.2.1 if not works in first time done it again n again.
FileHippo.com is a great web site from where you can download a lot of freeware and some shareware. The page is organized in the following categories of software:
And also two interesting categories, one is Latest updates and the other is Most popular downloads, very useful.
You can apply the following filters to the software shown: No Beta versions(very useful if you need stability) and Freeware Only(useful in my case, I don’t buy software).
And the best of the site(but still in beta) is that you can download a Client Agent program(called Update Checker) to maintain all the software that you install from this page to the latest version. You can download the Update Checker in two versions, Installer and Standalone.
I found this web page very useful to maintain all my freeware tools up to date. I’m actually using it at work, and found no issues.
- Has a RSS, e-Mail and Twitter notification system.
- Almost all the useful freeware is listed.
- Only software for Microsoft Windows systems.
- The Update Checker still’s in beta.
Are you a Chrome user? I bet you are; because since last september, when the browser was released, the response from the users was fenomenal according to Google. This light weight browser easly slide away inside the market, bringing a high performance option for not only the “anti-IE” users, but for all users (including those who said that there was no match for Mozilla Firefox or Safari).
Well now Google hits again, they are planning to release a new Chrome version that will increase the browser performance up to 30%. How? New version for WebKit and a JavaScript engine (V8) update. They even have a benchmark report that was executed comparing the new and old Chrome version:
But that’s not all. This new beta build will also include:
- Removing Thumbnails from New Page: A very requested feature (specially Safari users) that will let you to select the pages you want to see every time you open a new tab. I bet you were expecting this one, to remove “those” sites that you don’t want other people to know you visit a lot.
- Includes a Full-screen mode.
- Form Autofill.
- Fixed around 300 bugs from previous versions.
The only thing I wonder if this build will be more stable on Windows 7; that would definitely place Chrome as my preferred browser.
One thing is for sure, this is not a good news for IE8 that just started struggling for user’s acceptance, and with the bonus that IE8 appears as a “selectable” feature on Windows 7, no longer a mandatory installation for Windows operating systems. Looks like it’s going to be a long and a painful trip for IE to continue at the top.
