Archive for: free
Apple is currently offering corporations Mac OS X Server v.10.6 “Snow Leopard” for a free trial.
Mac OS X Server v.10.6 “Snow Leopard” has everything you need to deliver standards-based workgroup and Internet services, providing an ideal solution for education, small businesses, and large enterprises. The amazing features in Snow Leopard Server make it easy to share contacts and calendars, collaborate on projects, access information remotely, create and distribute podcasts, and more.
Snow Leopard Server offers countless behind-the-scenes features, which greatly reduce IT time and effort, improve compatibility in mixed environments, enhance support for iPhone and iPod touch users, and boost the already robust security of Mac OS X Server. With a full 64-bit operating system, Mac OS X Server is designed to maximize the computing potential of today’s Xserve and Mac Pro systems and dramatically increases the total number of simultaneous system processes, threads, and network connections that the server can utilize. Designed to handle the most demanding server operations, Snow Leopard Server is up to twice as fast as its predecessor.
All you need to do to receive your copy is fill out the form located here. You must be a USA citizen however.
Voddler is a new video startup that launch back in private beta back in July 2009. Currently it is rumoured that only 1,500 people have access to the site, so we wanted to run through the service for everyone else.
Voddler won’t be launched officially until sometime this fall, and then only in the Nordic countries for starters. The agenda is to go global, though.
Voddler aims to do for movies and TV series what Spotify is doing for music. Although in private beta Voddler already seems to be getting a lot of buzz in Scandinavia, so we hope to let everyone else know about it.
Voddler is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, Voddler will also be providing a Linux-based box with a pre-installed client that you can easily connect to your TV to get that home cinema feel.
Here below is a screenshot of the latest design of the landing page, designed to work best on widescreen televisions.
Movies are of course a lot more bandwidth-intensive than music. How well Voddler works for you will depend on your Internet connection. To get 1080p HD quality you should have an 8 Mbit/s connection, for 720p HD quality you should have a 5 Mbit/s connection, and for DVD quality you should have a 2.5 Mbit/s connection. Contrast this with Spotify which only has to deal with music streaming and therefore works just fine with a mere 256 kbit/s connection.
Picok stands for Personal Information Cockpit. It’s an open source software package, aimed at enabling users to build their personal information dashboards. The interface is very similar to Netvibes and Pageflakes, in which allows users to loaded their own content into small draggable boxes.
There are a quite few standard portlets shipped with Picok, but since it is an open system, maintainers of picok installations can easily create portlets of their own.
Picok is written in PHP 5, uses the Yahoo User Interface Library and Zend Framework Components and supports MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Lotus Notes and is ready to be integrated into your corporate intranet, website or community platform as well.
If you want to see a screenshot of Picok you can check it out here.
Ever fancied building a website but wouldn’t know the first thing about design or hosting. Now, there is a FREE website tool that will allow you to do it – BlueVoda. I downloaded BlueVoda expecting another knockoff that the minute you start it up it will be asking for your credit card number so you can upgrade or only giving you access to some of the features – I was wrong.
You get the whole shebang for free. The file itself is only 4Mb and you’ll have it installed and started up in under twenty minutes. Within an 20 minutes of using the software I had a homepage made up with a video player, banner, text and images all working well together.
It’s incredibly simple to use. All the tools are along the top and to the left. If you want to say… insert a flash application all you do is click on the button with the ‘flash’ icon, select where on the webpage you want it to be, adjust the size and then just click to position it there. What’s more, everything is interchangeable. When building a small website to try out the software, I felt more like I was playing with Lego blocks because you can just drag and drop things until you have it looking the way to want it to.
Other features include inserting in-line frames, galleries, lines, page breaks, Windows Media Players and literally hundreds of other features.
Then, all you do is copy and paste the HTML to your server, upload the files you used like images etc… and you’re up and running! There are tons of articles on the BlueVoda website to show you how to use the software and how to get your site on the internet.
For anyone looking to build a basic personal or business website this is the one for you. It’s simple to use, fast, effective and free. I can hardly think of a bad aspect (except maybe those annoying monthly e-mails you get from BlueVoda asking if everything is going okay or do you need hosting services). 8/10
Ever been dying to go to a concert, football match or F1 Grand Prix but the most plausible thing happened and you went to buy the tickets two seconds too late. Despair and anger (mostly towards yourself). The only chance you stand now is going on a mission to hunt down someone who has tickets (that may or may not be genuine) and pay two weeks wages for them.
Fear not – seathound.com has the answer. It’s a pretty basic idea and that’s why I love it. Ask any businessman/entrepreneur and they’ll tell you that tackling everyday, well-known problems is the way to make millions in this world.
Seat Hound will locate dozens of tickets for sale. Some are on eBay, others are on independent ticket sales sites – but who cares where you get them? The point is that you’re going!
I typed in ‘U2’ to check it out. I was greeted by dozens of search results from their upcoming gig in Croke Park here in Dublin to events as far away as October in Phoenix. The guys at Seat Hound have clearly done their work. Even small artists that you wouldn’t hear of everyday are listed. This is a great service that I fully intend to use – a lot!
It also saves you money as it displays the ticket prices right next to one another so you can get the best one. Seat Hound will also be so kind as to tell you where the ticket is in relation to the stage, pitch or track etc…. so you won’t need to bring the binoculars.
One bad thing that I will say about it however (and I really am nit picking here) is that it is US focused. While you can still find gigs all over the world – the homepage is dominated by the stripes and the stars. A UK or European version wouldn’t go amiss. 9/10
For a long time now a lot of people have been using Adblock firefox extension, however when people use this tool publishers lose their key source of income. Svetlana at Profy thinks that she may have found the key to unlock this issue, CancelAds.com. CancelAds is a very basic idea in which allows publishers to signup and add their sites to the service. Users are then able to signup and choose which sites they want to see without ads, in which they can pay a small subscription fee to view the sites without ads. Publishers have the ability to control the price of subscriptions and this is a very simple way for sites to add a new revenue source.
However, is CancelAds really a new revenue stream or is it just taking revenues away from advertising and just redistributing it. The idea of CancelAds is a good one, however practically im not too sure if it will take off, as users will only be likely to purchase a subscription for a major site in which have high quality content. Thus, this product isnt for the masses, it just for the high end publishers.
Aviary has just launched Screen Capture Talon that can let you capture any webpage from any browser, by simply putting Aviary.com/ in front of the URL. You can capture a page at different resolutions or to only capture a portion of the page as well.
After capturing the page, you can edit it, add simple markup to it and save it to your desktop.
Adobe Air is quite a new platform but it has been quickly getting an amazing name for itself. Adobe have their own marketplace (which received an overhaul recently) of applications but there aer a few new marketplace popping up. One of these new marketplaces is AdobeAirApps.com.
AdobeAirApps is a very simply marketplace that showcases the newest and greatest Adobe Air applications. AdobeAirApps reviews these applications and then just provides a basic screenshot, then finally allows users to comment and rate the applications. The site is very new and im looking forward to seeing them build this up over time. Im not a huge fan of the design, but im sure once the site starts making some revenues then it will get updated quite quickly.
Have you ever wanted top quality customizable icons for your blog or site but cant really afford it? Well here is the solution, Iconza. Iconza is a new application that allows you to customise icons just the way you want them. It is completely free and very easy to use with a great interface.
Iconza lets you customise the colours of your icons, backgrounds, sizes and then lets you easily download them all for free. So if you are in the need of some top quality free icons for your site or blog then head over to Iconza.
Imagination is a Fully Customizable WordPress Theme and comes pre-loaded with 9 different site-wide styles to choose from, with just a click.
Moreover, You can customize the style according to your mood, occasion or preferences. Use your imagination to create a unique look of your blog/website anytime you want. Imagination theme is free to use and distribute. Feel free to share this theme with anyone and everyone.
Since the launch of Adobe Air we have seen a huge amount of very slick desktop based applications launched and Polaris joins this group. Polaris is a free AIR based application which allows users to manage one website profile on Google Analytics.
The dashboard gives you nice overview of total visits, pageviews and other useful metrics. Other than that, Polaris has 7 different individual reports: Visit Overview, Map Overlay, Traffic Sources, Referring Sites, Top Content, Keywords, and Goal Value.
For those who are managing multiple profiles, the upgrade to the full version is $15/year. Both the free and the full version will get regular free updates with new functionality and features.
Microsoft has announced the availability of Visual Studio 2010 beta for public download. VS 2010 was made available to MSDN and TechNet users few days back and its now available for public download. Both MSDN/TechNet subscribers and the public are able to test VS 2010 Professional, Team Suite, Team Foundation Server and the .Net Framework 4.
Currently there has been no announcement of the shipping date of the final version but it will probably be int he final quarter of this year. Visual Studio 2010 ships in with lots of new features and changes. You can check out the complete list of changes here. VS 2010 also features better support for Silverlight and the Windows Presentation Foundation.
If you are interested in testing the new VS 2010 and .Net framework 4, then you can download them here.
