New In The News

T-Mobile will be the first carrier to offer a mobile phone powered by Google’s Android software, according to people briefed on the company’s plans. The phone will be made by HTC, one of the largest makers of mobile phones in the world, and is expected to go on sale in the United States before Christmas, perhaps as early as October.

The high-end phone is expected to match many of the capabilities of Apple’s iPhone and other so-called smartphones that run software from Palm, Research in Motion, Microsoft and Nokia to access the Internet and perform computerlike functions.

The HTC phone, which many gadget sites are calling the “dream,” will have a touch screen, like the iPhone. But the screen also slides out to expose a full five-row keyboard. A video of the phone has been posted recently on YouTube. A person who has seen the HTC device said it matched the one in the video.

The phone’s release date depends on how soon the Federal Communications Commission certifies that the Google software and the HTC phone meet network standards. Executives at all three companies are hoping to announce the phone in September because they would benefit from holiday season sales. The people briefed on the discussions declined to be named because they were not authorized to discuss the project.

Apple’s iPhone has shaken the cellphone industry, partly because of its design, but mostly because AT&T and Apple have allowed owners to download any number of applications to their phones. That freedom to individualize a phone’s functions has helped increase the popularity of the iPhone.

Phones using Google’s software will do the same thing. Google is making the Android operating system software available free to an alliance of companies, including cellphone carriers and manufacturers who have agreed to provide devices which, like personal computers, allow users to decide which applications run on them.

Google thinks that many consumers will want to personalize their mobile phones with unique applications and services, including those made by Google.

Google is eager to get the Android platform on phones quickly because it thinks that the mobile Web is vital to the long-term growth of its digital advertising business.

“We can make more money on mobile than we do on the desktop, eventually,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said in an interview on CNBC this week.

But carriers have their own reasons for wanting devices that are more Internet friendly. For one, they can charge more for data plans than typical voice plans. And some carriers, like AT&T, are creating their own mobile applications that they hope will also be revenue generators.

“The launch of Android is an important milestone in the industry,” said Richard Wong, a venture capitalist at Accel Partners, which invests in mobile start-ups. But, he warned, it was only one of several platforms being developed or upgraded today. He said that what he found most exciting was that Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone “forces others to innovate faster.”

Executives for T-Mobile, the nation’s No. 4 wireless carrier, declined to comment on the new phone except to say it was on track to offer it in the fourth quarter. HTC, which is based in Taiwan, also declined to comment, although executives there have said they expected to deliver their phone by the end of the year.

While other carriers and manufacturers have plans to offer phones based on Google’s software, the T-Mobile-HTC phone is expected to be the only Android phone available in the United States this year, according to a person briefed on the discussion.

Sprint, the third-largest carrier and also a member of the Google-led Open Handset Alliance, has been working closely with Google, too, but does not have a confirmed date for offering an Android phone, said Kevin Packingham, vice president for wireless product management. So far AT&T and Verizon Wireless, the two biggest carriers, have not committed to selling mobile phones sold with Google’s software.

The chip maker Qualcomm, another member of the alliance, said the company was working on Android phones with more than five phone manufacturers.

Google executives have confirmed that phones based on Android will be available this year, but have refused to reveal details. The company said it was testing the software on several devices.

“This process ensures we have an opportunity to receive feedback from users,” Google said in a statement.

Some makers of mobile software programs have complained that creating applications for Android has been difficult, as Google has continued to make changes to the operating system and has at times been too busy to provide support to developers. Some of those software makers have chosen to focus their development efforts, at least for now, on phones that are already on the market like the iPhone or the BlackBerry, made by Research in Motion.

Microsoft Corp. will release Windows XP Service Pack 3 during the second half of April, according to a report from a Web site that has correctly predicted recent Windows ship dates.TechARP.com, a Malaysian Web site that nailed Vista SP1’s release-to-manufacturing (RTM) date last month as well as its release to Windows Update last week, said that Microsoft will wrap up work on XP’s third and final service pack next month. The site pegged RTM for Windows XP SP3 as “second half of April 2008″ for seven languages, with a follow-on RTM of the remaining supported languages “approximately 21 days” later.

By TechARP’s account, Microsoft will first finish work on the Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Spanish versions of the service pack.

Microsoft declined comment, other than to repeat an earlier statement about the service pack’s timing. “We are targeting 1H [first half] 2008 for the release of XP SP3 RTM, though our timing will always be based on customer feedback as a first priority,” a spokeswoman said in an e-mail.

The last time Microsoft made a public move with Windows XP SP3 was a little over a month ago, when it posted a second release candidate to Windows Update.

About two weeks ago, however, XP SP3 caused a minor stir when what was purportedly the newest build leaked to the Internet and hit BitTorrent search sites such as The Pirate Bay. Although Microsoft initially refused comment, last week it acknowledged that the build — designated 5503 — was real and had been released to a portion of the invitation-only beta test group.

It also warned users away from any download. “This build was not intended for public release and anyone who has that build and is not part of the private beta is working with bits that Microsoft can’t verify,” a company spokeswoman said in an e-mail last week. “It’s possible the bits may have been modified with malware or other bad code that Microsoft hasn’t tested.”

Multiple versions of XP SP3 build 5503, including English- and Russian-language editions, are available via BitTorrent.

Once SP3 ships, the next major milestones for Windows XP are June 30, when the popular operating system is slated to fall off the reseller and retail availability list, and Jan. 31, 2009, when it will be taken out of all distribution channels, including system builders.

source: Computer World

Microsoft Corp. is offering free support to any Windows Vista user experiencing problems with installing Service Pack 1 (SP1), according to a company spokesman.”[Anyone] needing technical support regarding your installation of Windows Vista SP1, please go to the following URL and choose the bottom option that says, ‘Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (All Languages),’” said Brandon LeBlanc, a Microsoft employee who posted several comments to the company’s Vista blog. The link LeBlanc pointed users to led to a Vista SP1-specific support site.

“You have a variety of options you can choose for support, all of which will not cost you any support fee,” said LeBlanc. “I repeat: Support for SP1 will not cost you anything.”

“That’s a good move on their part,” said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft.

The SP1 site offers support via e-mail, online chat and telephone, and it lists hours of operation for the last two options. Free phone support, for instance, is available from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. Pacific time on weekdays and from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Pacific time on weekends. The free support will be available for one year, and it covers installation and compatibility issues.

Normally, Microsoft offers no-cost support only to users who bought Windows at retail. Users who obtained the operating system already installed on a PC are referred to the computer manufacturer or reseller; the company’s for-fee support runs $59 per request unless the user or business has a prepaid support plan with Microsoft.

That policy, as well as the wording of the Vista SP1 support site as late as last Friday, confused one user commenting on the same thread. “You cannot get free support from [Microsoft] if Vista came preloaded on your HP. At least, that is what the Web site indicates,” said “romroyer.”

LeBlanc quickly replied. “You are incorrect. We are offering free-of-charge support to anyone who is having issues installing Windows Vista SP1 — even folks like ‘pat’ [an earlier commenter on the thread] who may be using a [reseller] copy of Windows Vista that came with their HP laptop,” he said. “Again, anyone can get free support for installation issues of SP1.”

By Sunday, Microsoft had modified the Vista SP1 support site and removed references directing users to contact their resellers if they had acquired Vista on new computers. The site’s wording had been altered to read: “No charge: Unlimited support requests.”

That’s Microsoft’s standard support policy for service packs, a spokeswoman said in an e-mail. “The no-fee support is actually part of our Windows Service Pack policy, not something specific to Windows Vista SP1,” she wrote.

Microsoft, however, has done little to broadcast news of the free SP1 support. The home page for the Windows Vista Solution Center, the operating system’s help and support starting point, makes no mention of it, nor does Microsoft’s main Windows Vista SP1 site.

source: Computer World

“Drive” is what we call the new and beautiful car navigation feature. It looks great and is easy to use while driving: change “views” by clicking left or right, select functions from a “grid” menu. The Drive interface is transparent black and the turning arrows dynamically show the exact angle of the turn. Check out driving time and average speed for your journey and plan multiple stopover routes.

I’m very excited about a new feature that we call “Walk”. It lets you find your way in the city when you are on foot. It is easy to use and discreet (no voice instructions). Small “breadcrumbs” are shown where you have been walking so you easily see what direction to take. “Walk” is included in the navigation license for car navigation but can also be purchased separately. If you have already purchased car navigation with older Maps version, you will now get “Walk” free of charge!

The beta offers satellite maps in 200 cities worldwide. Satellite maps can be turned on when browsing the map and also in “Walk”. The satellite maps are downloaded over the air and are saved automatically. Next time you start Maps the satellite maps will be there, no need to download them again.

The search is much, much improved. It is now as simple as typing part of street names or a place in a search box. Search results are listed by category (addresses, cities, restaurants etc.)

Places are personal. You are now able to save places as favorites, create collections (folders for places) and even save your routes.

What else? Better 3D mode and overall faster, better, and more beautiful

Upgrading to Maps 2.0 Beta is easy. You can continue using your old maps and licenses. It is also possible to upgrade your map data using the new Map Loader (also provided from beta labs). You need to run the Maps beta once first in the phone before connecting to PC.

Grab Nokia Maps 2.0 Beta while it is hot and let us know what you think about it!

Note that since this is a beta, some less important functions may be ‘limited’. We are still working on the traffic feature for car navigation. We’ll keep you posted when that gets available too.

Tip 1: Shortcut keys in the map

• Use * and # keys to zoom in and out in the map
• Use to 0 key to go to “My position”
• Use the 1 key to change map modes (2D, 3D, Satellite, Hybrid)

Tip 2: Shortcut keys in Drive mode

• The “grid” (options menu) layout imitates the keyboard. Items in the grid are also accessible directly through the keyboard.
• The same shortcuts are also available in Walk

source: Nokia Beta Labs

Programmers will be able to earn money from games that they create and upload to Xbox Live

Tens of thousands of ‘bedroom developers’ are vying to create the next best-selling computer game after Microsoft effectively handed the keys of its Xbox console to the gaming community.

Microsoft has said it wants amateur developers to write games that can be played and downloaded via its Xbox Live web platform, which has ten million users worldwide - and for them to share in the revenues their creations generate.

The software giant said that a ‘toolkit’ it had released which enables developers to write games for Xbox had been downloaded 800,000 times and was being used by teams in more than 400 universities worldwide.

The first trials of the community-generated games for Xbox are due to begin in the spring, with a full commercial roll-out expected later in the year.

“I think of this as games created by the community, managed by the community and enjoyed by everyone,” John Schappert, corporate vice president of LIVE software and services at Microsoft, told the Game Developers Conference in San Fransisco.

Once a game is created for Xbox Live, it will be submitted for ‘peer review’ by other developers, who will check that it does not contain any prohibited material and that it is correctly labelled for graphic content, Microsoft said. The game will then be uploaded to Xbox Live Arcade and placed alongside other Xbox games that can be bought and downloaded.

Micrsoft also hinted that developers would be able to share the revenue generated from their games - either through download sales, or advertising that appeared alongside free versions - but said that the business model for the new venture was still being worked out.

The company released its free toolkit for creating games, known as XNA, two years ago, but until now the games developed using it could not be shared. Only seven community-generated games have so far been uploaded to the Xbox Live platform, Microsoft said, but by the end of the year this number would swell to more than a thousand.

“There are tens of thousands of developers out there chomping at the bit,” Mr Schappert said. “We need to unlock that potential.”

Third-party developers have always written games for Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo, but typically the software which enables them to do so is expensive, meaning that only established games developers have been able to afford it.

Microsoft’s announcement reflects an increasing desire on the part of the large console makers to tap the skills of the wider developer community. Nintendo has released a similar toolkit - called Wii Ware - and already about a hundred titles are in development, with the first due to be released in the US in May.

“It makes sense for Microsoft and others to develop their online platforms in this way,” Piers Harding-Rolls, an analyst at Screen Digest, said. “It doesn’t cost them much - other people are generating the content, plus it’s a way of maintaining good relations with the online gaming community, and there’s also a number of business models they can explore.”

Asked whether bedroom developers could compete with the likes of Activision, the company behind games like Guitar Hero, Mr Harding-Rolls said: “You can definitely make extremely interesting, entertaining and addictive casual games that become popular with a huge number of people.”

source: Times Online

Although Google has been talking about video advertising since May of last year, it has only now decided to introduce the service to its AdSense program.

After a long review period, Google has decided to use the solution the company is already using for advertising on YouTube called InVideo. With InVideo, ads are shown taking up a position on the lower edge of the video that is playing. The ads shown are either animated with images or just text overlay advertisements. Clicking on an ad will either take you to another webpage or open up a new advertisement video as an overlay on the video you are watching.

The service will be known as AdSense for video and is currently in beta. Website owners can choose to include the advertising on videos they already have or sign up to have videos supplied to their site that include advertising. Google sees this as a way of adding extra content to your site as well as earning you revenue from advertising.

So far, Google has signed up 20 major customers for the service, including the advertising agency YuMe Networks and Brightcove, which counts Time Warner on its customer list.

Read more at Reuters .

Today at Mobile World Congress 2008, Microsoft Corp. announced that Sony Ericsson will deliver a new Windows Mobile phone, the XPERIA™ X1, which blends mobile Web communication and multimedia entertainment, to meet consumer demand for a premium mobile experience for work and play.”People should be able to have phones that deliver what they need throughout the day and stay connected with today’s broad array of on-demand information and entertainment no matter where they are, said Pieter Knook, senior vice president, Mobile Communications Business, Microsoft. “Our shared vision with Sony Ericsson is to make the concept of ‘One Phone for Your Life’ a reality and finally give consumers the freedom of true mobility. The XPERIA X1 from Sony Ericsson lets users choose from a dynamic range of activities for work and play backed by the familiarity of Microsoft Windows and extensive availability of Windows Mobile applications and services.

To be introduced in the second half of 2008, XPERIA X1 is the first phone to realize the vision of XPERIA, a new Sony Ericsson sub-brand that reflects a premium experience of energized communication. “XPERIA is our promise to think foremost about user experience and to deliver on our goal of providing a true premium experience - anytime, anywhere, anything, with anyone,” said Rikko Sakaguchi, head of Portfolio and Proposition at Sony Ericsson. “By working with Microsoft on the XPERIA X1, we have been able to couple our excellence in creating compelling consumer propositions with the productivity capabilities of Windows Mobile to deliver a seamless blend of mobile Web communication and multimedia entertainment within a distinctive design.”Sony Ericsson is the latest leading device manufacturer to design and market mobile phones based on the Windows Mobile platform. The company sold more than 100 million handsets in 2007 and excelled in sales of imaging and music-enabled devices, such as Cyber-shot and Walkman phones. In fiscal year 2007, Microsoft sold 11 million Windows Mobile licenses and expects to sell more than 20 million licenses in fiscal year 2008, making Windows Mobile a leading smartphone platform globally.

With the addition of the XPERIA X1 from Sony Ericsson, four of the world’s top five makers of mobile phones will ship Windows Mobile devices in 2008. “The agreement between Microsoft and Sony Ericsson is undoubtedly a win- win for both companies,” said Lars Vestergaard, research director, European Wireless and Mobile Communications at IDC. “Marrying the power and ease of use of the Windows Mobile platform with the advanced consumer features Sony Ericsson is known for has the potential to reach the ’sweet spot’ for mobile phones.”The XPERIA X1 features include the following:

• Unique arc slider with wide-pitch, easy-to-use QWERTY keyboard, 3-inch clear wide VGA display and high-quality high-finish metal body
• Windows Mobile, HSDPA/HSUPA and Wi-Fi™ support so customers can enjoy their favorite entertainment and work efficiently on the move
• XPERIA™ panels to navigate Web, multimedia and other applications with the tip of a finger

The XPERIATM X1 combines a 3-inch clear wide VGA display and a full QWERTY keyboard within a quality metal-finish body. With Windows Mobile® inside, the XPERIA™ X1 lets you choose from a dynamic range of activities at anytime and anywhere; from enjoying your favourite entertainment content to working efficiently on-the-move. Access a world of experiences simply by touching the XPERIA™ panel on the screen.”XPERIA™ represents the first brand that is truly borne from within Sony Ericsson. It represents our vision for a premium, energised communication experience,” said Dee Dutta, Head of Marketing, Sony Ericsson. “This launch, and the announcement of the X1, further strengthens the overall Sony Ericsson brand and places us at the forefront of mobile convergence.“Our vision for the XPERIA™ X1 is to deliver a seamless blend of mobile Web communication and multimedia entertainment within a distinctive design,” said Rikko Sakaguchi, Head of Portfolio and Propositions, Sony Ericsson. “XPERIA™ is our promise to think foremost of user experience and to deliver the premium experience – anytime, anywhere, anything, with anyone.

read more at ecoustics.com

Just like rogue employees in the 1990s forced instant messaging into corporations, the new Google Apps Team Edition being launched on Thursday offers a way for workers to slip a hosted apps service into the enterprise.

This could help Google in its efforts to lure more people off desktop applications sold by Microsoft and onto the mostly free Web-based apps Google offers.

Google Apps Team Edition is a free service that lets people within the same e-mail domain collaborate easily with Google Apps, a package that includes Docs, Calendar, Talk, and Start Page.

Unlike IM applications, which open communication to anyone on the Web using a compatible IM app, Google Apps Team Edition lets you share with people only in your same organization.

Google’s stand-alone hosted apps for consumers haven’t really made a splash in the corporate world, largely because of the security threats posed by how easy they make it to share sensitive work data with people outside the company.

So Google created Google Apps, a free Standard Edition and a Premier Edition that has a fee. These editions give an administrator control over how the apps are used, allowing for services to be disabled, new services like Gmail to be added, and integration with apps for things like single sign-on. Google offers security and government regulation compliance services for those editions 9789901 through its Postini acquisition.

“People are already using the consumer (hosted Google) apps in the workplace, like they did IM a decade ago,” said Jeremy Milo, senior marketing manager for Google Apps. “We’re trying to bring more security by introducing the notion of domain awareness.”

The Team Edition offers a compromise for workers who want to use the apps in a company that isn’t already using Google Apps or if the company lacks an IT administrator. An administrator can always step in and switch from Team Edition to Standard or Premier if they want. And a new domain can be acquired through the Standard Edition for $10 for those who need a uniform e-mail domain.

With Team Edition anyone can open an account and start using the apps with anyone within the organization. For instance, a group working on a team project could use Google Apps Team Edition and be able to access the shared documents from any computer over the Internet.

“Google Apps Team Edition is another on ramp” to Web-hosted apps, Milo said. “They are one more way for businesses to get comfortable with computing in the cloud and anywhere, any time access to critical information.”

source: CNet

“This YouTube thing might be catching on.” Two years or so after that dawned on most people, Adobe has caught on, adding an upload-to-YouTube feature to its consumer video editor, Premiere Elements 4. But despite that and an overhauled interface, I wasn’t as thrilled with this update as I have been with past versions.

Enter your YouTube user name and password, and Elements saves it for future use. It outputs your movie directly to YouTube’s preferred Flash format, so you save time by skipping the step of outputting to some other format first. However, you can’t change any settings, and the quality wasn’t so hot. For now, it’s only YouTube, though Adobe says other sites could be added in the future.

Adobe calls Elements’ updated interface “decluttered,” and it certainly has fewer buttons and sliders. But it felt dumbed down to me: Some useful things are hidden or simply gone. For example, Elements 3’s interface let you move panes around the app and put them wherever you wanted, even on a second monitor. Elements 4 lets you resize panes, but you can’t move them. And it lacks graphical elements to delineate tracks in a timeline–I had to hover my cursor near where lines used to be and try to make the resizing icon appear.

The Media bin now has a Project sub-bin and an Organizer sub-bin; if you preview a clip in the Project window, you’ll see Elements’ familiar trim window, with rudimentary playback controls such as fast-forward, fast-reverse, and a “scrubber” to go to a certain point in a clip so you can evaluate it. But if you preview clips in the Organizer window, you’ll see it in a tiny window that has no controls; you can’t tell how long a clip is, and you can’t fast-forward to see whether material at the end is useful. And while the size of text in menus and other elements is much more consistent than in previous versions, it’s also pretty small, often uncomfortably so, and raising several settings didn’t help.

Premiere Elements has an audio mixer pulled from Premiere Pro; it lets you adjust audio levels as your timeline’s playing. That’s very useful for making sure your soundtrack doesn’t drown out voices in your captured video. A new image stabilizer works with moderate success; it automatically zooms and crops to smooth movement. A new feature detects beats and music and automatically matches scene changes to the beat; with a series of still images, I had to futz with the settings to get a pace I liked, but it provides you with a good starting point, and you can adjust further in the timeline.

In the past, a common criticism of Premiere Elements has been that it’s too complicated for novice users. That may have been true, but some compromises the new version makes to appeal to newbies will frustrate existing users.

source: PC World

The Microsoft operating system is improved by the soon-to-arrive service pack, but Windows Vista still is missing some features we’d like to see.

Want to make Firefox jump through hoops? Steve has things to read and add-ons to download.

My buddy Mike M., from Dripping Springs, Texas, started pestering me. “You’re still using that pile of junk browser?” he wrote, referring to Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Yes and no, I told him. I’m still using Maxthon 1.0, that marvelous browser that sits on top of IE. It works fine, I said, and no, I insisted, I’m not switching to Mozilla Firefox.

It didn’t stop him from telling me about two add-ons to Firefox that he finds extremely useful, so I decided to pass along Mike’s pearls.

The first is CoolIris, an add-on that allows you to preview a page by floating your mouse over a link. Once you’re floating, a smaller, resizable preview window pops up, saving you from having to fully open another page. Mike says that’s especially handy when reading news stories from Google News and reviewing search results from Google.

The other nifty add-on is PicLens. If you ever search Google Images, you’ll appreciate how PicLens turns all those little thumbnail images into a full-screen slide show. It also works with Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, and other image management tools.

Dig This: Watch this woman and lion bonding. If you didn’t know better, you’d think something awful was about to happen.

Dig This, Too: Not impressed with the lion hugging? Okay, how about Guinness’s $10 million “Tipping Point” TV commercial? [Thanks, Kris.]

Smart Ways to Use Gmail in Firefox

Did you know you can color Gmail labels? That’s perfect for highlighting incoming mail by color. You can also have a “preview bubble” that will show you a floating window when you right-click a piece of incoming mail. I love this because I don’t have to open the e-mail in another tab or window.

It’ll take three short steps to make this work.

First, if you haven’t already done it, you’ve got to install Greasemonkey. It’s a Firefox add-on that allows the implementation of user scripts. Just head for the site, click “Install Now” to get it, and restart Firefox.

Second, to install the label colors, go to the Google Code site and click on “Label Colors” from the list on the right-hand side of the page under “Links.” You’ll get a pop-up asking you to confirm the install by clicking the “Install” button when it lights up. The install will happen pretty quickly; you may not even notice that it occurred. No Firefox restart is required.

Finally, stay on the Google Code’s page and in the Links section, click on “Conversation Preview.” Follow the same routine as with Label Colors, and it will install quickly.

To color the labels, just rename them and add “color” to the name. For instance, Michael is renamed Michael red; e-mail from Steve is Steve blue. Read the full description if you want to get fancier colors.

BTW, Mike said that Gmail has recently started to roll out a “new” interface. If you’re using the newer version of Gmail, you can now directly color labels by clicking the gray box to the right of the label name and choosing a color. How can you tell if you’re using the “new version”? If you are, there will be a link in the top right corner of the screen that says “Older version.” Google temporarily left a link to let users go back to the old if they don’t like the new.

Dig This: These pictures from the Endeavour are something else: They make you feel like you’re up there with the astronauts circling the Earth. [Thanks, Don G.]

Dig This, Too: I never get tired of watching squirrels work their way through obstacle courses.

Want More Firefox Goodies? Can Do…

Identify Tracking Cookies: Lincoln Spector tells you about the cookies you accumulate while surfing the Net.

Undocumented Firefox Tips: Lincoln’s favorite browser is–you guessed it–Firefox. He’s got 15 tips to customize Firefox.

Firefox 3 Beta 1 Review: Curious about the next version of Firefox? Here are some details.

PCWorld.com Year-End Stats: Are you the only one using Firefox? Editor-in-Chief Harry McCracken shows us the numbers.

Rein in Firefox: Scott Spanbauer tells you how to get back the memory Firefox gobbles in its cache.

Zillions of Firefox Downloads

Okay, I exaggerated, but I do have freebies, extensions, add-ons, and other software for you to download and try out.

Firefox Portable: This version of Firefox is customized to run from a USB drive.

Foxmarks Bookmarks Synchronizer Firefox Extension: Synchronize your bookmarks between multiple computers.

Gmail Notifier Firefox Extension: At-a-glance browser indicator for new Gmail messages.

Loki for Mozilla Firefox: Turn your laptop into a virtual GPS device.

Del.icio.us Bookmarks for Firefox: Convert to social bookmarks with the latest del.icio.us Firefox plugin.

1-Click Answers for Firefox: Get quick info on any word or phrase on your screen.

MR Tech Local Install Firefox Extension: A powerful metatool for managing Firefox add-ons.

Chromatab Firefox Extension: Colorize Firefox tabs for quicker navigation.

Tweak Network Settings Firefox Extension: Change Firefox internal settings to speed page loads and downloads.

AllPeers: Easily share files online.

Yahoo Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox: Search Yahoo from Firefox, without opening a new tab or window.

NoScript: Protect your PC by customizing your JavaScript preferences in Firefox, Flock, or Mozilla.

ThumbStrips: Browse your Firefox session with thumbnails of recently visited sites.

IE Tab: Open pages that require Internet Explorer in Firefox.

Tab Mix Plus: This add-on provides a raft of useful tab controls for Firefox fans.

Snap Links: Open or save multiple search results with one mouse click.

source: PC World

Microsoft has largely succeeded in getting a PC into the home, but its effort to put a server there will be an uphill battle.

Bill Gates announced the product to much fanfare at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show. However, even folks who are bullish on the concept, such as Forrester Research analyst J.P. Gownder, say it’s destined to be a niche product for years to come.

In a soon-to-be-published research report, Gownder figures that home servers (not just those running Microsoft’s home server product) will reach 4.5 million households by 2012. That’s up from just 190,000 such servers last year.

“That’s a pretty good growth rate,” Gownder said, though he added that “it’s still a niche product, at that point,” with his forecast representing home servers in only about 3 percent of American homes five years from now.

Gownder said the rise in multiple-PC homes, the increase of broadband, and the fact that people now store their music and photos on computers creates the necessary conditions for a home server to be practical. “We really are at a point in history where a home server might actually make sense,” Gownder said.

But, he said, it’s still a tough sell. Most people don’t know what a server is. And even those who do have an understanding of servers from work may not have such a favorable impression. “They know that it goes down sometimes,” Gownder said. “They know that it causes problems for them.”

The one thing that could speed up the slow path to the mainstream, Gownder said, is if a cable company or other TV provider chose to deploy home servers as part of their service.

That concept is not so far-fetched, he said, given the fact that providers are having a tough time keeping up with on-demand TV requirements as content shifts to high definition. Such an approach could lead to growth 10 times what Gownder has forecast.

Microsoft has its own challenges with its Windows Home Server software. The company has struggled to get it into products and onto retail shelves. Hewlett-Packard delayed its shipment until late last year, and few other big-name computer makers have followed with products of their own.

The biggest recent news was negative, with the company announcing a bad bug that could lead to file corruption and data loss. Not exactly the kind of news that makes Middle America want to rush out and buy one.

Microsoft’s Steven VanRoekel said the product’s sales have exceeded the company’s expectations, though he declined to give specific numbers.

“It’s definitely tens of thousands,” VanRoekel said, “which in a month and a half is good.”

One area that Microsoft may look at to boost the popularity of the Home Server is having the software work better in households that have both Macs and Windows PCs.

“That’s something we are taking a close look at,” VanRoekel said, though he added that Microsoft has “nothing to announce.”

source: CNet

Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Images

Two new fresh copies of Windows XP SP2 are available as free downloads straight from Microsoft. This is, of course, not the first time when the Redmond company managed to come up with such an offering. In fact, Microsoft is making quite a tradition out of the practice of giving out free copies of Windows XP, destined for testing purposes.

Both copies of the operating system have already been activated, so users need not worry themselves with such a detail. In combination with the virtualization component, which in this case is Virtual PC 2007, Microsoft has dropped two Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Images, at the end of the last week. Pete LePage, Product Manager, Internet Explorer, Developer Division, has uploaded the images to the company’s servers as early as December 5. Both downloads are addressed at web developers that need to test websites on Internet Explorer 6, as well as on Internet Explorer 7.

In this regard, IE6_VPC.EXE weighs in at 485.0 MB while IE7_VPC.EXE is 471.1 MB. The two images have already been optimized for running inside Virtual PC 2007. “VPC Hard Disk Image for testing websites on IE on Windows XP SP2″, reads the brief description from Microsoft of the downloads. “VPC hard disk images containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, and either IE6 or IE7 and the IE7 Readiness Toolkit. You will need a minimum of 1.5 Gig hard drive space free to expand the VHD file”. As it was the case with the past offerings, the latest examples of Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Images are also time bombed. The expiration date has been set for April 1, 2008.

Up until this point, Microsoft has been refreshing the offerings upon expiration, this being the reason of the latest releases, and it is probable that the company will continue to do so in the future. The two Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Images are available for download via this link.

source: SoftPedia.com

RC1 to be distributed in stages; full public availability not planned until next week

Microsoft Corp. today began distributing the first “release candidate” version of its Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) update that will be made available to a wide group of testers.

Initially, though, only about 15,000 invitation-only testers will be able to download Release Candidate 1 of the Vista update. Microsoft released the RC1 installation file to that group at 3 p.m. EST today. They also were the only testers who were able to download an earlier batch of release candidate code, called Vista SP1 RC Preview, that was made available to them last month.

Subscribers to Microsoft’s MSDN and TechNet services, who number in the hundreds of thousands, will be able to download the RC1 software tomorrow, according to David Zipkin, a senior product manager at Microsoft. He said that the code will become “fully public” by next week. The RC1 code weighs in at 60MB for a single-language version, Zipkin added.

On Monday, Microsoft announced that in Vista SP1, it plans to do away with its so-called antipiracy kill switch — officially, a reduced-functionality-mode feature that was designed to take effect if users didn’t activate the operating system with a valid software license key within 30 days of installation.

But Zipkin said today that the antipiracy mechanism couldn’t be removed in time for the RC1 release. Microsoft plans to ship another release candidate that won’t include the reduced functionality mode before Vista SP1’s commercial release in next year’s first quarter, he said.

Although Microsoft said in October that more than 88 million copies of Vista have been shipped on PCs or sold at retail, the operating system has yet to be taken up in a big way by enterprise users in the 12 months since it was made available to them.

Vista SP1 won’t offer many new features to users, according to Microsoft officials. Instead, the update is focused on under-the-hood improvements designed to fix Vista’s nagging performance problems.

For instance, some Vista users have complained about long start-up, shutdown and application load times compared with Windows XP, the operating system’s predecessor. In addition, there have been complaints that Vista performs various computing tasks no faster, and in some cases slower, than Windows XP does. And users also have criticized the operating system’s lack of support for third-party software and peripheral devices.

Zipkin said that some of the improvements coming in Vista SP1 include improvements of up to 45% in copying files, plus faster resume, standby and hibernate times and speedier unzipping of compressed files. “Beta testers do like the performance,” he said, although he added that it’s still “too early” to do specific benchmarks comparing Vista SP1 with the initial release of the operating system or with Windows XP.

In contrast, an outside testing company that got its hands on the RC Preview version of Vista SP1 said last month that the software didn’t perform significantly faster than the original Vista release on a series of tests, and that it ran considerably slower than the upcoming Service Pack 3 update for Windows XP. A Microsoft official criticized the testing last week, saying in a blog posting that with the Vista SP1 code still under development, any benchmarks are “a moving target.”

As part of Vista SP1, Microsoft is also trying to make it easier for IT managers, especially ones at multinational companies, to install the operating system. Zipkin said that the service-pack update will be available in stand-alone installer packages supporting either five or 36 languages, enabling systems administrators to use a single installer file to deploy Vista SP1 for end users in different countries.

He added that Microsoft has been able to slash the size of the stand-alone installers in the RC1 software, compared with earlier beta releases of Vista SP1. The five-language version is about one-third smaller than it was before, and the 36-language package has been reduced by more than one-half — from 1.3GB down to 550MB.

However, the installers won’t be ready for use when Vista SP1 is released commercially in next year’s first quarter, Zipkin said. The five-language installer, which supports English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese, will become available a few weeks after SP1’s release, while the 36-language version is due eight to 12 weeks later, according to Zipkin.

Microsoft hopes that Vista SP1 will spur more companies to upgrade their PCs from Windows XP, as the first service-pack updates traditionally have done for the company’s products. The Vista update will be part of a busy first-quarter release schedule for Microsoft, which plans to simultaneously launch Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 on Feb. 27. The company also made an RC1 version of Windows Server 2008 available today.

source: ComputerWorld.com

Is this new video service from NBC/Universal and Fox a preview of how we’ll get our online TV shows and movies in the near future?

Big Hollywood studios take a somewhat scattered approach to distributing their video online, using a combination of their own Web sites, sites they’ve invested in (like Movielink), and popular third-party storefronts like iTunes.

But analysts say studios eventually want to sell video directly to consumers, either from their own sites or in small joint ventures with other studios.

That ’s why the October debut of Hulu, a web video joint venture between NBC/Universal (owned by GTE) and Fox (owned by News Corp.), is a notable date in TV and movies’ transition to the Web. Portals like Hulu may eventually be the places where we go online to buy mainstream TV and movies.

Using Hulu’s “private” beta with permission, I watched a good deal of the free service over the course of a weekend. I found Hulu’s content selection impressive, the video quality at least passable, the site design elegant and simple, and the navigation and community features mainly useful.

Hulu’s only sour note is the rather harsh restrictions that its Old Guard studio owners place on when and where and for how long you can watch the videos

Impressive Content

Contrary to the hype leading up to Hulu’s coming out, the site is not designed to be a “YouTube killer”. Hulu’s main draw is current, prime time TV shows like Heroes, House, Scrubs, and The Simpsons. Hulu also features some old TV series episodes (Kojak, Night Gallery), and a few old movies (The Blues Brothers, The Breakfast Club), plus some clips (like Saturday Night Live bits), movie trailers, and a few viral videos thrown in for good measure.

Video Quality: Not Bad

I watched Hulu on a Gateway home computer connected to the Internet using a 1.5 Mbps AT&T DSL line. The quality of Hulu’s video isn’t perfect, but I found it quite watchable, despite some slight pixilation and a few hiccups in the audio and video.

When I moved the navigation slider to a future point in the program, however, I saw a considerable amount of stopping and starting as the stream buffered. These things are, of course, more noticeable when you switch into full-screen mode, and any such service is only as good as the broadband pipe it comes in on.

Still, Hulu is among the best attempts I’ve seen yet at streaming video at high quality over the public Internet.

Navigation and Community Tools

Hulu’s designers appear to have done their homework, assembling a sort of “greatest hits” of navigation and community tools in the interface. The Embed tool spits out the HTML you’ll need to host Hulu video at your site or blog. The “Details” button gives you information on the show you’re watching, such as its episode number and original air date.

The designers may have borrowed the “Lower Lights” feature from Stage 6, which dims every pixel on your monitor except those within the video window. Hulu does feature one tool I hadn’t seen elsewhere: Within Hulu’s video share tool, you can use a simple slider tool to chop out a clip from a show and enclose it with a note to a friend.

source: Mark Sullivan, PC World