Archive for May, 2008

You may have heard the news about the upcoming Service Pack for Microsoft Office 2007, that will let you access more document formats like the XML Paper Specification (XPS), Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1. The ODF format is becoming quite popular these days because it’s a free and open file format for documents. With the upcoming SP2, available in early 2009, you’ll be able to open, edit, and save documents using ODF and save into the other formats, including PDF. However, if you don’t want to wait, you can go ahead an grab the ODF plugin now from Sun’s website.  This plugin is also compatible with older versions of Office, including Office XP, 2003, and 2000.

Get the ODF Office Plugin Now | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10

The Windows Live SkyDrive team blog gives us the latest on new updates to SkyDrive that launched today. SkyDrive is now available in 24 additional locations, with support for a total of 62 countries. You can now leave comments on any SkyDrive file. You can add captions to photos, there is a click control to quickly move through files in the folder, and the photo previews are larger.

Latest Updates to SkyDrive are Live | Larry Larsen | Channel 10

The one must-have add-on for Internet Explorer is IE7Pro. It gives Microsoft’s browser many of the features that Firefox aficionados consider essential, such as mouse gestures, ad blocking, user scripts, and other basic tweaks. Now IE7 users can add a session manager and prefetching to that list.

IE7Pro’s session manager lacks polish but gets the job done.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Using IE7Pro is a snap. The add-on installs an icon on your IE status bar at the bottom, and you right-click it to access the IE7Pro options. Think of it as a context menu for your plugins. The Settings panel is accessible from that menu or using CTRL+F7 hotkeys.

The session manager is much simpler than the popular Session Manager plug-in for Firefox. It lacks most customizable settings that you might hope it would have, but it does allow IE to restart with your last opened tabs. Users must manually save the SESS file, but that’s still a step up from not being able to save them at all.

The prefetching allows IE7 to download pages faster. Simple to configure by checking a box, it allows the browser to preload links and thus download pages faster. Also in this update, the MiniDM download manager gets support for dragging and dropping links.

There are fewer and fewer reasons to make IE7 your first-choice browser, but if you’ve got to use it for work or some other nefarious purpose, it’s almost a crime to not use IE7Pro with it.

IE7Pro adds even more features to IE | Software news, tips, and opinions from Download.com editors – Download.com

Their URL is simply iwindowsmobile.com, but their header image puts a heart in there, so I guess we could call the site iheartwindowsmobile.com. Regardless of what it’s called though, the site offers up a treasure trove of downloads and apps for Windows Mobile devices, the latest of which is a refresh of ZoomBoard.

This new app offers an onscreen keyboard for quick and easy touch typing on Windows Mobile devices. As you touch a letter, the app can either zoom in on the part of the keyboard under your finger in a pop-up lens or it can zoom in on the entire keyboard. The keyboard comes in different color palettes – black or bright blue – and looks great on the new HTC Touch devices.

However, ZoomBoard is just one of many great apps on iwindowsmobile.com. There’s also FunContact, a contact manager; GoodWin, a task switcher and launcher;  and SMS-Chat, an instant SMS messenger. You can also get the three of those programs bundled together with the Communication Suite download.

In addition, there is also EyePhoto, a photo viewer which lets use your finger to swish through your pictures; Audio Notes Touch, an mp3 recorder; and AstroNavigator, an interactive slide sky map.

The site is owned by Vito Technology, a company based in Russia who makes all kinds of apps for Pocket PC, Symbian, and other Smartphones.

There’s really only one problem with the apps from iwindowsmobile.com – they aren’t free ($14.95/ea) and you’re going to want to download them all!

iWindowsMobile Launches Updated ZoomBoard | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10

Update! I forgot to mention that you can get access to the ClearContext beta by using the invite code webware on the ClearContext site.

The Outlook plug-in Xobni (download) has been getting a lot of press recently, but it’s not the only Outlook helper out there.

On Monday, ClearContext, which has had a paid, enterprise-level e-mail organizer for a while now (download), is releasing ClearContext Personal, a free, de-featured version of the product (download). ClearContext isn’t Webware, but since I’ve covered Xobni here, I’d be remiss to ignore it.

CEO Deva Hazarika acknowledged to me that ClearContext Personal might not fit the needs of someone like myself, who gets a lot e-mail that’s important but comes from strangers. I tried it anyway.

ClearContext color-codes and sorts e-mail automatically.

ClearContext Personal organizes your e-mail as it arrives, in contrast to Xobni, which helps you understand more about the people who send you messages. I think ClearContext Personal is a more useful tool, but it’s also harder to get into, and if you’ve already got your workflow in Outlook set up in a way you like it, you may be frustrated when ClearContext tries to re-write your rules.

ClearContext examines your e-mail behavior to determine which senders are most important to you, and it color-codes (and optionally sorts) your in-box by priority. I found it did a middling job of determining who matters to me. You can easily train the app, though. I didn’t bother, which meant I really couldn’t trust the color coding.

The app understands message threads and, in each message window, will show you a list of other messages in the threads; it can even clump messages in a thread together in your in-box. ClearContext lets you "unsubscribe" from threads you don’t want to be bothered with. It’s great for putting down spam-like threads from your co-workers. It can also automatically collect all your notification e-mails ("Bacn") into folders, and similarly can auto-file all the messages you don’t want to keep but are afraid to delete in case you need them later.

If you’re an e-mail filer, ClearContext makes it much, much easier to move messages from your in-box to their final location.

A new view lets you easily sort through notifications from social networks and commerce sites.

The free version of the app has some limits on the number of Outlook files it can support, and it lacks the pro version’s delegation features. Another issue for power users will be ClearContext’s lack of support for mobile devices or for users of multiple PCs. And there’s no online version of it.

ClearContext is not nearly as pretty as Xobni, nor is it as easy to use.

ClearContext tames Outlook | Software news, tips, and opinions from Download.com editors – Download.com

No doubt you’ve heard about the recent earthquakes in China. The Live Search Maps team in China has put together a collection rendering all of the earthquakes in China. In addition to mapping out where the earthquakes occurred, there’s a sidebar which provides more information about each spot listed in the collection. This could be really useful for those tracking what’s going on in the various affected regions. Too bad it’s only in Chinese, though, I would love to have a translated version of this. (via Virtual Earth, an Evangelist’s Blog)

Map the Chinese Earthquakes | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10

Marshall Kirkpatrick, over at ReadWriteWeb, turned me on to Snackr with a post from earlier today. Snackr describes itself as being an RSS ticker. It provides a constant river of news on your screen. Built with Adobe AIR, it is compatible across all platforms and looks really slick.

Snackr sits on one of the four sides of your screen and scrolls through recent posts from sites which are input either by hand or by loading an OPML file. A nice added touch is that if there is an image in the post, it is included in the scrolling entry. There is a quick shortcut for minimizing the ticker in case it gets in the way and you can literally throw it around the screen. If you just grab Snackr and fling it in the direction of an edge of the screen, it will transform and stick there. Just try it to see what I mean.

Clicking on an entry brings up the full version of the post, readable and scrollable in the slide out window. This application becomes really useful when you narrow your feeds down to your mid to high priority ones and limit the items that it displays to a maximum of somewhere between 2 and 5 days old. If you have anything older than that, the posts start to become stale and irrelevant.

Snackr may be a distraction for some and overwhelming for others, but I really like having this extremely relevant river of news glide by on my screen. As Marshall mentioned, it’s a pain to remove feeds if you have a lot of them that you need to unsubscribe from after importing an OPML file, so a batch remove feature would be a great addition in the future. Additional features, such as indicating new items in the river and the ability to change themes, are things that would make sense for future releases, but Snackr runs really well and is very functional, especially for a first release.

Snackr is was written by Narciso Jaramillo, who is a product designer for Adobe Flex and previously worked on version one of Macromedia Dreamweaver.

Download Snackr

Snackr drenches your computer in a river of news | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone

Windows with Office 2007 or Mac with Office 2008: Spruce up your presentations, spreadsheets, invoices, letterhead and business cards with a set of free office templates from Microsoft. Everyone knows the default template choice in Office can be limiting, so this selection widens your range. These templates aren’t the most hip designs in the world, but they’ll at least separate your stuff from the default looks that ship with the office suite. The templates are a free download, and work in Office 2007 (and some in Office 2008 for Mac).

Featured Download: Free Office Templates

ObjectDock from Stardock provids a skinnable and extensively customizable Mac-style dock. ObjectDock is Free and lets users replace the Windows taskbar completely.

ObjectDock can replace the Windows taskbar, and includes a Start menu link.

Colorful and animated, ObjectDock is so customizable it’s impressive. Not only can you choose your own icons to represent programs and documents, set the dock size and location, and configure icon behavior, but you can set the the dock to run faster and take up more RAM, or sacrifice the gloss for other programs.

In replacing the Windows taskbar, users can insert a Start menu button that launches the menu right from the dock, as well as inserting a clock icon using the built-in docklets. Other docklets include pre-built links to your default Web browser, document editor, music player, email client, and other app essentials. The only docklet I found lacking was one for the task manager, but that’s easy enough to create by hand.

The simplest way I found to add a program to the dock was to send a shortcut for a program to the desktop, and then drag-and-drop directly onto the dock. Once added, it was easy to configure the specific icon for the app via the context menu and dock entry properties.

Users also have two choices as to how to indicate that a program is in use. You can have open programs appear minimized on the dock, or have an indicator hover over the dock icon. A huge mess of options makes the thirty included dock skins go a long way, from adjusting the transparency to importing icon and dock themes.

When hiding the Windows taskbar, ObjectDock still lacks an adequate replacement for showing programs that live in the system tray. If you’re otherwise dissatisfied with the Windows taskbar, though, or just want to spice up your desktop, ObjectDock is a cool port to call home

ObjectDock – Free software downloads and reviews – CNET Download.com

Mac users may have it easy with iTunes, but Windows fans should look elsewhere for solid features, a customizable interface, and device syncing support that doesn’t devour resources. That’s why there’s MediaMonkey, which juggles excellent library-management tools with skins, plug-ins, autotagging, links to the Amazon.com MP3 store, track encoding, podcast catching, and more.

Upon first launch, the program scans your drive for supported digital media files to add to the library. Files are sorted based on their ID3 tags, and the helpful Auto-Rename and Auto-Tag From Filename features keep untagged tracks from falling through the cracks. Party mode locks down your library while still allowing people to request songs. Third-party plug-ins are available from the site if you want to tinker with the playback and encoding engine or add additional sound-processing effects. Throw $20 at the Monkey to get advanced features such as sleep, scripting, previewing, and on-the-fly file conversion when syncing with a portable device, but all the best features come in the free version.

Featured Freeware: MediaMonkey | Software news, tips, and opinions from Download.com editors – Download.com

Today, the WorldWide Telescope has been made available to the general public. You may remember the WorldWide Telescope as the technology that made Scoble cry, but even without that hype, the project stands on its own as an amazing platform for scientific exploration and discovery. This virtual telescope is actually comprised of terabytes of imagery, collected and combined from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world. Using Microsoft’s Visual Experience Engine, you can use the telescope to pan and zoom through the night sky, moving in and around planets, stars, and even galaxies. Of course you can view the moon and the planets with WWT, but the imagery from this telescope also lets you do things you’ve never been able to before from your computer – like watching stars being born or galaxies collide.  

For both scientists and educators, the WorldWide Telescope will help to teach astronomy, computational science, and even provide opportunities for scientific discovery. For users of the telescope, there are rich media tours to that offer narration, music, text, and graphics to guide you through the night sky. It’s like going to the planetarium without leaving your home! You can also make your own tours to share with others – a feature that teachers will really enjoy.

I’ve been playing with WWT tonight and it really is amazing to see the galaxies in their actual positions in the universe and be able to zoom and move them around on the screen. There are several different collections of images to explore – constellations, Hubble images, planets, and many more that I wasn’t familiar with but were just as amazing. Click on one of the items from the collection zooms you right to the object in the sky. WWT is rich with technology that will appeal to astronomers, but it’s still simple enough for the everyday user.

The telescope is based on technology that came out of Microsoft Research, an area of the company that has operated for 16 years which focuses on long-term, broad-based projects such as this. It’s built on work that began with Jim Gray’s SkyServer and contributions to Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

WorldWide Telescope

Despite the fact that most of you prefer XP to Vista and would rather Microsoft extended XP’s shelf-life, several new and improved features available in Vista would be great to have in XP. This new functionality may not be enough to get you to switch to Vista, but that doesn’t mean you’re out of luck. Let’s take a look at a few ways you can incorporate Windows Vista’s best features into your current XP PC for free.

We’re going to focus on Vista’s small and large features that are missing from XP, separated into three categories: applications, functional, and aesthetic (e.g., transparency is aesthetic, the new start menu search is functional). This list is not exhaustive, but it does cover the features readers feel make Vista worth it.

Bring Vista’s Best New and Improved Apps to XP

First, aside from some of the small operating system improvements we’ll go into below, Vista also bundles up a few new and improved applications worth mentioning.

A Better Explorer: Windows Explorer is one of the most improved applications in Vista, thanks to added features like breadcrumb navigation, better file previews, and more. There are a few add-ons that add some of these better functional adjustments to Explorer, but in general XP users might want to consider replacing XP’s Explorer altogether with something like Xplorer2 (original post) or significantly beefing it up with a tool like QT TabBar (original post). You can also get that saucy breadcrumb navigation alone with Explorer Breadcrumbs (original post).

Encrypt Your Hard Drive: Some versions of Vista—toward the Ultimate end of the scale—come with a new drive encryption software called BitLocker built in. If you’re keen on security and encryption but you want to stick with XP, check out the free, open source TrueCrypt (original post). If you need a little help getting started, check out our guide to encrypting data with TrueCrypt.

Take Quick and Easy Screenshots: PrtScrn has been around forever, but it’s never been the most user-friendly way to get a screenshot. In Vista, Microsoft threw in a screenshot utility called the Snipping Tool. Fact is, if better screenshots are important to you, there are gobs of excellent free screenshot apps available for XP like Screenshot Captor (original post), Clip2Net (original post), and Jing (original post), among many others.

Bring Vista’s Best Functional Features to XP

Task-Switching à la Flip 3D: Vista’s Flip 3D is like Alt-Tab on steroids, displaying full previews of each window as you move through it. To a large extent it’s eye candy, but it can also be really useful in finding the right window when you’re switching from your keyboard. Freeware applications like Shock Aero 3D (original post) and WinFlip bring the same 3D shuffling (and then some, in the case of WinFlip) to to your XP desktop.

Integrated Start Menu Search and Launch: Dubbed Instant Search by Microsoft, this new feature adds a search box to the Windows Start menu for quick searching and launching of documents and applications. If you want to port this same functionality to XP, you can do so with apps like ViStart (original post) or Vista Start Menu (original post)—an extraordinarily beefed up version of the Windows Start menu. Then again, if you’re not stuck on the notion of a search-and-launch box built directly into the Start menu, you can’t go wrong with Launchy or Google Desktop Search.

Replace the Windows Sidebar: Third-party tools similar to Windows Sidebar and Gadgets pre-dated Vista, so you can trade in desktop real estate for the same functionality with SideSlide (original post) or the Google Desktop Sidebar.

Live Thumbnail Previews of Files: Vista does a nice job of providing thumbnail previews to most image files and even text files, and while XP does have similar functionality, it’s not as advanced as Vista’s. Freeware application Xentient Thumbnails (original post) creates live thumbnails for virtually all images, and if you want a more intimate look at the innards of text and other files without opening them, check out InfoTag Magic (original post)

Speed Up Your System with a Thumb Drive: Windows ReadyBoost speeds up your performance by using a USB thumb drive as system memory, and while nothing beats an actual RAM upgrade, XP users can check out eBoostr (original post) to bring the same functionality to XP.

Streamline Your File Renaming: Microsoft got smart in Vista and changed the behavior when you hit F2 to rename a file, selecting only the name of the file and leaving the extension alone. For a very simple integration of this feature into XP, check out Better Rename utility. Alternately, if you feel like adding this feature and beefing up Windows Explorer on top of that, you can get the same renaming behavior in Xplorer2 (original post) or QT TabBar (original post).

Taskbar Window Previews: If you like how Vista offers handy little thumbnail previews of windows when you hover over their taskbar item, freeware application Visual Tooltip (original post) brings the same goods to XP.

Give XP that Vista Look

Ultimately, despite all the little feature improvements Vista can throw your way, a new operating system’s biggest selling point is often the eye candy—in Vista’s case, Aero. There are a lot of tools available that can help you theme XP to look more like Vista, though often users of such applications see mixed results, so proceed at your own risk.

Probably the most comprehensive XP-to-Vista tweaker is the Vista Transformation Pack, which transforms everything from the Start menu and Control Panel to icons.

For a less full-on approach, you could try out skinning utility Uxtheme Patcher with one of several themes from art web site deviantART (like this one or this one) to make XP look and feel more like Vista.

Isn’t There More to It Than That?

There are surely some under-the-hood changes in Vista that you won’t get from these simple upgrades, but let’s be honest: You care about the features, not the underlying code. And since you can get most of Vista’s new features from the comfort of XP—and you can stick to XP as a quick, resource-light alternative to Vista—it looks like most of you won’t be changing horses anytime soon.

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If there’s a Vista feature or an XP app you love that wasn’t included in this list, let’s hear about it in the comments. While you’re getting the goods of Vista in XP, you may also want to take a look at how you can get the best of Firefox in Internet Explorer.

Windows: Get Vista’s Best Features in XP

Emailing large attachments has never been easy, but Pando for Windows and Mac combines P2P tech with a clean interface to make sharing files or folders as large as 1 GB a cinch–and free.

Circumventing FTP servers, online storage, and tertiary e-mail accounts, Pando either generates a link for instant messages and Web pages, or e-mails your recipient a tiny attachment. When you click that attachment or link, Pando connects to its server and downloads the "package," as the Pando people call the contents of your attachment. You even have 14 days to grab the "package" before it gets deleted from their server. Other useful features include support for multiple addressees, Yahoo and Outlook plug-ins that automatically Pando-ize attachments, and a record of how many times your package has been downloaded.

Easy to use, Pando could drastically change how files are transferred between small groups of people.

Featured Freeware: Pando | Software news, tips, and opinions from Download.com editors – Download.com

Our gadget-obsessed brothers at Gizmodo report that many AT&T hotspots—including Starbucks and Barnes and Noble—have started offering free Wi-Fi access to iPhone users. With a little ingenuity, the same free Wi-Fi access can be granted to your laptop. Using it from your iPhone, you just connect to the hotspot and give the site your iPhone number. To get the same access on your laptop, the key is to fool the hotspot into thinking your browser is still an iPhone. Here’s how:

To masquerade as an iPhone, you’ll need to tweak your browser’s user agent, which web sites use to identify your browser when you connect to the site. In Firefox, you can install the previously mentioned User Agent Switcher. In Safari, you can select the iPhone user agent through the Develop menu (which you can enable by navigating to Preferences -> Advanced and checking "Show Develop menu in menu bar." Likewise, Opera has user agent switching built in. On the non-Safari browsers, you’ll have to manually add a new iPhone user agent like so.

Now that you’re all set up with your spoofed iPhone user agent, head to the hotspot page and enter your iPhone number (or, if you’ve got permission, maybe the number of an iPhone owner you know).* Once you’re done, you should hopefully have free hotspot access from your full screen rather than your tiny iPhone screen.

I haven’t actually been able to verify this yet (though there are reports of success), so if you give it a try, let’s hear how it worked for you in the comments.

*One Gizmodo reader using his unlocked iPhone with T-Mobile reports that entering his T-Mobile number worked, but your mileage may vary.

Free Wi-Fi: Get Free Wi-Fi Access on Your Laptop at Starbucks, Barnes and Noble

Can’t wait to play games on your Zune 2? Here’s what you need to get started. Jump over to ZuneBoards.com and see instructions from a forum member who gives you the step by step guidelines to get started.
They point to two games to get you started, Galactic Wars 3 and Alien Aggressors (if you know of any others, leave them in the comments here.) The first reply in the comments on the ZuneBoards site says "More complicated than I hoped." Keep in mind you’re in the land of early adopting here.

How to Put Games On Your Zune 2! | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10