Archive for the ‘TV’ Category

It seems like every week we learn about a new tip to enhance the Windows 7 taskbar, and it’s hard to keep them all straight. Here’s the complete power user’s guide to tweaking and using your taskbar like a pro.

Before you even get started trying to tweak your taskbar, you should make sure that you understand how to use all of the features, and there might be more than you think—check out our complete guide to Windows 7 shortcuts to learn useful basic maneuvers, like how you can hold down the Ctrl key while left-clicking to cycle through a group of taskbar buttons, or hold down Shift while right-clicking to show the regular window menu. Here’s the full list of Taskbar-specific shortcuts:

• Win+number (1-9): Starts the application pinned to the taskbar in that position, or switches to that program.
• Shift+Win+number (1-9): Starts a new instance of the application pinned to the taskbar in that position.
• Ctrl+Win+number (1-9): Cycles through open windows for the application pinned to the taskbar in that position.
• Alt+Win+number (1-9): Opens the Jump List for the application pinned to the taskbar.
• Win+T: Focus and scroll through items on the taskbar.
• Win+B: Focuses the System Tray icons.
• Drag+Drop taskbar buttons or System Tray icons: to reorganize them.
• Shift+Click on a taskbar button: Open a program or quickly open another instance of a program.
• Ctrl+Shift+Click on a taskbar button: Open a program as an administrator.
• Shift+Right-click on a taskbar button: Show the window menu for the program (like XP does).
• Shift+Right-click on a grouped taskbar button: Show the window menu for the group.
• Ctrl+Click on a grouped taskbar button: Cycle through the windows of the group.
• Drag a File to a taskbar button: to pin the file to the current application’s Jump List.
• Shift+Drag a File to a taskbar button: to open a file with the current application.
• Middle-Click on a taskbar button: to open a new instance of the application.
• Middle-Click on a Aero Thumbnail: to close that application instance.
• Left-Click + Drag upwards: to open the Jump List for an application.

The Power User’s Guide to the Windows 7 Taskbar – Taskbar – Lifehacker

Where do you find the largest iTunes user base? On Windows. A large number of those users own an iPod touch or iPhone, and a similarly large number still use Live Messenger for chatting… so it really wasn’t a surprise when news get around late last year that Microsoft was working on a Live Messenger app for the iPhone.

Now it looks like the app could be arriving soon. NeoWin’s Tom Warren has posted a handful of images showing Live Messenger in action, and it looks pretty slick. Just about everything you can do on the desktop version you’ll be able to do on your iPhone: chat, send files, check your social stream, browse photos, and more.

Yes, you can already chat with your Live Messenger from your iPhone using an app like Meebo, but Microsoft has some serious brand recognition. That and the familiar interface will no doubt be enough incentive to attract a lot of users to the app.

Warren seems optimistic that this will hit the app store some time in June, when Windows Live Wave 4’s first public beta downloads are expected to arrive.

Microsoft Live Messenger app for iPhone [EXPOSED] | My Mac News

Kodu provides an end-to-end creative environment for designing, building, and playing your own new games. The core of the Kodu project is the programming user interface. The language is simple and entirely icon-based. Programs are composed of pages, which are broken down into rules, which are further divided into conditions and actions. Conditions are evaluated simultaneously.

The Kodu language is designed specifically for game development and provides specialized primitives derived from gaming scenarios. Programs are expressed in physical terms, using concepts like vision, hearing, and time to control character behavior. While not as general-purpose as classical programming languages, Kodu can express advanced game design concepts in a simple, direct, and intuitive manner.

Kodu | Projects | Fuse Labs

Microsoft has revealed today its public beta of the next version of WHS, code named "Vail." The primary upgrades / changes include the extension of media streaming outside of the home or office, improvements in multi-PC backup and restore, simplified setup and user experience as well as "significantly" expanded development and customization tools for partner. Beyond that, the company’s playing things pretty close to the chest, but you can feel free to grab a 64-bit copy of the beta starting today and dig in yourself. ‘Course, Microsoft recommends that you install the software on a secondary (read: not important to your livelihood) machine, and on the development front, it’s introducing a new SDK for those who wish to "create add-in applications using Vail’s new extensible programming model."  

Windows Home Server ‘Vail’ beta now available for download, brings improved UI and streaming options — Engadget

One of the more common question we’ve seen flying around lately is "Where can I download the Touch Pack for Windows 7?" That’s been a difficult one because it was created for OEMs and wasn’t meant to be a MS Download. That changed tonight, you can now download the Touch Pack from the Microsoft Download Center. The Touch Pack features three games and three apps including the Microsoft Surface Globe, MS Collage, MS Surface Lagoon, MS Blackboard, MS Rebound, and MS Garden Pond.

Download details: Touch Pack for Windows 7

Since the first Bing theme pack for Windows 7 was so popular, the Bing Team decided to do it again with the release of Bing’s Best 2, a new collection of desktop backgrounds for your Windows 7 computer.

Windows 7 theme packs let you click once to install a set of desktop backgrounds that rotate from one image to the next on an interval you specify. In this new collection, there are 21 images pulled from those featured on the Bing.com homepage. Via onTen

Bing’s Best 2 – Bing’s Best 2

Windows and Mac: Miro Video Converter quickly and easily converts video on-the-fly for popular devices, with presets for your PSP, Android phone, or Apple device.

The program has presets for a variety of formats and devices, such as the Motorola Droid, Google Nexus One, PSP, iPhone and a variety of iPods. It also supports MP4 and Ogg Theora conversion. To use it, just drag and drop a video you want to convert into the app, select your preset, and let the program work its magic, converting your file so you can easily add it to your portable device. The file is saved in the same folder as the video source. It has an easy and intuitive interface, and accomplishes in taking the hassle out of converting video. Miro Video Converter is a free utility for Windows and Mac from the same developers who created the open-source internet video player, Miro

Miro Video Converter Easily Converts Video for Your Android, PSP, or Apple Device – video converter – Lifehacker

Haven’t updated your laptop’s trackpad driver lately? Then you may well want to consider doing so, at least if your laptop is equipped with a Synaptics trackpad. As a user on the Hardware Zone forums discovered, the latest Synaptics driver seems to enable multitouch gestures on older laptops that didn’t previously support them, including two-finger scrolling, and three-finger click. What’s more, while the drivers themselves come from HP, they should work just fine on other laptops with a Synaptics trackpad. Hit up the link below to try it out for yourself.

Synaptics driver enables multitouch gestures on older trackpads — Engadget

At the MIX10 conference, Microsoft released the developer preview of Internet Explorer 9. This isn’t a full web browser like IE8 is – just a taste of what’s to come in IE9. Developers who have the preview browser installed, though, will receive updates bringing new code every 2 months until the beta release of IE9.

As previously announced, the new browser will support HTML5, CSS3, and hardware acceleration. It also sports a new JavaScript engine called “Chakra.” You can read more about its improvements and how to send feedback over on the IE blog here.

When you first launch the IE9 preview browser, you’re taken to the IE9 Test Drive website where you’ll find a series of tests ready to be run. There are speed demos for testing browser performance, graphics demos, and HTML5 demos for testing border radius, CSS2, DOM Style, and DOM events. There’s also an “HTML 5 T-Shirt Designer” app that uses HTML5 and XHTML to let you create your own shirt.

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Preview IE9 Now | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10

It’s been awhile since I last looked at Launchy, the open source application launcher for Windows. With this application, you use keyboard shortcuts to launch applications, files, folders, bookmarks and more with just a few keystrokes. Once installed, it hides in your system tray waiting for its next command. When you’re ready, you hit “Alt + Spacebar” to display the input window. Then you can just start typing what you want. Launchy finds it.

For users of Windows XP, this app has clear benefits. However, later versions of Windows offer a similar feature just by using the “Search” box in the Start Menu. Still, some Launchy enthusiasts prefer the app to the native functionality and, well, that’s the great thing about Windows – you can tweak away by installing alternative programs like this. 

Just recently, the developer released the next edition of this application – the Launchy 2.5 Beta. This version offers the following changes:

• Faster performance
• Icons displayed correctly
• Environment variables updated correctly when system changes
• Controly includes more items
• New shortcut keys
• New controls:
o Shift+tab or Shift+bkspc deletes previous tab
o Shift+Ctrl+Enter launches in elevated mode (Vista and Win7)
o Down arrow shows history (when there is no current search text)
• Default skin built into executable in case no other skin is found
• Down arrow
• Launchy now has an icon in the system tray
• Skins are simplified and easier to create

The executable is here. As with any beta software, the usual caveats apply. Install at your own risk. But this sounds like a good update to a pretty great program. Can’t wait to check it out!

New Beta of Launchy Arrives | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10

Have you wished that Windows had an App store that was as easy the iTunes App store?  Then You will love AllMyApps.

Allmyapps makes software installation a breeze. No matter how many applications you need, 1 click is all you need to have all your favorite applications installed on your PC.

Allmyapps also keeps your applications safe! Would you need to reinstall your system, Allmyapps takes care of reinstalling all your favorite applications in the blink of an eye.

Allmyapps – Application Store for Windows XP, Vista and Seven to find and install the best applications

Windows: Booting your computer up in the morning is one of the most tedious parts of starting your computer use for the day. What if you could gain the benefits of a reboot and still start quickly out of a hiberation?

The premise of Boot Snooze is that it takes less time to pull the computer from standby or hibernation mode than to do a full reboot, but rebooting a computer is necessary and sometimes beneficial. With Boot Snooze you shut down your computer, performing a full reboot, and then Boot Snooze puts it back into hibernation or standby mode.

You could obviously do this manually by rebooting your computer every night and then hibernating it immediately after it finished up the startup routines, but that would negate the time saving benefit of having Boot Snooze do it for you and leaving your computer fresh and ready to use in the morning without the down time of booting up.

Boot Snooze is freeware, Windows only. Have a favorite tool of your own for speeding up boot times or just helping you to spend less time waiting for your computer to do things? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Boot Snooze Reboots and Hibernates Your Computer for Faster Startup Time – saving time – Lifehacker

If you are like me, you love Pandora. My problem was that I would have 10 brewers open with 20 tabs each.  I would often close the browser that was playing my music.  Now Pandora One is a pay service, for 36 dollars a month, that comes with a great Adobe Air app, but I did not want a pay service.  Yes, Pandora One comes at a high bit rate, but regular Pandora sounds great.  I Binged and found OpenPandora. OpenPandora is an open source windows desktop application that exposes Pandora music discovery service.  It does every thing I want, without the pay service. 

Features

• Integration with Last.fm, Microsoft Messenger, Xfire and Skype
• Hide to tray and popup tray notification window with full info
• Full control from tray icon
• Control with multimedia keyboard and global shortcuts
• Support for Logitech G15 keyboard
• Control with Wiimote
• Lyrics
• more …

* Requires Internet Explorer 5.5 (or later) and .NET Framework 1.1

OpenPandora Home

Office Casual: Why Monster’s resume templates are easy

Now you can use and submit a resume template designed by Monster.com without leaving your Word program. Doug Thomas shows you Monster’s Easy Submit Resumes.

Office Casual: Why Monster’s resume templates are easy | Tina Wood | Channel 10

 You may remember seeing the Microsoft Research project Kodu for Xbox last year. The game allows programming novices to develop robust games on the Xbox and control interactions between the characters. Now the PC version is available in beta form which is great news as most schools don’t have Xbox 360’s.
With Kodu, the idea is to give kids a way to accomplish something they didn’t think they would be able to do while strengthening their design, math, and problem-solving skills. It was created as Matthew MacLaurin, director of Future Social Experiences Lab, watched his then three year old daughter interact with a computer. Realizing there was a disconnect between the passive experience she was having and the coding that went into applications, MacLaurin began the project. Kodu is now used in more than 60 educational institutions around the world including a pilot program across 26 schools in Victoria, Australia. You can download Kodu for PC and get started here.

Kodu Now Available for PC | Larry Larsen | Channel 10