Multimedia October 20, 2006

This week I spoke to Chris Beard, Mozilla’s vice president of products. Among other things we discussed how Firefox 2.0 is going to be marketed. I was going to save this for the full write-up of my interview with Chris Beard, but reading Chris Messina’s post today about IE7 made me want to address it now. Chris Messina, an ex-Flock architect, wrote:

“So here we are now, on the precipice looking out on the mere beginnings of Web 2.0. With Internet Explorer caught up and inching ahead, there is a critical question for Firefox advocates: do we stay the course and continue promoting Firefox as a product competing with Internet Explorer? Or, do we focus on the wider, more gradual fight to spread and improve open source principles and practices — in effect, to “win the hearts and minds” of those who employ us by day but leave us hacking at night, struggling to make a decent living at it should we choose to pursue it as our primary occupation? Personally, I prefer to chase the latter… for, after all, what really comes next, well, shall be determined by our combined intentions being realized.” (more…)

Internet news, Multimedia October 18, 2006

Belltech Greeting Card Designer is a professional quality greeting card software, which will help you create personalized cards for Birthdays, Wedding, New Year, anniversaries, Valentine’s Day or any special occasion.

How creative can you get? Well, this is something you have to discover for yourselves. The program comes with a lot of card templates, clip art, background pictures and drawing tools, so you have unlimited possibilities of combining these elements, for a better looking greeting card every time. (more…)

Internet news, Multimedia

Microsoft Corp. released the latest version of its free Internet Explorer browser Wednesday, simultaneously delivering an improved user experience and a salvo crucial to regaining ground lost to rival Firefox in the ongoing Web browser wars.

For PC users, Internet Explorer 7 — a free, 15-megabyte download available from microsoft.com/ie — is an improvement in security, privacy and usability in a software tool increasingly important to every connected citizen as the Internet spreads and deepens. IE6, Microsoft’s prior version, is five years old — ancient in Internet terms — and is notoriously vulnerable to hacking. (more…)

Multimedia

This is a prerelease version of the Adobe® Flash® Player 9 Update software for various platforms. It is being made available for developers and consumers to test their content to ensure existing content plays back correctly and that there are no compatibility issues.

The Flash Player beta is available in all languages; however, the beta installers are only in English and we can only accept feedback in English at this time. Flash Player beta downloads are now available for the Microsoft® Windows® Vista™ and Linux platforms. (more…)

Multimedia

Mozilla, maker of the open-source Firefox browser, on Monday released the latest beta, or test, version of the software, dubbed Firefox 2.0 Release Candidate 3 (RC3), and it could be the last test edition before the firm launches the final version, TechWeb News reports via InformationWeek.com. (more…)

Multimedia, Security news October 16, 2006

Microsoft will post links to rival security software makers in the welcoming screen for Windows Vista, the company has said, another appeasement to a competitor who has raised questions about the developer’s monopolistic position.

One of the changes to the upcoming new operating system, said Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, in a question and answer session on Friday, is to the Welcome Center, the first screen that Vista users see after installing the OS or turning on a new PC. (more…)

Multimedia, Security news

An effective and easy-to-use firewall program, ZoneAlarm does a great job of keeping your PC safe from a variety of threats. ZoneAlarm uses a simple wizard to make configuring a firewall, which seems like a daunting task to many computer users, incredibly easy. (more…)

Multimedia

There’s a lot of confusion going around about the new Windows Vista licenses. I wrote about the two-machine limit earlier this week. Now I see Gregg Keizer at TechWeb and Robert McLaws of Windows Now arguing that the new license bans the use of Windows Vista Home Basic and Home Premium in virtual machines.

I believe their interpretation is wrong. In fact, I think Microsoft deserves credit for this change, which actually gives purchasers of Vista Ultimate a benefit they wouldn’t have under any previous Windows license. (more…)

Internet news, Multimedia

KDE just got 10 years old! The K Desktop Environment, is “one of” the best (the “one of” was put in order to stop a flame war in my blog) desktop environments for Linux. KDE has been crucial in introducing Linux to the Desktop, true a GNOME based distribution, Ubuntu has the taken the reign now (I believe this was due to marketing and hype), but KDE based distributions, Fedora, Kubuntu etc are not too far behind. Its been now 5 years that I’ve been using Linux, my first distribution was Redhat 7.2, which was running GNOME; KDE, due to Redhat’s modifications had a similar look and feel in Redhat. So I couldn’t get excited about Linux at all, it was a very boring interface for me. But in a random surfing session I came across screen shots of Slackware, which of course ships with unmodified sources, and the screen shots really appealed to me, I downloaded Slackware, and from that moment I’ve never looked to any other distribution, and use Slackware with KDE exclusively. So what is it that I really like KDE? (more…)

Internet news, Multimedia October 13, 2006

Some call them “widgets,” some call them “gadgets.” In the end, they’re all really the same thing: little dynamic applets that run on your desktop. The idea has been around for ages, and relatively popular “widget engines” have existed for several years. Stardock’s DestkopX product allows for the production and consumption of desktop applets they call DesktopX Objects, but users can export those into little .exe files called Widgets that can be used by anyone without running DesktopX—with one major caveat. Though DesktopX doesn’t need to be running, it does need to be installed. Recently, Stardock enabled the ability for users of DesktopX Pro to export their own Widgets/Objects as “Gadgets,” which are stand-alone desktop applets that run on anyone’s PC, without even having DesktopX installed. Confused yet? (more…)