Currently browsing Posts Tagged “software”

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Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1 Unleashed

Posted by Scott Jarkoff in Shorts

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Speaking of desktop email clients, Mozilla just unleashed Thunderbird 3.1. The latest Mozilla email client is now based on the Gecko 1.9.2 platform providing improved performance, stability and web compatibility, among other nifty new features.

A new migration assistant wizard helps users move easily across from existing clients such as Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Mail, importing emails, address books, and settings into Thunderbird, whilst new tools including a timeline and filtering tools allow easy and efficient ways to find past emails.

And for those looking to expand their Thunderbird installation with new add-ons and extensions, it’s now easier than ever to install and download them – you can do it straight from the Add-ons Manager.

This looks to be one of the most solid Thunderbird releases to-date. The new account setup is magnitudes easier to use than in previous versions, hopefully facilitating an increased adoption rate for the less tech savvy users out there. There are a load of additional new features worth reading about as well.

Flock Beta Now Powered by Chromium

Posted by Scott Jarkoff in Shorts

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Flock, the Mozilla-powered social browser, has recently released a new beta powered by Chromium, the same foundation Google Chrome is built upon. The result of ditching Mozilla in favor of Chromium has allowed Flock to see a huge increase in speed, bringing it on par with its WebKit-powered brethren.

Flock is faster, simpler, and more friendly. Literally. It’s the only sleek, modern web browser with the built-in ability to keep you up-to-date with your Facebook and Twitter friends.

Share web pages, photos, and video. Update your status and make comments—from anywhere on the web!

Unlike previous incarnations of Flock, the new Chromium powered browser offers a minimal design utilizing a simplistic sidebar for the built-in social networking features. Flock uses this sidebar to present an activity stream from your accounts on popular social networking sites, combining Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and RSS feeds all in to one sexy display. The sidebar is entirely user configurable, allowing you to decide what information you want to see.

I have to say I am quite impressed. While I was always intrigued by the features Flock offered, I was never able to commit myself to using the browser. The GUI was chaotic and the implementation was lackluster, even though it sounded like a great idea. The new beta is a 180-degree reversal from the previous versions and may be a worthwhile switch.

Currently the new beta of Flock is only available for Windows although an OS X version is under active development. Although Chrome offers a number of extensions capable of performing many of the same tasks, Flock offers a far more fluid and intuitive design, simplifying the process and making it easier to combine all that data in to a single, usable stream.

If you are a hardcore social networker then Flock may be just the medicine you need!

Postbox Releases Free Edition – Postbox Express

Posted by Scott Jarkoff in Shorts

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Although I still truly believe desktop email clients are slowly becoming a dying breed, oddly I have been enamored with Postbox ever since it was released a few short years ago. Postbox offers a unique feature set not seen in any other desktop email clients, making it almost worthwhile. This uniqueness has its price as Postbox retails for US$40.

If you have been interested in playing around with Postbox long-term rather than through the mere 15-day trial period then look no further than Postbox Express.

Postbox Express 1.0 is a simple, yet powerful, new email application for Windows and Mac. It’s based on the same platform as our premium version of Postbox, but contains a lighter-weight feature set that’s perfect for home use.

Best of all… Postbox Express is completely FREE!

The majority of the important Postbox features remain included in Postbox Express but to a smaller degree. Check out the feature comparison for more details on what is and is not included in Postbox Express.

There are quite a few features missing from Postbox Express but the whole point of the product is to whet your appetite just enough so you are willing to spend the mere US$40 on the premium version. I played with Postbox and enjoyed the client but ultimately opted against spending the cash because I did not think I would use it enough to warrant the expenditure.

Personally, I am quite pleased with Mailplane, even though I definitely see exceptional utility in Postbox. The latter offers both a Windows and OS X client whereas Mailplane is only available on OS X, so if you are a Windows user then Postbox may be your email client of choice.

If you are asking yourself why Postbox over Mozilla Thunderbird then check out the page explaining why Postbox definitely blows away Thunderbird!

Fraise Takes Over The Minimal Text Editing Space Smultron Left

Posted by Scott Jarkoff in Shorts

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A few months ago the programmer behind the minimal OS X text editor Smultron opted to stop development of the application. If you, like me, adored Smultron and used it as your text editor of choice this was sure to be worrisome; no updates to the many minor idiosyncrasies and no true Snow Leopard support.

Look no further as Fraise has taken over where Smultron left.

Fraise is a free text editor for Mac OS X Leopard 10.6 which is both easy to use and powerful. It is designed to neither confuse newcomers nor disappoint advanced users. It should work perfectly for a whole variety of needs – like web programming, script editing, making a to do list and so on..

Fraise has all open documents in a list with beautiful Quick Look icons to your left just like e.g. iTunes so you can easily switch between many documents – you can also choose to display them as tabs if you prefer it that way.

It appears Fraise took the source code for Smultron, which was open source, forked it and developed a new product worthy of being considered a replacement. One of the long-standing Smultron bugs – the lack of ability to make the “line wrap text” option sticky – has finally been fixed!

I loved Smultron and have made the transition to Fraise – a beautiful and exceptional successor.

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Released

Posted by Scott Jarkoff in Shorts

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According to the Adobe Flash Player Team Blog, the long awaited Flash Player 10.1 has been released:

From hardware decoding to better buffering, p2p video, multicast and http streaming — there are many improvements in Flash Player 10.1 with regards to web video delivery and playback. For desktops, Flash Player 10.1 introduces hardware-based H.264 video decoding to deliver smooth, high quality video with minimal overhead across supported operating systems. Using available hardware to decode video offloads tasks from the CPU, improving video playback performance, offering smoother frame rates, and reducing system resource utilization

There is a plethora of new features and improvements in Flash Player 10.1, all of which are clearly outlined on the Flash Blog. One thing to note, Flash 10.0 does not appear to be affected by the most recent critical vulnerability allowing attackers potential remote control of affected workstations.

The single-most sought after feature Mac OS X users will most likely enjoy is the addition of hardware decoding. This should make video playback on the Mac less jerky, and less processor intensive, potentially improving the use of Flash on that platform.

Adobe also added multi-touch support to Flash 10.1, in lieu of the hope that Flash will be added to the many mobile devices expected to be produced this year – iOS devices obviously excluded. Android 2.2 “Froyo” appears to be the front runner in the flash-for-mobile race.

Many companies are beginning to rollout touch enabled devices, and not just smartphones, but tablets as well as PCs like the HP Touchsmart. With Flash Player 10.1, you can take advantage of the latest hardware and operating system user interaction capabilities using a new set of ActionScript 3 APIs for multi-touch and native gesture events, creating the ability to interact with multiple objects simultaneously or work with native gestures, such as pinch, scroll, rotate, scale, and two-finger tap. Multi-touch may be one of the most important features for developers and designers creating new content with the Flash Platform, knowing your implementations may be easily extended to devices with touch capabilities.

It looks like Adobe took their time to make Flash 10.1 a decent product. The only outstanding question is this: how many critical security vulnerabilities will be found in this version of Flash? Adobe seems to be the one company consistently producing exploit-riddled products.

Stream Videos To Your iPhone and Save Time

Posted by Scott Jarkoff in Shorts

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Why use the time consuming method of converting videos to a format capable of being played on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad when you can let Air Video stream them and do the converting on the fly?

Air Video can stream videos in almost any format to your iPhone and iPod touch. You don’t need to copy your videos to the device just to watch them.

Granted, Air Video is not an application you are going to use over 3G, but for use via WiFi on a local LAN it is an absolutely perfect fit. What is really cool about Air Video is that if the video is in a format not natively supported by iPhone OS then it will be converted on the fly. In my experience this can save hours of conversion time, allowing the videos to be watched immediately without any hassle.

Additional software is required for either Mac OS X or Windows to facilitate the on-the-fly conversion and streaming process. The processor time required for the conversion is a little costly, so it is best to ensure the software is installed on a box with some decent specs.

While Air Video is a universal application capable of running on either the iPhone or the iPad, it does not natively support native iPad screen resolutions. It appears the developer is working on an update to address this in the near future.

Pino – Sexy Linux Twitter Client

Posted by Scott Jarkoff in Shorts

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Pino is a sexy Twitter client for Linux.

Pino is Twitter and Identi.ca client for Linux desktop (actualy, for any OS, that has X11). It’s simple and fast. Pino is written in Vala language and compiled to the native binary code.

I am not entirely pleased with the existing Twitter client landscape, however Pino appears to be one of the best possibilities for Linux users. The application is available on just about every distribution possible and fulfills the standard Twitter client requirement – a tab for your stream, another for @replies and yet another for direct messages. Pino even supports multiple Twitter accounts as well as support for identi.ca accounts.

While Pino does not have built-in twitpic support, the capabilities offered by this lightweight client outweigh any potential drawbacks for those who truly need a dedicated Twitter client. I just played with Pino in an Ubuntu build I have running and was impressed with the simplicity. (via minimal linux)

Adobe Says, “Sorry” For The Bug

Posted by Rich Chuckrey in Shorts

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TechMiso - Adobe Says, With Adobe’s latest crasher bug going on two years after being discovered, Adobe finally released a statement saying they in fact dropped the ball during software development of Adobe Flash 10.

Did Adobe just ignore a well known and significant flaw in their software and in turn ship a degraded Flash player out to the masses?

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The Mac Experience

Posted by Rich Chuckrey in Articles

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Mac OS XA quick couple of months have passed since I migrated from a Microsoft Windows environment to Apple’s OS X — the experience so far has turned out to be nothing shy of rapturous.

I’m still grounded in Microsoft at work, but have no complaints doing so — it keeps me unbiased.

I’ll say this about Mac-

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Are Desktop Email Clients a Dying Breed?

Posted by Scott Jarkoff in Articles

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thunderbirdAlthough the current generation of Internet users may not believe it, email has not always been web-based like it is today. Desktop email clients used to be the only method for accessing email. One of the more popular free email clients from back in the day was Mozilla’s Mail and News. After Firefox was spun off of Mozilla, the Mail and News app followed suit and Thunderbird was born. Given the widespread use of web-based email these days, are desktop email clients a dying breed?

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