Hasta La Gadget!

Windows Media Center fans can finally breathe again. After seemingly endless will they / won’t they speculation Steven Sinofsky, the President of the Windows Division has confirmed in a blog post that Media Center will return for yet another go ’round in Windows 8. There’s no word on any possible changes, only that the company has “work to do” concerning the quality and compatibility of add-ins. Wondering why it hasn’t been in some pre-release builds? Between the potential for multiple SKUs (no details until closer to release, but it seems like you’ll be looking for an Ultimate pack or something similar again to get everything) and simple engineering decisions as features are added and removed that’s just the way it is. Another factor is that WMC isn’t exactly mass market, as he cites stats indicating only 6 percent of Windows 7 users launched the app in July, with over half of those sessions lasting less than a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, IE apparently pops up on 88 percent of Windows 7 desktops. Check the blog post for his full statement, plus a bit of discussion about the new Metro style and ribbon mechanism.

[Thanks, Joe]

Microsoft confirms Media Center will be in Windows 8 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on April 28, 2008 by CyberNet.

Weather is an important part of our daily lives, and can drastically affect any plans that we have. Lucky for us the Internet is making it easy to stay on top of weather developments as they happen, and the newest Beta of Weather Watcher for Windows lets you do it in style.

Personally I’ve always been a huge fan of this software, and the best part is that it’s completely free! It has a small System Tray icon that will always display the current temperature (as seen in the screenshot above), and the interface continues to get better and better. Weather Watcher 6.0 Beta has once again received a face lift, and it is now showing real-time weather conditions pulled from WeatherBug or NWS. If you’re located outside of the United States the weather reports will be pulled from CustomWeather.

And to help you appreciate the new interface we’ve decided to gather screenshots for a few of the different areas in Weather Watcher. The “new” links point to screenshots from version 6.0 Beta, while the “old” links are from version 5.6 which is the current stable version:

• Current Conditions: New vs. Old
• Hourly Forecast: New vs. Old
• Daily Forecast: New vs. Old

The general layout of the program is still the same, but I think it goes without saying that it’s now a lot easier on the eyes.

If you’ve never used Weather Watcher before I’ll be the first to warn you that it’s easy to get caught up in all of the customization options. There have got to be at least a hundred different options that you can change within this program. So don’t be surprised if you spend 15 or 20 minutes tinkering around with it.

Download Weather Watcher 6.0 Beta

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Continue reading Nokia Nearby tells your S40 where the action’s at

Nokia Nearby tells your S40 where the action’s at originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apparently, the iOS hacking community is not working for the weekend, judging by the two days it took to crack Apple’s latest beta wide open. Available as of this morning, the Sn0wbreeze 2.8 Beta 6 unlock tool can now give those of you with developer credentials jailbreak access to iOS 5 beta 6. From the looks of this release, the hack works on most iOS devices with the sole exception of the iPad 2. Already itching to get that custom firmware on your Ive-designed iSlabs? Then hit the source link below, and let us know how things turn out.

iOS 5 beta 6 gets a Sn0wbreeze jailbreak, iPad 2 still stuck behind bars originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 21 Aug 2011 23:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on December 13, 2007 by CyberNet.

PhraseExpress is one of our favorite freeware applications because of the sheer power it harnesses. They’re stepping up their game with the new PhraseExpress 5 that is slated for release sometime next month, but in the meantime they have a Beta version that you can kick around.

Version 5 introduces several new features, and two of them are particularly great. The first one is an automatic text prediction tool that will learn phrases that you commonly type. That’s right, if it sees you repeating the same phrases over and over it will automatically start suggesting them in a small popup as you’re typing.

The other cool feature is a more advanced clipboard that retains several of your recently copied text snippets. By default the Windows clipboard is only able to store the last item that you copied, but with PhraseExpress 5 you can access several text items that you’ve previously copied. To retrieve them you’ll simply use the Shift+Ctrl+V keyboard shortcut.

I’m sure you want to see all of this in action, and there’s no better way than with a video demonstration:

PhraseExpress is free for personal use, but the Beta version will expire on January 31, 2008. They expect the final release to be completed before then, so this is just a way to ensure people upgrade to the latest version.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Daily Downloads: Flickr, QuickTime, Opera, and MorePhraseExpress 6: HTML Formatting & Performance EnhancementsDaily Downloads: PhraseExpress, SetPoint, Yahoo!, and MoreCyberNotes: Automatic Text Replacement ProgramsCyberware: Download The Free PhraseExpress To Save Keystrokes