Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on November 23, 2009 by CyberNet.

Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about. Don’t forget to send in your own tips, or just leave a comment on this page if you think you’ve got something we should include.

–News–

Google Chrome OS
This was a pretty big week for Google, and in the middle of it was their announcement that they were open sourcing the Chrome OS already. They are doing this so that they can start working with partners, the open source community, and developers prior to the launch late next year. Running the new OS isn’t exactly a point-and-click operation, but some sites have already posted instructions as to how you can have it up and running in a virtual machine with very little work.

Gmail Creator Thinks Email Will Last Forever
The creator of Gmail, Paul Buchheit, was interviewed by TechCrunch with the topic of whether email was ready to die. They talked about whether something like Google Wave would be enough to kill it. In a nutshell he said that email is not going to fall off the face of the Earth… well, at least not “until robots kill us all.”  

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0 Beta’s Available
Both Beta versions of Adobe’s flagship frameworks sport multi-touch gestures, which will be an important addition as Windows 7 touch-screen machines increase in popularity. They are also both significantly better in performance, or they are at least in the quick checks that I’ve performed.

–News in Brief–

Google Calendar Testing “Sneak Preview”
Google Calendar users will be able to enjoy a Labs feature (being rolled out) letting you preview whether an appointment you’re creating conflicts with something else on your schedule.

Windows 8 Expected in 2012
Looking at Microsoft’s roadmap it appears as though they will try to stick to a three-year release cycle for Windows 8.

Office 2010 Mobile Beta Available
Microsoft has posted the mobile version of Office 2010 Beta for anyone running Windows Mobile 6.5.

eBay Completes Skype Sale at $2.75 Billion Valuation
eBay has sold off a majority (70%) of their ownership of the Skype software company.

Automatic Captions in YouTube
Google has employed an automatic speech recognition system on YouTube videos so that users can get closed captioning on nearly all uploads.

Remember the Milk Gadget for Google Calendar
Remember the Milk (RTM) users can enable a sidebar gadget in Google Calendar for easy task management.

Internet Explorer 9 Announced
At PDC Microsoft unveiled some of the things that should be expected from IE9, including hardware acceleration.

Mininova Breaks 10 Billion Torrent Downloads
The popular BitTorrent search engine hits the huge 10 billion download milestone.

Silverlight 4 Beta Released
The new version of Silverlight includes huge performance gains as well as support for the Chrome browser.

Explore Images with Google Image Swirl
Google showed off a new way to search for images this week called Google Image Swirl. It tries to group images according to the subject of the photo.

Ubuntu One Music Store
Canonical is working on a music store for their Ubuntu operating system that could compete with iTunes.

Templates Available in Google Sites
Anyone looking to create a quick website can find refuge in the new templates offered by Google Sites.

A New Look for Google Translate
Google Translate can now translate your text as-you-type, and provides phonetic pronunciations for people who can speak languages like Chinese but don’t know how to read/write them.

–Tips, Tutorials, and Reviews–

Use Aruna to Share Files  
Finding a good way to share files with friends can be difficult because of limitations many of them impose, but GoAruna knocks off most of those barriers. You can upload an unlimited number of files as long as each one is under 100MB in size. They can then be shared with anyone that you want through a simple URL. You can even manage the files you’ve uploaded through a convenient interface.  

Listen to Entire Music Albums with Lala
There aren’t many sites out there that will let you legally listen to entire songs or albums, but Lala is one of them. The catch? You can only listen to each song once. That is a pretty big limitation, but what’s nice is that this gives you the chance to preview entire albums before you decide whether there’s just a few songs you want to pickup.

Office 2010 “Quick Steps” Feature
One of the new features in Office 2010 Beta is the ability to add “Quick Steps” in Outlook. These are essentially easy-to-create macros that make managing your emails that much better. They can be used to forward/send email, archive emails to a certain folder, and a lot more.

–Tips in Brief–

How to Run Google Chrome OS from a USB Drive
This is a guide showing you how you can run Chrome OS on your PC using a USB drive.

Grep on Windows
Search multiple files on Windows using the same popular format found in Unix/Linux.

iTunes in your Mac Menubar
Mac users can control most aspects of iTunes right from the Menubar with this free app.

Foobar2000 v1.0 Beta Available
It’s been over 7 years in development, but version 1.0 of Foobar2000 is on the horizon with features like Windows Media streaming support.

Add 50 Pidgin Plugins with One Download
Grab all of the most popular Pidgin plugins without having to hunt them down one-by-one.

MinimizeToTray for Firefox
The new version of this popular extension now supports Firefox 3.0 and beyond.

FastStone Image Viewer 4.0
The update to this image viewer includes performance improvements, Windows 7 compatibility, and more.

Find “Secret” Messages in Website Headers
This isn’t all that useful, but can definitely be fun!

Extensive Ubuntu 9.10 Review
Ars Technica provides an in-depth review of the latest Ubuntu 9.10 operating system.

Convert FLV Video to AVI
Convert your favorite Flash videos to a format that is more device-friendly.

Seesmic Desktop for Windows
This is one of the first Twitter clients for Windows that doesn’t use Adobe AIR, and the interface fits in better with other aspects of the operating system.

mmKeys.dll Makes iTunes Work with Multimedia Keyboards
This DLL will address compatibility issues between iTunes and multimedia keyboards.

Sumatra PDF Reader 1.0
Sumatra still keeps things lean in terms of it’s PDF capabilities despite hitting the big 1.0 milestone.

Monitor a Website for Changes
Get notified when the content on a website changes.

MyPorts Gives You Detailed Info on Open Ports
See what ports are currently being used on your computer, and which applications have them open.

–Downloads–

• Adobe Air 2.0.0.10760 ^Beta [Mirror]
• Digsby Build 73 ^Beta [Mirror]
• FastStone Image Viewer 4.0 [Mirror]
• FeedDemon 3.0.0.45 [Mirror]
• Firefox 3.6 ^{Beta 3} [Mirror]
• Flash Player 10.1.51.45 ^Beta [Mirror]
• Google Chrome 4.0.249.4 ^Beta [Mirror]
• Google Desktop 5.9.911.3589 [Mirror]
• Google Earth 5.1.3509 ^Beta [Mirror]
• Google SketchUp 7.1.6087 [Mirror]
• Growl 2.0 [Mirror]
• MediaMonkey 3.2.0.1294 [Mirror]
• Miranda 0.8.10 [Mirror]
• Mozilla Camino 2.0 [Mirror]
• Opera 10.10 [Mirror]
• Paint.NET 3.5.1 [Mirror]
• PDF-XChange Viewer 2.0.42.9 [Mirror]
• PeaZip 2.8.0 [Mirror]
• RSS Bandit 1.9.0.972 [Mirror]
• Screenshot Captor 2.76.01 [Mirror]
• Silverlight 4.0.41108 ^Beta [Mirror]
• Sumatra PDF 1.0 [Mirror]
• VirtualBox 3.0.12.54655 [Mirror]
• WindowBlinds 7.0 [Mirror]
• uTorrent 2.1.17350 ^Beta [Mirror]

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on May 09, 2008 by CyberNet.

Win; Mac; Linux
Opera is obviously not content with sitting on the sidelines when it comes to being the fastest browser out there. Back in February Mozilla decided that it was time to optimize it’s JavaScript performance, and used a technique called Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) that gave it a nice boost. Opera decided to jump on the PGO bandwagon as well with this week’s release of Opera 9.5, and here is their explanation of how it works:

With this technique, Opera is compiled twice. The first compilation creates a specially instrumented build that gathers statistics about which code is called and which variables are used most often. The instrumented build loads sites automatically using “URL player”, a testing feature available in every Opera build (more information about that in a later blog post). This information is dumped into files and used to produce the final build that’s optimized based on the gathered statistics.

Did it help? Unfortunately there are some bugs in Opera 9.5 that prevent it from finishing the Sunspider test, but in the areas it does complete the result is normally better than Firefox 3 Beta 5. It does, however, consistently beat Firefox 3 in the MooTools SlickSpeed test in addition to this JavaScript benchmarking tool.

Congrats Opera! It looks as though you might be recapturing the JavaScript performance crown, but we’ll have to wait and see what the final version of each browser is like before we make any conclusions along those lines.

Be sure to checkout our more complete article where we compare the performance of more browsers.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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Internet Explorer not stirring your cup of Windows Phone 7 tea correctly? Well, you now have an alternative in the form of a new browser that’s arrived in the Marketplace: Browser+. It does seem to have been built on IE code rather than its own framework, so don’t get your hopes up for Chrome to Phone on WP7 any time soon. Anyhow, the new app’s been given a test drive by a couple of sites, who note it integrates a view of your current tabs and a Google search box right into the general web view, providing a slightly more accessible interface than the default option, while also throwing in a private surfing mode for the paranoid among us. A few crashes and bugs have been spotted in Browser+ so far, but hey, it’s cheap and it at least gives us hope for a less monotheistic browsing experience. See it in video action after the break.

Continue reading Windows Phone 7 will work with third party browsers, so long as they’re based on IE? (video)

Windows Phone 7 will work with third party browsers, so long as they’re based on IE? (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 06:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Pocketnow  |  WPCentral  | Email this | Comments

This article was written on July 23, 2007 by CyberNet.

The IE-based Maxthon browser released a much anticipated version 2 today. This comes just 3-months after Google invested an astounding $1 million into the browser, and that raised a lot of eyebrows because of the close relationship Google has with Firefox. I’m guessing that Google saw it as a way to gain more popularity in China since 17% of people there use it to search sites like Google and Yahoo. Why? Because users can set it up to use proxies that will bypass any filtering techniques employed by the government.

We actually took a look at Maxthon 2 starting in August 2006 (yes, it’s been in development for over a year now). There hasn’t been many new features since then, but there have been quite a few bug fixes. For those of you thinking about trying it out here’s what you’ll find in Maxthon 2:

• New Look & Optimized Layout – The default skin of Maxthon Browser has been completely redesigned and polished to provide a clear and smooth user experience.
• Fully Customizable Interface – Almost all elements of Maxthon Browser are customizable. You can create layout to fit your browsing habit and have a different look of Maxthon Browser by applying skins.
• Quick Search – Type the keywords you want to search in the address bar and press Enter, Maxthon will search them with the Default Search Engine. You can also do a search by drag & drop selected text in page.
• Mouse Gestures – Hold down right mouse button and move in different directions, you can perform a lot of common operations with it.
• Super Drag & Drop – Drag & Drop a Link to open it in new Tab. Drag & Drop to Perform a search on selected text. With key combinations, you can perform even more operations with this feature.
• Feed Reader – Maxthon Browser has integrated a powerful and easy to use Feed Reader sidebar which supports all RSS and Atom feed formats.
• Popup Blocker – Prevent unwanted popup windows to show up unless it’s triggered by your interaction.
• Content Filter – Remove Ad Images & Flash Movies from your view.
• Anti-Freeze – Maxthon has developed a new technology to prevent freezing due to AJAX while browsing websites.
• Web Sniffer – Helps you find the real URL’s of FLV video files on sites like YouTube.
• Screen Capture – Capture Full Screen, Selected Area, Selected Window and Page Content as an image. Then copy it to the clipboard or save it to a file.

Of course there are two features that disappointingly don’t seem to work. One is the tab manager which I mentioned in my early review, and the other is Aero Glass support on Vista. The tab manager is equivalent to Internet Explorer 7’s thumbnail view of all your open tabs, and the Aero Glass support is supposed to add transparency to things like the address bar (for those of you running Vista).

Another disappointing thing is that you can no longer use the Gecko engine in Maxthon, which is a feature the previous version had. In Maxthon 1.5 you could choose whether you wanted tabs to render using Gecko (the same thing Firefox uses), or have it use the IE rendering engine. The benefit of using Gecko is that sites will typically load faster, but as it turns out most people only use Maxthon because it uses IE to render sites.

Maxthon 2 Tour
Maxthon 2 Features
Maxthon 2 Homepage
Maxthon 2 Download

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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Sure, it’s one thing to build a Game Boy emulator out of what is typically viewed as a limited-purpose language for enhancing website interactivity for the usual emulator-building reasons: you like video games, you’re trying to impress the ladies. But just to prove a point? Imran Nazar is building a Game Boy emulator out of JavaScript to show how far the language has come, particularly with the fancy new stuff HTML5’s <canvas> tag allows for, and to see if it would be possible to fully emulate a Game Boy from the CPU up. Sure, HTML5 has already proven useful for straight games, but an entire architecture? Turns out, it’s pretty possible, and Imran has an excellent multi-part tutorial for how he’s doing it. Right now there’s a nearly playable version of Tetris, and pretty soon we’ll all be playing Zelda in our web browsers and that time when we tried to build an HTML table from scratch to show a few of our favorite animated GIFs on our GeoCities page will only be a distant memory…

Game Boy emulator being developed in JavaScript by a very smart person originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Nov 2010 11:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Digg  |  Imran Nazar  | Email this | Comments