Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on October 26, 2007 by CyberNet.

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Do you remember the WebRunner browser that we wrote about last week? It was created by Mozilla as a way for websites, such as Google Reader, to provide a standalone application for their users. That way people don’t have to keep their main browser open all of the time if all they want to do is read news on Google Reader, or browse Facebook.

At the time shortcuts (called a WebApp) had to be downloaded for each of the sites that you wanted to use with WebRunner, or you could create your own which was slightly complicated. Now WebRunner has been moved to a Mozilla Labs project, and it was renamed to Prism.

There are two really great things that were introduced with the release of Prism: a create your own WebApp GUI, and inline spell checking. In the screenshot above you can see what the GUI looks like when you run Prism for the first time. It asks you for details on creating your own WebApp, and takes just seconds to do.

Tip: Enabling the location bar does not mean you’ll be able to type an address into it. The location bar is a read-only bar that accepts no input, so it doesn’t serve any purpose other than telling you what site you are currently on.

And spell checking! Oh how I love the inline spell checking. It is arguably Firefox’s best feature, and now you can use it in Prism. This is great news for anyone who wants to use Prism for writing emails. Not to mention Prism’s extremely low memory footprint, which means it will be friendly on your system’s resources.

I believe that Prism really has a great future, and it will be interesting to see if offline support ever finds its way into the project. That would really make it even more superb!

Prism Homepage [via Mark Finkle]
Kudos to RangingTrip for the tip!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on June 25, 2008 by CyberNet.

When WordPress 2.5 was released earlier this year the development team spent a lot of time focusing on the commonly overlooked administration area. Anyone running their own WordPress blog knows how much time you spend on the backside of things, and so this update was very much appreciated. WordPress 2.6 is due out in mid-July 2008, and with it comes even more new features for blog administrators!

What kind of new things will WordPress 2.6 bring? For starters it will have early support for Google Gears. You might be thinking that since it supports Google Gears authors will be able to write articles offline that can be published later on, but that’s not the case at all. Instead, WordPress 2.6 utilizes Google Gears to increase the online performance for administrators, and it does this by downloading frequently used images and static files onto your computer via Google Gears. That way when you’re navigating around the administration area of your blog it won’t need to load the JavaScript files or images since they’ll already be on your machine. This is therefore supposed to increase the responsiveness of the online interface.

One of the other more interesting features WordPress 2.6 will have is a post revision history. This will save copies of your posts as changes are made to them, and you’ll be able to restore a post back to any of the states available. Plus WordPress will even highlight the changes for you, which is especially handy if you have multiple authors working on a blog. This is all very reminiscent of how Wikipedia handles revisions.

Those are two of my favorite features in the upcoming WordPress 2.6, but you can expect to see some other new stuff as well:

• A new and improved image editing dialog that offers lots of control over the images in your posts
• A “Press This” bookmarklet for tumblelog style quick posting
• Theme previewing as seen on WordPress.com
• Built-in word counting in the post editor
• The ability to disable remote publishing for the security conscious
• The ability to relocate your content directory
• The ability to move wp-config.php out of your web root
• Drag-and-drop sortable galleries
• Bulk delete, activate, and deactivate for plugins
• and more…

All of this is currently available in the WordPress 2.6 Beta, or you can wait for the final release of the content management software which is due in mid-July.

WordPress 2.6 Features [via ReadWriteWeb]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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20th Century Fox is dipping its downloading toes into the 21st century’s waters, releasing movies on Android in addition to good, old-fashioned Blu-ray. According to the Financial Times, retail discs of X-Men: First Class will direct owners to a website where they can sideload a digital version of the film onto their Android device of choice. Apparently some of the suits over at Fox caught wind of how popular Android tablets are getting, and now see them as complementary, not cannibalistic (remember that industry buzz kill?) Sure, right now you shouldn’t expect any Netflix-sized library of titles, but perhaps we can all agree this is a step in the right download-to-own direction. Residents of the US, UK, Germany, and France will get the first crack at downloading the films. The rest of you can just stream and wait.

[Image credit via 20th Century Fox]

20th Century Fox to offer digital downloads for Android devices, Blu-ray purchase required originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Jul 2011 17:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on January 24, 2007 by CyberNet.

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I don’t think that anyone would argue that getting used to Microsoft Office 2007′s new interface takes some time. I’ve been using Beta 2 for what seems like forever (probably about 8 months in reality) and I finally feel comfortable being able to find the commands that used to reside on toolbars and menus in previous versions of Office.

It turns out that Microsoft is working on a plug-in for Office 2007 with the codename Scout, according to I Started Something. It will offer an additional tab that is similar to the one pictured above so that users will be able to quickly search for the commands that they could instinctively find before. As you start to type a word in the search box, such as “pictur” in the example, it will show you live results from the list of available commands.

One recommendation that I can give you is to make good use of the Quick Access Toolbar that is located above the tabs. It keeps you from having to constantly switch back and forth between tabs to get to the commands that you use frequently. The easiest way to add something to the Quick Access Toolbar is to just right-click on any item located on a Ribbon, and select the “Add to Quick Access Toolbar” option:

To keep the toolbar from getting too cluttered you can customize it using the respective option on the right-click menu. That way you can reposition items and put separators in.

Of course, you’ll have to be able to find the command in the first place. I’ve found the help to be quite useful and it can save you more time than you think, but once the Scout add-on becomes available that will surely speed things up. This morning I actually came across an interactive tutorial that Microsoft is offering for Word 2003 users that lets you hover over a command to see where you can find it in Office 2007 (as pictured below). If that isn’t enough for you then click on the command and it will actually demonstrate how you can find that command in Word 2007.

I was really impressed that they even let you go through all of the menus and select commands there as well, so it will be pretty comprehensive for most Word users. It would have been nice, however, if they put a tutorial like this together for Excel and PowerPoint but I couldn’t find one.

Once you start to get used to Microsoft Office 2007 it is hard to switch back to the previous versions that only have the toolbars. Everything works so smoothly and, despite the initial frustration, you can find things much faster. If you really give the new interface a fair shot, and still walk away not liking it I would be quite surprised.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on January 19, 2007 by CyberNet.

Going along with our recent poll, here’s another question for you.  How many of you that own an Xbox 360, also own or owned at one point the original Xbox?  According to Chris Satchell of Microsoft, he’s saying that so far, 10.4 million Xbox 360 units have been sold.  But, even more interesting is that he says over half of those have come from people that never owned the original Xbox. Are any of you Xbox 360 owners previous Playstation owners? Satchell says, “There’s lots of new people coming in, which kind of surprises you.  What we’re actually finding is that our customer set is broadening, which we think is important.”

If that’s true, and half of those 10.4 million units were sold to those who weren’t original Xbox users, that says something. Dead Takahashi of San Jose Mercury News interviewed Gates and asked how his plan for 360 was working. Gates says, “It’s working perfectly.  We wanted to be the guy with the small box that costs less.  We wanted to have the most games.  We wanted to play to our software strength, and tools and online.  We wanted to swap positions with Sony.  We wanted to not be a year late, not be a bix box, not be a more expensive box. How are we doing on that?”

Well, let’s see. They wanted to be the guy with the small box that costs less. Check. Most games? Well, considering the 360 has been out for over a year now, of course there are more games than those made specifically for Playstation 3. Are they playing to their software strength, tools, and online? Absolutely. Xbox Live has 5 million users and it’s growing! At CES, Gates and Robbie Bach announced the move of Xbox Live to Vista this year, and an IPTV service for US Xbox 360 owners.

In the same interview with Takahashi, Gates admits that Microsoft did fail in terms of lack of software, price, and size with the original Xbox. It was bigger, cost more, and when it came to software, the Playstation 2 blew it out of the water. When Gates says, “We want to swap positions with Sony” I think just maybe, they could be well on their way with that.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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