Hasta La Gadget!

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

When Mozilla launched Firefox 3 there were some people who weren’t fond of the changes they made to the address bar. With it they decided to intermingle results from the user’s history, bookmarks, and typed addresses to provide a long list of sites they might be trying to find. While not everyone liked the feature there were quite a few who did, and among those people the name “Awesome Bar” caught on.

Well, the download for Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 was just posted, and it is sporting an “Awesome Bar” that is even more powerful than Firefox’s. The screenshot above shows how it grabs results from your history, favorites, and also from any feeds you’ve subscribed to within IE. All of the different types of results are divided up so that the user can quickly determine what’s what, which was often a complaint with how Mozilla decided to implement their solution. If you see a result that you want to delete just hover over it, and a red “X” should appear at the end.

One of my new favorite things would also have to be the colorized tabs. When you Control+Click on a link from a site the new tab will not only open next to the current one, but it will also inherit the same color. That way you can visually associate tabs with each other.

And lastly when you open a new tab Internet Explorer 8 will ask whether you want to do things like open a tab you accidentally closed, use an accelerator, or start browsing privately:

I have to give Microsoft a lot of credit for what they’ve done here. I was thinking that the only new feature we were going to see in IE8 Beta 2 was the InPrivate Browsing that we previously covered. They definitely shocked me with the other features they added, and they did a really great job with them. I can’t wait to see what the final release is like.

Get Internet Explorer 8 for Windows
Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on February 22, 2008 by CyberNet.

Back in September, the Firefox download counter rolled over the 400 million mark giving Mozilla yet another reason to celebrate over their open-source web browser. At the time, Ryan looked at their current trend in growth and estimated that around April 15th, 2008 Firefox would hit their 1/2 billion milestone. Well, it’s only February 22, 2008 and they’ve just hit their 500 million mark. Congratulations Firefox!

On the Mozilla Blog, they made the announcement and helped show the significance of it by explaining that in terms of dollars, $500 million would be enough for you and 15 of your friends to fly to the International Space Station. In weight they say that it would be like 8,500 Boeing 747 airplanes.  For Mozilla, part of celebrating this milestone includes giving back.  They’re inviting people to help celebrate by playing a “game” over at www.freerice.com.  We’ve written about it before, when you go to the site, a word will be displayed and you’ll be given four difference choices of what the word means.  For each word you get right, they’ll donate 10 grains of rice to a hungry person through an international aid agency.  On their blog, they said that they are trying to break another milestone by donating 500 million grains of rice in on day.

Looking ahead, given the current trends, it looks like the next big milestone will be around Wednesday, July 30th 2008 when they’ll hit the 600 million download mark. Once again, congratulations to Mozilla and the Firefox team!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on October 03, 2007 by CyberNet.

For the longest time I was always a huge fan of OpenSUSE. Up until about a year ago that was all I used on the Linux side of things, but Ubuntu’s quickly rising popularity caused me to start using that more. Tomorrow, however, will mark the release of OpenSUSE 10.3, and I flipped through a lot of documentation today to see what it was going to include.

I started over at the TuxMachines.org review of the first release candidate, and then moseyed on over to the OpenSUSE news page to see what they’ve had to say the last few weeks. From what I’ve seen I think it will be time to rekindle the old flame when OpenSUSE 10.3 is released tomorrow.

–One Click Install (More Info)–

SUSE engineers recognized the hassle that installing some applications presented. They understand the burden of needing to locate packages, add repositories, and then perform the install process. The solution? One-Click Install! There is a package explorer website setup that will aid users in finding packages, and once they have found what they are looking for they just press the One-Click Install button to initiate the installation. A wizard will automatically begin, and the necessary repositories will be added:

The installation process will then continue, and in no time at all you should have your new program running. I like how this works, and it’s nice to see that more steps are being taken to make software installation easier.

–Compiz & Compiz Fusion (More Info)–

I’m a sucker when it comes to eye candy, and OpenSUSE 10.3 is putting a lot of it at your fingertips. Compiz features will be available out-of-the-box, and Compiz Fusion can be installed using the One-Click Install that I mentioned above. Before diving into enabling these features let’s drool over a collage showcasing the Linux goodness:

To get Compiz up and running just enable Desktop Effects in GNOME, or type gnome-xgl-switch –enable-xgl (in GNOME or KDE) into the terminal.

To get Compiz Fusion installed you’ll have to take advantage of the new One-Click Install. Click here for more information on doing that.

–KDE 4 and GNOME 2.20–

OpenSUSE 10.3 will have the latest version of both the KDE and GNOME desktop environments. KDE 4 and all of its glorious features will be included. For the players out there you’ll be pleased to know that there are several games bundled with it: KMahjongg, KMines, KPatience, KReversi and KSudoku. Many of these had been included in previous versions of KDE, but now in KDE 4 they have been revamped to include better graphics! Suddenly I have an urge to play Reversi.

And we can’t forget about the inclusion of GNOME 2.20! Normally I’m more of a KDE fan myself, but the SUSE engineers have found ways to make me yearn for a sampling of what GNOME has to offer. It started with the unique Start Menu, called SLAB, that they created (pictured below), and now they have a sweet World Clock Applet that can be retrieved from the tray. Among other elements of the GNOME Desktop, SLAB has received some minor updates to the appearance.

–And More–

You thought that was it? I don’t think so! OpenSUSE 10.3 has hundreds of improvements, bug fixes, and enhancements that will please users in ways they didn’t even know was possible. Take a look at some of the other significant enhancements:

• There have been a lot of changes to the bootup process, and the result is phenomenal to say the least. You should find that your computer reaches the login screen in about half the time that it did in OpenSUSE 10.2.
• You only need to download 1 CD for installation! There will now be a CD for KDE, and another for GNOME that will be used for installing OpenSUSE. Prior to this there were 5 CD’s available, three of which were required for installation. Now you just have to pick the desktop environment you want, and then download only that CD.
• Better multimedia support, which prompts you to install codecs that currently aren’t on your system.
• Includes the latest OpenOffice.org 2.3.
• Includes a program called Giver that can be used to transfer files with other Giver users. Any Giver users on the network are automatically recognized, and the transferring works without any extra configuration.
• And there’s still more!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

By this point most of you have probably had the opportunity to either tinker around with or at least see pictures of the new Office 2007 user interface. It is a huge change from the normal toolbars and menus that we were accustomed to in the previous releases of Microsoft Office, but most people who actually sit down and use it believe that the change is for the better.

To replace menus and toolbars, Microsoft is using what they call Ribbons. There are hundreds and hundreds of commands in Office, and these Ribbons make it easier to find those commands. They are much more intuitive than needing to dig through menus to make sure you had the right toolbar enabled.

A company called Addintools has developed a product that might interest those non-Ribbon fans out there. I haven’t tried “Classic Menu for Office 2007” myself, but from the screenshots it appears to bring together the ease of navigation from the ribbons and the traditional menu/toolbar layout from previous versions of Office.

Unfortunately this does come with a price-tag, and that’s $29.95 for all the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint add-ons or $15.99 for each individual program that you want. I am not surprised to see something like this come out because they are obviously trying to capitalize on people who don’t accept change very well.

Personally I think that Microsoft could have very easily included a feature like this, but they are probably trying to inch us closer to a more drastic redesign in future versions of Windows? I could be way off with that, but Microsoft obviously spends millions of dollars in usability research for their applications and I would think that they are trying to show us that a change in design can be very beneficial in terms of productivity.

Source: ComputerWorld

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on September 10, 2007 by CyberNet.

FileZilla 3 was just released and I have to admit that I’m pretty excited to see my favorite FTP client hit this big milestone. This version has spent several years in the making, and even though it doesn’t have many new features over the previous version there is something that is definitely worth noting: it’s now cross-platform! That’s right, it doesn’t matter whether your a Windows, Linux, or Mac user because FileZilla runs on them all.

Making FileZilla 3 cross-platform was no easy task, and it required a complete code rewrite. Unfortunately they also weren’t able to bring back all of the features from FileZilla 2, but I believe that most casual FTP users won’t notice much of a difference. The only thing I’ve found so far that FileZilla 3 is lacking is the synchronization capabilities that FileZilla 2 offered. If you never used that feature I think you should be pleased with the new version.

One of the other great things that I noticed in this version is the organization of queued, failed, and successful transfers into separate tabs at the bottom. This makes it much easier to see how your transfers are going.

Interestingly enough the developer also decided to refresh the FileZilla icon by choosing a different color scheme. It’s not a drastic change from what it was, but it’s enough to make me look twice when trying to find the program in the Start Menu.

FileZilla Homepage

Note: The Mac OS X version is currently experiencing some delays.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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