Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on March 29, 2007 by CyberNet.

Today Apple iTunes introduced a new feature to the iTunes store called “Complete my Album.” This is for those times when you’ve purchased individual songs, and then later on you decide to buy the entire album which the song(s) came from.  For each song that you’ve bought that’s on an album that you end up buying, you’ll get a 99 cent credit.

That means that you will no longer have to pay for the same song twice! And because songs are typically 99 cents to begin with (albums are usually $9.99), you’re essentially getting a refund in the form of credit for the purchase that you made. 

After reading several comments, I’ve seen a few people say that this is pretty much useless and they won’t use it. However, often times only certain songs from an album are released, and then months later the full album is available for purchase.

iTunes will give you 180 days after purchasing an individual song to get the credit for songs that are on an album that you purchase. And don’t worry, they’re not leaving out the millions of people who have purchased songs previously, and want the full album now because of this new offer. During this initial introduction, you will have until June 26th to “complete albums” for songs that you have already purchased at any point from iTunes and get the “discount”.

When you go to the “Complete My Albums” page at the iTunes store, you’ll see the songs that you’ve purchased, the albums that they correspond with, and what the cost of the album would be with the credit applied for your previous a-la-carte purchases. Nice move Apple, I can see a boost in Album sales coming already!

Source: News.com (Thanks CoryC!)
Image Source: Gizmodo

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on March 30, 2007 by CyberNet.

Amazon (only in the United States) is currently offering the Kaspersky Antivirus for free (actually $-0.01) after you mail in two rebates that are each worth $25. I know, rebates are a pain but it might just be worth it knowing that you are using one of the highest rated antivirus applications available. Amazon also offers free shipping on this item and you’ll actually be receiving a boxed version of it…not just a download link.

The rebates from Amazon will both be valid on purchases until April 7, 2007 so you still have a little bit of time to think about it. They’ll need to be postmarked (a.k.a. mailed out) within 30 days of your purchase which means you can’t just put it on the backburner and forget about it for a few months.

If you don’t mind having a limited feature set you could always download the always free AOL Active Virus Shield which is powered by Kaspersky Antivirus. That will give you great protection, but you will have to find a way to survive knowing you have an application by sponsored by AOL on your computer.

Note: There is an update available on Kaspersky’s website so that the antivirus software works with Windows Vista. The version that Amazon is offering only says that it is XP compatible but the update will also make it compatible with Vista.

Get Kaspersky Antivirus for free from Amazon

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on May 30, 2007 by CyberNet.

The Windows Live Writer team just posted the Beta 2 which is now available for you to download. It has a handsome list of new features, but nothing I hadn’t really seen in a blog editor before:

• Inline spell checking
• Table editing
• Ability to add categories
• Page authoring for WordPress and TypePad
• Support for excerpts and extended entries
• Improved hyperlinking and image insertion
• Paste Special
• Automatic synchronization of local and online edits
• Integration with Windows Live Gallery
• Support for Blogger Labels
• New look and feel
• Available in 6 languages
• Improved accessibility and keyboard support

My first impression of the new Live Writer was…wow! It looks amazing, and if appearance counts for anything it blows the other blog editors out of the water. It is sharp, sophisticated, and most of all, usable.

Click to Enlarge

The inline spell checking and table manager are awesome features that will surely come in handy. Unfortunately it still doesn’t appear to support the XHTML standards, but I’m sure many of the Live Writer users don’t know what that is.

I played with it a little more, and two things I thought you might like to see is the appearance of the right-click menu for the spell checker, and what you can actually do with the tables. Here are two screenshots that will sum that up well:

When creating the table, it asks you for all of the basic information just as if you were creating it in a word processor:

As you can see there are a lot of great things available with the new Live Writer, and you should consider giving it a shot. Personally, I’m a huge fan of Post2Blog which coincidentally turned to freeware the other day. It is a great application that has a ton of features, but I would have to say that Live Writer looks better and is a little simpler to use.

So what’s it missing? Despite Live Writer supporting plug-ins, I still think there are some things that should be built-in. Some of these things might be available via a plug-in, but this is what I would like to see Live Writer shipped with:

• XHTML standards compliance
• Table options (a.k.a. the stuff from the Table Menu) should open in the sidebar like they do when you click on an image.
• Customize the order of the categories (I don’t know of any blogging software that does this though).
• Enable Auto-saving by default. I don’t know who wouldn’t like the assurance that their documents are constantly being saved?
• Align buttons! If I want to center some text, I shouldn’t be going to the Format -> Align menu. That takes way to long. There should be buttons to do this. Also, what about the shortcut keys for aligning things, such as Ctrl+E for centering?
• I’m not sure about this one, but maybe make the sidebar expand/contract when you hover over it? That way it saves space and is still extremely easy to get to.
• I would like to create snippets as well. That way some of the repetitive things aren’t so…well, repetitive. This is great for people who guest blog and always conclude each post with a short summary of who they are.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on May 01, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

We have raved about the free PhraseExpress software before, and we are going to do it again! They recently released version 4 of their application, and the enhancements it has will make you so much more productive that you’ll be wondering how you got by without using it!

The concept behind PhraseExpress is extremely simple: you type some text in an application and PhraseExpress will automatically replace that text with something else. When would that be useful? Well, I’m sure you use abbreviations all of the time without even thinking about it. Take for example a chat conversation where you type messages like BRB (be right back) or TTYL (talk to you later). You probably use those abbreviations because they are faster to type, but you can setup PhraseExpress to automatically kick the habit of sending abbreviated phrases!

The newest version of PhraseExpress has all sorts of enhancements that take the program beyond just being a simple text replacement utility:

• Formatted text and bitmaps: This is great news for people who have signatures that they automatically want inserted when composing an email or document. I’ll explain more about this below.
  
• Automatic spelling corrections: This is just like Microsoft Word because PhraseExpress will automatically correct misspellings of thousands of the most common words. Having this feature when composing emails or typing comments in a browser is extremely handy!
• Assign multiple phrases to an Autotext: With this feature you can essentially have multiple phrases assigned to a single “keyword.” Whenever you type that keyword you will be presented with a drop-down menu for you to select which phrase you would like inserted:
  
• Assign multiple Autotexts to a phrase: This is the opposite of the previous bullet because this lets you setup multiple Autotexts (or keywords as I like to call them) for a single phrase. This is useful if you have a hard time remembering what Autotext you assigned to a phrase. An example of this is seen below with the default “.com” auto replacement that is setup. If you mistype “.com” with any of the variations listed it will automatically correct it for you.
  

There is a whole lot more that is new in PhraseExpress 4, but what I have listed above are the most beneficial for me. There are a few kinks that I have noticed with the formatted text and bitmaps addition though:

• To copy a Bitmap image or formatted text into a signature you actually need to highlight it in either a browser or in a document. Then click on the PhraseExpress icon in the System Tray and select the “Create new phrase” option. This will prompt you with a dialog box to save the highlighted text, but you need to make sure the “Save text formatting” box is checked. Click here for more detailed instructions.
• Saving formatting in Firefox doesn’t seem to work, so you’ll either need to use Internet Explorer or an application that supports text formatting/bitmaps if you want to save anything besides for a plain text phrase.
• When originally seeing the image support feature I must have bypassed the word “Bitmap” in the description. I spent about 15 minutes trying to get a JPEG image to be saved in an email signature, but it just wouldn’t work. I’m guessing that the image must be saved in the Bitmap format for this feature to work properly.

There’s a lot more that you can do in PhraseExpress, which are all explained more in the manual. Here are a few of the tips that might be the most helpful for you:

• Add the current date to a phrase
• Call a phrase within another phrase
• Add manual text input to a phrase
• Create an email from a phrase
• Launch an application from a phrase
• Open a file from a phrase
• Open a webpage from a phrase
• Add a special key into a phrase

Download PhraseExpress 4

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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

Microsoft made an announcement this morning that the Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta will debut on Xbox Live May 16th and will run through June 6th. This is a big moment for any Halo fan, and here is what Bungie says the Beta will include:

• The Beta itself consists of three maps – Valhalla, High Ground and Snowbound – graphically improved since our first MP screenshots – and all three will be playable in Matchmaking only (that is after all, what we’re Beta testing here). All three maps are suitable for a wide variety of gameplay types, and you will have the chance to try all manner of game types, familiar and new.
• There are a number of new features you’ll get to test out – including a new grenade type, a completely different class of weapon and some of the enhanced online functionality we plan to bring to the game – but it should be noted, a lot of secret features are hidden in this Beta. We’re keeping a lot of our powder dry for Fall. In May, when your firing the Spiker, sniping vehicles with the Spartan Laser and sticking fools with the Brute Spike grenade, remember that it’s just a peek-a-boo fraction of what’s to come.
• There will also be new guns, vehicles and gameplay features to try – including the mysterious “X-Button” functionality. But you don’t have to wait to find out what that is, since you can now view part of its functionality in our latest Vidoc, “Is Quisnam Protero Damno!” a long look at the making of Halo 3’s Multiplayer game.

If that isn’t enough info to grab your attention, then maybe this 7–minute video on the making of Halo 3 will strike your interest:

There is a lot of interesting stuff that they demonstrate in the video, such as the “Man Cannon” which replaces the teleportation devices from Halo 1 and 2. At first I thought it would be a little weird, but I was sold when they showed a person shooting someone else coming out of the Man Cannon (check it out about 3 minutes and 35 seconds into the video).

It’s going to be tough to make it better than Halo 1 and 2, but I think they are definitely on the right track!

Source: Kotaku

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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