Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on October 08, 2007 by CyberNet.

It’s been an extremely sad week for Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client. We’ve seen the only two full-time developers announce that they will be leaving the organization at the end of this week. News of this started when Scott MacGregor, the lead Thunderbird engineer, said that October 12th will be his last day as an employee. David Bienvenu then followed up Scott’s announcement with his own.

This comes just a short while after Mozilla announced the creation of MailCo, a subsidiary created for Thunderbird with $3 million in seed funding. People had a lot of fears that the result would be disastrous, but Mozilla put up a FAQ’s site regarding the new subsidiary to help calm everyone down. They wanted to reassure us that everything was going to be alright, and ironically this was included in the FAQ’s:

How will the current Thunderbird developers be involved?
We expect the current developers (Scott MacGregor and David Bienvenu) to continue to be the module owners for Thunderbird and Mozilla mail codebases.

Do we have reason to be worried now? We don’t actually know the reason that Scott and David are leaving Mozilla so it’s possible that it has nothing to do with the subsidiary being established. David Ascher, the leader of the new MailCo, said:

Both Scott McGregor and David Bienvenu have posted that they are leaving Mozilla Corp.  My understanding from chats with them weeks ago (I hope I’m not divulging anything that I shouldn’t) is that they have decided to start a new venture.  They’ve worked on Thunderbird and its predecessors within Mozilla and Nestcape for a long time, and I can certainly understand their desire to do something different.
…
The bulk of the MailCo budget is expected to be spent on staff (as with all small software companies, and especially small open source software companies!), with most of that going to Thunderbird-focused staff for a while, I expect.  We’re recruiting experienced developers now to focus specifically on Thunderbird and more broadly on improving mail and communications in general.

The future of Thunderbird doesn’t seem all that bright anymore, but it is a little reassuring that the bulk of the MailCo budget will be spent on staff. They have $3 million to work with as of right now, which seems like a lot, but Thunderbird doesn’t really have its own revenue stream so that money will be gone in the blink of an eye. It might be a little early to make any judgements, but I don’t have a good feeling as to where this is headed. I really feel bad for Eudora who had just decided to make their popular mail app use Thunderbird as its base.

Source: Mozilla Links

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

There’s a new Swype in town this week for Android, running with new features requested by the masses throughout the year. This version of the 3rd-party keyboard software continues to replace the standard keyboard experience on your Android device, both smartphone and tablet, and here brings on the ability to work with the tiniest of […]

This article was written on April 05, 2007 by CyberNet.

Azureus 3 just announced today that their client, formerly code-named Zudeo, will be called Vuze. In addition to the name change the press release also says that the service is getting more content:

The service enables a robust community to browse and discover premium content from both worldwide media companies and high-quality self-published content. Vuze now offers dramatically enhanced features and premium content from around the world, including the U.S. premiere of the hit BBC television series Sorted, which will be offered in HD. Azureus also announced that it has entered into an agreement with Showtime Networks for distribution of its original programming, including award-winning hit shows Weeds, Dexter and The L Word.

I haven’t used the service since it was first introduced because it just wasn’t compelling enough for me. Not only that, but as Slyck File Sharing points out Vuze is not DRM-free:

And yes, Azureus’ Zudeo/Vuze outlet contains its fair share of DRM – much like the BEN. Material that Starz Media sells is wrapped within a DRM environment, as is BBC content. The difference between BitTorrent, Inc. and Azureus however, is Ashwin Navin and Bram Cohen has been aggressively vocal against DRM, while Azureus has been noticeably quiet.

As of right now the most popular videos on the site are mostly movie trailers, such as Spiderman 3 and Transformers, in which almost all are provided in HD quality. It definitely isn’t for people on dial-up though, because the 2 minute Spiderman 3 trailer is a whopping 99MB in size!

There seems to be a lot of competition in the video arena these days, which makes me wonder whether Vuze will be a success? If it is then it will probably be because of the Azureus name that stands behind it.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on November 15, 2007 by CyberNet.

Apple released a pretty big update to the Safari 3 Beta browser for Windows this morning. One of the most notable additions is the spelling and grammar checking, which can be done inline if you so desire. To have Safari check the spelling while you type just right-click in a text box, go to Spelling and Grammar, and then tick the Check Spelling While Typing option. As you can see above it underlines incorrect words with a dashed red line.

One of the other big features is the ability to perform a full history search. If you pull up the browser’s history and start to do a search it will scan all of the text for your visited websites, instead of just the titles and URL’s. This is almost like what Opera 9.5 offers, except that Safari’s isn’t searchable directly from the address bar.

There were also improvements to security, stability, compatibility, keyboard shortcuts, and several more features:

• Windows to be resized from any side – thank goodness! It was annoying have to grab the bottom-right corner each time I wanted to resize Safari.
• Includes an additional font smoothing option (“standard”)
• Supports listing FTP directories
• Links to proxy settings from Safari (Safari respects the proxy settings in the Windows Internet control panel)
• Adds cookie management
• Includes tooltips
• Allows printing of page numbers, titles, margins
• Improves bookmark collection interface
• Maintains original order of imported bookmarks
• Adds an interface for editing AutoFill information
• Adds a new preference to manually mark RSS articles as read
• Includes support for tilt wheels

If I didn’t know better I would almost say that Apple is trying hard to provide a decent version of Safari for Windows users. Who would have ever thought it would come to this?

Get Safari

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

Google appears to be getting serious about putting the whole modern device lineup on their newest Android 4.4 KitKat operating system software update here just days after the system was revealed in full. While you’ll be able to pick up the LG-made Google Nexus 5 right this minute, each of the four major US-based manufacturers […]