Hasta La Gadget!

Nov 21

WrapUp: Adobe Flash 10.1 Beta, Listen to Entire Albums with Lala, and More

Posted in: adobe, Firefox Extensions, performance, Tips and Tricks, Today's Chili, WrapUp

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.