Dec 13

Opera Mini Flash Replacement Coming Tomorrow?

Posted in: Freeware, Pre-Release, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on June 18, 2007 by CyberNet.

Opera MiniEarlier today Opera Watch posted a reminder of the pending Opera Mini 4 Beta release that’s coming tomorrow. What’s so big about this release? Well, only a handful of people actually know, but the Opera Mini team has posted some clues as to what the big new feature is.

The clues obviously point to music, photos, and games for the mobile browser. The real question is whether that is in regards to the specialized Flash player that Opera is known to be developing? That would make sense because of the photo slideshows available on the Web, as well as the Flash games people play. I’m sure a lot of people would appreciate a fast and efficient version of Flash on their mobile phone.

So tomorrow we’ll find out what the big news is for the next Opera Mini milestone, but in the meantime it is anyone’s guess. Maybe Opera Mini 4 will eliminate much of the need for the new YouTube Mobile. :)

Opera Mini Homepage

Thanks for the tip CoryC!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Dec 12

Microsoft Office 12 Now Sports ‘Super Tooltips’

Posted in: Pre-Release, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on December 05, 2005 by CyberNet.

Ever have that function in Microsoft Office that you just can’t figure out what it does or how to use it? Well it is a common issue with many users, which results in extensive use of the built-in help. To prevent people from having to go to the help screen, Microsoft decided to create Super Tooltips which allow the user to hold their mouse over an item on the Ribbons and it will tell you exactly what the function is for and how to use it. Jensen Harris, head of Microsoft’s User Experience team, provided the following statement about the new tooltips:

We’ve written these in the form of: “This is the right feature to use if you want to [tooltip text here].” The concept is to give you the idea of what a feature is for without needing to look it up in help or in a manual.

Microsoft Office 12 Super Tool Tips

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Dec 12

ESET Smart Security & NOD32 4.0 Beta

Posted in: Features, performance, Pre-Release, Release Date, Software, Today's Chili, Windows

This article was written on November 26, 2008 by CyberNet.

arrow Windows Windows only arrow
ESET NOD32 and Smart Security have always been my favorite security products because of their performance and high detection levels. There’s some good news for current owners! ESET is getting ready to move to the next level with version 4 of their security suite and antivirus software.

NOD32 4.0 and ESET Smart Security 4.0 are currently in a public Beta phase, and include numerous enhancements. One such improvement is that they will now be bundling the SysInspector tool that they have been, and still do, offer as a free download. Here are some other features new to version 4.0:

  • Tasks can be postponed when the machine is running on battery, and a notification can be displayed if a larger update is going to be downloaded.
  • Improved scanning of removable media (used maximum settings when running files from removable media, allows blocking/allowing USB ports)
  • Improved cleaning and self-defense
  • Added statistic graphs and information about the currently scanned object
  • Added an option to use advanced heuristics on file execution
  • Added an option to control the level of archive scanning or maximum scan time of objects
  • Added option to supress notifications when applications are run in fullscreen mode
  • Scanning of encrypted HTTPS/POP3S protocols
  • Website management allowing to block/allow access to user-defined sites
  • New Document protection module for scanning MS Office files
  • Password protected uninstallation
  • Notification about missing operating system updates
  • Works with Windows Live Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird
  • Antispam now uses a user and global address books
  • Potentially unwanted/unsafe applications are now reported in a yellow alert window which requires a user interaction

nod32 4.jpg

There’s no word on a release date yet, but the current Beta applications don’t expire until 02/03/2009… so I wouldn’t expect to see a final release before then.

ESET Beta Homepage
Thanks Storytellerofsci-fi!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Nov 02

Firefox 3.1 Introduces More Address Bar Improvements

Posted in: Firefox 3, Freeware, Pre-Release, Reviews, Software, Today's Chili

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

arrow Windows Win; Mac Mac; Linux Linux arrow
Mozilla is working hard on Firefox 3.1 which is slated for release later this year, and with it will come several improvements. For starters it will include a Control+Tab replacement that makes switching between tabs a bit more fancy. It will also come packed with numerous improvements to the address bar to help please those of you who don’t like how it currently handles itself.

What they’ve added in the current nightly releases is a way to restrict what kind of results are shown in the address bar by using customizable characters. I’ve highlighted the corresponding options in the about:config that I’m about to talk about:

firefox 3 urlbar config.png

So what do these five new options do for you? I’ve got several screenshots below that show exactly how they work, but here is an overview of what each one does:

  • browser.urlbar.match.title: Returns results that match the text in the title.
  • browser.urlbar.match.url: Returns results that match the text in the URL.
  • browser.urlbar.restrict.bookmark: Returns only results that are from the bookmarks.
  • browser.urlbar.restrict.history: Returns only results that are from the browser’s history.
  • browser.urlbar.restrict.tag: Returns only results that have been tagged.

How do these work? It’s actually pretty simple. Just include the character anywhere in the address bar (separated by spaces) to have it restrict what results are displayed. Here’s an example of using the asterisk to only return results that are bookmarks:

firefox 3 restrict bookmarks.png

Including a pound sign in the address bar will only have it scan the titles of results, thereby ignoring the URL when searching:

firefox 3 restrict titles.png

Mix and match baby! This example will only search the titles of your bookmarks for matches since I’ve included both the pound sign and asterisk:

firefox 3 restrict title bookmark.png

How does all of this benefit those of you who hate bookmarks/tags showing up in the results? Hop on over to the about:config, find the browser.urlbar.restrict.history value, and delete the character that is assigned to the value. What that does is tell Firefox to only return history results when no special character is recognized. Then delete the browser.urlbar.match.url character while you’re at it if you don’t want the page titles being searched (meaning only URL’s will be scanned). You might have to give the browser time for the changes to take affect since some of your searches get cached due to performance reasons.

Hopefully this will make you a bit more fond of the address bar introduced in Firefox 3. Don’t forget to grab CyberSearch to supercharge the address bar even more, and the latest release of the extension adds Firefox 3.1 compatibility.

P.S. We’ve got a rather big update for CyberSearch coming up in the next few days. A HUGE thanks goes out to everyone that has been giving CyberSearch stellar reviews! Our extension currently has a 4.60/5.00 rating from 33 reviews. That’s awesome!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Oct 31

Download Vista SP1 RC Refresh (6.0.6001.17028)

Posted in: Features, Pre-Release, Software, Today's Chili, Windows

This article was written on January 14, 2008 by CyberNet.

Vista SP1 744 Microsoft gave a pleasant surprise over the weekend for all of the Vista SP1 testers out there. Earlier last week they provided a “refreshed” version of Vista SP1 to a group of 15,000 Beta testers who’ve been part of the SP1 program for quite awhile. A few days later Microsoft decided that they wanted more feedback, and therefore made the Vista Service Pack 1 RC Refresh available to the public.

For the curious minds: The new build number is 6.0.6001.17028 and it will show up as version 744 in the system properties.

I jumped on the download because I wanted to see if it fixed an issue I was having with Vista SP1 RC when attaching an external monitor. The first thing I had to do was uninstall Vista SP1:

Open the Programs and Features control panel and select View installed updates. In the Microsoft Windows section, right-click Service Pack for Windows (936330) and select Uninstall. Please wait one hour after uninstalling a previous version of Windows Vista SP1 before installing Windows Vista SP1 RC Refresh. The installer service needs to clean up and complete the uninstall prior to installing the RC. Failing to do this can result in installation errors when installing the RC version.

Uninstalling took about 45 minutes to complete, and then the process of reinstalling Vista SP1 took another hour or so. Make sure you set aside plenty of time for this process, because most of the time the computer is in an unusable state.

Now I don’t know for sure whether the bug that I mentioned above has been fixed, but I haven’t had it happen thusfar. It’s kind of been an intermittent problem, and I’ll have to give it a week before I know for sure.

As far as other changes go I haven’t noticed much, but in general after testing Vista SP1 I would have a hard time going back to a PC running Vista without it. Searching for files is so much faster with the Service Pack installed, and file transfers are definitely speedier. I can’t wait for the final version which should be out within the next couple months.

Important note: Installing a pre-release version of SP1 will cause the operating system to expire on June 30, 2008. An “Evaluation Copy” message will also appear on the desktop, but uninstalling the pre-release version of SP1 will remove all of these restrictions. This is just a way for Microsoft to ensure that people will install the final version when it comes out.

Download Vista SP1 RC Refresh [via Download Squad]

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Oct 28

Opera Dragonfly Developer Tools

Posted in: Freeware, Opera, Pre-Release, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on May 06, 2008 by CyberNet.

opera dragonfly developer tools-1.png

Opera Dragonfly is here, and as expected it is a new set of tools to help developers create functional websites. It’s obvious that the Opera team wanted to develop something to draw developers to their browser, much like how Firebug has become an irreplaceable tool for the developers that use Firefox. The real question is whether Dragonfly is the tool we’ve been longing for?

I was pretty pumped when I went to try it out in the latest snapshot build of Opera 9.5, and didn’t know quite what to expect. It turns out that Dragonfly (currently Alpha) is pretty much written entirely in JavaScript, and so the performance wasn’t the greatest. This also means that you must have JavaScript enabled in your browser to even start Dragonfly.

To get started with Dragonfly go to Tools -> Advanced -> Developer Tools and a new window should popup. The first time you load the tools it might take a little while since it has to download the necessary files onto your machine, but each subsequent launch should be much faster. Well, that is until you clear your browser’s cache which will also wipe out Dragonfly, and the files will once again be downloaded the next time you launch the developer tools.

In terms of functionality Dragonfly is decent, but doesn’t quite stack up to what Firebug can deliver. In Dragonfly you can do things like set breakpoints that make debugging JavaScript code a lot easier, but since it all operates in another window I found it to be a pain to use. Firebug, on the other hand, will display itself immediately below the website you’re trying to debug. From what I gather support for something like this is coming in a future version of Dragonfly.

Here is the documentation on using the JavaScript debugger, DOM/CSS inspector, and more in Dragonfly. I’m interested in hearing what everyone thinks of it, but I don’t see it pulling me away from Firebug anytime soon. I guess this is an Alpha release, and maybe they have some tricks up their sleeve?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Oct 27

ViStart gets an Awesome Upgrade

Posted in: Freeware, Pre-Release, Software, Today's Chili, Windows Vista, Windows XP

This article was written on June 09, 2007 by CyberNet.

ViStart Beta 5A few months ago I wrote about a cool application for Windows XP which will emulate the Start Menu in Windows Vista. Then came along another Start Menu emulator from the creator of the Vista Transformation Pack, and this one has received a great update as the final step before Vista Transformation Pack 7 is released.

ViStart Beta 5 is the standalone Start Menu that runs in Windows XP, and perfectly replaces your Start Menu. It does all of the following:

  • Puts your user image in the upper-right corner, and replaces that image with other graphics as you hover over the menu items on the right side.
  • The Programs menu is actually contained within the Start Menu, instead of popping out like it does in XP. This is a big thing that skins alone were never able to emulate.
  • Search! It doesn’t index your files, but the search bar does pull up matching program names as you type.
  • System Tray icon that you can right-click on to shut-down, restart, or log-off of your computer.

The screenshot above is what ViStart looks like in the Vista Transformation Pack, and as you can see there are a lot of similarities to the Vista counterpart. While this program can be run as a standalone program, the font used is what’s specified in your system settings. So from my experience it doesn’t look as spectacular if you don’t have the Vista Transformation Pack installed.

Things are definitely looking up for the Vista Transformation Pack, and when version 7 gets released we’ll be sure to let you know. In the mean time you can play around with ViStart a little more:

ViStart Homepage (English Download Mirror for Beta 5)

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Oct 27

IE8 Beta 2 Download – Colored Tabs, an “Awesome Bar”, and More

Posted in: Features, Freeware, Internet Explorer, Pre-Release, Software, Today's Chili, Windows

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

ie8 awesome bar.png

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.

ie8 tabs.png

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:

ie8 new tab.png

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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Oct 24

Shareaza Team Launching New File Sharing Client Soon

Posted in: Freeware, Pre-Release, Screenshots, Software, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on August 19, 2008 by CyberNet.

panthera.png
(Click to Enlarge)

The open-source file sharing application Shareaza has been going through some tough times lately. They had their domain hijacked by a company called Discordia Ltd. back in December 2007, which is the same company who turned Bearshare and iMesh into paid services. On the Shareaza.com site they then started offering an app called “Shareaza 4″ that promotes legal downloads. If a user installs the “new” Shareaza any older version of the real open-source application will be removed. Discordia has even gone as far as to file for a trademark registration for the Shareaza name. *sigh*

What does the Shareaza development team have up their sleeves now? They are actually working a new project that they’re calling Panther, and it’s slated for release on August 25th. It does everything that Shareaza is already capable of, plus some. Things like better BitTorrent support, skin support, not using the registry, and a revamped media player are all included.

Pre-release versions of Panther can be found here, but there are still quite a few bugs in it right now. As seen in the screenshot above there is still a lot packed into the program, but it’s tough to beat if you’re looking for an all-in-one file sharing solution that works on the BitTorrent, Gnutella1, Gnutella2, and ED2K networks. I’d just hold out until the official launch of Panther where it will likely be more polished than it is right now.

P.S. The real Shareaza homepage is now located on SourceForge’s servers.

[via TorrentFreak]

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Oct 21

Switcher 2 – Best Exposé Clone for Windows

Posted in: Features, Freeware, Pre-Release, Software, Today's Chili, Windows Vista

This article was written on September 02, 2007 by CyberNet.

Switcher

There is no doubt in my mind that Switcher is the best Exposé clone ever made for Windows, and only Vista users get to bask in the features that this free program has to offer. Switcher 2 Beta has just raised the bar several notches by adding features Apple’s own Exposé doesn’t even have!

Among many other things the new Switcher has tremendously improved the smoothness of its animation. You’ll see this in the video demonstration below, but first lets take a look at some of the great new features.

–Custom Window Labels and Backgrounds–

You can now have labels on windows as well as customized backgrounds and borders. You would probably think that the labels only tell you what the title of the app is, but you can put multiple things in the label. My personal favorite is having it show the number of megabytes the particular program is using, but you can also have it display the program’s icon, the filename of the application, or the process name.

–More Productive–

Switcher WindowNow the first 9 windows in Switcher are assigned numbers. This makes it a lot easier to move between windows without having to shuffle through them one-by-one.

One of my favorite features in Switcher has always been the customizable shortcut keys though. That’s also been taken up a notch by adding several new commands that can be assigned shortcuts, including "Begin and Select Next." That command behaves similarly to the standard Windows Alt-Tab where upon activation the last-accessed window is selected. I love this option so much that I’ve gone ahead and assigned it to be the default action. A more Alt-Tab like appearance can also be seen by using the new Grid View, which aligns all of the windows to a grid in number order. I’m sure the Alt-Tab fans out there will choose this to be their default preference.

Another shortcut action that was added was the ability to close a window straight from Switcher. I set it up so that anytime I right-click on one of the thumbnails in Switcher it closes that particular window.

–Live Filtering–

The live filtering gives you the capabilities to only show certain sets of windows at any given time. For example, you can have all minimized windows be hidden or you can only show windows from a certain program (like Windows Explorer). Here are the various options for filtering along with their default shortcut keys:

  • Search by window title (default shortcut Ctrl+F, or simply type to automatically display the search box). You can search using regular expressions (an obscure feature that I keep forgetting about).
  • Exclude minimized windows (default shortcut Ctrl+M).
  • Hide a particular window (default shortcut Ctrl+H).
  • Show only the windows belonging to a certain program (default shortcut Ctrl+W).
  • The default shortcut to remove all filters is Ctrl+R.

After trying out the search feature I couldn’t stop myself from creating a video to show off this cool feature:

–Overview–

I honestly can’t believe how much Switcher has evolved since I first started using it, and it’s quickly become something that I recommend to anyone using Vista. Of course, if you’ve never used Alt-Tab before then you’ll probably never think to use this, but I’ve quickly found this to be a valuable tool in my daily work.

Get Switcher 2 Beta

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