Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on February 24, 2009 by CyberNet.

Windows; Mac;
Today Apple kind of took everyone by surprise when they released a big milestone for the Safari browser. The new Safari 4 Beta from Apple borrows some ideas from their competition, and they spiced it up a bit with some fancy graphics. This is most notably seen in the “Top Sites” screen as seen in the image above. It’s a combination of Opera’s Speed Dial and Google Chrome’s most frequently visited pages. Then they added a little glamor to really make it pop.

The Windows version also received a major visual overhaul so that it actually fits in well with the operating system, and for the most part feels a lot like Google Chrome. Especially since the tabs are located along the top on the titlebar… again, like Chrome.

When it comes down to speed Apple has actually managed to squeeze out a bit more. I ran the Mac version of the browser on the SunSpider test against Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 (also Mac), and Safari 4 Beta squeaked out on top. It took Firefox 3.1 a total of 1409.6ms to run all the tests, and Safari 4 was 1276.8ms (lower number is better). It’s not much of a difference, but Firefox 3.1 beat out Safari 3 proving that Apple didn’t focus solely on appearance this time around.

Aside from that here are some of the features Apple pointed out for Safari 4:

• Top Sites – See your favorite websites at a glance.
• Cover Flow – Flip through your site history or bookmarks like you flip through albums in iTunes
• Full History Search – Easily retrieve sites you’ve seen before.
• Tabs on Top – Manage your tabs elegantly and open a wide window for exploring the web.
• Nitro Engine – Surf the web with the world’s fastest browser.
• Windows Native Look and Feel – Vista and XP users will feel right at home.
• Developer Tools – Access the best suite of development tools ever included in a browser.

I’m diggin’ Safari 4 on my Mac, and despite being a rather dedicated Firefox user I plan on giving Safari a fair shot. I think Google might be able to grab an edge on Safari once they add support for extensions, but until then I think Windows users will, at the very least, be giving the browser a shot.

So what do you think? The number of web browsers and what they’re capable of doing is getting pretty amazing when you think about where this market was just a few years ago. I can’t wait to see what comes next, and what company it will come from.

Haven’t read enough? Here are some more articles worth checking out regarding this release:

• This is one fast browser – by Hardware 2.0
• Safari 4 Hidden Preferences – by Random Genius
• Safari 4 a big step up, but not as far as rivals – by Webware
• Safari 4 First Impressions – by Gizmodo

Get Safari 4 Beta for Windows or Mac

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on January 05, 2008 by CyberNet.

There’s a new app on the block, and it looks as though it may have a very promising future. The open source Spicebird project has its first Alpha release coming up soon, and to tease us they’ve posted a video of what to expect. We’ve outlined all of the features demonstrated in the video below, and provided screenshots from each important aspect of the program.

They haven’t released Spicebird 0.3 Alpha yet, but you can plan on it having a customizable homepage, email, calendar, contacts, and instant messaging all rolled into the application. As time goes on they would like to integrate a way to blog from Spicebird as well as a task manager.

The great thing about Spicebird is that it seems really intuitive. They’ve laid out the various services (email, calendar, etc…) into an already familiar tabbed interface. Take a look for yourself at what Spicebird 0.3 Alpha will have to offer when it is released:

–Homepage–

This is one of the really unique aspects of the program. It’s a customizable homepage that has a handful of modules by default. There’s a module for your inbox, calendar, clocks, feeds, and agenda. You can add multiple copies of each module to your homepage if you would like, such as one for each inbox, and they can be arranged by dragging them around.

(Click to Enlarge)

–Email–

Email works just like it does in Mozilla Thunderbird. The nice thing is that it will detect when an event is mentioned in an email, and offer to schedule it for you.  That’s a lot like what Gmail does with Google Calendar.

(Click to Enlarge)

–Calendar–

As expected the calendar will completely support the drag & drop creation/management of events. If you’ve used Mozilla Sunbird before you’ll already be pretty familiar with how this works.

(Click to Enlarge)

–Contacts–

There’s not a whole lot you can do with a contact list, but this one looks pretty nice.

(Click to Enlarge)

–Instant Messenger–

Chatting is rather straight forward, and it looks like for right now it will only work with Jabber accounts. I’m guessing that would mean Google Talk can easily be setup.

(Click to Enlarge)

Spicebird [via Lifehacker]

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This article was written on March 12, 2008 by CyberNet.

With the release of Firefox 3 Beta 4 the other day it is good to see how many extension developers have been providing updates to prepare the launch of the Firefox 3 browser. The extensions that need the most love and care are those that deal with bookmarks, and that’s because the backend of the bookmarking system in Firefox 3 has been significantly changed.

One of the extensions that I’ve been waiting the longest for is Foxmarks (review). It’s useful because it runs in the background of Firefox, and it will synchronize your bookmarks with a remote server. That way you can access your bookmarks from any computer, or sync them with other Firefox installations. And they have a mobile interface for quick access even on your cellphone or PDA.

Foxmarks is currently testing a version of the extension that is compatible with the pre-release versions of the Firefox 3 browser, but there’s a catch. You have to sign up to be part of the Beta program (must be a registered user), and according to them there is a list of people waiting to get in. If you do sign up to be part of the Beta program be prepared to submit any bugs that you find.

And as their blog points out testers may find that there are issues while using the extension:

There hasn’t been a single report of Foxmarks crashing Firefox beta 4 yet; that version was only released yesterday, but we’ve been impressed by how the quality of Firefox keeps marching forward with each release. Beta 4 may well be stable enough for general use with Foxmarks. We’re keeping our fingers crossed.

There are also reports of occasional performance problems — sometimes sync under Firefox 3 is really fast, and sometimes it’s quite slow. Surprisingly, this variability occurs on the same computer with the same bookmarks within the same session. We’re not sure what might account for the difference yet, but we’re looking into it.

So if you feel like living on the bleeding edge there’s no better combination than downloading Firefox 3 Beta 4, and then signing up to be part of the Foxmarks Beta program.

Foxmarks Beta
Kudos to Leland for the heads up!

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This article was written on February 15, 2006 by CyberNet.

There has been a lot of hype about the Microsoft Office Live Beta, of course most of the hype came before it was released. Now that people are actually beta testing it they are starting to realize that it is not so special after all. Screenshots, like the one posted above, show the features that you can find in the new Microsoft Office Live Beta. Even though I have not received my invitation to test it, the pre-release excitement has warn off for me. If you would like to see the entire gallery of screenshots then you can follow the link below.

View The Complete Gallery: XxDesmusxX.NET

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This article was written on June 21, 2007 by CyberNet.

There is no doubt that the typical icons laying around your desktop could probably be a little more useful than they already are. Some operating systems are trying to dive into that by making the icon a representation of what the file’s contents hold, but I’ve wondered for a long time why so many services have neglected to provide a revolutionary new icon.

Now I’m not exactly an operating system developer, but here are some of the ideas for icons that I have come up with at one point or another:

• An icon that you can flip around and write a note on. This could be particularly useful in trying to find a specific file instead of looking at non-descriptive file names.
• Color-coded icons based upon their filetype. Nothing really extravagant, but a thin colored border around the icon might help you better distinguish what kind of file your about to open.
• Change the size of an icon, and not all of the icons. This would give me the ability to make one icon really large so that it draws my attention more than the others do. When you need to get something done, sometimes it is nice to have a big reminder right in front of your face.
• Pie menu that pops out when you hover over the icon, providing quick links to open the file, open the properties, rename the file, or much more. Face it, pie menus are a lot more efficient than a traditional menu system.
• Stack icons on top of each other. If I had a bunch of related images on my desktop it might be more useful if I could just stack them on top of each other instead of creating a folder to put them in. Then at anytime I could click on the stack and they would pan out like a dealer showing a deck of cards.
• "Live" icons that can be updated much like an icon in the Windows System Tray. That way the same icon that I launch Google Talk with could also display how many unread emails I currently have. Then I wouldn’t really need both a Quick Launch icon and a System Tray icon, since they would serve the same purpose.

Okay, so those are most of the decent ideas that I have thought of at one time or another as ways to make icons more useful. And it looks like KDE 4 (for Linux) will be bringing one of those ideas to life…well, kind of. One thing that I listed was having a pie menu popup when I hovered over an icon, and KDE 4 will present the user with icons in each corner when they click on it. As seen in the mockup above, a music file would have buttons to play the song, add it to a playlist, or show the information for that particular song. Here’s a YouTube movie of this feature’s current state.

It’s not quite a pie menu like I would have preferred, but this is an awesome step in the right direction. Hopefully other operating system developers are trying to brainstorm how they can make icons more useful.

And then there are Panels which hopes to reduce the clutter in the Taskbar. This is done by placing the System Tray and Taskbar icons in expandable Panels that are only shown when the appropriate options are clicked. I’ll admit that this looks cool, but I don’t want to see the KDE interface going to something like this. When I want to switch between programs, I want to do it quickly instead of waiting for a panel to pop out to show my running applications:

Click to Enlarge

I think the KDE team is definitely on the right track, although the Panel thing isn’t my cup of tea. If KDE 4 stays on track it should be available on October 23.

Source: Liquidat [via Digg]

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