Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on April 16, 2007 by CyberNet.

If you use eBay and Firefox frequently, you have an opportunity to get in on “Firefox Companion for eBay,” a new alpha test program.

Recently, eBay has made an effort to make advancements and improvements with their service while Firefox has been putting major effort into securing as much of the market as possible. They’re teaming up to offer both eBay and Firefox users the best of both worlds.

Back in March when the alpha version of Adobe Apollo was released, it was stated that eBay was working to take advantage of Apollo to bring in a better experience for their users, and a demo showed just what eBay was working on. It was nice to see that eBay was taking advantage of new technology that could make their user’s experience that much better. 

Firefox’s efforts have focused on teaming up with major companies.  Most recently, Firefox teamed up with Kodak to offer an image-sharing feature where users can drag and drop image files from their hard drives to the Firefox window, and then they can be published on Kodak’s gallery site.

The latest team-up between Firefox and eBay will be used to “help build a faster, safer auction experience,” and will help Firefox users manage auctions right from their browser.

Mozilla is definitely smart for joining with major companies to help promote Firefox. Both eBay and Kodak will end up promoting Firefox because it works well with their services. Non-Firefox users in turn will be enticed to try out Firefox to see how their favorite services work with it.

We’ve contacted Mozilla to get in on their reviewer’s program, and once we do we’ll give you an update on how this add-on/extension works.

If you’d like to sign up for the Firefox Companion for eBay alpha test program, click here.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on April 17, 2007 by CyberNet.

Mozilla has hit another huge milestone, this time with their email management software called Thunderbird. The newest Thunderbird 2 contains a whole list of new features that I normally just point out really quick. This time I wanted to go a different route and visually walk you through Thunderbird 2 so that you can better determine if it is right for you before installing it.

Before I get into my review, I wanted to first point out that the release notes page for Thunderbird 2 is up but still refers to the last release candidate. Mozilla hasn’t officially announced the release of Thunderbird 2, but they have already begun prepping their FTP mirrors for the big release.

To download Mozilla Thunderbird 2 straight from one of Mozilla’s mirrors, just select your language below and choose the appropriate operating system:

Alright, let’s go ahead and jump into everything that makes Thunderbird 2 so great!

Account Setup

As soon as you start Thunderbird 2 you’ll be prompted to setup email accounts or RSS feeds. The wizard is pretty self explanatory and walks you through everything you will need to do.

Reading Emails & New Mail Notifier

Mozilla has redesigned the user interface to not only make it more pleasant on the eyes, but also more usable. The notifier (as seen in the first screenshot below) has been revamped to give the user much of the information they need to recognize whether the email needs to be viewed immediately. The only thing that I have found it lacks is a way to pin the notifier so that it does not automatically retract itself.

Tagging Emails

Tagging is becoming a more important way for users to keep photos, files, and emails more organized. Thunderbird 2 is the first version of Mozilla’s email client to offer a tagging feature.

Find as you Type

Finding a specific email can be pretty tricky when you get hundreds a day. Luckily Thunderbird 2 offers a great new feature to instantly search for emails as you type in the Search Box.

Options

Like always, we enjoy being able to customize an application to our every whim. This is actually one of the most important features for me when trying to find just the right application for the job. That is why I made sure to capture nearly all of the different options you can change in the screenshots below. Oh yeah, and the options page received a nice facelift as well!

Account Settings

There are a lot of settings (as always) when it comes to managing your email accounts as well. You can do everything from attaching a signature, to configuring which account Thunderbird uses to send your emails by default.

Other

There were a few last things that I wanted to throw in screenshots in for, and pictured left to right you’ll see the Composition Window, adding a contact, the Address Book, and the About Page for Thunderbird.

I know that Mozilla put a lot of time and care into this release, so I wanted to make sure I did Thunderbird 2 justice by providing as many screenshots as I could. This email client is among the best out there, and if you haven’t tried it out for yourself then you haven’t experienced the simplicity and power that Thunderbird has to offer.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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Apple has sent a clear message to any developers who try to game its iTunes App Store. Software developer Molinker has been kicked out, along with more than 1,000 of its iPhone applications.

The Chinese developer had, according to some estimates, 1,000-plus applications in the store, most of which were copycat knockoffs of existing applications. When the friend of writers at the iPhoneography photography blog saw these rather poor applications consistently scoring 5-star reviews, they got suspicious. Some investigation showed that Molinker’s applications were getting many top ratings and almost nothing in the 2-to-4-star range. In fact, the only other ratings were often 1-star, and likely the only truthful feedback on the apps’ pages.

iPhoneography wrote a long letter to Apple’s marketing boss, Phil Schiller, and posited that Molinker was giving out promotional codes — essentially free copies of the applications — in return for these 5-star reviews. In almost all cases, these reviews were poorly written, and came from customers who almost exclusively reviewed just Molinker applications.

This scam was so effective that the applications regularly rose to the tops of charts. One, called ColorMagic, even made it into the Staff Favorites section of the store (which brings some doubt as to whether these are actually staff picks at all).

After a week of typical Apple silence, iPhoneography wrote again, and received a reply direct from Schiller: “Yes, this developer’s apps have been removed from the App Store and their ratings no longer appear either.”

So what, you say? Some dodgy developer got its entire portfolio chucked down the memory hole, and the App Store continues as if Molinker had never existed. First, the scale of this purging is huge: 1,000 applications represents almost 1 percent of the entire App Store offering. This alone shows that Apple is happy to do whatever it takes to keep its house clean.

It also shows the power that Apple has over those that sell in its exclusive marketplace. Sure, Molinker was caught cheating, and punished, but Apple could pull the same trick on any developer, for any reason. We don’t think that it would, but iPhone developers are a nervous bunch as it is, rubbing on rabbits’ feet and crossing their fingers as their creations make their way through a fickle and seemingly arbitrary approval process.

And what about the customers? We doubt that Molinker will be refunding all the money it has made selling the applications (plus 30 percent on top that went to Apple, and is non-returnable). This means that, at best, these customers can keep using their now-banned apps until a future OS update breaks them. Perhaps, though, they should have bought better applications in the first place?

This is the key. Because there is no clear way to try-before-you buy, the shareware model that works so well for computers, the ratings are absurdly important to choosing an application. Molinker’s scam, then, is almost a symptom of the App Store setup itself. Can Apple actually be blamed for the rise of the ratings scamsters?

Read what others think:

Apple investigates possible US AppStore ratings scam (iPhoneography)

Breaking News: Molinker expelled from the AppStore (iPhoneography)

Apple kicks prolific developer out of iTunes shop (The Register)

Apple comes down hard on one developer – bans 1000 apps (Times Online)

Ratings Scam Gets Almost 1 % of App Store Pulled [Gizmodo]

VMWare is making noise about smartphone virtualization again, claiming their new system will run two operating systems at once, sorta. It’s a compelling idea! But even more, it’s a reminder: Why the hell can’t we choose our smartphone’s OS, again?

When you buy a PC, the most important decision you make is selecting its OS. Do you want Windows 7, for a modern Windows machine-slash-media center? Are you a little more conservative, hanging back with Windows XP? Do you want a lightweight Linux OS on your netbook so you don’t have to worry about viruses, or slowdown? Are you a Gentoo purist, building your OS flag by flag, penguin shirt moist from excitement? Or, god forbid, are you a hackintosher? Whatever choice you make, you’re making a choice. You’re selecting the interface with which you interact with your computer, and by extension, the entire digital world. This makes sense.

But this just isn’t how things work in the mobile world. If you want Windows Mobile, you need to buy a Windows Phone, complete with a dedicated Start button. If you want Google’s Android, you’ve got a narrow selection of handsets from a handful of manufacturers, many of which, at least for now, don’t even support the same version of the OS. If you think webOS looks cool, buy a Pre. If you like Symbian, import a Nokia or settle for a Samsung. And most predictably, if you like the App Store, Apple—and only Apple—is ready to process your credit card. Like the Touch HD2’s obscenely hot hardware, but don’t care for Windows Mobile? Tough luck. Think the Droid is a perfect piece of machinery, but don’t understand what all this Android hubbub is about? Shut up.

In the last half-decade, we’ve become acutely aware of what goes into our smartphones. New phones get a spec rundown that mirrors a PC’s: Qualcomm processor X! RAM speed Y! Screen technology Z! It fosters a climate ripe for PC-style hardware wars, with new processor architectures competing head to head, an ongoing—and fruitful—resolution race, and each new phone edging out its predecessors with even more onboard storage, or support for a new input or output cable. It’s fascinating to watch the competition unfold, but it’s even more fascinating to see how tightly grouped development is. These are ARM-based phones, for the most part. They share memory types, display types, cameras, chipsets, processors and often, original device manufacturers. They’re the same thing.

When you buy a smartphone, you’re stuck with its OS. Your carrier might toss you a few software updates, and if you’re particularly gutsy, you might install some custom-baked software of your own, though you’re generally stuck with slight variations on and customizations of the handet’s default OS. It’s as if everyone in the mobile world is emulating what Apple does in the computer space, except worse: at least Macs have Boot Camp, for fuck’s sake. (And before they did, they had the PowerPC excuse.)

I know something like this is miles over the horizon—you can’t just will new hardware support into existence, and the entire industry is currently built around the bound relationship between software and hardware—and that some hardware (guess which!) is probably doomed to live out its entire life in a hollow monogamous relationship, but it’s time for handset manufacturers, along with Google, Microsoft, the Symbian Foundation, and Palm, maybe, to start setting goals. Or at minimum, it’s time for us to start asking them to.

For the companies, this would mean working on driver support for common componentry, opening up to the enthusiast communities who already do so much amazing software work on their own, and agreeing on some kind of common bootloader, from which users can choose to install their operating system.

For users, this would mean freedom. Going into 2010, our smartphones are more central to our lives than ever, and it’s time to acknowledge that. Consumers treat smartphones like computers. The people who make them, though, treat them like dumbphones; prepackaged products, artificially limited for no good reason—at least, no good reason to the people who buy them.

Can’t get enough of the Entourage Edge? We feel you. It’s easily a sight for sore eyes in the pool of me-too e-readers, and while we’ve learned that it has plenty of power under the hood to handle quite a few desirable tasks, we’ve yet to really see the software do its thing in any real capacity. Until now, of course. The video posted up after the break is as good a look of the inner workings as we’ve seen, and the company has contacted us directly to affirm that the Feburary 2010 ship date is still on track. To be honest, we’re really digging what we’re seeing on screen, but a premedidated demonstration and real-world usability are certainly horses of different hues. Here’s hoping we get a tick to play with a production unit ourselves at CES, but till then, you know where to head.

Continue reading Entourage Edge e-reader shows off its softer-ware side on video

Entourage Edge e-reader shows off its softer-ware side on video originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 07 Dec 2009 07:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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