Hasta La Gadget!

Snow Leopard is finally reaching the masses. As much as we like it, though, the interface feels awfully similar to its predecessor. Here are 15 tricks to check out that are undeniably new—and even a little exciting:

Gallery haters take note, clicking here will take you to a giant list of the tips.

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

Sync Contacts with Gmail and Yahoo: No longer just for syncing with the iPhone and Mobile Me, the Contacts app can now talk to your Yahoo and Gmail address books, and pull down your contact info. It’s as simple as going into Contacts preferences and hitting the Accounts tab.

Show Date In Menu Bar: If, like me, you’re too lazy to click on the clock, or launch widgets, or just make use of your God-gifted memory, you can now set the clock to display full date in the Menu Bar, just go into Date and Time Preferences and adjust.

Smart Text Formatting and Correcting on the Fly: Snow Leopard has a number of text-based enhancement for apps like Text Edit, iChat and Mail including spelling auto-correct, and text substitution, which lets you use shorter macros in place of longer words and phrases. The spell corrector is limited to commonly misspelled words, but the text substitution is yours to define. Just control-click in the text entry field for any of the aforementioned apps to toggle the features on or off, and visit the Text section of the Language & Text system pref for tweaking.

Password Log-In Delay: If you have password protection enabled for when your computer goes to sleep, you can now choose how long your computer snoozes before the password requirement actually kicks in. This means you can more easily have the privacy of a darkened monitor without the pain of having to key in your password every time you step away. These settings are under the Security preference pane.

Google and Yahoo Support in iCal: iCal is now much easier to add calendars from Google and Yahoo. No hacks or third-party software necessary. You just add a new account under preferences and select your service of choice. (Suit-wearers take note: Exchange support is here as well.)

Edit Videos in QuickTime X: QuickTime Pro users have long been able to edit and convert videos without launching the heavier movie apps. With QuickTime X, Apple has done away with that nasty fee. Yep, Pro is dead. Now everyone can trim and save, with a visual navigation timeline for easy edits, not to mention that other pro perk, viewing movies in full-screen.

Upload to YouTube From QuickTime X: Now you can upload directly to YouTube from QuickTime X. Just open any video file then go up to the menu bar and click Share. That same menu lets you upload movies directly to MobileMe, and convert movies to iProduct-friendly formats to send to iTunes.

QuickTime X Video Capture: How much do we love QuickTime X? It now also has video capture direct from the iSight camera, any FireWire video camera or any audio input. Better still, it can record the action happening on your screen, and save that as a movie too. A riveting one, to be sure.

Smarter Drive Eject: Half bug fix, half user enhancement, Snow Leopard now tells you exactly why it can’t eject a drive that’s in use. Instead of saying it’s just busy, it tells you what app is using it. Apple also promises ejecting in general is just “more reliable.”

Recover Trashed Files: If you accidentally sent an item to the trash that you want to replace, you don’t have to go in and then drag it to wherever you had it before (if you even remember). Now you just control-click on the trashed item and select “Put Back.” Problem solved.

Airport Signal Strength: Windows users have long been accustomed to this, but when you’re looking for free wi-fi to steal and wanna get an idea of what’s most reliable, you can now get an idea before you connect. It really took Apple this long to add this?

Automatic Time-Zone Detection: If you’re jet setting around the world with regularity, you can allow Snow Leopard to detect your location using Wi-Fi hotspots, and adjust the time zone—and clock’s time—accordingly.

Preview a File Inside Its Icon: If hitting the space bar for a “quick look” is too much for you, try the in-icon previews. Just roll your cursor over a video or audio file and a play button will appear. PDFs show arrows, letting you leaf through their pages. In most folders, there’s a slider that lets you scale icons up to a massive 512×512 pixels, presumably to make this file preview seem in any way rational.

Annotate This!: The increasingly useful Preview now has a bar at the bottom of the window full of various annotation tools, such as shapes, highlighter, memos, underline, strikeout and hyperlink. Useful for the bookworms out there who are deal with texts in digital formats. Perhaps it also hints at the Apple Tablet’s Preview app, because a device that goes up against a Kindle would need something like this (along with, you know, a five-day battery life).

Chinese Character Input: This isn’t really a feature the majority of us will use, but rather a demo of what’s possible with Apple input technology. You can use the trackpad to write Chinese characters and have them appear as computer text, just hit Ctrl-Shift-Space Bar. Pretty neat idea, and perhaps something else that might come in handy with a tablet.

There are, of course, even more tricks and new features. If you have any good ones you want to share, you know how to do it.

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

This article was written on January 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

VeriSign’s iDefense is offering big bucks, up to $12,000 for vulnerabilities found in Vista or IE7. VeriSign of course has an interest in this as their job is to provide secure Internet transactions.  In fact, according to their website, they process as many as 18 billion Internet interactions each day. It is no wonder why they’re willing to pay big bucks for Microsoft’s flaws. iDefense, part of VeriSign does these Vulnerability Challenges quarterly, and the latest is just getting started.

According to an article over at eWeek.com, this comes about 1 month after some researchers at Trend Micro found that underground sites were offering $50,000 for each Vista flaw. The people getting $50,000 under the table probably won’t trade their even bigger bucks for the $8,000 that iDefense is offering.  iDefense is willing to pay for a maximum of six vulnerabilities, each at $8,000.  Then they will also pay $2,000-$4,000 for working exploit code that exploits the vulnerability that was submitted. The additional amounts will be based upon

• Reliability of the exploit
• Quality of the exploit code
• Readability of the exploit code
• Documentation of the exploit code

If you’re interested in being a bug hunter, there’s a list of rules you’ll want to take a look at. Among them are: the vulnerability can’t be caused by or require third party software installed, or it can’t require additional social engineering beyond browsing a malicious site. The deadline is March 31st.

iDefense isn’t the only company offering money for vulnerabilities.  TippingPoint, a division of 3Com has a program called Zero Day Initiative, or ZDI. Their program is similar, if a research discovers a vulnerability, they log into ZDI to submit it. 3com tests the vulnerability, and after they verify it, they offer the researcher money. They take it a bit further though, and offer reward points for each submission.  Those reward points lead to bonuses and other cool benefits.

What does Microsoft have to say about all of this? “We do not believe that offering compensation for vulnerability information is the best way [researchers] can help protect customers.” Hmm.. with money being offered, I don’t think researchers are going to willingly call Microsoft and tip them for free when they could potentially make a good chunk of money.  Sometimes it takes a little motivation$$$. I guess Microsoft still benefits because companies like VeriSign and 3Com contact them with the confirmed vulnerabilities so that they’re able to get a patch available.  There’s no need for Microsoft to pay when others are willing to fork out money and do the work on their behalf!

With all of this said, the whole underlying factor of companies paying to find vulnerabilities is important.  With all of the new code that is being released with these new programs, (which undoubtedly  have a huge chunk of the market), it is really important that these vulnerabilities are found and patched as soon as possible.  There are plenty of people that will be diligently searching for the bugs and vulnerabilities for their own financial gain at the expense of unsuspecting users.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

CyberNotes: Secunia Software InspectorWindows Vista RC2 Expected FridayMicrosoft To Release Vista Betas MonthlyVista Transformation Pack 5.5 ReleasedEach Windows Vista Version Will Get Its Own CD

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

We just wrote about how Gmail 2 breaks a lot of the Greasemonkey scripts that are available, and Gina from Lifehacker turned right around and released Better Gmail 2. As expected this version only has a fraction of scripts that the original extension had, and it still lacks some of my favorites: Google Calendar integration, Google Reader integration, and Folders4Gmail. None of those scripts have been made compatible with Gmail 2 yet.

One script that I have to have is one for automatically inserting HTML signatures into my emails. The script I used previously wasn’t all that complicated, and I decided to go ahead and fix it myself. I took it one step further, however, and made it work with both the new version and the old version of Gmail.

Note: This script is designed to insert your signature at the beginning of replies/forwards, instead of at the end.

Here’s what you have to do:

1. Download and install Greasemonkey if you don’t already have it.
2. Install the script
3. You’ll need to have the HTML code for the signature that you want to insert. Once you have that just go to the Greasemonkey script manager and edit the script’s HTML signature. The code looks something like this (insert the signature where you see the green text):
   

   var htmlSignature = ‘<br>–<br>Ryan Wagner, Founder/Editor<br><a href=”http://cybernetnews.com/”>CyberNet Technology News</a><br><a href=”http://cybernetnews.com/”><img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/CyberNet.gif” style=”border:0″ alt=”CyberNet Technology News”/></a>‘;

   top.window.setTimeout(”top.window.frames[‘main’].frames[‘” + parent.name + “‘].document.getElementById(’hc_compose’).contentWindow.document.getElementsByTagName(’body’)[0].innerHTML = ‘” + htmlSignature + “‘ + top.window.frames[‘main’].frames[‘” + parent.name + “‘].document.getElementById(’hc_compose’).contentWindow.document.getElementsByTagName(’body’)[0].innerHTML;”,500);

   var allBody = document.evaluate(”//body[@class=’editable tr-field’]“, document, null, XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null);
   allBody.snapshotItem(0).innerHTML = htmlSignature + allBody.snapshotItem(0).innerHTML;

This script does work with Opera, but only with the older version of Gmail. I used a special Firefox-only searching property to insert the signature for the new version of Gmail, and the reason being that Gmail 2 has some issues in Opera. In fact Opera users won’t even see a link to the newer version of Gmail unless they are masking the browser as Firefox or IE.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

Gmail HTML Signature BookmarkletHow to Insert HTML Signatures in GmailFeedBurner Headline Animator Stats Prove Its WorthNew: Gmail Color Coded LabelsCyberNotes: How To Create A Great Email Signature

Marco Arment’s Instapaper is one of two* killer apps for the iPhone: It’s so useful that it just about justifies the phone’s purchase price all by itself.

Now Arment has cut the price of the Pro version in half, to $5, and you should buy it.

Instapaper started out as a simple web service. To use it, you drag a special “Read Later” bookmarklet to your browser. Whenever you find something that you’d like to read but don’t have time for at the moment, just click that “Read Later” button. The article gets added to your personal page on Instapaper. When you’ve got time later, just visit that page and read away. Conveniently, every article is automatically reformatted (all excess HTML and graphics are stripped out) leaving nothing but highly-readable text.

The Instapaper iPhone app lets you view all those saved articles in an iPhone-friendly format. The free version is so useful that I use it several times a day: On my commute, in the evening, during the odd moments of downtime.

In effect, it turns the iPhone into a super-convenient mini-reading tablet, great for catching up on the news, reading long-form articles, and more.

Instapaper Pro adds a couple new features. It now downloads articles in the background, so any time you have it open, it’s updating the list of stories for you to read. It handles the “graphical version” (with photo) of articles better than the free version. It lets you archive articles that you’ve read more easily. And it adds some minor interface enhancements, such as a reversed mode (light text on a dark background, good for reading at night) and tilt-scrolling.

And, it adds features that let you optionally share your articles with the wider Instapaper community, or read popular articles that have been shared by others.

But even if you don’t feel like you need those features, you should still get the Pro version. It’s only $5, and most of that goes to Arment. For developing such a great app, he certainly deserves it.

One side note: Instapaper pro is rated “17 and up” for “Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes,” which is an indication of Apple’s bizarre and arbitrary approval and rating policies.

* The other killer iPhone app is Tweetie, a $3 Twitter client that, if you’re a Twitter user and have multiple accounts, is as indispensable as a needle to a heroin addict.

This article was written on October 10, 2007 by CyberNet.

A few months ago we talked about .docx files in Microsoft Word 2007 and the problems that you could run into if you created a document in and saved it in the .docx format but sent it to someone to read who was using an earlier version of Office. They wouldn’t be able to open it unless they used one of the work-around options available. Another problem that some of you may have experienced is that you create a document in Word 2007 but the person that you are wanting to share it with doesn’t even have Office installed and therefore, can’t view it. While there are options available to solve both of these issues, Microsoft has made it just a little bit easier by developing a “Word 2007 Viewer.”

The description that they offer for the Word Viewer download is “view, print and copy Word documents, even if you don’t have Word installed.  This download is a replacement for Word Viewer 2003 and all previous Word Viewer versions.” Anybody who doesn’t have Office but needs to open a document for reading or printing will be able to download Word Viewer to view the document. Of course you won’t be able to edit or create a new document, but it’s perfect for viewing documents created in Word 2007. Keep in mind, once you have downloaded the Word Viewer, you’ll still need to download the compatibility pack  and use the two in combination to open documents that were saved in the .docx format.

Word Viewer is a 24.5 MB download which you can get here.

If by chance you’re interested in a PowerPoint Viewer, that too is available and works similarly allowing you to view full-featured presentations created in PowerPoint 97 on up without owning PowerPoint.

Source: Digital Inspiration

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

Office 2007 Trial Soon And File Converters ReleasedThe Wonders Of The Microsoft Word Spell CheckerMicrosoft Word 2007 Changes The "=rand()" FeatureMicrosoft Office 2007 Adds New Squiggly!MyFive: Reasons to Love Microsoft Office 2007