Filed under: Beta

Windows 7 SP1 beta download goes public

by Lee Mathews Jul 27th 2010

If don't have a TechNet or MSDN subscription and you've been anxious to get the Windows 7 SP1 beta installed (though I'm not sure why you would be if your system is already up to date and you're not a system admin or developer), now's your chance. Grab your Windows Live ID and head on over to the Microsoft Eval Center and download the beta right now!

One important thing to remember is that this isn't the final SP1 code -- and there's a good chance you may have to uninstall this pre-release at some point down the road so that you can install the Windows 7 SP1 RTM.

Features-wise, there's not much going on in SP1 to get excited about, so if you're happy with the way your Windows 7 system is running you may as well hold off until the service pack is available via Windows Update.

Tags: beta, service pack, ServicePack, sp1, win7, windows 7, Windows7

Filed under: Security, Microsoft, Beta

Microsoft Security Essentials 2 beta now available for download

by Lee Mathews Jul 20th 2010

Many of our readers have made the switch to Microsoft Security Essentials for malware and virus defense. It's free, and it offers protection that is every bit as good as (if no better than) commercial apps like Norton and McAfee. Anxious to know what's coming in version 2? Wait no more, the beta download is out now!

So what's new? MSE's defenses have been beefed up with a new scanning engine, better defense against network-based threats, Internet Explorer integration for blocking web-based threats, and improved integration with the Windows firewall. In short, the best, free antivirus app for Windows has gotten even better.

As with the original beta download of MSE 1, Microsoft says this is a "limited opportunity." In truth, you'll probably see this spring up on torrent trackers and mirror sites like Softpedia within hours, so don't fret -- if you really want to try it out, you'll be able to get your hands on the download... Even if Microsoft's own servers can't handle the demand (I had serious problems getting their server to push all 8MB or so).

Visit the Connect site to download MSE 2 beta -- you'll need a Live ID to sign in.

Tags: antimalware, antivirus, beta, mse, security essentials, SecurityEssentials

Filed under: Video, Mozilla, Beta, Browsers

Video: TabCandy is coming -- and it's like a virtual desktop manager for Firefox

by Lee Mathews Jul 19th 2010

With our Web browsers becoming more and more like an OS -- or actually becoming an OS as with Chrome -- it's not surprising to see developers turning their eye toward features which provide a desktop-like experience. Over at Mozilla, they've been working away at TabCandy -- which offers a whole new way to manage your Firefox tabs.

TabCandy is a bit like a full-featured virtual desktop manager -- think of Web pages as applications and browser windows as desktops. Install TabCandy and a button is added to your Firefox toolbar. Click it, and you'll see a view like the one above. You can group tabs, label them, and move tabs between groups with a simple drag-and-drop.

The layout is totally customizable -- resize group boxes however you want and reposition them, and the thumbnails automatically resize and re-order themselves. You can also add a new tab to a group by clicking the icon in the bottom-left corner. Click a thumbnail, and the page zooms into the foreground.

Want to see TabCandy in action? Check out my brief screencast after the break!

Tags: concept, experimental, firefox 4, Firefox4, tabcandy, tabs, ui

Filed under: Mozilla, Beta, Browsers

Firefox 4 nightly build debuts App Tabs

by Lee Mathews Jul 14th 2010

Google Chrome has been my default browser for quite some time, but I've got to admit... I like what I'm seeing so far in Firefox 4, and the tweaks just keep on coming. One recent addition which has been talked about for some time is the option to create App Tabs.

Firefox 4's App Tabs look pretty much like a pinned tab in Google Chrome. For now, an App Tab appears to simply force a tab to the left and display it with the favicon only. It's a great way to save additional space on your tab bar, and a feature I use religiously in Chrome.

Right now, you'll only find App Tabs in the Mozilla nightly builds of Firefox 4 -- which you can download here for Windows, Mac, and Linux. To create an App Tab, just right click and select the option from the context menu.

Tags: app, firefox 4, Firefox4, mozilla, nightly, tab, tabs

Filed under: OS Updates, Windows, Beta

Windows 7 SP1 leaked -- but you should probably wait for the final version

by Lee Mathews Jun 25th 2010

OK, so the Windows 7 service pack 1 beta has been leaked online and you can now download it from various torrent sites. For the sake of some of our less-experienced readers, here's a short PSA: you might not want to install it.

Apart from the obvious reason that it's a beta release, there's an annoying little problem I've been fighting with on a handful of my customers' systems. It seems that they somehow managed to get their mitts on a pre-release version of SP2 for Windows Vista. One day, out of the blue, Windows suddenly told them Vista was no longer genuine and they had to re-activate.

They punched the license key in multiple times, but no joy. It just wouldn't go.

The solution: remove their SP2 install and replace it with the final one. It's not a complicated fix, but it is one that ties your computer up for a long time and requires several reboots.

I can't say for sure that Windows 7 SP1 will behave the same way, but if you're not a fan of lengthy re-installs you should probably just sit tight and wait for Microsoft to deliver the final service pack. It's not going to be too much longer now anyway, and there's really nothing all that exciting under the hood for the average user at home.

Tags: beta, leak, leaked, sp1, torrent, update, win7, windows 7, Windows7

Filed under: Beta, Browsers

Flock 3 ditches Firefox core for Chrome, adds social networking awesomeness

by Lee Mathews Jun 16th 2010

You may not be familiar with Flock -- even with a user base of 17 million plus, it's still not a Web browser that gets a lot of coverage. That could be about to change, however, with the release of Flock v3 beta.

Why? Because the new version is really good. I was more than a little put off by Flock 2. Apart from a Mozilla-based core which felt sluggish in comparison to other browsers, the user interface was a bit too cluttered for me. In the new v3 beta, Flock has switched powerplants -- moving to Google's Chromium -- and concentrated on a clean, minimal interface.

Using the same code base as Google Chrome obviously brings a big increase in speed, but Flock has built in a number of enhancements that offer some serious advantages over Chrome if you're a serious social networker. Like what, you ask?

For starters, there's the awesome sidebar I've outlined in the header image. Sure, there are plenty of Chrome extensions which add a little drop-down display of your Twitter or Facebook streams, but Chrome doesn't have sidebar support out-of-the-box. Flock coded it from scratch, and it's a fantastic addition.

Tags: browser, chrome, facebook, flock, google, networking, rss, social, twitter

Filed under: Microsoft, Beta

Windows Live Sync 2011 offers slick peer-to-peer sync and remote control

by Lee Mathews Jun 14th 2010

Windows Live 2011 is arriving soon, but some of you -- myself included -- may have gotten your hands on the download a little early. It was, after all, like every other Microsoft product, predictably leaked to torrent sites over the weekend.

Live Sync has evolved from Live Mesh, and if you speak to just about anyone who used Mesh they'll tell you it's awesome. Sync now integrates with SkyDrive -- but before you get too excited, there's a catch. See, you don't get the whole 25GB of space offered to SkyDrive users for Sync use. No, you're limited to 2GB just like a free DropBox account. That limit is on cloud-only storage, so it's OK by me. I'm far more interested in keeping files in sync on my computers than I am with making sure they're cloud-accessible.

In addition to syncing any folders I specify, Live Sync also handles Office templates (handy, what with the Office Live apps integration now available in SkyDrive) and custom styles and Internet Explorer favorites. That's a nice bonus, since I sometimes still have to access sites which are IE-only at work.

Tags: 2011, beta, control, live, rdp, remote, sync

Filed under: OS Updates, Beta

Windows 7 SP1 public beta download to be available in July

by Lee Mathews Jun 7th 2010

Tech Ed might not get the same billing as Apple's WWDC. Heck, many of you may never even have heard of Tech Ed. Still, there's some important Microsoft news coming from the conference.

Among the announcements thus far: Microsoft is planning on releasing the Windows 7 SP1 next month. If you recall, there was speculation earlier this year that we'd see the download sometime this summer.

According to the official post today, there's not too much for the average Windows user to get excited about: "SP1 will simply be the combination of updates already available through Windows Update and additional hotfixes based on feedback by our customers and partners."

As we mentioned before, there will be some important updates for enterprise users, including Dynamic Memory and better remote desktop courtesy RemoteFX.

Tags: download, sp1, update, upgrade, win7, windows

Filed under: Utilities, Beta

Screenshot Tour: Soluto speeds up your Windows boot time with help from the crowd

by Lee Mathews May 25th 2010

Techy types like the typical Download Squad reader are just fine with manually tweaking our systems and using utilities that less savvy folks would cringe at. For them, it's not always such an easy task to find an easy-to-use program which actually does what it promises.

One newly launched app which is perfect for neophytes is Soluto. Just launched at TC Disrupt, Soluto calls itself "anti-frustration software," though at this point the only frustration it can tackle is slow Windows boot times.

But that's a task it handles with aplomb, and its interface provides plenty of information to help guide even the most casual user through the process of trimming down a sluggish startup process.

After performing a somewhat lengthy initial scan of the software installed on your system (mine took somewhere between ten and twelve minutes) and first-run boot analysis, Soluto displays startup items in three categories: no-brainers, potentially removable (recommended for more advanced users), and required. Pick a program, view its description, see how much time it adds to your boot process, and decide whether you'd like to pause or delay it to help speed things up.

Soluto will even tell you what other users chose to do with a specific program -- as long as someone else has tinkered with it already.

(more screenshots after the break!)

Tags: boot, fast, soluto, speed, startup, time, tune-up, utility, windows

Filed under: Mozilla, Beta

Screenshot tour: Mozilla Weave app (beta) for iPhone

by Lee Mathews May 21st 2010

A while back, Mozilla waxed poetic about creating an iPhone app. Like many of you, I was intrigued and wondered what form it would take -- I assumed it would be something of a Weave-on-iPhone with Safari integration. As it turns out, that's exactly what the project is about.

After receiving a tip from one of our commenters (thanks, John!) on my post about the re-branding of Weave as Firefox Sync, I headed over to the Mozilla Labs page for the project to check out the code. Mozilla had actually quietly released a preview back in February, but it didn't receive a lot of coverage.

Development looks to be fairly active, so I pinged our local iPhone dev Nik Fletcher (who's been busy away from Download Squad with his iPhone app Happenings) to see if he could compile it. About ten minutes later, he emailed me a handful of screenshots and his thoughts.

The verdict: it's nascent, but actually very good and would be useful for just about anyone who uses Firefox on their desktop and an iPhone or iPod touch for mobile browsing.

In Nik's highly technical opinion, "with the iPhone OS 4 background stuff it could be really interesting."

Screenshots after the jump!

Tags: app, firefox, iphone, mobile, mozilla, sync, weave

Filed under: Video, Beta

Where to download Chrome, Firefox, and Opera with WebM support -- and where to try it out!

by Lee Mathews May 21st 2010

Now that the VP8 video codec has been open sourced and we've been told numerous apps (including four of the top-5 web browsers) will support Google's WebM, maybe you'd like to test it out? You're in luck: Google, Mozilla, and Opera have preview builds ready to go!

Bear in mind that this is the first cut at implementing WebM, and it's not perfect. While the standard-def trailers I watched on YouTube streamed well and looked every bit as good as their Flash + H.264 counterparts, high-def playback was another story. It was a bit jittery at times on the first pass, though much better on subsequent views and it feels like a definite improvement over Google's first HTML5 player -- which used H.264.

So, where can you download a WebM compatible browser?

Google Chrome -- Currently only available in Chromium

Firefox -- Grab a Firefox WebM nightly build

Opera -- Opera 10.54 has WebM support

Now that you've got a browser, head over to the HTML5 beta page on YouTube and make sure you've joined. If you have, click on this link to check out a boatload of trailers (like Zombieland, 9, and Prince of Persia) using WebM. If you've done things correctly, YouTube's HTML5 player will display WEBM just to the left of your resolution choice.

Once you've given WebM a go, share your thoughts with us in the comments!

Tags: codec, google, H.264, html5, streamin, video, webm, youtube

Filed under: P2P, Beta

µTorrent 2.2 gets an app store

by Lee Mathews May 14th 2010

µTorrent is the most popular bittorrent client by a wide margin.

Dubbed Project Griffin, version 2.2 build 19640 has added a web-based framework which developers can use to create apps for µTorrent. The goal of the project is to allow extensibility while keeping µTorrent itself as light as possible. According to the Project Griffin web page, the two don't have to be mutually exclusive -- so don't worry about your favorite little torrent app becoming a bloated mess.

Apps are pure HTML and JavaScript, and while there are only four listed in µTorrent's Apps section right now they provide a nice look at the kinds of add-ons we're likely to see. There's an antivirus add-on, browser gadget for controlling downloads from IE or Firefox, and a streaming video app (VODO).

The sky's the limit, really. P2P distribution has plenty of good uses, and Project Griffin should provide developers with a relatively hassle-free way to experiment.

Want to check it out for yourself? Download the alpha release from the Project Griffin page.

[via TorrentFreak]

Tags: add-on, app, extensibility, p2p, store, Torrent, utorrent

Filed under: Google, Beta, Browsers

Google keeps pushing ahead, drops first version of Chromium 6

by Lee Mathews May 10th 2010

Here come the shouts of version jumping, ladies and gentlemen: Google has pushed the Chromium browser to version 6. If you're keeping tabs, the first publicly available version of Google Chrome arrived on September 1, 2008. About a year and a half later, they're 5 versions deep.

It's not as if Google just randomly decides when they want to bump the version number. Google has clearly documented reasons for why they make the change. Typically it's when major changes to either WebKit or the V8 JavaScript engine are made. (edit: Chromium v6 appears to have bumped WebKit to v 58855, which was released about 5 days ago). Still, I wonder if Chrome will hit version 9 before Internet Explorer does.

And hey, it's just a number -- right? To you and me, yes.

To the general computing public, though, bigger still means better -- and the average Joe just might be more receptive to a Chrome browser with a 6 after it than Firefox with a 3.

6 is twice is good as 3, right?

Builds stamped V6 are only available on the Chromium buildbot server right now -- but you'll be seeing the change in the Dev Channel as soon as update scheduled for tomorrow. We'll have a look at the changelog once it's posted.

Tags: chrome, chromium, google, jump, jumping, version

Filed under: E-mail, Social Software, Beta

Threadsy puts your email and social media in one interface

by Jason Clarke May 6th 2010

Threadsy is an interesting new approach to managing all of your inboxes at once. It's a newly launched beta product that connects to your email provider and social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter, and presents everything in a unified interface.

The Threadsy interface consists of two panes. The Inbound pane on the left is the primary pane, and it's essentially your inbox for incoming messages. Email that's in your inbox shows up here, along with messages from Facebook, and direct messages and mentions from Twitter. The Streams pane on the right shows you all the status updates from your social networks.

The app does a nice job of trying to tie together your contacts' accounts, so that when you're viewing a Facebook message from someone, you see their Facebook and Twitter updates in the pane on the right. Theoretically this can give you more context about the person you're communicating with, but often it's just visual clutter.

For me, Threadsy is a very well done and valiant effort at bringing together all of your inboxes into one interface. Unfortunately, for me email is still king, and my demands for email functionality are extremely high. Threadsy would have to be better at email than Gmail to make me even consider switching. I suppose that's still possible, since Threadsy is brand new in beta, and updates are likely to come.

Until then, I might just remove my email account and use Threadsy for monitoring Facebook and Twitter.

[via Technologizer]

Tags: email, email account, EmailAccount, facebook, gmail, inbox, social networks, SocialNetworks, status updates, StatusUpdates, threadsy, twitter, unified interface, UnifiedInterface

Filed under: Microsoft, Beta, Browsers

Microsoft releases second IE9 developer preview -- now where's that UI?

by Lee Mathews May 5th 2010

Hold your horses, though...while there have been some big updates internally, the one thing you're probably most curious about IE9 is still M.I.A.

IE9 Developer Preview 2 is here about two weeks ahead of schedule, but its user interface is not.

Still, the second version has progressed nicely. The fledgling browser's Sunspider benchmark result has been dropped by nearly 120ms (on my test rig it was about 11% slower than Firefox 3.7 overall), its Acidtest score crept up a few more points, and several new samples have been added to the test site (we'll have a screencast of one of the cooler demos up in a little bit).

I just wish they'd hurry up and give us access to some basic functionality like back and forward buttons and the ability to handle pop-up windows. It's rather annoying to test when pop-ups keep trying to open externally in IE8. Maybe next release...

Tags: browser, developer, ie9, internet explorer, InternetExplorer, microsoft, preview

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