Ommwriter: a Mac writing app that helps you concentrate originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Acrobat.com gets revamped and gets a mobile app originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Office 2010 beta for Windows and Windows Mobile now live originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Open source Adobe Reader alternative Sumatra PDF hits version 1.0 originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There's been plenty of buzz today about the Office 2010 public beta. Download links have gone live for Technet and MSDN subscribers, but as for the general public - they're left browsing yet another Microsoft tease.

Head over to the Office beta download page, and you'll see three links to chose from. Pick any one you like. The result's the same, a redirect to a page that says "Hey, Office 2010 beta is coming soon!" I guess that's fine, right? I mean, it's not like anyone clicking a download button would expect 1) direct access to a download or 2) a form they can fill out to get at the files.

Now, I don't run a big fancy website like Microsoft's, but is it really that hard to keep pages like this offline until the files are available?

The good news in this is that yes, the public beta is coming soon. It'd be nice if that landing page actually had "coming soon" buttons instead of shiny green "download" buttons. That seems like a distinction which is important to make.

As a bonus, it might save your servers having to deal with 12,000,000 page refresh requests.

Once again, Microsoft puts a download page live with no downloads to back it up originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Office 2010 Beta 2 download leaks to torrent trackers originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Zoho rebrands as FakeOffice (not really, but it's catchy, no?) originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

AbiWord 2.8 word processor adds collaborative features, web sharing originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Set your Google Docs free with the new Convert, Zip and Download feature originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Open Office 4 Kids is good for adults, too originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Goodbye MS Works, hello ad-supported Office 2010 Starter! originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

If you're not a developer, you're probably not aware that Google Docs has an API available for various document-related services. Recently Google added a new feature that allows developers to create applications that will pass an image-based (.png, .jpg, or .gif) document to the API, and using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, generate and pass back an editable text-based document. Currently the service can handle documents up to 10 MB in size.

For non-developers, this is certainly interesting, but not terribly useful. Well, a live demo is available that will allow you to test the service yourself. At the time of this writing I was successfully able to convert a single page document, though there are reports that the service has become overloaded and is slow or sometimes fails to respond. Given that this is a demo, that's probably not terribly surprising.

If Google is exposing this functionality to developers, it seems at least possible that it could become a built-in feature of Google Docs for regular users at some point in the near future. With Google's recent acquisition of reCaptcha, it seems likely that Google's document-scanning capabilities will soon be better than anyone else's. That would make for an incredibly powerful feature for Google to offer its users.

[via Google Operating System]

Google Docs API now provides OCR service originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Week in Review: 19th September 2009

Week in Review: 19th September 2009 originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 19 Sep 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

One of the more frustrating things I found when moving from Windows to a Mac in a business environment was receiving email messages that contained other messages as attachments. This is a fairly common thing for Outlook users to do, and it doesn't usually cause problems because Outlook can happily open those messages. It's not very good email etiquette and you should avoided doing it if possible (forwarding the message makes it possible for the receiver's email program to index and search the contents), but there are times when it makes sense -- such as when forwarding a batch of messages at once.

The problem is that the Mail app that comes with all Macs unfortunately isn't capable of opening Outlook's .msg files. If you use a Mac and regularly receive messages from Outlook users, it's likely you've run into this problem at some point.

45RPM Software created MailRaider to solve just this problem. It's a free app that does one thing, and one thing well: makes .msg files created with Microsoft Outlook viewable on a Mac, including any included attachments. Formatting may be lost, but typically that's not a huge issue.

One interesting aspect of MailRaider is that the developer has pulled out the code that he uses to read the mail messages, and has turned it into a framework he calls MOLE. MOLE is a free framework for developers to use that need to read Microsoft OLE documents on a Mac.

There are other ways to read Outlook messages on a Mac, but MailRaider's price (free) and simplicity are definitely compelling.

[via Lifehacker]

MailRaider - open Outlook .msg files on your Mac originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 17 Sep 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

IBM gives workers ten days to switch from Microsoft Office to Lotus Symphony - OR ELSE! originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Like many of you, I use a web-based app for my calendaring needs. My customers, however, aren't necessarily keen to make the switch from desktop applications just yet - and I have a number who need a good way to manage appointments and schedules from their PCs.

esyPlanner is a nice option. It sports a nice looking interface and provides both a full-featured calendar and Post-It style notes. Create and color code your categories, and set up multiple calendars to keep things like customer appointments separate from staff meetings.

Support for recurring events is excellent. Apart from daily/weekly/monthly events, you can set up "every X number" -- like every 3 days, 2 weeks, etc. It makes marking things like due dates and routine maintenance easy.

The learning curve with this app is kept to a minimum, so it's perfect for shop owners who aren't so computer-savvy. Tooltip balloons let you know which button does what, and they're small enough that they don't get in the way.

Free esyPlanner is a powerful, attractive calendar and scheduling app originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Office 2010 beta download leaked on torrent trackers originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Microsoft gets to keep selling Word... for now originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 03 Sep 2009 21:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google Docs now supports translation into 42 languages originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

OfficeTab adds tabs to Word, Excel and Powerpoint originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.