Quickies: Vista SP1 next week, Google announces Google ad manager

Vista SP1 in one week
Google ad manager

Get the Firefox 3 beta 4

You can now download the new beta of the Firefox 3 which is FF3B4 (Beta 4). New features and changes:

• Improvements to the user interface: better search support in the Download Manager, ability to zoom entire page or just the text, continuing look and feel improvements on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Richer personalization through: location bar that uses an algorithm based on site visit recency and frequency (called “frecency”) to provide better matches against your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, as well as an adaptive learning algorithm which tunes itself to your browsing habits.
• Improved platform features such as: support for HTML5’s window.postMessage and window.messageEvent, javascript 1.8 improvements, and offline data storage for web applications.
• Performance improvements: changes to our javascript engine as well as profile guided optimization resulted in significant gains over previous releases in the popular SunSpider test from Apple, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run much faster, and continued improvements to memory usage drastically reduce the amount of memory consumed over long web browsing sessions.

Download link: here

Say goodbye to spelling mistakes in text boxes (Firefox)

We all know that Firefox has a built in spell checking tool and it's very useful (for me at least). But this spell checking tool is a available only in text areas and not in little text boxes. To make them also be available there you just need to follow those simple steps:

1. Open Firefox and type about:config in the address bar.
2. Search for layout.spellcheckDefault
3. Change the value from 1 to 2 (right click > modify)

Now go to a webpage and test your new tool!

via http://www.nirmaltv.com/

In place of GPS, a new iPhone app tries Twitter

The Unofficial Apple Blog has posted a program for the iPhone which enlists the help of Twitter to alert the user -- or someone else -- of the global coordinates of a properly-enabled device.

Read more via Betanews

500 million Firefox downloads

Firefox just reached 500,000,000 downloads. This is an absolutely phenomenal milestone for Firefox. It is sort of hard to imagine what that number means. For some perspective, that’s roughly the audience size of 10,000 Rome Colosseums combined. It would be the weight, in kilograms, of 8,500 Boeing 747 airplanes. In dollars, for $500 million you and 15 of your friends can fly to the International Space Station.

via The mozilla blog

Download manager for Rapidshare

This is a nice one... why? Because this tool can even read captchas (the code you need to enter in order to download the file).
The program is called jDownloader and it can help you download from sites such as Megaupload and Rapidshare.

It comes into German but you can change the language as downloadsquad writes here:

1. Click the Extra button
2. Select Konfiguration
3. Select the Benutzeroberfläche tab
4. Under Sprache, select English
5. Hit the Speichern und neu starten button to save and restart in English

Now you're almost ready to go. But before you can download any files you'll have to accept the terms of service for each site you want to download files from.

1. Click the Extra button
2. Select Configuration
3. Select the Hosts tab
4. Check the boxes next to any file hosting service you expect to use.

1. 
   

Website: here
via downloadsquad

Mozilla releases Firefox 3.0 Beta 3; adds several features

The Mozilla organization on Tuesday posted Beta 3 of Firefox 3.0, for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux platforms. The beta's release notes are indicating substantial progress on new and so far unseen features.

Read more via Betanews

Apple Releases Aperture 2

Major Upgrade Features Improved Interface, Faster Browsing & Enhanced Image Processing

CUPERTINO, California—February 12, 2008—Apple® today introduced Aperture™ 2, the next major release of its groundbreaking photo editing and management software with over 100 new features that make it faster, easier to use and more powerful. With a streamlined user interface and entirely new image processing engine, Aperture 2 also introduces new imaging tools for highlight recovery, color vibrancy, local contrast definition, soft-edged retouching, vignetting and RAW fine-tuning, and lets users directly post their portfolios on the .Mac Web Gallery* for viewing on the web, iPhone™, iPod® touch and Apple TV®. At a new low price of $199, anyone can easily organize, edit and publish photos like a pro.

Read more at apple.com

Digsby: Manage Social Networks, Email and IM - 1000 invites

If you are the one who talks to friends, co-workers and others using several different IM services, check several email accounts or even use multiple Social networks such as MySpace or Facebook you would like to link them all together in one simple and clean software.


The software is called Digsby and it will help you organize your contacts from Yahoo messenger, Google Talk, Jabber, ICQ, AOL IM and Windows Live Messenger, e-mail, Facebook and MySpace into one single client.

So it allows you to talk to your contacts no matter which IM they use, you have an e-mail notifier and a pop-up to keep track of your Facebook or MySpace account.

Want to take Digsby for a spin? Even if it's in private beta, we managed to get 1000 invites for all our iMoka readers. Enough talk, it's time for action, if you want to try Digsby simply go to download and install Digsby and when prompted for an invitation code simply enter "imoka".

The installation goes very smooth and you can even create your Digsby account from there (which is very good). After the instalation you can simply add your IM, email and social network accounts to the client. Go to Tools > Preferences to add them.

This is the best way to link all of the above in one single software and I recommend it 100%.


System requirements:
Windows XP and Windows Vista. No version for Mac or Linux as they are currently under development.

Installation:

1. Download Digsby
2. Install it and when asked for an invitation code enter imoka
3. Add you accounts and you are ready to go!

Firefox 2.0.0.12 goes online and fixes crashes

Mozilla Firefox is a web browser that has 16% of the recorded market share in December 2007 making it the second-most-popular browser worldwide.

Mozilla launched Friday the version 2.0.0.12 of their browser that includes many fixes:
MFSA 2008-11 Web forgery overwrite with div overlay
MFSA 2008-10 URL token stealing via stylesheet redirect
MFSA 2008-09 Mishandling of locally-saved plain text files
MFSA 2008-08 File action dialog tampering
MFSA 2008-06 Web browsing history and forward navigation stealing
MFSA 2008-05 Directory traversal via chrome: URI
MFSA 2008-04 Stored password corruption
MFSA 2008-03 Privilege escalation, XSS, Remote Code Execution
MFSA 2008-02 Multiple file input focus stealing vulnerabilities
MFSA 2008-01 Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.8.1.12)

Download link: here
If you want to test the Firefox 3 Beta 2 you can download it from here

Vista SP1 available on the torrent sites

Not to long after Service pack 1 for Windows Vista was released to manufacturers... a simple "The pirate bay" user posted on the internet the 32bit and the 64bit of the "Windows Vista SP1 Standalone Installer ".

Enough said... here are TPB links:

32bit: here
64bit: here

Wordpress 2.3.3

Wordpress is one of the best personal publishing platform available. It's free and easy to use. You can start blogging in no time.
WP 2.3.3 is an urgent security release which is fixing a security flaw that would allow a user to edit posts of other users on that blog.

Website: Wordpress.org
Download: Download .ZIP or Download .TAR.GZ

Can't wait? Click here to preview the 2.4 version of wordpress that is just around the corner.

Windows Vista SP1 realease dates

So here are those release dates we were (and are) waiting for:

• In mid-March, we will release Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update (in English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese) and to the download center on microsoft.com. Customers who visit Windows Update can choose to install Service Pack 1. If Windows Update determines that the system has one of the drivers we know to be problematic, then Windows Update will not offer SP1. Since we know that some customers may want to update to SP1 anyhow, the download center will allow anyone who wants to install SP1 to do so.
• In mid-April, we will begin delivering Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Vista customers who have chosen to have updates downloaded automatically. That said, any system that Windows Update determines has a driver known to not update successfully will not get SP1 automatically. As updates for these drivers become available, they will be installed automatically by Windows Update, which will unblock these systems from getting Service Pack 1. The result is that more and more systems will automatically get SP1, but only when we are confident they will have a good experience.
• The remaining languages will RTM in April.

via http://windowsvistablog.com/ (link to post: here)

I would have to say that this is a little late... BUT... maybe we will have SP1 faster on the world of torrents (leaked of course) because:

Today we are excited to announce that we have released Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista to manufacturing (RTM) for our first set of languages (English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese).

Skype for iPhone/iPod touch

Image from www.apple-touch.com

If you are in a hurry and want to chat or even talk with your skype contacts, then go to http://s4iphone.com from your iPhone/iPod touch. This great application will let you do everything you want, from your gadget.

Windows 7 M1 available for download!?

After Windows 7 Milestone 1 had been released to a few lucky guys, fake uploads of Windows 7 appeared on some well known torrent sites such as mininova, isohunt.
The new Windows 7 is scheduled to be the next version of Microsoft Windows

A little search on YouTorrent will give you some clues about what I am talking about.
I suggest you not to download anything for now because all of this are fake.

Office 2008 for Mac hits store shelves

After four years of waiting, Mac users are finally able to get their hands on a new version of Microsoft's productivity suite for the platform.

Source: Betanews / Read more

Microsoft changes mind, get vista sp1 from microsoft.com

After being released to 15 000 people, Microsoft finally decided to allow regular users to get the update. I think this comes after a little hack that allowed users to download the update even thought it wasn't yet released (read news)

Supported Operating Systems: Windows Vista; Windows Vista Business 64-bit edition; Windows Vista Enterprise 64-bit edition; Windows Vista Home Basic 64-bit edition; Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit edition; Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit edition

Website: here
via computerworld

Dual-boot for OLPC

OLPC and Microsoft are both working on developing a dual-boot system for laptops aimed at kids from the developing countries.

"We are working with them very closely to make a dual-boot system so that, like on an Apple, you can boot either one up. The version that's up and running of Windows on the XO is very fast, it's very, very successful. We're working very hard to do both," said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC.

I think this is an important step in the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. Bringing Windows to the low cost laptops will let users to test something different from Linux.

Read more

4 things to make your computer faster

Here I made a little list that you can try if you really need that little something that can make your PC move faster:

1. Use Readyboost (if you run Windows Vista), a tool that let's you add more memory to your PC using your memory card or USB flash drive. Good if you have a memory card/flash drive that you don't use at that moment (also you can set how much of the space available you want to use to speed up your computer) Read more
2. Buy more Memory. This one is maybe the best thing you would want to do if you really want performance. You might say why because I already have Readyboost? Yes but Readyboost uses your memory card/flash drive, you USB port (or your memory card reader) and many people doesn't want to go with Readyboost because they consider it doesn't improve your performance as a memory card does. To run Vista you need a minimum of 1GB RAM but I recommend you something like 1,5GB or even 2GB of RAM
3. Upgrade your drivers. Using the latest software for your hardware could lead in better performance most of the time.
4. Overclock your computer. This one is for advanced users. You can add more performance by stressing your hardware to work to it's best. Note that you can shorten your hardware life or even damage it if you make a stupid move. Read here

2,3 and 4 also work with other Operating Systems!

Get your copy of Yahoo go!

Even if it's still in beta, Yahoo go! is a great tool that connects you and your Yahoo account so that you can use Flickr, Messenger, Mail, News, Sports and so on.

Yahoo go! v3.0 beta doesn't support all the phones v2.0 does but I think once out of Beta, it will!

To check if your phone supports this software just check: this list and if you decide you want it, just follow this link via your phone:

get.go.yahoo.com