Download Office 2010 Beta

Office 2010 will mark the debut of free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, which will work in popular web browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari). Another feature to the 2010 Microsoft Office is the social connector feature. It allows users to write emails while keeping track of their family, friends and colleagues by viewing status updates and past communication history with the individual. While users view their emails a name, picture, and title will be available from the person they are contacting. Upcoming appointments can also be viewed with this new feature and users can request friends.

Nokia Beta Labs announced the public availability of Microsoft Silverlight for Symbian – Beta. This beta release is primarily focused towards the developer community so they can start building great experiences on mobile devices.

Silverlight includes a runtime that is optimized to display content on memory-constrained devices. Silverlight support for Nokia Symbian^1 devices includes:

• The ability to view Silverlight applications in the mobile browser.
• Tools to build Silverlight applications that target devices.

Downloads :

• Download Silverlight for Symbian – Beta Developer Tools
• Download Silverlight for Symbian – Beta (device installer)

My all time favourite browser has improved. Opera the only browser that brings shiny new features with every release has now a beta for it’s new version : 10. It’s interface has been redrawn ( looks like Opera 7,8 ) but it still lacks finishing. It seems to load webpages faster but it’s still slow on some specific pages like Yahoo Mail. We have new features like Auto Update, inline spelling checker, Turbo, a log awaited Configuration fo Speed Dial, Tab Bar thumbnails and some improved existing features like Dragon Fly.  Scroll down for pictures and detailed feature list.

Thanks go to the great Opera Team for a promising new version of a great browser !!!

Opera 10 beta 1

Opera auto update (New)

Opera now includes the ability to update itself automatically when new releases become available. By default, Opera will notify the user about available updates. Users can specify that snapshot build releases of Opera should be downloaded by enabling “Download All Snapshots” in opera:config. Users can also choose not to check for updates or to automatically install updates by going to Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Security and changing the “Opera update level” (select box) to the: “Automatically install updates” setting.

Opera crashlogging tool (New)

An integrated user interface for built-in crash reporting has been added to Opera. This feature automatically appears when Opera has suffered a crash and enables a user to easily report the event directly back to Opera.
Opera inline spelling checker (New)

Spelling errors are now indicated as you type via a dotted red underline in all places where you can input text: form fields, Opera Mail compose windows, Notes, Chat, etc. Only single-line text fields do not check spelling automatically. The spelling checker can be enabled/disabled from the context menu (right-click a text field to open this menu). The context menu also includes spelling suggestions, the ability to change dictionary languages, and the ability to select additional dictionaries for automatic download and installation. Opera uses the Hunspell dictionary format, and a US English dictionary is included by default.
Opera Turbo (New)

This new Opera feature increases your internet bandwidth speed on slow connections using data and image compression technologies. Opera Turbo uses Opera proxy servers to compress the traffic before it reaches the Opera browser on the client’s computer; see this Opera reference. Opera Turbo can easily be configured to suit your browsing needs:
Right click the Opera Turbo icon located on the left side of the Status Bar.
In the context menu, select “Configure Opera Turbo” to open the Opera Turbo Settings dialog box.
The following choices can now be made:
Automatic (radio button): Turbo will enable only if it detects a slow network
On (radio button): Optimize pages with Turbo so they load faster on slow networks
Off (radio button): Load pages normally
Notify me about network speed (checkbox): network speed indicator becomes visible within the Opera Turbo icon on the Status Bar
Opera skin elements (New)

New skin elements have been applied to the Opera 10 Beta 1 user interface, and will continue to be added as Opera 10 progresses to its final release; see this Opera reference. Some of these are:
Etch effects and border inner highlights have been applied giving extra crispness to edges.
Text Shadow has a new parameter. This was added to reproduce the etched text effect that is standard on OS X® and many Windows® applications.
Horizontal and vertical splitters can now be skinned.

Opera Speed Dial configuration options (New)

You can now easily configure how many speed dials will fit comfortably on your Opera desktop. Click “Configure Speed Dial” in the lower-right corner of the Speed Dial page to open the configuration dialog box. Three tools are available:
Background image
Browse to an image you wish to use as the background of your Speed Dial page.
Position this image on the Speed Dial page by selecting center, stretch, or tile.
Layout of your speed dials
Select which dial layout best suits your monitor size:
Small (2 x 2): renders a 4 speed dial grid
Normal (3 x 3): renders a 9 speed dial grid
Wide screen (4 x 3): renders a 12 speed dial grid
Large screen (4 x 4): renders a 16 speed dial grid
Large wide screen (5 x 4): renders a 20 speed dial grid
Extra large screen (5 x 5): renders a 25 speed dial grid
Hide Speed Dial
Unchecked by default, check this box to hide all speed dials.

Safari 4 beta has totally new interface with new tab management and the tabs have been moved to the top of the browser similar to Google’s Chrome. When you open a new tab, you can view speed dial links or also called as top sites as thumbnails which are configurable. It provides a highly visual way to sweep through your sites and bookmarks in the form of Cover Flow. Cover Flow displays your bookmarks and history as large graphical previews, so you can pick out a website instantly. Searching the history is also much easier with previews of websites opened avaiable. You can zoom in web pages easily with the toolbar which can be enabled from the toolbar menu. The bookmarks bar has also been revamped and thumbnails are available for bookmarks menu as well.

In the navigation side, there are new features and improvements. Tabs can be rearranged, opened in new window and also be merged into one window. Safari allows you to organize tabs by dragging and dropping. Movable tabs give you the power to organize your sites exactly the way you want. If you close any tab by accident, then you can recover it by choosing Reopen Last Closed Window from the History menu.

Safari 4 beta also has built-in spell checking and built-in grammar checking. It also feature private browsing. When opening websites, we could not find any considerable speed in the load time when compared to Firefox or IE8.

Overall Safari 4 Beta has lots of features and a fresh new look. The improvements are really worth trying and Safari 4 works even on Windows 7.

Download Safari 4 Beta

The first public sightings of Windows 7 were at Microsoft’s PDC developer conference in October last year. The lead-up to PDC was unusually secretive, with Redmond giving little away about what Windows 7 would actually contain when it shipped, in contrast to the extremely public lead-up to Windows Vista’s release. The covers came off at PDC, with the star of the show being Windows 7′s new taskbar. Unfortunately, the build that was given out to PDC attendees lacked the new taskbar, so the one feature we all wanted to play with wasn’t actually available. The public beta, build number 7000, finally gives us the new shiny taskbar. If all goes well, this will be the only beta Windows 7 gets; a Release Candidate should land some time around April, going RTM in July, and hitting retail two to three months later.

Windows Vista made a lot of changes to the driver model and the display layer, and took a much harder line on security, which was all very necessary work, but which caused a lot of teething trouble in its early days. Windows 7 doesn’t undo any of that work; it does, however, build upon it to make using the OS simpler and more refined. The major focus with Windows 7 is how the user interacts with the machine, and so the major work in Windows 7 is to the user interface. Therefore I’ll focus mainly on the new interface elements in this brief look. For those more interested in the system administrative perspective, our PDC Coverage would be a good place to start.

The taskbar

The taskbar is probably the defining feature of the Windows user interface. The introduction of the taskbar and Start Menu with Windows 95 was something of a landmark; it was the taskbar more than any other aspect of the Windows 95 UI that made Windows 95 feel modern, leaving Windows 3.11 far behind. While the Start Menu has undergone radical improvements (culminating in Vista’s searchable Start Menu, which I can’t live without), the taskbar has changed little since its introduction. Minor refinements have been made over the years—the IE4 shell update added the ability to dock special toolbars to the taskbar (most notably the Quick Launch icons), Windows XP added stacking to allow multiple buttons to collapse if the taskbar became too full, and Vista added thumbnails when hovering the mouse—but the basic mechanics of switching between running tasks have remained unaltered.

The new taskbar

Fire up Windows 7 for the first time and the taskbar is pretty much what we saw back in October. No more Quick Launch toolbar, no more button text, just a set of large icons. An icon on the taskbar doesn’t necessarily mean that a program is running; programs can be pinned to the taskbar so that their icon is persistent. Clicking the icon starts the program (if it’s not running) or switches to it (if it is). If a program has multiple windows, clicking the icon shows a list of thumbnails; clicking the thumbnail switches window.

The new taskbar with multiple windows

Once you get too many windows, you just get a list instead of thumbnails

Though the appearance is quite unlike any previous taskbar, and is liable to cause some consternation among those resistant to change, the basic operation of the taskbar is much the same as it has been in XP. In this regard, the biggest behavioral change is the conflation of running and non-running programs.

Personally, I like this. Whether a program is currently running or not is, to me, a minor detail, and so the mechanism I use to switch to an application should be the same regardless of whether the application is currently running. Forcing me to do one thing (Quick Launch or Start Menu) when the application isn’t running, and a second (taskbar) when it is strikes me as unnecessary. With Windows 7, the same approach can be used in both situations; just click the icon.
Windows 7 taskbar

There are small visual cues to indicate the state of each application; IE (left-most) isn’t running, so has no box around the icon. Media Player (second from left) has a single window, so gets a single box. Chrome (third from left) and Explorer (fourth from left) have multiple windows, so they get a kind of stacked box.

The rather vociferous supporters of a certain Cupertino-based company will probably say that this aspect of the new taskbar (in conjunction with its large icons) shows that Microsoft has simply copied Apple. That may be so, but I’m not sure why anyone should care. The new taskbar works better than the old one, and that alone justifies the decisions Microsoft has taken.