Digsby - instant messaging application

Digsby is a multiprotocol instant messaging application developed by dotSyntax, LLC. It currently supports e-mail notifications and alerts from MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. It is released under a proprietary license and is free to download. To control access, users must register for a Digsby Account. Registration can be done through the program's installer or through a web interface. As of March 20, 2008, Digsby is in public beta, and no longer requires an invitation to set up an account.

Email

• POP3 and IMAP support for almost any email service available
• Pre-configured email services such as Yahoo, AOL Mail, or Hotmail's webmail, emulating a POP3 or IMAP client
• Email alerts which pop up a small window in the corner of your screen, alerting you of new mail
• Built-in email composition, which can automatically acquire email addresses from IM profiles.

Social Networking

• Support for MySpace alerts, keeping you informed of updates to your friends' profiles, status, and private messages. Provides instant access to various parts of your MySpace account, such as your profile, home page, blog, etc.
• Support for Facebook, alerting you of updates in your friend feeds.
• Support for Twitter, allowing you to easily submit new "tweets", and view your friends' tweets, as well.
• Future support for additional social networks are currently being developed.

Buddy List

• Supports metacontacts, much like Trillian's metacontacts by a simple drag-and-drop system.
• Instant status updates.
• Customizable ordering of all aspects of the buddy list.
• Email and social network alerts.
• Skinnable buddy list for a personalized look and feel.
• Custom notifications for various actions such as contacts signing in/out, messages sent/received, etc
• Buddy list, IM accounts, widgets, and application settings are synchronized on Digsby's server, so all your settings are transferred between installations on other computers.

Supported protocols

• .NET Messenger Service (Windows Live Messenger, commonly known as MSN)
• OSCAR (AIM/ICQ/.Mac)
• XMPP (Jabber, Google Talk)
• Yahoo!
• Twitter

courtsy : www.digsby.com

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Earth Day cleanup is March 29

Turning the lights off for Earth Hour is a great first step, but if you really want to see a difference, then make Earth Hour part of your everyday life.

Simple things like turning off appliances while not in use and switching your light globes to energy efficient bulbs, will all help us reach our goal of reducing our annual emissions by 5%. Even something as simple as turning out lights when you’re not in a room and switching to cleaner sources of electricity like “green power”, make a big difference.

At Home

You don’t have to live in total darkness every day to make a difference. Just follow these five quick and easy tips.

• Switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs to save money and reduce emissions. Lighting accounts for around 5% of household greenhouse gas emissions, and compact fluros use 75% less energy than an equivalent incandescent bulb. Although the bulbs cost more up-front, you will actually save money through the energy saved and extended life of the bulb.
• Turn appliances off while not in use. Unplug any appliances like mobile phone chargers, TVs, microwaves, MP3 players, which are not being used and are on standby. In Australia, appliances on standby consume up to 10% of your electricity bill.
• Turn off anything that doesn’t need to be on. A good rule is to turn off anything not being used. When you leave a room or leave the house, turn off your lights or appliances like the TV or computer.
• Switch to green power. This is one of the best ways you can make a difference. Contact your electricity provider today and switch to green power, a cleaner, more renewable form of energy that does not contribute to global warming. If all Australians switched to green power today, Australia’s total greenhouse pollution would be cut by 30% in one year. That’s the equivalent of more than 40 million cars!
• Use less hot water. This is not only a good water saving tip, it saves electricity too. Spend one minute less in the shower.

At Work

As well as the very simple things you can do in the office, like printing double-sided and using recycled paper, there are many other ways to help your workplace reduce its carbon footprint.

• Get off standby. Speak to your office manager about turning off any equipment at work that is not being used, including computer screens, photocopiers and printers, particularly when you leave at night.
• Turn off lights at the end of the working day. Before you leave your place of work remember to turn off any lights in your workspace and your computer if you use one at work. Remember to unplug your mobile phone or laptop charger when it’s not in use. Speak to your office manager about installing motion-sensor lighting after 5pm when most people have gone home.
• Find out what’s happening in your workplace. Ask about your company’s emissions reduction policies and find out what’s already happening. Look for ways to reduce energy use in your workplace and encourage improvements. If employers know their employees are keen to make their workplaces environmentally friendly, they’ll be even more inclined to take action.
• Encourage your organisation to have measurable emissions reduction targets. Many Australian businesses are committing to emissions targets and have plans to be carbon neutral by a certain date. Switching to green power, reducing and offsetting energy use and travel, and incorporating this into all areas of the business are critical to this process. Does your company have a plan?

source : technozone

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Firefox 3 Beta 4 Released For Download

Mozilla has released the fourth beta of its popular open source browser Firefox. This almost coincides with the release of the first beta version of Internet Explorer 8.1 by Microsoft. Mozilla says that the new beta version of Firefox has more than 900 enhancements. Additional stress has been given to performance, memory and simplifying the user interface.

The company also claimed that web applications run twice as fast in Firefox 3 when compared to the earlier version. The beta four also has a resume download application, a new location bar and an auto-complete system which presents options for the addresses of pages as soon as a user starts typing. Only the most relevant matches are shown based on frequency of use. Mozilla will release one more beta before coming out with the full fledged version of Firefox3.

Firefox is a fast, full-featured browser that makes browsing more efficient than ever before. More information about Firefox is available.

Firefox 3 Beta 4 is 5x faster than IE7, 3x faster than FF2

The almost-but-not-quite-final beta of Firefox 3 (FF3 beta 4) is now available for download. The most noticeable improvement is speed. In some tests, it’s three times faster than Firefox 2 (meaning the test completes in 1/3 the time), and a whopping five times faster than IE 7:

Other improvements in beta 4 include:
Smarter location bar that tunes itself to your browsing habits. As you type in part of the URL it will offer suggestions based on where you’ve been before. Better native look-n-feel on Vista, Mac OSX, and Linux.

This includes continuing work on icons, menus, native controls.
Zoom just the text or the whole page.
Zooming the text was one feature I missed from Firefox 2.
Reduced memory usage. This is the main reason I switched to Firefox 3 for my everyday use.
The old version often became unstable after a long session with many tabs open.

To see all the changes made so far in Firefox 3 read this excellent summary by Percy Cabello or see the release notes. Mozilla watchers expect one more beta before the production version is released.

Ed Burnette has programmed everything from device drivers and compilers to video games and multi-user servers. He is currently writing enterprise software in a variety of languages including C, Ruby, Python, and Java.

Download It

Source : technozone

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ADrive offering up 50GB for free

Storage newcomer ADrive offering up 50GB for free
By Josh Lowensohn – March 6, 2008, 5:13 PM PST

I'm big on places to store a lot of files, and Web storage newcomer ADrive seems up to the challenge. The host serves up a whopping 50GB of storage for free, with the only bandwidth limitations being in the size of the files you can upload, which are capped at a reasonable 2GB. The free "beta" accounts are supplemented with ads (hence the AD in the name), which show up on the top and bottom of your file explorer.

While lacking some of the graphical beauty and familiarity of other file-hosting services like Box.net and DigitalBucket, ADrive lets you arrange whatever you'd uploaded into nested directories to help maintain organization. It also doesn't require any special software to upload or download your files.

The one major downfall I came across is the Java-powered file uploader, which uses a pop-up status indicator to let you know what's going on with your transfers. The problem is that it takes control of whatever else you're doing in that browser window. This means uploading large files should be done in another instance of your browser just in case you feel like regaining control of whatever tabs you had open.

Regardless, I found the performance on file transfer to be phenomenal. Given our speed here at CNET HQ in San Francisco is faster than what most people have at home, the uploader will take as much bandwidth as you can give it--which should come in handy if you've got Verizon FiOS or live in Sweden.

source : technozone

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Mozilla VP talks IE 8, Firefox 3

LAS VEGAS--Mozilla Vice President Mike Schroepfer said Microsoft's decision to support a more standards-compliant mode by default should keep Web developers from having to waste so much time.

With the current set-up, he said that developers have a fairly easy time getting a site that renders properly in Opera, Safari, and Firefox, but often spend a lot of energy trying to get that same site to also render correctly in Internet Explorer.

"Web developers burn through a tremendous amount of time getting their sites to work with IE because of IE's special quirks," said Schroepfer, who I caught up with here at Mix '08.

He said that Microsoft's move toward greater embrace of standards with Internet Explorer 8 is a good thing.

"There are some encouraging things there and I hope to see more," he said.

In particular, it would be helpful if Microsoft gave a roadmap for which standards it planned to support down the road, that way Web developers could decide earlier to invest time. He said he would really like to see Microsoft support a new graphics standard known as scalable vector graphics.
"That would be a great win for the Web," he said.

Meanwhile, Schroepfer also talked up the benefits of Firefox 3, which is just hitting its fourth beta and is edging closer to a final release. In particular, he pointed to the browser's "Awesome bar" that remembers not only specific Web addresses that have been visited but also other information from the page. For example typing in "televisions" might bring up a recent TV search on Amazon, even though television wasn't in the address.
"Once you use it you actually can't use any other browser," he said. Also on tap are improved speed and antimalware features, he said.

source : technozone

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Download Accelerator Plus

From SpeedBit:

Download Accelerator Plus (DAP) leverages patented technology, easy management of downloads and rich features and includes an enhanced Search Tab, improved download mechanism for faster downloads, ZoneAlarm Download Security; Alert Messages and Private Download for Premium users. Available in 10 languages. Version 8.6 enhances search tab.

Full Download SPEED & Security! Continue to download DAP - Download

Review

This program is absolutly FREA*ING awesome!!
Grabs video files from metacafe and Pornotube, youporn, redtube, and anysite that host FLV files! Simply add the .flv extention in DAP options and this jewel will actually download it from their website. what more can you ask for??? And downloads everything at rocket speed. A must download!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Absolutly NO CONS OF ANY KIND! EXCEPT FOR ADS ON THE SOFTWARE.

to download DAP - Download

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Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 - Download

Developer : Microsoft
License : Freeware
Size / OS : 14.4 MB, Windows XP/2003/Vista/Server 2008
Last Updated : March 5th, 2008, 20:04 GMT

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 description
The first public beta of Internet Explorer 8 is alive and kicking. Well, you have been waiting for it for more than a year. Microsoft has successfully kept the lid closed on the work it was doing with Internet Explorer 8, more so than on the work poured into Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP SP3 and Windows Server 2008. After being dogfooded throughout 2007 over at Microsoft, IE8 first peeped outside of Redmond with the recent private Beta 1 testing program. Now, Microsoft is ready to open Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 to all Windows users.

"Welcome to Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, the latest test release of the most popular browser! This release contains some great advances in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and layout, programming model, performance, reliability, usability and service integration. We are eager to ensure that the transition to Internet Explorer 8 is seamless for you and your audience, and to give you a head start on using many of the new features with your sites and services. We encourage you to test your sites and services, and our platform implementation, and give us feedback," stated Chris Wilson, IE Platform Architect.

The fact of the matter is that Microsoft's official Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 public release webpage has went live ahead of the company's web-centric MIX08 conference in Las Vegas. During the opening keynote address at MIX08, Dean Hachamovitch, IE General Manager, will give an in-depth presentation of Internet Explorer 8.

To Download Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, follow this link : Download

source: technozone

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Microsoft Releases Internet Explorer 8 Beta

Microsoft unveiled today the public beta version of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) for developers at the annual MIX08 conference in Las Vegas.

By David A. Utter - Wed, 03/05/2008 - Review

Next version of Microsoft's browser emerged at MIX08

The answer to the question "how long until IE8 will be ready for download" turned out to be 3pm ET today.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Internet this afternoon. A few websites noted Internet Explorer 8 emerged as a beta download.

Several clicks and a restart later, we have IE8 Beta 1 for Developers running on Windows XP SP2. First order of business? The Acid2 Test of course!

Where previous versions of Internet Explorer, including IE7, bombed out of Acid2 in knee-slapping fashion, IE8 renders it as well as Opera ever has. Microsoft's chest-thumping about better standards compliance has proven accurate, at least by one measure.

The company also described the two big new features in IE8, called Activities and WebSlices. Activities enable the use of web services provided by Microsoft and other activity providers directly from text highlighted on a page and right-clicked by the user.

WebSlices enable people to subscribe to content directly within a webpage, as though it were a feed. Developers define parts of a web page as a WebSlice. From the WebSlices whitepaper:

WebSlices are enabled by adding HTML annotations directly to the Web page. WebSlices use a combination of the hAtom Microformat and the WebSlice format to describe a subscribable portion of a Web page.

People who subscribe to a WebSlice will be able to keep track of it from the Favorites bar in IE8. "If anything, this launch shows that Microsoft is not taking Firefox's creep into browser market share lightly," ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez said of the surprise launch.

Source : technozone

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Microsoft Embraces Standards For IE8

Fear of possible "legal and regulatory" issues likely motivated Microsoft to enable three rendering modes for the next version of the Internet Explorer browser.

Microsoft's rendering gyrations in its widely-used web browser gave web designers fits over the years. Pages needing special tweaks to overcome IE oddities like its handling of CSS meant designers had to practically design the same pages twice.

A nice round-up of standards compliance on HTML, CSS, DOM, and ECMAScript for IE, Firefox, and Opera may be found at Web Devout. We imagine web designers will look at the browser support comparison there and nod their heads in grim agreement.

A silver lining appeared in the cloud of Internet Explorer rendering with Microsoft's announcement of better support for web standards.

"Microsoft is now configuring the settings in Internet Explorer 8, the upcoming version of its browser, to render content - by default - using methods that give top priority to Web standards interoperability," they said.

Web designers may be stunned to read this quote from chief software architect Ray Ozzie: "Even in its first beta, IE8 correctly renders the popular test known as ‘Acid2,’ which was created by the Web community to promote real-world interoperability," he said.

The Acid2 test demonstrates a browser's compliance with HTML and CSS standards. Viewing it under IE7 and other versions of Internet Explorer returns a result that isn't even close to the reference rendering.

But having been stung recently by another fine from the European Union over its business practices, Microsoft found the motivation to make IE8 behave. IE8 will have three rendering modes in place to accomplish this:

Internet Explorer 8 has been designed to include three rendering modes: one that reflects Microsoft’s implementation of current Web standards, a second reflecting Microsoft’s implementation of Web standards at the time of the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, and a third based on rendering methods dating back to the early Web. The newest rendering mode is forward-looking and preferred by Web designers, while the others are present to enable compatibility with the myriad sites across the Web that are currently optimized for previous versions of Internet Explorer.

"While we do not believe there are currently any legal requirements that would dictate which rendering mode must be chosen as the default for a given browser, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue," Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith said in a statement.

Source : technozone

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