Silverlight 4 beta now available

Microsoft have just announced Silverlight 4 beta today at PDC09, that is available for download today. Silverlight 4 promises to enhance the overall user experience, improving speed, performance and rendering for browsers.

Silverlight 4 was demonstrated today with some practical applications that are able to take pictures and modify the image in real-time, using a web-based service. The service lets you take a picture of yourself and modify it in real-time to adjust your appearance, and even change the colour of your shirt.

Microsoft released some statistics on Silverlight 3, being installed on 33% of all computers and mobile phones during summer 2009.

Silverlight 3 is now installed on approximately 45% of all computers and mobile devices around the world today.

Silverlight was also demonstrated with Microsoft's own search engine, Bing, where it was able to split the image into a puzzle and scatter the image around. This application was also used with a YouTube video, being able to scatter the page and still being able to play the video in real-time.

A new desktop Facebook application using Silverlight was demonstrated using a drag and drop feature for images, including folder groups. The application demonstrated smooth scrolling through images and comments without any interruption.

Silverlight also showed off a video on-demand video third-party video application that allows the user to rewind, fast-forward and even pause live or recorded TV, all using your browser. Microsoft also showed off a demo of a football game that allowed multiple camera angles, even available for a live broadcast

 

source: www.neowin.net

Windows Mobile 7 UI confirmed by Microsoft?

Microsoft confirmed today that the company will unveil its plans for Windows Mobile 7 at the MIX 2010 conference in March next year.
Microsoft Office Vice President Kurt Delbene confirmed the news at the end of day two at the Professional Developers Conference here in Los Angeles. Little is known about Windows Mobile 7 except that it has been plagued with delays.

Screenshots of the rumoured interface leaked in March this year and Microsoft officials refused to confirm or deny. Interestingly, Microsoft has posted a shot of a Windows Mobile interface on its Office 2010 beta site that looks identical to the rumoured Windows Mobile 7 shots. Is this Windows Mobile 7, something in-between or just concept?

Office 2010 Mobile site:

Previous leaked shots:

 

source: www.neowin.net

Microsoft demos Internet Explorer 9

Microsoft today demonstrated an early, three week old, build of Internet Explorer 9 at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference 2009.

IE 9 will take advantage of the power of the GPU for all page rendering and developers can exploit this using CSS, DHTML and javascript. In just three weeks Microsoft believes performance has increased for IE9 resulting in smoother rendering and improved performance. Interoperability and standards support is increasing and features such as rounded corner CSS support will be built in. A new JS engine will also be built into Internet Explorer 9.

Microsoft offered no time lines or indications as to when a build of Internet Explorer 9 will be available publicly. Steven Sinofsky, President, Windows and Windows Live Division, mentioned that Microsoft had only begun working on Internet Explorer 9 three weeks ago, according to our sources the latest internal build is labelled 7658.0.091116-1745.

 

source: www.neowin.net

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Prerelease and AIR 2.0 Beta Now Available

Adobe is making a big push today with new versions of its popular media platforms Adobe Flash and Adobe AIR. With Flash Player 10.1 prerelease (a cross between a beta and a release candidate), Adobe actually brings a lot more features than the small .1 update in the version number would have you believe, including support for multi-touch and other media capabilities. More exciting though is the new AIR 2.0 beta, a hefty release with a bunch of new features and updates.

The biggest new feature in Adobe Flash Player 10.1 pre-release is multi-touch and gesture support. Obviously, you need a device with a touch screen, but the technology is becoming increasingly popular, especially in mobile devices and also in desktops and laptops, now that Windows 7 has shipped with full multi-touch support. Moreover, the runtime can take advantage of the hardware decoding capabilities, available in most of today's devices, to render H.264 encoded videos. Adobe says this saves energy, improving battery life, and also uses up less resources.

The latest Flash Player is the first step towards realizing the goals of the Open Screen Project, with which Adobe aims to enable developers create a single app that would work on any device, mobile or desktop, without the need to be specially designed for smaller screens and the likes. At this point, the 10.1 release isn't available for smartphones, but it should come for Palm's WebOS by the end of the year and for Android devices in early 2010.

Adobe has big plans for AIR, its multi-platform runtime, which allows developers to build just one app for all of the major desktop platforms Windows, Mac, and Linux. With AIR 2.0 the company has introduced some handy features, both on the system level but also with the platform itself. The latest update comes with significantly improved memory management, AIR being known to be a resource hog, something that should make AIR apps a lot more appealing. The platform also includes all of the features and updates of the Flash Player 10.1, which is build-in.

 

source: www.softpedia.com

Windows 7 vs. Windows Vista - 234% More Sold Boxed Copies

Windows 7’s overall superiority to Windows Vista has translated into the latest iteration of the Windows client, leaving its predecessor in the dirt in terms of commercial success as well. Windows 7 RTM has been embraced by over three times more customers compared to Vista RTM in the first week on the market alone. Market research company, The NPD Group, indicated that initial sales of the boxed, retail copies of Windows 7 dwarfed those of Vista’s. In the first few days on the U.S. market, Microsoft sold 234% more boxed copies than Vista, noted The NPD Group.

“Microsoft’s program of early low-cost pre-sales, high visibility marketing, and aggressive deals helped make the Windows 7 software launch successful,” revealed Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD. “In a slow environment for packaged software Windows 7 brought a large number of customers into the software aisles.”

Microsoft executives, including Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, had revealed during visits in Taipei and Japan that Windows 7 sales were strong. However, Microsoft has so far failed to confirm the data provided by The NPD Group. At the same time, the Redmond company has yet to make public any official sales figures associated with Windows 7.

Still, although it outsold Vista by 234%, Windows 7 delivered a smaller boost in actual revenue. Statistics provided through the NPD’s weekly tracking service, reveal that actual Windows 7 dollar sales were only 82% higher than Vista. This can be explained through not only the consistent discounts on pre-sales that Microsoft offered, but also through less sales of the Ultimate flavor of Windows 7, as Microsoft worked to focus consumers more on the Home Premium and Professional editions.

And, as was expected, the launch of Windows 7 also contributed to pushing sales of Windows PCs, although to a lesser degree than Vista did starting with the end of January 2007. Sales of Windows 7 computers were 6% less than those of Vista machines, in a maker that reveals an overall 49% year-over-year units growth, and 95% over the week prior to Windows 7’s general availability on October 22nd, 2009.

“A combination of factors impacted Windows 7 PC sales at the outset, but the trajectory of overall PC sales is very strong leading into the holiday season,” added Baker. “Vista had a slight advantage at launch, as January traditionally has a bigger sales footprint than October. The other hurdle Windows 7 faced was sales of PCs with older operating systems (XP and Vista) were high, making up 20 percent of sales during the Windows 7 launch, compared to just 6 percent of older operating sales during Vista’s launch week."

 

source: www.softpedia.com

Firefox 3.5.5

Google is not the only browser maker releasing a minor update for its browser this week. Mozilla, which has recently refreshed both versions 3.5 and 3.0 is currently pushing an update to v3.5.4, which was offered at the end of the past month. Users of the latest stable version of Mozilla’s open source browser now have available for download Firefox 3.5.5. Version 3.0 of the browser was not updated this time around, although Mozilla traditionally offers 3.5.x and 3.0.x refreshes in tandem. The exception was generated by the introduction of v3.5.4 last week.

On October 27th, Mozilla made  Firefox 3.5.4 and Firefox 3.0.15 available and also stability and security updates for their respective versions. However, it appears that insufficient testing was carried out on 3.5.4. This made necessary the delivery of Firefox 3.5.5 at a little over a week, since the previous release of the open source browser hit the download tubes.

“As part of Mozilla's ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.5.5 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a free download. We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3.5, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting "Check for Updates..." from the Help menu,” explained Samuel Sidler, Quality Assurance engineer at Mozilla.

According to Mozilla, stability issues have been identified following the availability of Firefox 3.5.4. The company moved fast and had all fixes in place by Saturday of the past week, and moved to ship Firefox 3.5.4 on November 5th. Moving forward, Mozilla is planning to offer the next stability and security updates for supported versions of Firefox in mid-December 2009. Firefox 3.0.16 and Firefox 3.5.6 will be offered to customers the coming month.

 

source: www.softpedia.com

Mandriva Linux 2010 Officially Released

After Canonical showed off their latest operating system, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), it is now time for another Linux mammoth to take the spotlight. In other words, Mandriva Linux 2010.0 was just released a few minutes ago, after two Alpha versions, one Beta and two Release Candidates, totaling more than four months of hard work. With this article, we are proud to present the new features that are included in the new Mandriva Linux release. Don't forget that Mandriva 2010.0 can be downloaded for free either as a Live KDE and GNOME CDs or a 100% Free DVD/Dual CD/Mini CD, for both i586 and x86_64 architectures (see download links at the end of the article).

Under the hood of Mandriva Linux 2010.0:

· Linux kernel 2.6.31;
· GNOME 2.28.0 desktop environment;
· KDE 4.3.2 desktop environment;
· EXT4 filesystem;
· X.Org 7.5;
· X.Org server 1.6.5;
· Moblin support;
· New artwork.

The Mandriva Linux 2010.0 feature tour:

· Improved boot performance - through various tweaks and hacks, the boot performance has been greatly improved since Mandriva 2009 Spring. The suspend, resume, hibernate and shutdown functions are also a lot faster;
· Amazing new boot splash - powered by Plymouth, the new boot splash looks much better than in previous releases of Mandriva Linux;
· Better installer - the hard drive partitioning step in the Mandriva Installer has been redesigned to be more user friendly;
· 4 new themes - Mandriva 2010 comes with four themes, one for each edition (Free, One, Powerpack and Flash). The themes can also be used independently, by installing the "mandriva-theme-< flavour_name >" packages;
· 10 new, beautiful wallpapers - both KDE and GNOME desktops include many new and interesting wallpapers from various photographers around the world. By default, the wallpapers are designed to change depending on the hour of the day;
· Landscape screensaver - a new screensaver offers a slideshow of various beautiful landscapes from around the world;
· The KDE 4.3.2 desktop environment - as the default desktop, KDE 4.3 comes with the beautiful Air theme, Plasma enhancements, file previews and video thumbnails in Dolphin, new effects, new Plasma widgets, Nepomuk integration, KDE 3 data migration support, Amarok 2.2, KMess 2.0.0 instant messenger for MSN Live, KOffice 2.0.82 and Digikam 1.0;

· The GNOME 2.28.0 desktop environment - available in the GNOME One Live CD, it offers better Webcam and Bluetooth support, an improved Time Tracker panel applet, the Empathy instant messenger, the Epiphany web browser, the Evince document viewer (with support to save and edit annotations), the Pitivi video editor, improved Totem (with DVD navigation and playback resume support), better GNOME Power Management that supports multiple batteries on laptops and hard disk spindown, Snowy sync support for Tomboy, and many more;
· Moblin support - Mandriva Linux 2010 is the first Linux-based operating system to include a full Moblin environment. The "task-moblin" package needs to be installed. After that, choose "Moblin" from the session list in the connection manager;
· Sugar Desktop support - like Moblin, the Sugar desktop is also present in Mandriva Linux 2010. By installing the "task-sugar" package, the Sugar desktop environment will be available in the session list, on the login screen;
· Better support for Intel graphics cards - thanks to the new UXA acceleration method and DRI2, the new driver for Intel graphics cards improves the overall performance/stability (including suspend and resume) and reduces display flickering during boot;
· Support for modern netbooks - the support for hardware components found in latest netbooks on the market, such as Asus Eee PC models, the Acer Aspire One or the MSI Wind, has been greatly improved;
· Mozilla Firefox 3.5 - as the default web browser, Firefox 3.5 offers an improved performance, support for HTML5 < audio > and < video > tags, support for Ogg Theora videos, support for Ogg Vorbis audio streams, private browsing mode, location sharing and new themes;
· OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 - everything is improved in this release, from the Microsoft Office 2007 filters, the screen appearance, the file locking, the Comments, the Calc performance, KDE4 and the grammar checker integration;
· VirtualBox 3 - the latest version of the powerful and free virtualization software from Sun Microsystems offers Guest SMP for no more than 32 virtual CPUs, support for playing Direct3D 8 and 9 games on Windows guest machines, support for OpenGL 2.0 for Linux, Solaris and Windows guests;
· Elisa Media Center - with a brand-new interface, this project is now known as Moovida;
· Wine 1.1.32 - with improved support for DirectX 10, OpenAL, HTML, JavaScript, Gecko integration and overall performance improvements;
· Phoronix Test Suite - the famous system benchmarking and testing suite is now included in Mandriva Linux 2010;
· USB Startup Disk Creator - just like Ubuntu, Mandriva also provides a little tool, called Mandriva Seed, to make a bootable USB stick that will help you install Mandriva Linux 2010 on netbooks or workstations without a CD-ROM device;
· New network monitor tool - replacing the old net_monitor, Network Monitor will provide users with a complex network traffic monitoring application.

 

source: www.softpedia.com