Sarah In Tampa

4 Unique Features in Live Search

sarahintampa — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:27:00 GMT

Over on the Digital Inspiration site, Amit Agarwal discovered some lesser-known features in Live Search that are unique to the search engine. These little gems are worth checking out - click here to review them in more detail on his site. The four tips he came across include:

Watch Video Previews – right in the search results, you can click on the thumbnail to see a short preview of the video which you can watch without having to visit the video website
Find Web Pages that Link to Docs, MP3s, Videos, etc. – This is different than the filetype: search operator which searches the text within that particular filetype. Using contains:doc, for example will search for all pages that link to a Word document. Combine with site: to find all pages from a particular website linking to a particular file type.
Save Images As You Search – Live Image Search features a scratch pad that lets you drag and drop pics as you search.
Subscribe to Search Results – By appending "&format=rss" (sans quotes) to the end of search query, you can subscribe to any search result via RSS. (Oh yeah, I discovered that earlier this year, too). You don’t even have to append text if your browsers identifies RSS feeds on its own - it will display the RSS icon in the address bar for you to subscribe to.

Out of all these tips, it’s that last one that has the most relevance for me. As an RSS addict…err…user, being able to quickly and easily get feeds for search results is something that other search engines don’t provide for universal search results. Instead, RSS feeds elsewhere are isolated to specific verticals like news search or blog search. When you want a universal search feed, Live Search can be a useful tool.

Save Your Spreadsheets With Autobackup

sarahintampa — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:26:00 GMT

I can’t tell you how many times I was asked this question when I worked in I.T.: “I accidentally just closed my spreadsheet and said NO to saving my changes…is it gone?” For whatever reason, some people’s fingers slip from time to time and the wrong button gets mashed. The shadow copies feature introduced in XP (aka “previous versions” in Vista) helped to some extent as does the AutoSave feature in Office. However, if you’re working with a spreadsheet undergoing a lot of revisions, what you might like even better is a tool that took periodic snapshots of the file at intervals you specify, allowing you to restore the spreadsheet to any particular moment in time.

As it turns out, there is a tool that does just that. I recently came across a review of it over on gHacks. The tool is an Excel plugin called Autobackup. With Autobackup installed, you can specify how often you want your spreadsheet backed up, how many copies it should save, and how long those copies should be saved (in days). Installation is simple – just got to Tools –> Add-ins and browse for the Autobackup file. Autobackup is available as a free download from here. An English and Portuguese version are available.

Windows Live Messenger Translation Bot Released

sarahintampa — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:26:00 GMT

Do you chat globally? If so, you’ll be glad to hear that the Microsoft Translator team has just released a new translation bot for Windows Live Messenger. With this new bot, you can IM back and forth with friends who speak different languages while the bot does the translations for you. To use the new bot, just add here).

Desktops 1.0: A New Virtual Desktop Sysinternals App

sarahintampa — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:25:00 GMT

When Microsoft bought Mark Russinovich’s Sysinternals site back in July 2006, I.T. pros and power users everywhere were thrilled to have all of these tools available from one convenient location on the web. If there was any fear that the purchase would mean the end of development for these great apps and utilities, those fears were soon assuaged. Today’s Sysinternals website features all the programs organized into categories like networking utilities, system information, file and disk utilities, and so on, and new ones are released on a regular basis. And to keep updated on those releases, there is the Sysinternals RSS feed – subscribe to this and you’ll always know when there’s a new utility for you to play with.

Recently, that feed was updated and I came across Desktops 1.0, a new utility for virtual desktops in Windows. The software is very much like this old XP Powertoy, but the difference is that Desktops 1.0 runs on Vista. The program itself is very simple. A .exe file installs the software which can be configured to run upon startup or not. You can specify what hotkey combination should be used to switch between the four desktops and then the app sits in your system tray, ready for you to swap between the different desktops as often as you wish.

Did You See The New Ad?

sarahintampa — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:58:00 GMT

While I was watching NBC Football (or rather, I was surfing FriendFeed and my husband was watching football), when, all of a sudden, I looked up to see Bill Gates on the screen! Yep, it was the first commercial from the new Microsoft ad campaign from Crispin Porter + Bogusky (backstory here), the ad agency that just won the big $300 million contract with Microsoft. You may not have heard of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, but you’ve definitely seen their ads: the Burger King “King” ads, Miller Lite’s “Man Laws,” and those freaky VW ads where unsuspecting drivers and passengers are sideswiped by SUVs and trucks in real-time.

The Microsoft ad that aired was not as harrowing as those VW ones, though, thank goodness. Instead, it was pleasantly goofy. Jerry Seinfeld spots Bill Gates buying shoes at a shoe carnival and goes into to help him out. Bill comes across as a lovable geek – and be sure to catch his Shoe Carnival card for a hilarious photo. But don’t leave it up to me to summarize. You can watch it now.

Looking at V2 Cities in Virtual Earth

sarahintampa — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:35:00 GMT

At this year's Virtual Earth and Location Summit, hosted by Microsoft Research in May, Steve Stanzel of the 3D Imagery Group gave a presentation about the new Virtual Earth released earlier this year. Virtual Earth version 2, in case you don't know, is a pretty impressive step forward in this mapping product. There are currently over 300 cities in 3D and many of them are already "V2" cities. In a V2 city, the texture qualities are greatly improved, making the buildings look more real. V2 cities all use what's called "oblique" imagery, aka "Bird's Eye View," that presents the imagery at a 45 degree angle, letting you clearly see the sides of the buildings. In V2 cities, you can also toggle street and building labels.

Another difference between V1 and V2 cities is the increase in the number of buildings displayed. In the earlier version of VE, only the taller buildings were rendered, but one and two-story structures were largely ignored. Now with V2, the number of buildings in a city has increased from about 6,000 to over 150,000, according to this Radar post blogged from the Summit. In addition to the buildings, trees have been rendered and placed in specific spots based on the height and diameter of the real trees. The trees are a nice touch, but its the sheer number of buildings that make a V2 city stand out - they have far more buildings that any competitive mapping product.

At the time of launch, four cities received the V2 face lift: Vegas, Denver, Dallas, and Phoenix, and today there are a total of seven (Vienna, Seattle, and Miami have now been added). However, by the end of this year, there will be hundreds of these cities online, says the team. Sounds like they are going to be busy!

Life|ware Launches New Media Servers

sarahintampa — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:34:00 GMT

At this year's CEDIA EXPO, the show put on by the trade association of home theater companies, Lifeware launched a brand-new, all-in-one, Lifemedia Server (LMS). This new server combines Windows Media Center with a 5.1 surround-sound amplifier and ZigBee control technology all within a single box. The LMS-170 line of media servers with ZigBee built in will allow the servers to communicate directly with Centralite's JetStream products, including dimmers, modules and switches. Whereas before they had to install a bridge in order to get the systems talking, the new servers will have direct communication.

There will be two models of the new server expected in the 1st quarter of 2009: the LMS-175 which will support dual Cable Cards (less than $4000) and the LMS-172 which has dual NTSC/ATSC tuners but no Cable Card support. No word on its price yet, only that it will be the less expensive of the two.

If you want to learn more about Life|ware, check out some of our earlier posts - we’ve mentioned them many times here on Channel 10. I reviewed their Home Automation software back in December, Nic visited them at CES 2008 and recorded footage of their e-home setup, and, more recently, Laura looked at their inclusion in Disney’s new Innovations Dream Home.

(Image courtesy of cepro.com)

Surf The Web From Your PowerPoint

sarahintampa — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:34:00 GMT

I just saw this PowerPoint addin on MakeUseOf and it make me think about how many different PowerPoint tools I’ve seen lately: the Office Labs pptPlex addin which makes PowerPoints deem-zoomable; the Cooliris plugin which takes your slideshows to 3D; the PowerPoint Remote Gadget that lets you control a slideshow from your phone; Freepath, which lets you mashup your slideshows with other web content; and, of course, Slideshare, the home for sharing PowerPoints with others on the web.

This latest addin called LiveWeb doesn’t appear to be new exactly, but it was new to me. LiveWeb works with any version of PowerPoint from 97 on up to allow you to open a web browser within the presentation itself as opposed to launching an external application (like IE). Its browser can display the real web in PowerPoint including PDFs, java, and VRML. You can download LiveWeb for free from here.

Fleace: Use Flickr Images To Decorate Your Desktop

sarahintampa — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:34:00 GMT

Here at Channel 10, we’re big fans of John’s Background Switcher for rotating our desktop wallpaper. The software is highly customizable and pulls in images from photo-sharing sites like flickr, Phanfare, smugmug, picasa, and Yahoo image search. But for those that are looking for a lighter and simpler solution, there’s now a new app to try: Fleace.

Fleace, which stands for Flickr-Enabled Automatic Changer for Everyone (ha!) can’t access photos from anywhere except flickr, but that may be just fine with you. You can have the app display wallpaper based on the tags you specify and you can customize a few options like size, layout, and a countdown timer for previewing images. The timer displays an image for a set time while you decide whether or not you want to use it. After applying the wallpaper, you have the option to shut the program down which is great for those of us who don’t like having apps runs in our system tray.

Fleace is compatible with all versions of Windows and is a free download available from here.

(Thanks gHacks)

TinyURL Accelerator for IE8 Beta 2

sarahintampa — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:57:00 GMT

Tim Heuer a program manager for Microsoft Silverlight and published author, has just created a new accelerator (formerly known as an “activity”) for IE8 Beta 2: the TinyURL Accelerator. His accelerator will be especially handy for anyone who makes use of this popular URL-shortening service.

In case you’re unfamiliar, TinyURL is a service that takes a long, unwieldy URL and shrinks it down to a more manageable size in the format of http://tinyurl.com/xxyyzz. This service and others like it have gained in popularity since the rise of micro-blogging tools like Twitter (and other similar services) which limit the amount of text you can type in for each update.

Tim’s TinyURL accelerator, as you may have guessed, integrates with IE8 Beta 2 to shrink down URLs. To use it, you highlight the hyperlinked text and right-click (or choose the accelerator icon in IE8) then choose the “Shrink URL” option. The accelerator will then automatically send the link to TinyURL for you. If you want to see it in action, check out the quick screencast he made and posted to his blog.

If you’re running the IE8 Beta, you can install the TinyURL Accelerator by clicking here.

TV Manager for Windows Home Server Now Out of Beta

sarahintampa — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:56:00 GMT

In July, we told you about a new plugin for Windows Home Server called TV Manager. This plugin lets you copy your recordings from a Vista Media Center PC or XP Media Center 2005 over to your Home Server for storage and management. At the time we originally wrote about it, the plugin was still in beta. But now, the first version of the plugin has been officially released: TV Manager 1.0. With TV Manager, you can view your recordings stored on your WHS in Media Center as if they physically resided on your PC. Recordings can also be deleted from either the WHS Console or Media Center.

Since the beta, several fixes and additions have been added to the software, including the following, listed below.

Fixes:

TV Manager Service setting permissions.
Compatibility with limited user accounts.
Launch recordings straight from the Windows Home Server Console.
Changed how recordings were moved (to fix ghost file issue) but lost the ability to monitor progress percentage.

New Additions:

Added Media Center Extender compatibility.
TV Manager Add-In interface redone.
Experimental ComSkip feature (disabled by default)
Regenerate the Xml in case of cache corruption without tester.exe.

If you’ve been waiting for the final version before trying out this software on your WHS, you don’t have to wait any more: you can download TV Manager 1.0 from here and the documentation from here.

Track Hurricanes at MSNBC

sarahintampa — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:44:00 GMT

As we enter into hurricane season, there’s no shortage of sites and tools for monitoring the latest news, viewing satellite imagery, and getting other storm-related information online. As I write this, I’m watching as Hurricane Gustav pounds the still-recovering Gulf Coast of Louisiana and already there’s another storm, Hurricane Hanna, on its way to Georgia (well, possibly – you know how these things go).

This season, weather watchers can track these and all other future storms using the new MSNBC Hurricane Tracker. Built on top of Virtual Earth, you can pick a storm to track from the dropdown provided (the link reads “more”) to see its path displayed on a map alongside other information like wind speed, ground speed, and pressure. Circles representing the eye of the storm are color-coded to denote how strong the storm is (Category 1 – 5) and when you hover your mouse over them, the exact GPS coordinates display. The bottom left side of the screen has a graph that shows a progress of the storm over time. You can also zoom in and out, pan, and rotate the map to get a better look. The Hurricane Tracker is a really handy tool to use to see exactly where the storms are and where they are headed, too.

For anyone in the path of any of these storms, we hope you take precautions and stay safe. Good luck!

IE8 “Unboxing” Video

sarahintampa — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:44:00 GMT

In the tech world, “unboxing” videos have surged in popularity over the years as recording and uploading video to the web became easier than ever for anyone to do. As soon as a gadget geek gets their hands on the latest shiny new contraption, a video of them carefully unwrapping and unboxing the gadget and all its little components is soon to follow. In that spirit, the IE team recently posted an “unboxing” video to their Facebook page. However, as you know, there’s nothing to really unbox with a software download like IE8...so what could they possibly record? Well, as you may have guessed, the video is a parody of unboxing videos, this one featuring a “professional unboxer” by the name of Roland Wacker. The video comes across like a bit on SNL and in it, Mr. Wacker gets quite upset at an unseen nemesis by the name of Eugene. The video seems to represent a new direction for the IE8 Facebook videos page – instead of just instructional how-to’s, it looks like the team is going to have some fun too. The next video, “the History of Slices,” looks at slicing through the ages (sliced bread! surgical instruments!) and compares IE8’s web slices to the “awesomeness of samurai swords.”

Special Edition Political Zunes

sarahintampa — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:36:00 GMT

Gizmodo reports that the delegates at both the Republican and the Democratic National Conventions will be receiving politically-branded Zunes this year. The Democratic one is green, with the DNC 08 logo and branding on the back. The Republicans’ Zune is red and features their convention’s logo and slogan. At the DNC, 4500 delegates received one of these Zunes which came pre-loaded with some content, including one game. The hope is that the delegates can use the devices for downloading speeches and videos from the convention. The Zunes are 4 GB models and arrive with an insert that touts a message about the environment, such as the one seen here.

Facebook Sidebar Gadget

sarahintampa — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:35:00 GMT

If you are a Facebook user running Vista or XP, there’s a new Facebook sidebar gadget for you to check out. This gadget lets you quickly change your Facebook status as well as see all the notifications sent to you including pokes, event invites, messages, friend requests, wall posts, etc. When you receive a new notification, you can click the link to open up the page in your browser. To use the gadget, you only need to download it and login. Log in once and it will remember your settings. Unlike a lot of sidebar gadgets, XP users can install this gadget, too. On XP machines, it will run as a desktop app. The gadget is ad-supported by means of a small text link at the bottom of the app.

pptPlex From Office Labs

sarahintampa — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:35:00 GMT

Having just recently released Speed Launch, an application launcher for Windows, the Office Labs guys are at it again. This time, they’re releasing pptPlex, a plug-in for Microsoft PowerPoint that provides zooming capabilities. With pptPlex installed, you can present your slides as a tour through a zoomable canvas – sort of like Silverlight’s Deep Zoom – instead of a linear deck. You may remember seeing a similar technology demoed by Bill Gates at this year’s Microsoft CEO Summit, but pptPlex is really just a take-off on that technology, which was called Plex. It’s not the same prototype as Plex.

First we get the Cooliris plugin for PowerPoint and now this? Wow, looks like boring slideshows may be a thing of the past.

pptPlex only works with Office PowerPoint 2007 and is available for download here.

Tag Your Friends on Facebook…For Science

sarahintampa — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:34:00 GMT

This summer, Microsoft Researcher Desney Tan led a team that created a Facebook app called Collabio to investigate a new way of applying meta-tags to people – by using the power of crowdsourcing. In the game, friends label each other with descriptive tags that can include anything from physical or personality descriptions (curly-haired, organized, smart) to geographic locations to professional titles and more. When playing the game, you see a blanked-out tag cloud for a friend. By guessing which tags have been applied, you get points. Two or more people have to agree on a tag in order for you to receive those points.

While it’s fun for friends to play Collabio and see how they perceive each other, the researchers are more interested in how the knowledge contained in social networks can be tapped into and utilized for applications like personalization, expert matching, and so on. They plan to analyze the patterns revealed by this data to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of using games like Collabio to harness that knowledge. Using games to gather data can make social networks more of a useful and productive tool while still appearing to be a just be a place for simple, fun activities.

You can learn more about this project and their findings at http://research.microsoft.com/cue/collabio. To play Collabio on Facebook, go here: http://apps.facebook.com/collabio

What’s New in IE8 Beta 2

sarahintampa — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:08:00 GMT

The IE team recently announced the availability of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, the latest iteration of the upcoming browser which is now available for download from www.microsoft.com/ie8. This new version of IE features several new improvements and changes, but we decided to list our favorites below.

Smart Address Bar: Taking a note from Firefox 3’s Awesome Bar, the Smart Address Bar offers suggestions as you type based on website history, favorites, and RSS feed. There’s even an autocomplete feature that will suggest sites based on what you’re typing. Domain highlighting is also used to highlight the domain name. This feature allows for improved security and is especially useful in thwarting phishing attacks.

Colored Tab Groups: When you Ctrl+Click a link to open up a new tab, the new tab will have the same color as the original tab. New tabs that you launch on your own will be in a different color. This feature helps you easily visualize how tabs are related to each other.

Enhanced Find On Page Search: Ctrl+F launches a Find-on-Page Toolbar at the top of the page underneath the tabs. Search terms on the page are highlighted and the number of times they appear are counted.

Switching Search Providers Easier: Now when you enter in a search term in the search box, you’ll notice a row of icons that appear below the search suggestions that appear. These icons allow you to change your search provider on the fly from Live Search to Google to Wikipedia to Amazon, eBay, and more…all with the click of a button.

Visual Search: In addition to being able to change providers quickly, sites that support visual search (currently Amazon and Wikipedia) will display a small thumbnail image of the results which you can view without having to visit that page. What a timesaver!

Crash Recovery/Session Saving: You now have the option to reopen the last tab group when closing the browser. Also, if a tab crashes, crash recovery will restore the tab as well as any info you had filled in there such as in the case of writing an email or filing out a form.

InPrivate Browsing: This new technology lets you browse privately, making sure that history, temporary internet files, and cookies are not recorded on the PC

Other new features include an updated look for the IE chrome, improvements to both web slices and accelerators (formerly called “activities”), tools for IT professionals and developers, and a lot more. You can check out the full list of enhancements here as well as read reviews from both Ed Bott and Brandon LeBlanc, who both take a comprehensive look at the new browser.

Making Engaging Digital Presentations With Freepath

sarahintampa — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:42:00 GMT

Freepath 2.0 is a new application that lets you create presentations that are mashups of web content and content from your PC. So, instead of a traditional PowerPoint, for example, your Freepath presentation could combine a PowerPoint file with images, videos, music, PDFs, Word, and Excel documents and play them as a seamless digital presentation. You can integrate web content like YouTube videos, slideshow’s from slide.com, music from Pandora, images from flickr or photobucket, and more alongside files saved on your PC like those from Office documents, PDFs, Quicktime videos, or Flash files.

The Freepath 2.0 software offers three different viewing modes: a preview mode which shows you digital assets on the right but also makes the playlist and playlist library accessible, a full screen mode (like what PowerPoint offers), and a dual screen mode which shows the presentation both on your screen and that of an external monitor. This dual monitor mode is also compatible with WebEx, GoToMeeting, Live Meeting, and Intercall.

If you’re more comfortable creating presentations in PowerPoint and are hesitant to try a new tool like this, you can actually prepare your slides in PowerPoint itself and then drag them into FreePath’s downloadable software to take advantage of the other tools that it provides.

When complete, your presentations can be shared with the Freepath community on myFreepath.com, which is similar to how Slideshare operates. All beta users receive 100 MB of free storage space in this community.

Rock the Vote From Your Xbox

sarahintampa — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:39:00 GMT

Xbox and Rock the Vote have partnered up in order to reach out to young voters through the Xbox community. Starting August 25th – the same day as the first day of the Democratic National Convention - Xbox 360 owners will be able to register to vote, participate in presidential polls, and voice their opinions to the presidential candidates through Xbox LIVE, a community whose members reach 12 million. Said Heather Smith, executive director, Rock the Vote: “To realize our goal of registering 2 million young Americans by this fall, we need to go where young Americans are, and there’s no doubt in our minds that many are on Xbox 360 and Xbox LIVE.”

I remember in the past Rock the Vote was involved with MTV, but I don’t ever remember seeing them actually go seek out young voters through a gaming platform before – that is definitely a first. And how creative! I went and checked out the Rock the Vote homepage to see where else they were besides Xbox, and it turns out that they’re on YouTube, facebook, and flickr, too. (Hmm, someone should tell them about Twitter.)

Twitter SideShow Gadget Released

sarahintampa — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:59:00 GMT

SideShow is a technology platform that allows developers to create applications specifically for devices with smaller screens. These apps, called “gadgets,” can run on devices like the displays attached to laptops, front panel computer displays, displays embedded in keyboards, displays on remote controls, digital picture frames, and more. Recently, the team at Ikanos Consulting released a new Twitter gadget for SideShow devices. With this gadget, you can update your status, view your friends’ timelines, and more. The gadget is now available for download from the Windows Live Gallery (click here). Note that this is not a Sidebar gadget – it’s SideShow only. (via The Media Center Blog)

Mesh Your Bookmarks!

sarahintampa — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 05:11:00 GMT

One of the most useful things you can do with Live Mesh, beyond just syncing files and folders, is syncing your bookmarks. This is as simple as right-clicking on your Favorites folder and adding it to the Mesh. (Doug has more detailed instructions on this here). When you do this on all your machines, you’ll end up with a merged directory of all your Favorites so you can manage your bookmarks from in one location, no matter how many machines you have. How handy is that? You can even access them from any other computer that has internet access just by logging into your Live Desktop. And don’t forget that Live Mesh lets you invite others to share a folder, so, if you wanted to share your bookmarks, for example, with a team at work so everyone could contribute, you could that, too.

How To Use Photosynth In 4 Easy Steps

sarahintampa — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 05:01:00 GMT

So now that you’ve heard the big news about Photosynth, you’re probably dying to get started with your first synth. Well, get your camera ready, because here’s all you need to know as to how to use this new technology

STEP 1: TAKE PICTURES

When you’re creating your first synth, remember the rule of “3” – each part of the scene you shoot should appear in at least 3 separate photos from different locations. Try for at least 50% overlap when taking the pictures. Take a panamora shot and then move around – the wider the shot, the better.

STEP 2: EDITS

Photographers usually want to do all kinds of tweaking to pics, but with Photosnyth, there are things you don’t want to do, such as the following:

don’t crop
don’t do any geometric transformations like flips and perspective transforms
don’t use artistic filters (de-noise may be safe, though)
don’t use watermarks (Photosynth provides something for this itself)

You can, however, adjust color and contrast without any worries.

STEP 3: SYNTH IT

If you haven’t already, download the free software from http://photosynth.com. The software works alongside the web site, also a free service. From the Photosynth site, click on “Create” and pick the pictures you want to use. Give your creation a name and click on “Synth.” Photosynth automatically creates and uploads your synth which can then be accessed from any XP or Vista PC.

STEP 4: SHARE IT

Your finished synth can be embedded on web sites, blogs, social networks, or any other page where HTML can be edited. You can see other people’s synths that they’ve created and leave comments, too.

Circle Dock Is No Ordinary App Launcher

sarahintampa — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 04:45:00 GMT

I’m sure you’ve seen docks before – the launch bars that let you start up applications with one click. For Windows users, one of the most popular docks is Rocket Dock (I use this one myself). Another favorite is Object Dock. However, I had never seen anything quite like Circle Dock before. Instead of a simple bar that attaches to a side of your computer screen, Circle Dock will launch (via a hotkey) wherever your mouse sits on the screen. The apps it contains can display either as concentric circles or as a spiral. There’s a lot you can do with Circle Dock too – you can rotate it, skin it, and add apps, files, folders, and shortcuts to the dock by drag and drop. Circle Dock may not be for you, but it’s definitely a unique take on the UI experience. Circle Dock is free download and works on 64-bit. It’s available here.

If you want to get really crazy, you can download the newly-released alpha version of Circle Dock. In this version, Circle Dock 0.9.2, the middle button can now open up the Windows start menu. You can also group your icons into dock folders and open them up in groups and click on the middle button to navigate back out of the folder. (The picture is of the alpha version).

Live Mesh Expands To More Countries

sarahintampa — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 04:43:00 GMT

Today, the Live Mesh team announced the expansion of their service into other markets. Now the list of countries that will allow sign-up without a wait list for the Live Mesh Tech Preview includes Canada, India, and Ireland. This is in addition to USA, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, for whom Live Mesh has already been made available. The announcement was posted today to the Live Mesh blog, where they also pointed us to other Live Mesh resources, including these Channel 9 videos and the link to the Community Forums, which is where you can send in Live Mesh feedback.