Archive for the ‘Software Reviews’ Category

Hey everyone, I thought I would let you know that Windows Media Player 11 Beta 2 is now available for download. It’s added some small tweaks in design, as well as soem fixes in it’s overall stability.

I really love the way that it looks now to match up with the sleak look of Vista.

Microsoft has release Internet Explorer RC1, and from what’s being said on the IEBlog, there has been more than a few problems occur from the installation, but I’m sure that has been many, many more successes in installing the program, me included. 

The one thing that changed in this release candidate is the fact that the any previous versions of IE7, including the early beta’s will be uninstalled during the installation, which is great, because it’s a pain in the ass to manually uninstall the software everytime there is an update.

From what I can tell it’s mostly cosmetic as everything functions the same as it normally did, and no new additional features are present.

I for one see IE7 as a really tight package, if Microsoft could just fine tune the security and permformance, it would definately be a cut above the rest.  I’m not much of a person for change, and although I do use other browsers such as Flock, FireFox, and Opera, Internet Explorer is still my primary browser.

Microsoft is giving out free copies of Windows Vista Beta 2 to people that complete a short 8 question quiz about the software itself.  They are actually fairly simple questions if you think rationally.

You don’t necessarily need to answer the questions right to get your free copy of the OS, they just want to get an idea of how much people know about the software itself.

Here are the answers if anyone really wants to know:

Q.1:  Vista
Q.2:  Clarity
Q.3:  November 2006
Q.4:  True
Q.5:  Aero
Q.6:  All of the above
Q.7:  All of the above
Q.8:  512MB

Microsoft has released a new piece of software called Windows Live Writer and it’s currently in it’s Beta stages.  This software app allows to you to create blog posts directly from your desktop, and provides a nice interface for publishing and saving drafted posts.

I’m really impressed with this program and in fact I’m using it to write this post right now.  One thing I think is really cool is that it mimics my own homepage look, and makes it as if I’m writing the blog entry directly as I would see it on the blog.

It’s more or less a software text editor that allows anyone with most popular blogging software to publish posts directly from there desktops, instead of logging into his/her blog every single time.  I would highly suggest this product to anyone with a blog as it makes it extremely easy.  Windows Live Writer is also connected to Windows Live Local so you can add maps to your blog posts.

Adding images is also really great because it offers more advanced features such as image transformations, border controls, linking options, and watermarks.  This is one of the best Windows Live products I have seen thus far.

There is also an SDK for the software so that you can easily extend it’s capabilities for more enhanced publishing.  I give mad props to Microsoft on this one.

A little while back both Yahoo! and MSN announced that they would be merging networks in the near future which would essentially allow Windows Live Messenger users to IM Yahoo! messenger users, and vice-versa. It appears as if the wheels are already turning with this with the latest version of Yahoo! messenger for Mac, who can already send messages to Windows Live Messenger users. (MSN Messenger, and Windows Messenger users will not be able to do this.)

Currently only Yahoo! can send to WLM, not the other way around. It appears that WLM has not added in there network features to be able to contact Yahoo! users.

I’ll keep you up to date on any new things I find out regarding this.

In a previous article I told you about Microsoft Expressions, Microsofts newest sweet of webdesign tools that will essentially take over where FrontPage and Publisher left off. This suite of tools includes Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer, Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer, and Microsoft Expression Web Designer, each with it’s own part it taking a site from not so cool, to really cool :).

I’m not sure when this began but you can now download the CTP releases of all three software applications, for free directly from the Microsoft Expression website. I’m definately going to download them and try them each out.

I’ve only tried the web designer and what I saw, I really liked. As it’s a Microsoft product it has complete libraries for ASP and ASP .Net to easily integrate both powerful languages. Also has an excellent CSS and XML portion to it. The interface is very clean and easy to navigate. If this is what’s taking over FrontPage, I would glady accept it.

Today MS released the Windows Live Messenger public beta, so for those of you that haven’t had the chance to test out the new version of WLM now you can.

Flock, for those of you living in a hole :), is a Mozilla based browser that they have added some features to for a more comfortable web experience. They have many integrated features such as Flickr, photobucket, and del.ico.us.

More information about the great features can be found over at TechCrunch who also interviewed the developers of Flock and has it posted on the site.

The beta is supposed to be released this evening, so watch for it.

Download It Now!

At first I was a little skeptical about installing a Beta from a company that has had it’s fair share of bug with any release of it’s software, so I could only imagine what surprises I might find in a Beta of that software. What made me install it is that I knew some people who had and got them to tell me the problems that they ran into, so that when I did I wouldn’t make the same mistakes :D.

My install went perfectly without any problems at all. This is actually a fresh install after a format so when I installed I had absolutely no drivers installed, and this is originally what kind of scared me, as I had heard many bad things about the driver support (I installed the x86 version so I wouldn’t have as many problems). I booted Vista up for the first time, and bam audio, I was pleasantly surprised.

I really couldn’t be happier about this OS and can’t wait until the full version.

Windows Vista Beta 2 went to public download today, and is available over at the Windows Vista website. The download itself is available in 3 languages, as well as a 32-bit and 64-bit download. The download itself is an .iso file and is downloaded through a Java download manager called ‘Akamai’.

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