Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
Enjoying those DRM-free music tracks you decrypted using FairUse4WM? Well, it looks like the fun is over, at least for now.
Microsoft recently send out a Windows update that seems to block the Windows Media hacking tool.
We have every confidence that FairUse4WM's author, (a hacker going by the name of Viodentia) or someone else will come along and crack Microsoft's DRM scheme again. But it's anybody's guess how long that will take. When Viodentia released his first version of the program last year, Microsoft responded within a matter of days. It took another half a year before FairUse4WM was updated.
Does that mean it was harder to break the encryption scheme the second time around or just that Viodentia had better things to do? We don't really know. What we do know is that this means if you're downloading music from Napster, the Zune Marketplace, or another store using Windows Media DRM, you'll have to play that music on a Microsoft-approved device for now.
Leopard, Gmail, IMAP, Facebook, and Digg. If you know what at least four out of five of these things are, you can probably skip the rest of this article. If not, it's time to catch up on some of what you've missed this week. That's right, it's time for another fabulous edition of Download Squad's Week in Review.
Gmail Gets IMAP Some people have been waiting for years for one thing: IMAP support in Gmail. Now it's finally here. That means full synchronization between Gmail and third party e-mail clients, including Outlook, Thunderbird, and even an iPhone. Delete a message in Outlook and it'll disappear from your Gmail web interface as well. Not everyone has access to this feature yet, so keep checking the settings tab in your Gmail account to see if it's been enabled.
Forget about purchasing expensive graphic how to books. OK not really, but you should still check out Tutsbuzz before shelling out cash at the book store. This tutorial archive links out to demonstrations on popular techniques using creative software aimed at 2D graphics, 3D graphics, video editing, audio editing, desktop programming, and web development. Tutorials range from Adobe Photoshop and Flash, Premiere, Final Cut, Sound Forge, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and MySQL. This is a must bookmark for any creative individual.
Adobe Flex Builder is an application for developing rich internet applications using the Flex framework. With this, developers can build intuitive interactive apps quickly. Why would Adobe be doing this? To try and gain some interest from new developers of course. Taking the lead from some fast food joints out there, hit them while at University and get them addicted, especially since some schools will begin offering Flex based training.
With retail prices sitting at $499, why not pick up a free copy for yourself if you are a student or faculty member and test your luck at application development. And hey, grab a copy for your non university friends too, it can sure make a great gift!
The YouTube team has a surprise in store, a YouTube redesign is in the works. Please get your sunglasses ready though, it tends to be a little hard on the eyes.
YouTube will incorporate user feedback into the changes throughout the site. That's something that a lot of companies neglect to take into account when undertaking website changes. Over the next few months new additions will be rolled out, and will include improved categories, dropdown menus to get to where you want faster, and a new look and feel for tabs and video browsing pages.
All that new red seems a little too distracting for us, and the dropdowns can be a little distracting, but it does seem quicker to get around the redesign.
It turns out the iLiad ships with a stripped down version of the Minimo web browser for reading HTML files. Out of the box, you can't browse the web with this version of Minimo. But Adam B has released an update that effectively unlocks Minimo on the black and white device.
Minimo is not an official Mozilla project, but the mobile web browser is based on Mozilla code and hosted on Mozilla.org. Now that Mozilla has announced plans to develop a mobile version of Firefox, we suspect there won't be much more development in the Minimo space.
After quietly launching SearchMash as a test ground for all things search late last year, Google is making the site a bit more Flashy.
SearchMash is a playground of sorts for Google to experiment with interaction and the display of search results. Now they have taken their simple search philosophy to the limits and added in a Flash interface for a more interactive look at results.
The new interface uses Snap previews of websites before they are visited and tabs that seamlessly switch between web, image and video searches. Keyboard shortcuts and mouse scroll wheel interactions have also been put into place for quicker navigation. A list of recent searches is conveniently hidden on the left side, with a portion of a window slightly sticking out. When moused over, a tray slides out and display the keywords. Not the best placement and surely not something that the average user would know where to mouse over. Then again, we have to pinch ourselves because this is after all just a test search interface for Google to play around with. Of course the HTML version of the site is still available if you aren't inclined to search with Flash.
What do you think of this little Google experiment. Would Flash interfaces fly for search efforts in the real world?
Google's Blogger platform makes blogging about as simple as it gets. You can start writing your blog a few seconds after signing up for an account and choosing a template. But Blogger has long been a few steps behind other popular blog clients like WordPress and TypePad when it comes to enabling new features.
For example, Google has just added the ability to subscribe to post comments via email. Up until now, if you left a comment on a blog post and wanted to keep up on the conversation, you had to keep checking back with the page. While this might seem great if you're trying to generate more traffic for your site, the truth is most people will forget they ever left a comment and move on.
So it's great to see Google add this feature to Blogger. On the other hand, you can only subscribe to comments if you have a Google account. No Gmail? No e-mail notification for you.
We don't know whether this is more an indicator of some hacker's bountiful free time or of the popularity of exploiting cats and kittens for cheap laughs online. Either way, we think it's gnarly. A user of the photo-sharing, feline-themed web site LOLCats.com has built a programming language using the preferred dialect of LOLCats users: which is a cross between toddler talk and l33tspeak. The formula for LOLCats photo captions is to apply this odd way of writing, and the result is usually hilarious. Ie. my "kugfu" iz stronger.
Inspired by such sayings as "do you want karate" and "I'm in ur chair ignorin ur seetin reqwirmnts", the .NET language is called LOLCat. Take a look at this code snippet: IM IN UR LOOP IZ APPLE BIGR THAN CHEEZBRGR BTW comment here. YARLY DIAF 1 "Can I haz apple plz" NOWAY DIAF 1 "Can I haz cheezbrgr now" KTHX [....]
Is there a better way to end a long week than to sit down in front of the screen and do a little shopping? For some, maybe, but how about when you get good deals?
Shopping online. We all do it out of convenience and the fact that we are able to surf around for the best deals from the comfort of our own homes. RetailMeNot is a website that compiles coupons from major online retailers and makes them available to anyone who wants them. They are the coupons that the stores don't tell you about. We covered this site way back in 2006, but since then they have completely redesigned their service.
The RetailMeNot website is simple to use, enter the shopping site you want to check coupons for and you will be presented with a generous list of coupon codes and what their deals consist of. Then use the coupons upon checkout from said stores. RetailMeNot also lets users surf around by popular stores, popular coupons and keywords that they have in their database.
RetailMeNot is a quick and easy way to make sure you are getting the best deal online. Some of the deals might have limited time access, and their success rates are noted under stats for each coupon.
While many folks recommend waiting for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (or maybe 5) before "upgrading" from Windows XP to Vista, apparently Microsoft has managed to sell a few copies of its latest desktop operating system. In fact, Microsoft reports that it's sold 88 million copies since launching Vista in January.
Microsoft has apparently seen a 20 percent growth in Vista sales for the last three quarters. Microsoft also announced its quarterly earnings yesterday, showing that the company made $13.76 billion, or about 27% more than the same period last year.
So while there's been a lot of talk lately about Ubuntu, Leopard, open source, and web applications, it's worth remembering that Microsoft is still the dominant force in software. The company is projecting revenue of around $59 billion next year.
We rarely get through a day without hearing about global warming, and how to make our lives a bit greener. Now Hugg brings it all online.
Hugg, similar to the social news website digg, allows users to vote up and down top news stories. But this site was built by the folks behind the popular eco-blog Treehugger, and it concentrates on green news. With an array of user submitted green news from green gift giving, practical ways to washing clothes and eco-friendly flooring, Hugg is on its way to being your one stop shop for the latest green news and trends in the marketplace.
Categories include architecture, beauty, celebrity, fashion and food. It is a relatively new site that is a bit low on the user submitted news at the moment, but it is growing with at least a few stories hitting the website each day.
So if you're feeling a little green, check in to Hugg to see what the hottest and freshest eco news is of the day.
Now you can stay in touch with friends using Facebook for Blackberry, a standalone application. Sure Facebook can be accessed normally through the likes of mobile browsers like Opera, but this new application provides more streamlined and optimized mobile access for Facebook.
After installing the application, users can send and view messages, photos, pokes, and wall posts. They will also be able to take a picture and directly send it to their profiles complete with tags if their Berry's have cameras. Although this is good for long commutes and waiting for meals to be served, it could be encouraging a new level of unproductiveness in the workplace!
There have been reports of Facebook for Blackberry not working with older handsets and on some mobile networks.
To inaugurate Apple's latest Mac OS X release, version 10.5, we grabbed all the latest news we could find to answer some of the outstanding questions floating around the web:
Q. Can Time Machine backup to network shares? A. Yes, but only using the Apple File-sharing Protocol (AFP). Jeers. And Macworld agrees with us that Time Machine is Leopard's most important new feature.
Q. Is Time Machine visible on screen during backups when the external hard disk is connected? A. No, backups occur automatically in the background.
Q. The new screen sharing feature is VNC-based. Does this mean I can use my other VNC-equipped machines with Leopard? A. Yup, only not with iChat's screen sharing feature; that only works with iChat clients.
Q. How long does this puppy, er kitty, take to install? A. According to Engadget, about one hour on a Macbook Pro with 2GB of RAM.
Q. Have any improvements been made to file systems or disk partitions? A. Well, the most underhyped improvement is this: According to MacWorld, disk partitions can now be resized on the fly. Nifty.
Enjoying those DRM-free music tracks you decrypted using FairUse4WM? Well, it looks like the fun is over, at least for now.
Leopard, Gmail, IMAP, Facebook, and Digg. If you know what at least four out of five of these things are, you can probably skip the rest of this article. If not, it's time to catch up on some of what you've missed this week. That's right, it's time for another fabulous edition of Download Squad's Week in Review.
