I woke up this morning and found an Office 2010 Technical Preview invitation waiting for me. I could not stop my excitement and quickly downloaded it. Join me in downloading + installing this wonderful product!

Downloading

Like other Microsoft beta products, I had to go through a series of annoying registration process. Seriously, can’t they just get information from my Live Account? That’s how Google does it and has proved working so far.

A lot of products under the big family “Office 2010” are available for download, including Office Professional (incldes Outlook), Visio, SharePoint, InfoPath and a whole lot others.

Then, after selecting the version I want (32 bit or 64 bit), another MS annoying thing appeared – having to install an ActiveX control (yes, that means only IE can download) to download the files I wanted. I thought the one that they used for downloading Windows 7 was nice, so why did they switched again? Grr.

Download was pretty fast and stable at a rate of 400kb/s.

Installing

The installing interface wasn’t that different from the one of Office 2007. Except, the background is maybe darker than the previous one.

Oh wait, wow, there is an upgrade option!

But of course, I still wanted my Office 2007, so I will do a clean install this time.

The installing process took about 20 mins on my Athlon TK-53 1.6Gx2 + 2GB Ram laptop. Acceptable. After the installation, a reboot was necessary.

Using

Right after reboot, two icons showed up:

When I thought I got a virus or something, I found out that they are part of the Technical Preview. It is a little bug report feature, I guess. How effective is it? Not sure.

The Splash Screen shocked me. The colors at the bottom is animated, and it is much more than just an image.

Honestly, the interface isn’t that much of a change, other than the whole color scheme has changed from blue to grey. 3 Color schemes are included, like Office 2007, and they are light grey, grey, and dark grey.

The biggest change lies in the “Dashboard” (or is there a name for it?) When you click the Blue button next to “Home” on the ribbon, a dark background “dashboard” thing comes out (no longer a dropdown menu). Options are same as those in Office 2007 when you press the same button, but in a much cooler interface

For example, when you print a page, you no longer have to open another window to set the print options:

I figured out I really like this feature. Some options, like “Options” and “Open” and “Save”, however still requires opening a separate window. If I can choose the file I want to open within the Dashboard, it will be much easier to use.

Conclusion

Although there are only a few surprises, they sure are really good surprises. I have yet to test other Office products, so stay tuned for a full review of the Office 2010 Technical Preview!

A new design of the Firefox addons page just went online. The new interface is much more beautiful to look at and somewhat easier to use. Addons can now be viewed in grids, instead of just lists – lets the users see more addons in one page.

Hmm… a new design makes me wonder… is Firefox 3.5 coming soon? Well, Beta 4 released not a long while ago… If Gold isn’t releasing soon, I suspect at least RC is. (Review on software development stage: Alpha –> Beta –> RC (Feature freeze, if no more bugs, release gold) –> Gold (Final))

Features

The Library view is similar to iTunes. With addon support, it can even support Cover Flow. It features a list pane, filter and other things that you probably wouldn’t think of.

The new version (1.1.1) allows users to search album artworks automatically (by selecting all the songs and right clicking on them), and the Artist Bio is loaded automatically with mashTape, an addon, too. One of their most recommended addon, LyricMaster, can automatically search lyrics and display. Appearance is also customizable with dozens of themes available at the addon site.

The best thing yet is that it supports iPod syncing with even iPod Touch and iPhone. With a built in addon, iPod Device Support, all you need to do is click a single button to sync with the Songbird library.

Expectations

Songbird is still a young software, and so we didn’t really expect much of it just yet. However, if these features are possible in later releases, it would be simply the best media player:

1. Sync Videos with iPod
2. Auto tag musics
3. Visualizations

However, even without these features, Songbird makes a really great, lightweight, and most of all, open source music player already. Good job! Download the new version (released yesterday) here!

Here’s the main window of Safari. The first time you run Safari, you will be greeted with the Top Sites page. Thanks to Top Sites, you can enjoy a stunning, at-a-glance preview of your favorite websites without lifting a finger. Safari 4 Beta tracks the sites you browse and ranks your favorites, presenting up to 24 thumbnails on a single page. You can even customize the display by pinning a favorite site to a specific location in the grid. That locks it into position, so you know just where to find it every time you open Top Sites.

Safari takes tabbed browsing to new heights — to the very top of the browser window — instantly providing more room for you to enjoy the sites you’re reading.

Just like Google Chrome, Safari has its own version of Private Browsing. In this mode, Safari doesn’t save or cache any personal information you enter or pages you visit. It’s as if you were never there.

Find what you’re looking for instantly. As you enter text in its search field, Safari recommends relevant searches courtesy of Google Suggest and lists your most recent searches, presenting them in an easy-to-read list.

Safari offers a in-built download window. Use it to view the progress of your downloads; pause, resume, or cancel a transfer; or find the location of downloaded files.

Safari provides an iTunes-style interface you can use to view, create, and organize your bookmarks. The bookmarks library is organized into collections (folders) of custom bookmarks, your browsing history, Address Book links, Bonjour connections, and RSS feeds. To access the library, click the open-book icon on the left side of the bookmarks bar.

Developer? Safari comes with a whole range of developing tools.

Safari offers a range of developer features such as Web Inspector, Error Console, disabling functions, and many more.

The Web Inspector gives you quick and easy access to the richest set of development tools ever included in a browser. From viewing the structure of a page to debugging JavaScript to optimizing performance, the Web Inspector presents its tools in a clean window designed to make developing web applications more efficient.

Safari 4 introduces the Nitro JavaScript engine, an advanced bytecode JavaScript engine that makes web browsing even faster. In fact, Safari 4 executes JavaScript up to 6 times faster than Internet Explorer 8 and up to 4 times faster than Firefox 3.1.

With so many browsers in the market for you to choose, its really hard to say which is best. However, Safari is indeed promising of what it can achieve. If you haven’t downloaded Safari, its really worth a try!

From Apple:
» What’s new in Safari 4
» Download Safari

If there is one thing that everybody is annoyed by with the computer, it might be the boot-ups. Boot-ups might be fast on an initial installation, but as you install more software, it is going to become slow. How can you accelerate the boot ups?

A small little Windows Tool is going to help you. Press Windows + R or Start Menu –> Run, and type in msconfig.

It will bring up a dialog like the one below. Choose “Selective Start-up”, and then click on the “Startup” tab.

Here is a list of items that gets run whenever you start your computer. As you install more softwares, the list becomes bigger and bigger. Tick off those which you don’t need and click OK.

Note that through this way, you may also prevent some viruses from happening. Some viruses gets run during startup. There is basically a golden rule to disabling start-up items: If you are unsure about a certain item, tick it off. For example, a program called “JFDS938fds” might show up and you have totally no idea what it is. That can be a virus.

Also, you may tick off some services that you don’t need. For instance, you realize that you don’t normally use Desktop search. Feel free to take it off! Often times, running it by clicking the shortcut on desktop/start menu would be the same as running it on startup.

If you are unsure whether you can take off something (or something that looks important), feel free to post here. After you make your changes, reboot and see how much faster your boot-up can be!

Windows Live Mesh is a software that helps syncing between two computers, with both P2P transfer and Upload/Download from server available. No software is required, although a software is also available for ease of transfer. Let’s begin with a demo on how to sync files between computers.

Step 1: Sign in to http://www.mesh.com with your Windows Live Account

Step 2: Start by installing the software by clicking “Add a Device” and download the appropriate version of the software for you. Note that it also works with Mac!

Step 3: Start syncing your folders after you install the software! You might need to sign in right after you install it, and if you choose the “Remember” option, you won’t ever have to bother again. Go into explorer, and find a folder you wanted to sync.

You will have more options to how to share. You can choose to sync whenever there are updates, or never, or other options.

Step 4: Immediately, you will be able to see that your folder is already sync’d to the other computer. Every update is recorded in the “News” section and can be read there.

Extras:

Note that your “Live Desktop” is also sync’d. That’s your online space, and you may access to it anytime at anywhere with internet with internet access.

Conclusion: With Live Mesh, it is so much easier to move files from one to the other. It was a nice idea to have this, and hopefully more features can be seen on this, such as syncing with phones, etc.

AMD has just released a tool designed to help you discover its “fusion” experience, namely AMD Fusion for Gaming.

What does it do? In a nutshell, it improves system performances by shutting down unnecessary programs and (possibly) overclocks or tweaks CPU and Graphics. Using it is easy, all you need to do is click on the icon, and you can enjoy gaming.

There are three built-in profiles: Basic, Advanced, and Expert. In basic mode, it shuts down all foreground programs. In Advanced, it shuts down all foreground + superfluous background programs. In Expert, it does all of that + overclock your hardware automatically. When you disable it, it will relaunch those programs.

Apart from those, you can also create your own profiles where you choose to let AMD Fusion do what and not do what.

Does it really help? I know that a lot of programs have claimed that it helps performance, but doesn’t really do much. This here isn’t the case. A magazine has once reported that the 3DMark score jumped from 13000 to 17000 with AMD Fusion for Gaming.

From a personal experience, some resources-monster 3D Games, such as GTA 4 lagged a lot when I ran it without AMD Fusion. With it, the situation has changed significantly.

What does it need? It needs a Windows Machine (Windows 7 Compatible!) with an AMD CPU, and that’s all.

Have fun gaming with it! Get it here.

Firstly, the app which allows you to do this is none other than fing. Of course, fring is not the only VOIP client in the market. But the good thing about fring is that its FREE and it has a wide range of services to offer!

fring is a mobile internet service & community that enables you to access & interact with your social networks on-the-go, make free calls and live chat with all your fring, Skype, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, SIP, Twitter, Yahoo! and AIM friends using your handset’s internet connection. Beyond fring’s social appeal, it also saves money letting you make affordable local and international calls to landline and regular cellular numbers using your SkypeOut/SkypeIn account or almost any internet voice service (SIP) such as SIPNET, EuteliaVoIP, VoIPVoIP and VoIPTalk, even from non-SIP enabled handsets.

Here’s a video that introduces fring for iPhone / iTouch.

fring is available FREE from your Apple iPod store.

The software we will be using to achieve this is Poedit. Poedit is an open-source cross-platform gettext catalogs (.po files) editor. It is built with wxWidgets toolkit and can run on any platform supported by it (although it was only tested on Unix with GTK+ and Windows). It aims to provide more convenient approach to editing catalogs than launching vi and editing the file by hand.

Step 1

Go to http://www.poedit.net/download.php and download the latest version of Poedit and install it.

Step 2

Once installation has been completed, launch the application. Since this is the first time you are starting Poedit, it will prompt you for your name and email address to set as the Last-Translator of GNU gettext files.

Step 3

Open the *.pot file by clicking File > New catalog from Pot File.

Once you open the file and fill in the information required, you will be prompted to save a *.po file.

Step 4

Once the strings are loaded, you can click on any one of them and type the translation into the box below. The status bar at the bottom allows you see how much you have translated so far.

Step 5

Once you’ve translated all the strings, just click File > Save.
Browse to the location where you saved your *.PO file. You would notice that a *.MO file has appeared, having the same name as the *.PO file. Email these two files to the software developer and you’re done!

Note

If you have some spare time, you might want to help TechCube and your community by translating the CubePoints Wordpress Plugin to another language. If you are willing to help, do let us know through the contact form or by dropping a comment on the CubePoints Plugin page.

Google Chrome new version 2.0.158.0 is out, with the introduction of faetures like profiles, auto form submittion. To install, you will need to follow this guide here: http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel. I have, however, found a problem with the tabs management in Chrome in Windows 7. Meh, as software in beta stage, you can’t really expect much. :P

To learn more on getting this release, visit this link: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/01/google-chrome-20-pre-beta.html

As for Google Chrome on Mac and Linux, there is a bunch of guys that made it here. Although not official and definitely should not be ued as a main browser, but is definitely a step towards it. If you want to get the first news on Chrome on Mac and Linux, it is the best to subscibe to the official newsletter at here (linux) or here.