Filed under: Blogging, Google

Google has rolled out a whole slew of new features for Blogger, the company's user-friendly blogging software. In order to enable the new goodies, you'll need to login to draft.blogger.com instead of www.blogger.com. This is where Google rolls out tools that might not be quite ready for prime time. But once you try out the new version, you'll probably never want to go back.

First up, Google has redesigned the post editor. It's still a what you see is what you get editor, but the toolbar looks much cleaner and placing images got about a thousand times easier thanks to a new drag and drop image handling. You can also easily resize images by clicking (or double-clicking in Firefox 3) to bring up a box that asks if you'd like an image to be small, medium or large.

Blogger in Draft also has better support for HTML and enables tables and other advanced HTML code to be placed in a post. And the preview feature brings up a new window so you can preview your post without leaving the editor window.

One thing to note is that Google has turned off the autosave feature, so you'll need to click the save button periodically if you don't want to lose your work. Autosave should be restored in a future update.

Continue reading Google gives Blogger a long overdue facelift

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Filed under: Windows Mobile, Symbian, Mobile Minute, Browsers

Opera's been working on its next generation mobile web browser for months now. And while a handful of folks have been able to get their hands on devices preloaded with Opera Mobile 9.5, most of us have been waiting impatiently to get our hands the downloadable version.

While Opera might not have much market share in the desktop browser space, the company's mobile browser is miles ahead of the browsers that come standard with most Windows Mobile, Symbian, or other cellphones. Opera Mini and Opera Mobile 8.65 are already some of the best mobile browsers around. Opera Mobile 9.5 adds Flash Lite 3 support, quicker page rendering, full page zoom, a password manager, and the ability to copy and paste text selections.

Today the Opera Mobile team announced that the first public beta version of Opera Mobile 9.5 will be available for download on July 15th. If history is anything to go by, Opera will probably charge somewhere between $20 and $30 for this browser eventually. But while in beta, the browser will be free.

[via jkOnTheRun]

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Filed under: Video, Web services, Beta

We've covered the BBC iPlayer in great depth here at Download Squad - from its inception to nationwide rollout - and today, the BBC has announced version 2 of the (hugely successful) project. The new-look site has been heavily re-designed, bringing together both Radio and Television shows in a central portal. Personalisation also seems to be the key to the new release, which incidentally runs side-by-side (at least for now) with the previous version. The iPlayer site keeps track of what you last watched, listing up to ten recently-viewed shows and if that weren't enough, a list of 'last night's TV' is available to help you find shows to catch up with. The video playback size also increased from 512 pixels wide to 640 pixels (a jump of 25%) and the BBC has promised a more 'cinematic' feel to pages playing video.

The iPlayer continues to use Flash to stream videos online for seven days after broadcast, and remains available only to UK residents due to the BBC's publicly-funded status - but if you're a UK resident then you can get started with this new beta here.

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Filed under: Search

Pdf search engine bills itself as a search engine to locate ebooks on the Internet. Enter in the title you are looking for and it scour the world wide web displaying links to pdf files it comes across that matches your search term.

But you'd be wrong if you thought pdf search engine was just a one trick pony. While it does call itself a book search engine, the site can also locate any pdf document that's out there. In our testing, we were able to locate tax return forms, DMV applications for specific states and other pdf documents floating around the 'net.

Powered by google, pdf search engine might be the site to visit when you're looking for pdf documents on the Internet. Or you could simply just enter what you're looking for plus filetype:pdf in google and achieve the same results.

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Filed under: Internet

As expected, the international body that oversees internet domain names has voted to change the way top-level domains work. Right now there are only about 200 top level domains, with some of the most widespread being .com, .net, .org, and .edu. But under the rules adopted by ICANN today, companies or individuals will be able to register top line domains using pretty much any string of characters.

For example, why settle for www.downloadquad.com when you could have www.download.squad? The advantage to the new system is that it will be much easier to snag the domain you really want. The down side is that most web surfers tend to think in .com. It's already hard enough to remember whether you need to type in .com, .net, or .org. It could be much harder to find the page you're looking for if there are literally millions of options.

Of course, it's not like just anybody is going to go out and register a new top-level domain. The application fee will be upwards of $100,000. And even if we do wind up with 2000 or even 2,000,000 top-level domains instead of 200, odds are it'll still be easy enough to find the sites you're looking for thanks to these nifty things called search engines.

ICANN has also approved the use of Arabic and Cyrillic scripts for top-level domains.

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Filed under: OS Updates, Microsoft

Like most tech companies, Microsoft tends to come up with code names for upcoming software releases. Windows Vista was called "Longhorn" before it was released. And for a while, we've been hearing that Microsoft is working on an updated version of the operating system called "Fiji."

Fiji won't be Windows 7, but rather an updated version of Windows Vista that could contain additional features such as an updated version of Windows Media Center.

There's pretty much zero chance that Microsoft will ever release a product called Fiji. This is just a codename used by the developers. But apparently Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, attorney general of the nation of Fiji says he's not particularly pleased with Microsoft's use of the name. Of course, it seems that Sayed-Khaiyum may be under the mistaken impression that Microsoft will release a commercial product called Fiji, since the attorney general says the country's name should not be used for "commercial gain."

[via Ian Dixon's Blog]

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Filed under: Utilities, Windows

If you use have a handful of portable apps on a thumb drive you'll appreciate the portable start menu.

Developed by Aignesberger Software GmbH, portable start menu will scan your thumb drive for all your executables and create a start menu accessible from your system tray.

Portable start menu can also be configured to auto run applications when the thumb drive is inserted as well as close out all your portable apps when you exit the start menu program.

Available for the Windows operating system, portable start menu can be downloaded for free at Aignes.com.

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Filed under: Fun, Internet

I remember being a little girl, and watching my friends fuss about what their babies would like if they married George Michael, or Michael Jackson (so I am not only carbon-dating myself, but I'm also showing how naive my friends and I were). Oh, c'mon, I never fussed about these things. I was too busy playing with the Commodore PET.

The Commodore PET could only dream of doing the things modern computers (or little girls) do. Today, its dreams have come true with the introduction of (cough) MakeMeBabies.com. Okay, this site is for entertainment purposes only. The resulting child of any of these unions, holy, unholy, or otherwise, may not be true to life. Yet all of us here at Download Squad are wasting way too much time spreading our genes throughout Hollywood.

They'll thank us later, for sure.

The results of our fooling around (hate the game, not the playaz, guys) produced some interesting (if extremely disturbing) results. My (real life) husband and I had a blonde child that was much too good looking to have come from either of us. Never mind that neither of us are blonde. Antonio Banderas and I produced a child that had some serious facial issues. Interestingly enough, fellow Download Squad lady bloggers (why aren't the guy Squadders doing this too?) seemed to have children with similar facial issues. Actually, we all seemed to have the same child with Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, and Antonio Banderas.

So what do you all think? One trick algorithm putting similar features on generic children's heads? Or is it a deeper conspiracy? Do all the guys in Hollywood have the same genetic structure? Are they all inbred? Or maybe... Maybe it's all of us here at Download Squad. We'll never tell.

[via Jay Martinez.com]

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Filed under: Windows Mobile, Microsoft

Microsoft has announced plans to buy MobiComp, a Portuguese software company that develops applications for storing cellphone data online.

MobiComp's products allow you to perform over the air backups of your contacts, calendar, and other mobile data. The company's MobileKeeper Sharing & Communities software also lets you share and download content from social networks including Flickr and Hi5.

The acquisition is described as Microsoft's largest investment in Portugal. Nobody's saying exactly what Microsoft is planning to do with MobiComp's technology, but we'd say it's a safe bet that you could eventually see some sort of data backup/synchronization software for Windows Mobile devices, perhaps as part of the Windows Live suite of web-based services.

[via Electronista]

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Filed under: Internet, Office, Web services, web 2.0

Those folks at Zoho just don't quit, do they? Last year the company rolled out a major redesign of its powerful, web-based PowerPoint clone. And now Zoho Show 2.0 has 8 new features, some more exciting than others.

1. Export to PPT, PPS, PDF, and ODP. You've been able to export files as HTML for a while, but the addition of PowerPoint and PDF export brings Zoho Show a bit closer to being a true PowerPoint replacement
2. You can now import images from Picasa (Zoho Show already supported Flickr importing)
3. Support for up to 50 undo/redo actions
4. Support for 9 new languages: Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Portguese, Spanish, and Swedish.
5. Create contact groups for sharing your presentations with
6. Copy and paste slides from one presentation to another
7. Enhanced remote presentation user inteface
8. Advanced options for embedding presentations on a web site

You can see a demo presentation highlighting the new features after the jump.

[via Mashable]

Continue reading Zoho Show now supports PPT export, Picasa import

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