The last few Alpha releases of Ubuntu 8.10 have been a bit controversial because of the dark brown theme, called NewHuman, that it was shipping by default. Good news for those of you who weren't too fond of that theme...
It was almost one year ago that we first got a glimpse of what Firefox Mobile looked like running on the Nokia N800. Then in January we saw some mockups of what their iPhone-like interface might look like for other devices, and even more recently we saw a video demonstration that knocked our socks off with an intuitive tab navigation system.
A few months ago we tried out Digsby, and our verdict was that it's one of the best cross-network messenger clients available. The only downside was that when it came to the performance of Digsby things weren't so pleasant.
Mozilla is apparently not going to sit on the sidelines while browsers such as Flock get all of the social fanfare. Instead they are trying to develop a way to integrate Web 2.0 services such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Talk, and more into a central location that makes following your friends easy. Huh, sounds like exactly what the Flock browser is for.
Songbird is a media player that I've had a lot of faith in ever since I took a look at it back at version 0.2. The fact that users create extensions just like in Firefox gave the perception that it would become very successful, but for awhile development had slowed down considerably.
AOL has retired the older version of their radio application for the Mac OS X operating system in favor of the new AOL Radio 2.0. The application is powered by CBS Radio, and includes over 200 radio stations including 150+ CBS Radio stations that are spread out across the United States.
It seems like just yesterday Firefox 3.0 was released, and here we sit with the first Alpha release of Firefox 3.1 in our lap. This new release is supposed to reach final form towards the end of the year, but until that time comes there will be plenty of pre-release versions (like this one) that you can tinker with.
Mozilla is working hard on Firefox 3.1 which is slated for release later this year, and with it will come several improvements. For starters it will include a Control+Tab replacement that makes switching between tabs a bit more fancy. It will also come packed with numerous improvements to the address bar to help please those of you who don't like how it currently handles itself.
There are a lot of great applications that are coming through Apple's App Store for both the iPhone and iPod Touch, but one of my new favorites would have to be the 100% free WordPress for iPhone.
Foxmarks has rightfully become an outrageously popular Firefox extension. I love it because I'm able to sync/backup my bookmarks with multiple computers. What makes it really nice, however, is that it integrates right into Firefox's bookmark system. That essentially means you won't even have to think about the extension once you've got it setup.
Now that Mozilla has shipped Firefox 3.0 they have begun working on the next milestone that's due out at the end of 2008. Firefox 3.1 Alpha (code named Shiretoko) is should be released on July 25th according to ZDNet, and the first Beta is expected as early as August.
VLC is one of the most well-known media players out there, and it's been almost 4 years since they've released a major new version. VLC 0.9.0 is on the horizon, and it packs in 2 years of development... so you can expect some great things. There's just one gotcha: Windows 98/ME and Mac OS X 10.3.9 are no longer supported operating systems.
One of the the most frequent comments I hear from new Ubuntu users is that the default theme for the operating system is a tad too brown. I kind of like the current Ubuntu theme, but it was supposed to get an overhaul with the last release. The new default theme has got pushed back to Ubuntu 8.10, and we're getting our first glimpse of the new theme now that Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 1 has shipped.
It's been a long time coming, but it looks as though we might have our first full-fledged desktop feed reader that supports synchronization with Google Reader. The RSS Bandit blog announced over the weekend that they have released version 1.7 Alpha that is capable of downloading podcasts as well as synchronizing feeds with Google Reader.
Digsby is hands-down my favorite instant messenger on Windows not only because it works on all the major networks, but also because it is well designed. When we first covered the messenger some of you were a little hesitant to use it because of the excessive amounts of memory it chewed up (upwards of 70MB), but you'll be happy to hear that the Digsby team has taken your criticism to heart!
Notepad++ is definitely one of the best text editors for Windows, and pretty soon it will be getting even better. The new Notepad++ 5.0 is currently in Beta, and it includes a feature I've been waiting a long time for: auto-completion! As you can see in the screenshot above I was writing a bit of HTML, and as I started to close the "center" tag it offered to auto-complete it for me.
About two weeks ago we gave you a heads up that Flock 2.0 Beta was coming, and there was a lot of excitement surrounding the release since it's based on Firefox 3.0. With that you get all of the Firefox 3 goodness including performance enhancements, advanced bookmarking, new address bar, and much more.
Win; Mac; Linux Hot on the heels of Firefox 3, the Opera team announced today that they are preparing for the launch of Opera 9.5, and they are doing so by shooting out the first (and possibly last) Release Candidate to the public. This comes just about one week after they added a new default theme to the browser.
VLC is an incredibly popular cross-platform media player, and it's well known for supporting a wide variety of media types.
The Opera browser has been prancing around with the same ol' theme for several years now, which can easily be seen from our look back at older versions of popular browsers. Needless to say a makeover has been long overdue, and it's now here! The new theme is dubbed Sharp, and is currently available in the latest snapshot release of Opera 9.5.
