The next major release of Open Office is now publicly available for testing and features some interesting new enhancements and improved compatibility with Microsoft Office. Of particular note is the fact that it is now able to run on Mac OS without the need for X11 therefore meaning it now behaves like any other Aqua application. Equally important is the fact that Open Office now works with Microsoft Office 2007 and 2008 documents.

Other exciting improvements include a solver component which allows solving optimization problems where the optimum value of a particular spreadsheet cell has to be calculated, chart enhancements, better sharing options for spreadsheets, some new and updated icons and enhanced editing features in Writer to make tracking changes much easier to follow. The developers behind Open Office have also introduced a new Start Centre which they claim will make launching components from the suite much easier:

The most immediately visible change to OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the new “Start Centre”, new fresh-looking icons, and a new zoom control in the status bar. A closer look shows that 3.0 has a myriad of new features. Notable Calc improvements include a new solver component; support for spreadsheet collaboration through workbook sharing; and an increase to 1024 columns per sheet. Writer has an improved notes feature and displays of multiple pages while editing. There are numerous Chart enhancements, and an improved crop feature in Draw and Impress.

Note that because this is still a beta version, you may experience some bugs or difficulties but for me, this is certainly the most exciting Open Office yet and with ability to work with MS Office 2007 and 2008 now added, surely even more users are going to wonder why they should bother coughing up hundreds of dollars for Microsoft Office.

The world is going through a tough economic period: rising inflation, high unemployment, crises in the housing and banking sectors, oil prices running high….things are looking pretty bleak this year and aren’t expected to get any better for some time. While the US economy isn’t officially in a recession, at least not yet, it is expected to stagnate this year. What is it you can do to prepare for an eventual recession? The best I can do is suggest a few widgets to help you monitor your stock and news on your Mac. At least you won’t be surprised if a real crisis hits.

• iStocks Widget - View stock on all world markets. Includes a graph view expendable from a day to 2 years.
• Google Adsense Widget - Money not coming in from your other sources of income? Check how much you’re still making online daily on your Google Adsense account.
• Currency Converter - Worried about fluctuating currency rates? Use this widget to compare the best rates and avoid losing out when converting money.
• Gas - Oil prices have gone up drastically in recent years. With this widget you can find the cheapest gas station near you.
• iActu USA - Keep an eye on the news at all times so you can be informed in case a disaster strikes.
• WagerWidget - Your last chance of saving yourself my just go by betting the last of your savings over your favorite sports team.
• AirCompare - Can’t stand the pessimism? Find yourself a cheap flight and runaway to an exotic location until the economy gets better.

And if you have a portable device check out our post on pocket apps to monitor your stock.

Ever felt that Outlook is not exactly the most helpful e-mail client when it comes to finding old attachments or sending group e-mails? If so, then get your hands on the excellent Xobni which has just been released as a public beta version. This is no average plugin either - it’s the result of 7 months closed beta testing and adds major new functionalities to Outlook.

Once installed, you’ll see the Xobni sidebar on the right of your Outlook interface. It creates a separate profile for every contact (with a little photo too if you want) in your contacts list where you can see data about your relationship statistics (how many e-mails you’ve exchanged including a ranking based on how frequently you contact them), related contacts, threaded conversations and attachments they’ve exchanged with you.

One particularly useful feature is a small graph at the top of the profile which shows you averages of the time of the day you most frequently exchange e-mails which gives you an idea of that person’s working time schedule (useful if you don’t work in the same office). In addition, it adds contact details automatically to your e-mails without even requiring any info from your Outlook contacts list. It does this by detecting phone numbers and e-mail addresses that people have sent you and then automatically creating a profile based on this data. On top of this, finding threaded e-mails and attachments is considerably easier than trawling for them through Outlook. In fact, searching in Xobni is a pleasure because it has its own search bar which instantly brings up contacts with contact details and your most recent conversations with them.

If you’re continually finding yourself frustrated with Outlook, then you might find that Xobni brings long overdue Gmail style functionality to the world’s most widely used desktop e-mail client.

You can download Xobni here and see it in action here:

Widgets have added a whole new dimension to Windows desktops allowing you to track and stay informed about your favourite sites and news sources more easily than ever before. If you’ve never tried one then widgets are basically downloadable tools that provide services such as showing you the latest news, the current weather, the time, a calendar, a map program, a calculator, a language translator among many other things. Windows Vista has incorporated widgets into its very make up automatically providing you with a calendar and clock widget as standard with options to add many more. Mac fans will be keen to point out that widgets have been a part of their world for a long time already as Cyril highlighted a while back. XP users however have had to wait until developers and software giants such as Yahoo have slowly released widgets that work on XP’s desktop but it’s been worth the wait.

Here are 5 XP widgets from Yahoo that you might not know about but should definitely check out:

Vista Sidebar XP - Get Vista’s widget sidebar on Windows XP for free

Picture Frame - The quickest way to upload your favourite photos to Flickr

Yahoo! Widget Gallery - Get updated with the latest Yahoo widget releases

Rainlender - Fully customisable desktop calendar to make you better organised

Desktop X - Still haven’t found what you’re looking for? Then make your own widget with this

Windows: Though Windows is relatively easy to customize, there are still a few options that remain hidden under unknown menus. TweakNow WinSecret unveils them all in an attractive, well organized interface where you’ll be able to tweak all sorts of special Windows settings concerning appearance, security and behavior.

Mac: The Sudoku fad may have been replaced by all the brain training games popping up everywhere, but Sudoku is still pretty popular, and remains a very enjoyable logic game. SudokuAdept is great for beginners as it features loads of settings to help you finish off your sudoku and adjustable difficulty levels, great to help you progress.

Mobile: Looking to travel during the weekend? GPS Tuner offers high precision measurements to show you detailed maps. The application works very well whether you are on the road, out on a boat, hiking in the mountains or even flying. GPS Tuner also makes it very easy to manage, modify, import and export your waypoints.

Windows: Are you tired of castles and soldiers historical strategy games? Give the genre a twist with Sins of a Solar Empire, a real-time strategy game set in outer space. Command your spaceship troops and explore other planets while struggling to manage resources properly and taking your civilization to the highest levels of social and scientific development.

Mac: If you have a busy schedule, staying on top of tasks is crucial. Dejumble is a menu bar item which lets you not only create your own tasks, but also view them in a list, add tags and enter notes. The application integrates with iCal, so your tasks are stored there too, and comes in a simple floating window which can be launched quickly from the menu bar.

Pocket PC: If you’re anything like me then you’ve always dreamed about living in a world entirely made out of clay. Well, now you can thanks to Platypus, a side-scrolling shooter where all the game’s elements are made from clay. You take command of a doughy spacecraft and must blast invaders out of the sky. Watch out for the splatty explosions - they’re out of this world!

Pocket PC:UNO is one of the most wickedly intensive card games ever created, and you can now play the game on your mobile phone. UNO Classic 2007 is a gorgeously presented recreation, with loads of characters and backgrounds to choose from. Don’t worry if you don’t know the rules because they’re very well explained here.

Windows: If you wan to add even more functionality to your Firefox browser, this extension is for you. With Auto Context you get an extra web context menu that pops up when you select any word or text, and offers a customizable selection of tasks from searching that text on Google to opening it as an URL. Auto Context can also work with other compatible extensions so that you get the most from them all.

Mac: Want to focus only on today’s work? Then the Today application for Mac should help you out. This program synchronizes perfectly with both Apple Mail and iCal to show all your tasks and events for the day. It can be opened up from the Dock or the menu bar. And if you don’t want to bother opening up iCal you can create new tasks and events straight from Today. Try it out now (I mean today)!

If there’s one thing I really need help with in my browser, it’s bookmarking. I’m constantly discovering new and interesting sites and pages but rarely have time to organise them in any in any meaningful way. Of course, I have folders for each different subject and topic but I just don’t have the time to go through them all once I’ve decided to add them to my favourites. I just add them to the main menu until my favourites list is now just a sprawl of bizarre links ranging from cooking sites to classic YouTube videos.

That’s why I’m quite excited about the much talked about new bookmarking feature in Firefox 3. There are three main features that disorganised bookmarkers like myself will welcome - Bookmark Stars, Bookmark Tags, and Smart Bookmark Folders. The Star feature is my favourite. It’s similar to the way you can mark items with a star in Gmail. At the end of the address bar, there appears a star that once clicked on, immediately adds the page to your bookmarks - no more going to the time consuming process of the file menu and selecting “Bookmarks - Bookmark This Page”. If you double click on the star, it brings up the bookmark editor so you can easily select which folder you want to put it in or even quicker, just give it a tag (again, very similar to the way Gmail works). Tags allow you to organise bookmarks in a bunch of folders or areas rather than just one - very useful for those bookmarks which don’t fall neatly into one particular category. Finally, the Smart Folders option is a very clever way of keeping your folders always up to date and organised. By creating a keyword for a particular folder, everytime you tag a page with that word, it will be automatically added to that folder with no further action required on your part.

On the downside however, it does seem that the bookmark dialogues and menu take slightly longer to open in Firefox 3 than Firefox 2. So sometimes, you feel like whatever time you save in organising your pages, you lose in loading time. Whether this is just a bug that they will hopefully iron out in the final version or whether it’s something we’ll have to live with for now remains to be seen but for once in my life, my bookmarks make sense again and I’m rediscovering pages I’d bookmarked years ago.

A recent announcement from Dell and a BBC report, outline that sales of Linux based computer have experienced a year of constant growth. Linux is rebounding, at least for non Wal-Mart customers, among end-users for several reasons. Let’s take a look at some of these.

Both end-users and organizations are largely unhappy with the latest version of Windows OS, Windows Vista, which has been perceived more as a theme-pack for Windows XP than as a new operating system. It has been said to be slower, to require more resources and to have still lots of bugs. Bill Gates has announced in fact that a new edition of Window, version 7, will be released in one year time.

On top of this, many computer producers, from ASUS to Dell, decided to offer the option to buy PC and notebook with Ubuntu pre-installed - a user friendly Linux distribution. This allows them to lower the final price, offering cheaper but competitive products. The reason behind a general lower price is not only because Linux is free and almost all its programs are as well. This operating system tends to require fewer resources so that the hardware used doesn’t necessarily have to be the latest, cutting edge kit.

On top of these two main factors, the security side also plays a big role in favor of Linux. The threat of virus spread via P2P and other Internet technologies is greatly reduced, as not only are there far fewer viruses and Trojans designed to attack Linux, the kernel (or core) or the operating system is inherently more stable than that of Windows.

Last but not least, the availability of software like Wine and Cedega, allows users to emulate the Windows environment in order to run games and programs they couldn’t otherwise run. Consider it just as an option for specific programs you can’t find a Linux version of or for games. To be clearer, it will be much faster to use Linux OpenOffice rather then using Windows MS Office with Wine on Linux. But for specific apps, like phone managers, 3D games etc, Wine or Cedega are better.

One of the coolest looking features of Leopard has got to be Spaces, the virtual desktop manager made easy for consumers. But is it really that useful?

Spaces is not intended for different users on one Mac. If that’s what you need just create different accounts. Instead you’ll find that Spaces is useful if you carry out very different tasks on your Mac and usually find your desktop cluttered with open applications. Exposé users who tend to use F11 to clear up all items on their screen, or often find they have more than four applications open will also find switching to Spaces much easier.

Let’s see how the function can be configured and what Spaces you can create on your Mac. Spaces is available from the ‘Personal’ section in your System Preferences. You can create up to 16 different desktops in total, divided in four rows and columns. From the System Preferences pane, you select the hotkeys to activate Spaces and switch between them. The default is F8 and CTRL+1 (or 2, 3, 4, etc) lets you switch between them. You will see a popup window appear on the screen to indicate which Space you switched to. I also suggest selecting a ’screen corner’ from the Exposé tab to activate Spaces at the drag of your cursor.

Read the rest of this entry »

Voice Over IP is a technology that allows you to use the Internet Protocol to transmit your voice and, practically speaking, to call everywhere in the world, mobile or landline numbers. Skype is the most widely known and used VoIP application, but there are also other valid options, like VoipBuster, which can be an even a cheaper solution when calling abroad.

Recently though, I had some issues on the quality side of my VoIP conversations. Although I used a handset, this was not enough to reach the same quality level of a normal land-line telephone conversation. You can actually end up getting very frustrated when your voice is cut and you don’t realise it until you discover the other person is speaking on their own without listening to you at all! In fact, it may happen that if you both speak at the same time, your voice doesn’t go through and you have to repeat things, ruing the natural feeling of a relaxing good chat. How can you improve then the quality of VoIP conversation?

Some well known advice is to use a good handset, which in fact is a must have for internet phone calls, then to double check that your software is updated and finally to avoid downloading or watching online TV while calling. That’s all fairly obvious.

More advanced users could double check if in their router is set to prioritize the VoIP traffic in the router configuration page. Most routers allow you to do so in their Quality of Service (QoS) settings, and you should prioritize the IP address and audio UDP port for your VoIP provider. Some modern routers though, are smart enough to recognize VoIP traffic, and automatically prioritise it over other kinds of traffic, but you can easily check this in your router configuration page. Another easy step to follow is to optimize your computer for broadband. SG TCP Optimizer, for example, can change your OS’s networking settings to allow your computer making the best use of your broadband connection.

If you have experienced poor quality on VoIP conversation, tell us how you solved it and what do you believe being the best VoIP application.

If you’re sitting in front of your PC and feel like watching TV, you don’t need to switch your TV set on anymore: simply launch Zattoo and you’ll be able to watch a bunch of online streaming TV channels right on your computer. The program’s latest version, 3.1.1 Beta, includes a TV guide and a channel selector as the main new features.

For those of you that spend a major part of their day writing, having a good program to create and save abbreviations can be a real lifesaver. Typinator for Mac lets you easily create abbreviations, which you can save in sets and use in any sort of document. It also imports snippets from similar applications like TypeIt4Me.

Why bother scrabbling around inside your the many menus in your Windows Mobile Pocket PC, when you can manage your whole life simply from the Today screen? PocketBreeze replaces the built-in calendar, tasks and mail on your home screen with a series of other customisable features. Try it now and your life will never be so well organised!

The Windows standard Notepad is certainly not the best text editor around. It doesn’t play well with large files, open files from other platforms properly, let you customize background and text color… not to mention the absence of an advanced search and replace tool or the inability to work with several documents open at the same time.

For these reasons many people simply abandon it and start using other editors, which usually include all those advanced tools and features that Notepad lacks. Here are some of them:

• Notepad++ - powerful editor with support for zoom, bookmarks and drag-and-drop
• Notepad2 - advanced text editor with syntax highlighting for coding languages
• TED Notepad - light-weight editor with very powerful tools
• EditPad - an editor with no size limits and an auto-save feature
• MiniPad2 - great editor with tabbed interface and advanced clipboard functionality

You can use any of those instead of Notepad. But if you prefer a more radical change, you may replace the standard Windows tool completely with your new favorite editor and forget about Notepad forever. Want to know how? Just following these simple steps: Read the rest of this entry »

You know how every time you transfer files from a PC to a Mac via a USB stick you get all these .DS_Store or Trashes files cluttering up your thumb drive? Lifehacker point to a blog post from Macworld which tells you how to get rid of hidden files like these via the Terminal. If you have Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) then open up the Terminal from your Utilities folder in Applications and type: dot_clean /path/folder. This command will join all .DS_Store files with the ones they correspond to.

Another way to get rid of these hidden files is by using an application built to take care of them. CleanArchiver can create archive files for you whilst excluding icon files and .DS_Store files, so the bundle comes out looking cleaner. Changes tracks the differences in multiple versions of files or folders and can make .DS_Store files immediately visible to you. The best one to take care of these pestering files though would be BlueHarvest. This program can be set to search for hidden files like .DS_Store or Trashes in the folders you tell it to look into. It’ll make sure your drives and servers always stay clean of these unwanted and useless files.

The number of online TV services is growing by the day, and every time you wake up there seems to be dozens more ways to enjoy your favorite programs. Online Live lets you watch more than 3,000 free Internet TV channels, on-demand videos and listen to free online radio shows. The live TV channels database claims to be the biggest in the world.

It’s not always that we talk about widgets, but when we do it’s usually that they’re pretty good. iCal Events is exactly what you’d expect of one: it simply makes your life easier. The widget will display all your events from one day up to two weeks. It’s also resizable so you can have all future events displayed on your Dashboard without ever having to open up iCal. Events are shown with their corresponding color code and date and hour. A great way to keep on top of your schedule.

Bomberman is one of the all-time classic console titles and now you can enjoy the fun on your mobile phone too, thanks to Bomber. The game charges you with the task of setting bombs to blast your way through rocks and reach the aliens - who you must also blow up. Just make sure you get out of the way before the explosion goes off!