There is a new and fresh logo for .NET. The team refer the new design as “wave” and the logo contains light and dark background oriented vertically and horizontally.
The old .NET logo was 8 years old and Microsoft wants a new logo which sync with .NET key values: consistency, robustness and great user experiences. That’s why they had came out with this logo.
There are a lot of desktop applications go online nowadays. For example, we have Sumo Paint, PhotoShop Express, and Google Docs. Now, Microsoft announced that they are extending Office to the browser.
They will provide users lightweight version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. With these web based applications, user can use a browser to create and edit documents.
Microsoft will deliver Office Web applications through Office Live. With the release of Office Live, Microsoft will competes with other famous web based office provider such as Google Docs and Zoho Office.
If you are going to buy a laptop, i am sure you will do a lot of survey to gather more information. You may want to know the laptop’s spec, the pros and cons of the model, and probably some screenshot of the laptop in different views. So, you may need to go through a lot of websites and put a lot of time to gather the information.
So, why not give Laptopical a try. They list down the specification, pros and cons and a full and detail review of laptops. You can even found similar laptops and view the photo of the laptop at different views.
The above screenshot is the main page of Laptopical, which clearly shows the laptop news and latest reviews, while you can find more information through the sidebar. The Interesting Laptop News section covers all latest information about laptop and computer accessories.
How you define a computer/laptop speed? How fast is fast? It is actually according to how you are going to use the laptop. You may interest to read more on how to choose the best laptop in their The Best New Laptops section.
You may also read the reviews by each brand. For example, you may go through the Samsung reviews by entering the Samsung Laptops category.
If you want to get the latest news from them, you may consider to subscribe to their RSS feed or follow their Twitter.
Adobe had released its new PDF reader, Adobe Reader 9. With Adobe Reader 9, users can play Flash, shockwave, and other rich media contents directly from Adobe Reader without the need to open another applications.
Adobe Reader 9 also loads faster than its previous version. The main attraction of Adobe Reader 9 is users can view the flash content from the reader, without the need to open another applications. I am sure a lot of rich media PDF documents will come out due to this feature.
I hope Adobe Reader 9’s load speed will not affected by these rich media content, else users will go to other alternatives such as Foxit Reader or Sumatra PDF, which load faster than Adobe Reader.
Yahoo had add two new domains – Ymail and Rocketmail for its Email service.
How many of you are Yahoo mail users? I think most of the internet users will have at least one Yahoo mail account right? But, when you try to register a new account, and you found that some one had already chosen the name, what will you do? Use the recommend name or think another one? Or you will give up Yahoo mail and switch to another Email provider?
With the new domains, Yahoo believe more users will stay with them and can get their desired username. To register with the new domains, simply click the signup button, and choose your domain when you provide your yahoo ID.
So, why not grab your desired account now?
Google Docs users may discover that they can start upload, preview and share PDF documents. Google had announced this feature in the blog and every Google Docs users can enjoy it.
Following Scribd, SlideShare, Docstoc, Google finally launched PDF documents sharing service. With this service, Google Docs users can upload and share PDF documents.
Currently, users can only upload and view the PDF documents, but they are not allow to edit. Also, the maximum size supported is 10MB for documents upload from PC, while 2MB for documents from web.
I hope that Google will implement the PDF editing feature in future. Furthermore, if Google let users to save documents directly to PDF format will be the best.
Source: Google docs blog
Skype just announced new unlimited calling plans to overseas phones for just $9.95 per month. With the new packages, you can get unlimited calls to the 34 countries over the world.
Skype introduce 3 different packages for users in different region. The screenshot below show the differences between 3 different packages:
Countries that are included in Unlimited World are Chile, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Malaysia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe countries. You can view the full list of supported countries here.
In some countries such as Singapore and China, you even can call the mobile for free!
Source: Life Rocks 2.0
Scribd had launch a program called Convert your paper to iPaper, which means they will scan your paper documents for free, and publish them on the internet for free.
Document sharing website Scribd launched iPaper in February and now they are taking one step further to introduce this service. The company has a strict process to make sure you are not going to send them a lot of documents. Here is the instruction:
To participate, just send a brief description of the type and quantity of your documents to paper@scribd.com. A Scribd representative will reply shortly with further instructions for how and where to mail the documents. Scribd will have the content scanned and published on Scribd.com to be easily shared with anyone. Include your Scribd username along with your paper so that your content will be published in your account. If you are not a Scribd user, include your email address, and Scribd will email you a link to your published content.
I believe this service will bring a lot of benefits to students, as they can get free scanning service and can share their documents with friends.
Scribd claims that this service will be available for limited time only, and they may choose to not scan the materials received. For further information, please visit their page.
Source: webware
Pingie is a service which is kind of RSS to SMS notification utility. It will send an SMS to you whenever a new post appear in your “watch” feed.
Google Reader, Feedreader, RSS Reader, and Newsgator are examples of great Reader, but if you want the RSS content deliver to your mobile, you need Pingie.
Pingie is an absolutely free service. You provide your email, phone number, and RSS Feed URL to them, and they will notify you whenever the RSS Feed get updated. You can follow certain category’s or certain author’s update by provide the correct Feed URL.
For example, if you want to follow my Tech News, you can enter http://www.techsnack.net/category/tech-news/rss.
Pligg going to lunch a new service named “Fraxi” which is a feature web-based tools for creating Pligg powered site. You can create a Pligg site for your interests, such as computers, internet, or any other topic.
Ning allow anyone to create their own social network and same thing happen to Pligg now. Pligg will soon launch Fraxi which let user without any web design skills to launch their own social news website. There are lots of Digg-similar website around us, Mixx and Reddit are two of them.
Pligg is an open source project that allow users to create their own Digg-similar website with just a few mouse click. You can download the source code and install at your own web server to try it out. According to Techcrunch, Pligg was recently put up for sale, but nobody showed any interest in acquiring them, so i think this is the main reason why they launch Fraxi.
Fraxi will give a subdomain for every user, such as yourname.fraxi.com. The service will be free and we are waiting the company to announce more details.
This new service will compete with coRank, which was recently relaunched and has a lot of users. I believe that Fraxi will have ad-based revenue model. Maybe they will placed some ads on the sidebar or any place of the site.
Currently, Fraxi main page only show a splash page, so we are waiting them to announce more details.
