Windows alternatives...: September 2010

OpenOfffice becomes LibreOffice!

About LibreOffice

LibreOffice is a productivity suite that is compatible with other major office suites, and available on a variety of platforms. It is free software and therefore free to download, use and distribute.

Download LibreOffice

The following software packages are intended to give you a first impression of what LibreOffice is. Currently we are in the process of combining the work of many contributors, and improving how to make the software available to our users. There are known issues, so please consider reading the release notes below for a list of known issues being worked on, the most obvious being the missing language packaging situation.

This beta release is not intended for production use!

You can also download using BitTorrent.

LibreOffice Productivity Suite - The Document Foundation: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

WordPress.com and Windows Live partnering together and providing an upgrade for 30 million Windows Live Spaces customers

Over the last few weeks, we’ve spent a good bit of time talking about our approach to partnering with the web, and as part of that, how we’re deeply integrating with the leading consumer services that you find most valuable. Earlier today, I had the opportunity to get on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, and with Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic (the parent company of WordPress.com), announce an exciting partnership between our companies.

Providing a great blogging experience

As we looked at customers’ blogging needs and what different companies were providing, we were particularly interested in what WordPress.com is doing. They have a host of impressive capabilities – from a scalable platform and leading spam protection, to great personalization and customization. WordPress powers over 8.5% of the web, is used on over 26 million sites, and WordPress.com is seen by over 250 million people every month. Not only that, Automattic is a company filled with great people focused on improving blogging experiences. So rather than having Windows Live invest in a competing blogging service, we decided the best thing we could do for our customers was to give them a great blogging solution through WordPress.com.

As we looked at how we brought Windows Live and WordPress.com together, there were three big things we wanted to deliver:

Giving existing Windows Live Spaces customers an easy upgrade of their blogging experience to WordPress.com
Letting anyone connect their WordPress.com blog to Messenger so their Messenger friends are updated when they publish a new post on WordPress.com
Allowing Windows Live customers to easily create new blogs on WordPress.com

Upgrading a Windows Live Spaces blog to WordPress.com

There are 30 million people who are actively using Windows Live Spaces and have been eagerly awaiting the next set of new blogging features. For these customers, Windows Live and WordPress.com have worked together to build a simple way to move your blog posts, comments, and integrated photos right over to WordPress.com and start taking advantage of all their new features. And we’ll also redirect all your old Spaces URLs to your new blog, so you don’t lose any visitors along the way. If you want to get started today, just visit your existing Space and you’ll see a prompt like this:

If you’re not ready to migrate today, you can also choose to download your blog content, migrate later, or delete your Space. There’s more information posted online to help you with your options, and if you have additional questions on the migration, please visit the WordPress.com support center.

Easily share with your Messenger friends

With Messenger Connect, any website can easily give their customers the ability to share updates with their Messenger friends, and WordPress.com has done exactly this.

So, if you have a blog on WordPress.com, we know that one of the things that is likely important to you is the ability to share the blog with your friends. Of course, on WordPress.com, you can make the blog public and people can subscribe to the blog via RSS or you can just email a link to the site. But when you connect your Messenger account to Wordpress.com, you can have new posts on your WordPress.com blog automatically send a notification for each new blog post to your Messenger friends’ feeds.

Windows Live customers getting started with a new blog

Starting today, when new Windows Live customers go to create a new blog on the web, we’ll help them create that new blog on WordPress.com. And when Windows Live Essentials 2011 releases later this fall, Windows Live Writer will also use WordPress.com as its default blogging solution.

Windows Live and WordPress.com

We’re very excited to work with WordPress.com to give our shared customers a great experience that connects the fantastic blogging capabilities on WordPress.com with the leading communications and sharing services on Windows Live. We hope you enjoy this too, and we look forward to partnering with even more great services from around the web.

Dharmesh Mehta
Director, Windows Live Product Management

WordPress.com and Windows Live partnering together and providing an upgrade for 30 million Windows Live Spaces customers

35 HIDDEN APPLICATIONS IN WINDOWS XP - FixYa

35 HIDDEN APPLICATIONS IN WINDOWS XP
Here is a list of hidden applications which are quite useful...

To run any of these applications go to Start > Run and type the executable name (ie charmap.exe). 1) Character Map = charmap.exe (very useful for finding unusual characters)

2) Disk Cleanup = cleanmgr.exe

3) Clipboard Viewer = clipbrd.exe (views contents of window$ clipboard)

4) Dr Watson = drwtsn32.exe (Troubleshooting tool)

5) DirectX diagnosis = dxdiag.exe (Diagnose & test DirectX, video & sound cards)

6) Private character editor = eudcedit.exe (allows creation or modification of characters)

7) IExpress Wizard = iexpress.exe (Create self-extracting / self-installing package)

8) Micro$oft Synchronization Manager = mobsync.exe (appears to allow synchronization of files on the network for when working offline. Apparently undocumented).

9) window$ Media Player 5.1 = mplay32.exe (Retro version of Media Player, very basic).

10) ODBC Data Source Administrator = odbcad32.exe (something to do with databases)

Full list here: 35 HIDDEN APPLICATIONS IN WINDOWS XP - FixYa

Google Apps: Should You Switch?

Google's new web-based office software suite, which the company announced Thursday, is a swift kick to the teeth delivered squarely in the direction of Microsoft. Or is it?

Google Apps Premier Edition is a collection of office tools for businesses -- word processor, spreadsheet, e-mail, calendar and web page creator -- all of which are accessible through a web browser. Pricing is set at $50 per user per year, less expensive than Microsoft Office but with much the same functionality. Microsoft has its own web-based suite of tools in Office Live, but the company's offering doesn't match Google's. And Google isn't going after Office Live, it's going after Office.

The suite and others like it are visions of a possible future when all software will be delivered over the internet. Does the arrival of Google Apps Premier Edition signal the death of desktop software dinosaurs like Microsoft Office?

While the idea is compelling, the answer is no. Not yet, at least. There are many reasons to get excited about Google's new plan, but there are just as many reasons to stick with the status qu

Google Apps: Should You Switch?

SCRAPBOOK :: Firefox Extension

ScrapBook is a Firefox extension, which helps you to save Web pages and manage the collection. Key features are lightness, speed, accuracy and multi-language support. Major features are:

SCRAPBOOK :: Firefox Extension