Microsoft Office 2010 Beta
Microsoft has now released a beta of its new office suite, Office 2010. Microsoft Office 2010 offers you rich and powerful new ways to deliver your best work – at work, home or school – on your computer, from a Windows Mobile-based Smartphone or via a Web browser. Quickly and creatively grab your audience’s attention and inspire them with your ideas by using enhanced and easy-to-use tools, customizable templates, color schemes, and photo-editing capabilities. With a new co-authoring experience, you can work with people from different locations at the same time. And by offering more ways to access your files from almost anywhere, Office 2010 puts you in control of getting things done according to your schedule. Simplify your tasks and create amazing results with Office 2010 — wherever life takes you.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 is Released
Mozilla has released yet another beta of Firefox 3.6, and they have fixed more than 140 bugs fixed, get it now from the link below.
Download Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 – Eng
Download Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 – All Lang
Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 Released
Mozilla has released yet another beta for Firefox 3.6, this is the third beta meaning the RC is at hand, this beta fixes more than 80 bugs and much more stable and the improved JavaScript engine does a good job in rendering but the 3.6 is marginally faster than 3.5 I hope this will change in 3.7.
If you are using 3.6 beta 1 or 3.6 beta 2 I advise you to upgrade ASAP. Incompatible plugins are always an issue, but you can always disable compatibility checking by following this guide, but Its better you install Mozilla’s Add-on Compatibility Reporter add-on and tell Mozilla if your favorite add-ons work with the new Firefox release. This add-on disables compatibility check as well.
I have checked and I’m confirming that Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 DOES NOT break the following extensions:
LastPass
Xmarks
Greasemonkey
Ad Block Plus
Ad Block Plus Element Hiding Helper
Download Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 – English
Download Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 – All Language
Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 Released
This is bit late, but if you are dying to test Firefox 3.6 and have not yet been informed of it, well here it is. There are some major changes introduced here including built in support for personas. So if you haven’t got it yet well here is your chance download and see the web through the eyes of a next generation Fox. 
Main Features Introduced in 3.6 beta 1
- Users can now change their browser’s appearance with a single click, with built in support for Personas.
- Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
- Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
- Support for the WOFF font format.
- Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
- Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.
The complete list of changes, known issues and release notes can be found here. The list of changes for plug-in (or add-on) developers can be found here.
Download Firefox 3.6 Beta 1
Opera Mini 5 Beta
Opera has released a beta version of their mobile based browser Opera Mini. The beta version named Opera Mini 5 adds several new features:
- New design – A new sleek looking user interface has been added.
- Touch screen browsing – Support for touch screen has been added.
- Tabbed browsing – Now opera mini supports tabs so that multiple sites can be opened. This is one of the best so far.
- Password manager
- Speed dial.
Yahoo Messenger 10 Beta Direct Link
Yahoo Messenger 10.0.0.525 beta has been officially released. Now you can download it directly from yahoo instead of the leaked copy(version 10.0.0.331). Yahoo messenger 10 includes some feature improvements and added social network support. As for features these are the main it has to offer:
1. High quality video calls(HiDef): The video call feature has been redesigned to support high quality video streaming with synced audio. And the video call is made in the chat window to reduce space usage. Full screen support has also been added.
2. New Yahoo Insider page: The yahoo Insider page has a more “different” look rather than the dull page nobody liked. It does still have news feeds,weather and mailbox notification.
Avast 5.0 Beta released
Avast 5.0 beta was released yesterday. This new version comes with a clean interface instead of the hard to operate media player type GUI it had. At the moment it has several limitations and bugs, so casual users stay away. If you want to just test it out go ahead.
A list of the current limitations can be found here.
Download Avast 5.0 beta (version 5.0.70)
Opera 10 Beta (V10.00b1)
Opera 10 beta is supposed to be 40 percent faster than the previous version. This version include resizable tab bar, improved user interface, spell checker support for 51 languages and Opera turbo which can switch automatically according to network speed. This feature will definitely help users with a slow internet connection. Currently the Opera 10 beta is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, QNX, OS/2, BeOS operating systems. Use the Opera 10 beta page to download or the links given at the end of this article.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 beta 1
Visual Studio 2010 is out. Currently its beta but its supposed to have lots of new features. Some of them are:
- Clear UI Organization
- Reduced clutter and complexity
- Improved editor
- Better support for floating documents and windows
- Enhanced document targeting
- Focused animations for action feedback
- IDE support for parallel programming
- Native C++ libraries that use lambda functions and align well with STL
- Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework offers support for imperative data and task parallelism, declarative data parallelism, and more
- Resource management of the multicore hardware and task scheduling enabled by Concurrency Runtime
- Parallel debugging windows and profiling views
- A high-performance and standards-compliant JavaScript IntelliSense® engine
- "One Click Deployment" that quickly publishes files and configuration settings from development machines to the final deployed site
- Full support for Silverlight™ for cutting-edge, rich Internet applications
more details can be found on the MSVS 2010 product page
Microsoft Silverlight 3
Microsoft Silverlight 3 was released today and there seems to be a huge load of new features in it. Some of the main new features are: major media enhancements, out of browser support allowing Web applications to work on the desktop, significant graphics improvements including 3D graphics support, GPU acceleration and H.264 video support, features to improve RIA development productivity and it will have designer support on Visual studio editions 2008 and 2010.
Below is a detailed(extremely detailed) list of new features taken from the Silverlight official site;
- Support for Higher Quality Video & Audio. With support for native H.264/Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) Audio, live and on-demand IIS7 Smooth Streaming, full HD (720p+) playback, and an extensible decoder pipeline, Silverlight 3 brings rich, full-screen, stutter-free media experiences to the desktop. New and enhanced media features in Silverlight 3 include:
- Live and on-demand true HD (720p+) Smooth Streaming. IIS Media Services (formerly IIS Media Pack), an integrated HTTP media delivery platform, features Smooth Streaming which dynamically detects and seamlessly switches, in real time, the video quality of a media file delivered to Silverlight based on local bandwidth and CPU conditions.
- More format choice. In addition to native support for VC-1/WMA, Silverlight 3 now offers users native support for MPEG-4-based H.264/AAC Audio, enabling content distributors to deliver high-quality content to a wide variety of computers and devices.
- True HD playback in full-screen. Leveraging graphics processor unit (GPU) hardware acceleration, Silverlight experiences can now be delivered in true full-screen HD (720p+).
- Extensible media format support. With the new Raw AV pipeline, Silverlight can easily support a wide variety of third-party codecs. Audio and video can be decoded outside the runtime and rendered in Silverlight, extending format support beyond the native codecs.
- Industry leading content protection. Silverlight DRM, Powered by PlayReady Content Protection enables protected in-browser experiences using AES encryption or Windows Media DRM.
