Category: Beta

Microsoft has made the first beta of Office 2010 Service Pack 1 available to testers. This is not a publicly released beta, and probably never will be -- it is ready for download by those who Microsoft has invited to test it and people who have registered to test it via Microsoft's Connect beta testing portal. The version number for this beta is 14.0.6011.1000. It doesn't boast any new ...

A new beta release of Firefox 4 has finally been made available. What was the hold-up, you ask? Well, with Firefox 4.0 beta 7 being tagged as the feature freeze, Mozilla had to make sure that everything they planned on being built-in by default was ready for prime-time testing. And since there's no shortage of new features and improvements in Firefox 4, it stands to reason that beta 7 took a ...

As with earlier previews of Internet Explorer 9, the latest release is totally chromeless (there's no shiny user interface, just a floating window). That can make it a little tricky to test things, but fortunately Ars Technica has posted a simple guide on how to turn on the IE9 GUI in Platform Preview 6. First, you'll need to download and install both the Internet Explorer 9 Beta and Platform ...

A new version of the Facebook app for BlackBerry is now available from BlackBerry Beta Zone. This is version 1.9, and it brings loads of new features to enhance your Facebook experience on BlackBerry OS devices. First off, there's now a dedicated inbox for Facebook messages. This inbox syncs with the Web-based Facebook inbox in real-time, including read states. And if you want to, you can ...

Currently available in the Firefox 4 nightly builds, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) support is due to be rolled out with the next iteration of the Firefox 4 beta. For those not in the know, SVG is a family of 2D XML-based image formats that can be created as either static or dynamic images, similar to what you can do with GIFs. The benefit of using vector graphics over raster or bitmap formats, ...

During an event in Cupertino this morning, Apple has announced FaceTime for Mac. A beta version of the application is already available to download. This partially addresses one of the biggest gripes FaceTime users have had with the service -- lack of support for video chatting with people on their computers. It only partially addresses it though, since it's only available for the Mac as of now ...

Music streaming service Rhapsody has just announced the release of its beta BlackBerry application. This app is very similar to Rhapsody's iPhone and Android offerings, in that it allows you to listen to any song in their 10.5 million-strong database on your smartphone. Aside from listening to albums and songs on-demand, you can also tune in to radio stations customized around artists or genres. ...

Google's Analytics service is a very useful tool for webmasters to track what their visitors are doing on their sites and what they're clicking on. However, up until now there was no good way to visualize how visitors navigate on a website. Analytics reports do contain a lot of data, but making sense of all the different elements of a page that are referenced in them can be a pain. To ...

Despite what you might think, Microsoft's no stranger to software on a Mac. Its Office suite from the Mac Business Unit is still one of the best-selling pieces of software on OS X. With all the commotion about Windows Phone 7, it's easy to just assume that Microsoft's new and shiny mobile operating system would play nice with Macs, but given the Zune's track record, it certainly wasn't assured. ...

Internet Explorer 9's new tab page (or about:Tabs) is a handy way to access your most frequently accessed sites. But suppose you'd like to display more than 10 sites -- there's no way to change the number in IE9's options screen! Fortunately, a quick registry edit is all that's required. Thanks to Microsoft's Eric Law, you don't even need to get your hands dirty in regedit. On his recent blog ...

HyperDock is a System Preferences pane, which you can install on your Mac, that adds some nice visual improvements to the dock, as well as some very useful window-handling functionality. Currently, it's in beta, but you'd never know it; I have yet to have a single problem with it on my system. Visually, HyperDock adds window previews when you mouse over icons for running applications, much like ...

Firefox 4 shutdown is already almost instant, but Mozilla has had their sights set on faster start-up times for quite a while. Over the summer, a pair of Mozilla interns looked at simple tweaks which would make Firefox appear faster. It now looks as if at least one of the suggested changes will make its way in to Firefox 4. Thanks to what Mozilla is calling Cascaded Session Restore, the ...

 Maybe you've seen enough of the Internet Explorer 9 beta for now -- you just wanted a taste, but you'd rather not use a beta browser on a day-to-day basis. Maybe you just want to know how to uninstall it because other people are going to ask you how to do it. Unlike most other programs on your computer, however, you won't find IE9 listed on the Uninstall or change a program screen. That's ...

Now that the proverbial cat is out of the bag, the Internet Explorer 9 news is coming hard and fast. I've compiled some of the best articles I've seen thus far, including hands on reviews from other bloggers, some slick demos and tutorials, and a ton of official postings from Microsoft. Engadget's Joanna Stern reviews the IE9 beta Switched goes hands on with IE9 Ed Bott's in-depth review: ...

Been waiting to get your hands on the Internet Explorer 9 beta? The bits are up, so go get 'em. Both 32 and 64-bit installers are available, and more than 20 localized versions area provided. There are also additional standalone language packs for Catalan, Hindi, Hebrew, and Vietnamese. Sebastian is currently live blogging the launch, so follow the news on his post as it breaks! So what ...