Tag: OPEN

Open With is a neat little Firefox add-on (from a developer with the interesting domain name DarkTrojan.net). Domain name notwithstanding, the add-on feels pretty solid (and has been tested by Mozilla). It adds a set of buttons to Firefox, which let you open the current page in any other browser that you've got installed. In terms of UI, it's very flexible; you can add entries to the View menu, ...

Diaspora, the much talked about open competitor to Facebook, has set a launch date of September 15. We've extensively debated Diaspora's chances of success here on Download Squad, and the real test is about to begin. We'll finally see how Diaspora has used that $200,000 in donations -- the most ever raised by a single project on Kickstarter.com. Apparently, flashy features have been put on ...

With the latest privacy debacle on Facebook, users leaving the site are looking for somewhere to go. Diaspora has popped up as an open Facebook alternative, and people are getting behind it in a big way. The new service is funded by donations through crowdsourcing site Kickstarter, and supporters have backed Diaspora to the tune of $118,000 and counting. It's already the biggest Kickstarter ...

Louis Suarez-Potts, the community manager for the open-source Open Office project, says software piracy also hurts the open-source community, and though it can be argued that open-source is bad for innovation, most of us love the open source community. So does the occasional pirated piece of software really hurt our beloved open source projects? Suarez-Potts thinks it's bad for everyone including ...

digg_url = "http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2008/01/24/flipping-the-linux-switch-myths-about-linux/"; There are a lot of funny, preconceived notions about Linux (and Linux users). Some ideas fall in to the realm of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt). Some ideas have an inkling of truth to them, and have grown and mutated into full fledged myths. Sort of like how Vlad the Impaler became Dracula, ...

Digg, your favorite social news site, ran a contest to celebrate and promote the release of the Digg API. Entrants to the contest used both the Digg API and the Flash toolkit to create interesting works that could be viewed in flash and on the Adobe Apollo platform. Submissions ended on May 16th, and the work started for the judges who narrowed things down to the top 10. Criteria for the final ...

Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba and the The United States Library of Congress have all approved the Office Open XML (OOXML) specification to be sent to the ECMA (a European standardization association). This is the next step in Microsoft's spec being accepted across many systems, platforms and applications. This is ...

Today Facebook, the U.S.'s second-largest largest social networking site, opened its doors to the world. With the long-anticipated addition of regional networks, new Facebook registrants no longer need an email address from a Facebook-approved college or company to join. Facebook's Carolyn Abram explains the privacy implications of the change on the official (and frustratingly feed-less) Facebook ...

This is pretty huge. Facebook, the #2 social networking site in the U.S., has released an open API that allows third-party developers to "make remote procedure calls to Facebook on behalf of a Facebook user." The current version of the REST API allows applications to get information about a Facebook user's profile, friends, photos, events, messages (but of course requires said user to be ...

A minor peeve of mine is the way Firefox tries to protect you from yourself, i.e. not letting you choose the "Open With" option when downloading certain files, and instead making you save it to your hard drive first. Usually this only applies to executable files, but Firefox's definition of executable is pretty broad, so sometimes this restriction kicks in even when opening, say, JavaScript files. ...