IT Masala

Gspace is a lovely firefox addon and supported on 3 platforms(Windows,Mac,Linux). It makes life easier to store all your stuff on Gmail very easily. What do you do with a 6Gb online space, use it as a storage space..just dump all your stuff.

- Install the firefox addon : | Windows | Mac | Linux |

- Goto Tools -> Gspace . The panel will open up in a different tab (chrome://gspace/content/gspaceWindow.xul )

You are shown a 2-column panel , left side is your pc and right side is your gmail storage space. Nice thing about this addon is, it shows the total space and the free space and shows details of files with timestamp etc… Below is the capture of how the email message looks like in the inbox.

How to use: Login to your account using your gmail account and password. You can create folders and put your stuff into your account. When you upload your stuff, it shows up as shown in the screenshots. To avoid showing all the upload messages in your inbox, archive the mails sent by Gspace.

PS: Using this addon maybe(not sure) against Gmail's TOS. So be careful !

[Gspace] [Gmail] [Firefox addon]

Apple will pay $25 to $79 to customers who "bought an adapter made by Apple or another company to replace a failed one." Customers who bought certain replacement adapters for PowerBook and iBook computers are eligible for the settlement. Apple is gonna pay that amount to around 2.3 million Macintosh computer owners.

[LA Times, photo by Don Ramsey]

Do you want to give your desktop a pinch of Mac OS X? Do you want to change your GNOME desktop from the default look to something like this? Use Mac4Lin to give it the look and feel of Mac OS X (latest being 10.5, Leopard) on *nix GTK based systems.

Make this happen by Using Mac4Lin on your Linux system. I use Ubuntu  and it worked awesome. The only thing I could not get is  the icons at the bottom, apart from that I have got the perfect MAC look for my Ubuntu system. 

Here is a nice tutorial on how to go about on Howtoforge and also the Mac4Lin has nice documentation.

Don't forget to thank the owner. Its an amazing piece of work.

Download all the 3 parts.

[ Download Mac4Lin ]  [ Tutorial on HowtoForge]

Apple introduces world's thinnest notebook -Macbook Air. Here are some configurations if you wanna pre-order Air. It seems too costly but still a Macbook is always worth the pay.

Interesting thing to observe is its thickness, its jut .76" , thats really awesome. Anyone would love to have a laptop that thin and light ! 

Priced at $1,799.00,Macbook Air ships within 2-3 weeks with 13inch 1.6ghz ,Intel Core 2 Duo processor,2GB memory,80GB 4200-rpm PATA hard drive1,Built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi2 and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR.

Around the new year, someone started alerting the rumors sites that there was going to be a "MacBook Air" product at Macworld.  Also that it was the "worst kept secret at Apple" (which is very suspicious!)  His/her words sound very similar to this Digg commenter. - 9 to 5 mac

Watch the Ad 

Google has now released the complete version of a ‘Google for your computer’, the Google Desktop that lets users search their computers at the same speed they can search the Internet and easily find all their files. ( Beta version was released earlier this month)

The features section on what’s inside the new Google Desktop 5 says the following about security: “We care about your security, and have added a feature to make your search experience safer and easier by helping to combat both phishing and malicious software websites. Whether you’re clicking on links from documents, IMs and e-mails on your desktop or browsing the web itself, you may receive a warning when you’re about to visit a site that might be trying to steal your personal information or install malicious software on your computer, so you can decide if you want to use the site.”

Some New features to look at in Google Desktop 5 :

The application involves a sidebar for the user's desktop environment, variety of "gadgets", designed to display a range of functions, including the time, photos and stock prices. Vista, the latest version of Windows, offers similar functionality to the desktop sidebar(is it a copy ??)..

- It also incorporates previews of desktop search results

- warnings for Web sites that may contain malware.

- It is visually more enhanced than its predecessors and Windows Vista's version.

- Some popular gadgets have also been redesigned.

PN : Google Desktop now has for the first time, supports Hindi along with 28 other languages.

Awesome cool , Google claims , you can now search your pc's at the same speed that they can search the internet. 

[ Download Google Desktop 5 ] [ Mac version ] [ More information on features ] 

A hacker managed to break into a Mac and win a US$10,000 prize as part of a contest started at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver.

The conference organizer decided to offer the contest in part to draw attention to possible security shortcomings in Macs. "You see a lot of people running OS X saying it's so secure and frankly Microsoft is putting more work into security than Apple has," said Dragos Ruiu, the organizer of security conferences including CanSecWest

The contest originally was open just to conference attendees, who were invited to try to break into the machines through a wireless access point. But on Thursday evening, 3Com Corp.'s TippingPoint division put up the cash prize and put the machines online so that anyone could participate.

The winner has not yet been named but is not someone attending the conference in Vancouver.

via [ pcworld ] 

The first public beta of Google Desktop for Mac has arrived, providing integrated searching of local files and the web.

This is the first time the search engine has had it's search tool available for Mac users apart from using the web-based search engine.

"[W]e took the time to develop a product that deeply integrates into Mac OS X and maintains its high standards of usability," wrote Google software engineer Mike Pinkerton in the company's Mac blog. "This is a Mac product through and through, from the bezel on our search box down to correctly (and securely) handling multiple users and FileVault."

Features : 

Full text searches are supported for many file types include text, PDF, HTML, email (Mail, Entourage), iChat transcripts, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, music and video files, and Address Book contacts. The program also searches file and folder names.

Google Desktop provides a degree of integration with Spotlight, taking advantage of any installed Spotlight importers to broaden the range of file types that can be searched. It also uses the Spotlight privacy list to determine which items should not be searched.

PN :The first version of Google Desktop does not appear to be able to index PC-formatted drives.

Advantages:

- Google does not see or record Google Desktop results without the user's permission.

- If a user is still concerned, he can choose to disable the integration option in preferences.

- Google Desktop also returns results more quickly than Spotlight does.

- Google Desktop does the same partial word searches as spotlight during entry, but without the delay.

- Google Desktop is easy to use, allowing a search without going into the dashboard.

[ Google Desktop ] 

Microsoft has started private testing of the next version of Office for the Macintosh, which is due out in the second half of the year.

According to apcmag.com, Microsoft's Office 2008 for Mac has proceeded into private beta stages of development. Microsoft has detailed several new features. One is a program called My Day, which gives users quick access to calendar information without requiring them to first go into the Entourage e-mail program.

Screenshots : (apcmag.com)

 

  Artful charts

"Part of our mission with Office 2008 is to expose all the things that are already there and make the product easier to use" says Jones. "We wanted to make it more discoverable, to bubble up the features that people didn't always find. We also have an opportunity to have a simple UI and a more intuitive interface.

"We got a lot of customer feedback (on the UI), we've kept the menus and embedded toolbars, but I can hide rid of embedded toolbars to have a really streamlined interface."

Parts of the redesign are peeking through almost every application, as well as application modules such as the notebook view in Word, and Jones promises that there's plenty to share in the months ahead.

Also on tap are improved page layout controls in Word and new Excel templates, called ledger sheets, which allow users to handle tasks like producing invoices without having to create or understand the underlying formulas.

Microsoft has taken longer than its normal 18 to 24 months to come out with a new version of Office for the Mac. The current version, Office 2004 for Mac, debuted in April 2004.