IT Masala

The eBay Toolbar lets you search eBay, access your account and more, all from within Firefox. Currently, eBay's own browser toolbar is an Internet Explorer-only product. grow up ebay !!

You can do everything which is possible on present ebay's toolbar - Search eBay from anywhere, Access your account easily, Get to ending auctions quickly, See image previews for all search results. Compatible with linux,mac,windows. we can say that this works wherever Firefox works !!

My eBay Fox rocks ..njoy !!

[ My eBay Fox ] [ Download Plugin ]

Don't use cracked version or pirated version of DivX Pro.Want to have the professional version of DivX for FREE legally..then here's your chance …

Help rid the world of grainy, low-quality video and get DivX Pro for free!

Join DivX in their mission to spread the good word about DivX by posting links or buttons to your website, blog or social networking profile and we’ll give you DivX Pro for Windows or DivX Pro for Mac (a $19.99 value) for free.

Take the Share DivX Pledge:

    * I believe the future of Internet video can be better than it is today
    * I believe we can make it easier to create, discover and share meaningful digital content
    * I believe we all deserve high quality video that isn’t stuck on the PC

How to get DivX Pro for Free :

Step1 : Copy the code for any of the buttons from this page into your site or page code.

Step2 : Enter your email address and the URL for the page where you linked to DivX

Step 3: You’re done! Wait for 5 days while the DivX guys check your site.

If it’s been more than five business days or you have any questions about Share DivX, just Email DivX

[ Download Free version of DivX ] [ Get DivX Pro Free ] 

DivX is really a great software , as i always compress videos using their DivX codec  and its fantastic..DivX just rocks ! 

I have done the above steps too..waiting for my DivX Pro.This is a nice kinda of viral marketing ..spreading about their software without any cost. This is pretty great idea !!

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 ] 

Adobe Systems plans to open-source Flex, its development framework for building Flash and Apollo-based applications.

What is Flex ?

Flex is one of a growing number of alternatives for building so-called rich Internet applications, which sport an interactive front-end interface. Using the development framework, programmers create an application that can run within Adobe's Flash Player or Apollo, its "player" for desktop applications. 

What the package includes:

The company said it will open-source the Flex software development kit, which includes a compiler and libraries designed to speed up development. It plans to continue to sell Flex Builder, an Eclipse-based development tool, and Flex Data Services, server software for accessing corporate databases. 

The company chose to create an open-source project for the Flex software to garner good ideas and contributions from developers outside Adobe, said Jeff Whatcott, vice president for product marketing at Adobe's enterprise and developer business unit.

The move is also meant to appeal to open-source developers who shun closed-source and proprietary products. Adobe already offers the Flex software development kit for free and provides the source code.

"For some people, (open source) is a philosophical requirement, a sign of integrity and trust in a vendor," Whatcott said. "This will close that gap and address any lingering doubts they have about our openness and commitment to community."

via [ adobe ]

PageAddict is a Firefox extension that will help you monitor your Internet addiction. Once you install it, choose PageAddict from the Tools menu to display a summary of the time you've wasted on each web site for this day, and a graph of your web…

Its really cool, you will actually know what to do and what not too.. i mean if you are spending more time on something very less useful , you will know your stats ! It might help you make yourself better. This could be very useful to monitor children's browsing habits and what steps to take to put them on to track !

I really love you pageaddict

Become Better with pageaddict ! njoy

[ Download add-on / Alternate Link ] [ Firefox Add-ons ] [ pageaddict ] 

Microsoft Corp., as part of its outreach to the open-source community, has released a new official Windows Media Player plug-in for Firefox 2.0 that resolves problems with the older one.

The plug-in enables Windows Media Player to work on Firefox for Windows Vista and resolves known issues with the old one, wrote Hank Janssen, the program manager for Port 25, Microsoft's software lab that works with open source, on a company blog Monday.

The plug-in, available on Firefox's add-on site, is compatible with the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the XP SP2 and Vista OSes.

Note : Microsoft is working on another plug-in for Firefox.

There is however one known issue with the new plugin as noted on the Port25 site:

There is a known issue if you are using Firefox version 2.0.0.3 on Windows Vista with the installer failing with error code -203. To work around this simply restart Firefox (you will get a notification that Windows Vista will be changing the Firefox compatibility settings) and then install again - the second time should succeed.

I did not experience this problem and in fact had no problems at all installing the plug-in on Firefox 2.0.0.3 on XP. 

A video from MSNBC.com playing perfectly well inside the WMP 11 Plug-in for Firefox. I often had trouble viewing videos on sites who stream in Windows-based formats.

"Is Microsoft competing with Linux and OSS" Janssen writes. "You bet they are. Is Microsoft working to better interface with some of the Linux and OSS products? …

It took a long time for this to happen but finally their is a WMP plugin for Firefox. !

[ Mozilla Plugins Page ] [ Download Plugin ] [ Microsoft Software Labs ]

Long Live Open Source ! 

Windows/Mac/Linux (All platforms): Free, open source application Shoka is a PDF library manager with a difference.

Shoka has been designed to perform full text searches on all documents in your Shoka library and share documents over LAN, it comes with a simple and attractive graphical interface.

Shoka has some nice features like tagging and smartlists. There is something wrong with the windows version of Shoka. I am not able to use it properly. Tools like Google Desktop already do similar thing of indexing but for exclusive managing of pdf's Shoka is great.

Note : It needs JavaWebStart.  

[ Shoka ] [ Download ] [ Java ]

I had some harddrive problem and that made my Adobe Professional 7 not to work properly. So i had to uninstall and use Adobe Reader as it was a urgent need for me. So i went to the official Adobe Site and downloaded the latest Adobe Reader 8. Its Free to download and free to view and print Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) files, which is widely used as a way to present information.

You can always download latest version of Adobe Reader 8.0 from Adobe website. However, the setup file that you download is actually a download manager which has a small download size(533kb). The Adobe download manager will be launched later for configuration options and then the actual installer setup files for Adobe Reader can be downloaded once you have finished selecting the components you want. This small download manager is not really necessary.

If you download this direct download, even when you are offline, you will be able to install it without any hassles .

The Official direct download links to various localized language editions of Adobe Acrobat Reader 8 are listed below:

Visit [ Adobe Acrobat 8 ]

Great News ….NASA scientists plan to announce a new open-source project this month called CosmosCode — it's aimed at recruiting volunteers to write code for live space missions.

Jessy Cowan-Sharp and Robert Schingler set up CosmosCode to help NASA develop open-source software for space exploration.

The program was launched quietly last year under NASA's CoLab entrepreneur outreach program, created by Robert Schingler, 28, and Jessy Cowan-Sharp, 25, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Members of the CosmosCode group have been meeting in Second Life and will open the program to the public in the coming weeks, organizers said.

"NASA is recognizing the value of free and open-source software in other sectors," said Cowan-Sharp, a contractor at NASA Ames in Mountain View, California. "CosmosCode is going one step further by allowing NASA scientists to begin a software project in the public domain, leveraging the true value of open-source software by creating an active community of volunteers."

NASA has already released more than 20 open-source software titles, including World Wind, a 3-D virtual globe similar to Google Earth, and Vision Workbench, a framework for computer vision applications.

via [ wired ] 

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.