Windows Media Player 10

http://thomashawk.com/2004/09/windows-media-player-10-good-bad-and.html

Thomas Hawk's review: WMP 10 - The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.

Folder Redirection

Meryl Evans writes about this great utility called TweakUI (freeware)

I never use Microsoft Window’s default settings of My Documents, My Pictures, or My Music. I change it up on my own or use TweakUI, a Windows PowerToy. For home users, there is no compelling reason to change the defaults. I do it because I have my way of doing things and organizing. For business users or networked environments, it’s a good idea to redirect folders because of the backup system and use of network…

http://channels.lockergnome.com/windows/archives/20040906_folder_redirection.phtml

Microsoft Streets And Trips 2006 with GPS Locator

Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of Microsoft Streets & Trips 2006 with GPS Locator, the latest version of the best-selling mapping and travel planning software for the United States and Canada. Microsoft Streets & Trips 2006 with GPS Locator introduces Voice-Prompted Directions, a hands-free option that reassures travelers with turn-by-turn directional information so everyone in the car can enjoy the ride without the stress of getting lost. For running errands around town, taking a family road trip, finding the way around a new city or planning a day of business meetings, Streets & Trips 2006 with GPS Locator offers easy-to-use tools to plan personalized trips and travel with confidence.

Microsoft Streets and Trips 2006 is a slick mapping program that's great for planning weekend getaways, cross-country treks, and other vehicular excursions. This year's version displays about 5.9 million miles of roads, plus another 1.8 million points of interest, including ATMs, museums, restaurants, and zoos. Impressive sounding, perhaps, but DeLorme Street Atlas USA 2006 shows more eateries and attractions, a fact we learned when using both programs to explore various U.S. cities.

Example: In a square block of downtown San Francisco west of Moscone Center, Streets and Trips shows only 4 points of interest, while Street Atlas USA displays 11. Free mapping services, such as Google Local, also help to make Streets and Trips a tough sell. If ease of use is critical in a software-based atlas, Microsoft Streets and Trips is your best choice. If you want a mapping program that shows the most restaurants, hotels, and other roadside attractions, DeLorme Street Atlas USA 2006 is the better pick.

Microsoft Streets and Trips 2006 offers some enticing extras like a the link to MSN Virtual Earth, Microsoft's online repository of satellite maps. Let's say you're viewing a map of San Francisco's Union Square and you want a bird's-eye view of it. Click the Virtual Earth icon at the top of the screen, and a satellite image of Union Square loads in your browser. Granted, this may be fluff, but it's fun. Far more useful are the (optional) GPS-related upgrades, particularly the new voice directions--crucial for using Streets and Trips while driving. (We'll examine the GPS features in a separate review.) If you don't have a GPS transponder but do have a Wi-Fi connection, the new Locate Me feature can utilize Wi-Fi hot spots to estimate your location. Naturally, you'll first have to be inside a Wi-Fi hot-spot range for this feature to work.



Microsoft Streets and Trips 2006 provides a better interface than DeLorme Street Atlas USA 2006. To view a city map, for instance, you simply type its name in the Find box. By comparison, Street Atlas makes you enter start and finish locations in separate windows, then it calculates the route before displaying a map--a slower approach. And it's easier in Streets and Trips to load sections of a map not on the screen--just click near the edge of the map window. The same task in Street Atlas requires an annoying click-and-drag procedure, which gets tiresome after a few tries. Not that online mapping services are any better, as is evident from a real-life comparison of online mapping capabilities.

Another new tool called Night Map Style is like wearing night-vision goggles. The map's background is pitch black, and roads and street names are shown in shades of green. It's convenient for night driving and other low-light conditions, although most of the background detail, including points of interest icons, aren't visible. We prefer the conventional map view, which is easy to read on a backlit laptop at night. Your visual preferences may vary.

Microsoft's support for Streets and Trips 2006 is very pretty generous. Streets and Trips includes one year of unlimited e-mail and toll-free telephone support--almost unheard of in software technical support. Microsoft promises e-mail responses within one business day. Microsoft also provides a searchable knowledge base dedicated to Streets and Trips 2006, as well as blogs, chats, and newsgroups, all available online.

System Requirements for Microsoft Streets & Trips 2006 with GPS Locator: Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, Microsoft Windows XP Professional, Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition, Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition

Microsoft Street & Trips with GSP is available for US, UK, Germany and Italy.

AbiWord vs. MS Word, For Now

AbiWord vs Microsoft Word

AbiWord contains tons of features which should make MS Word jealous; though there are some features which AbiWord lacks, such as a grammar checker.

AbiWord is part of a larger project known as AbiSource, which was started by the SourceGear Corporation. The goal of the project was the development of a cross-platform, Open Source office suite beginning with AbiWord, the project's word processor.

The user interface in AbiWord is very similar to that of MS Word except that AbiWord uses much bigger icons than MS Word. All of the usual features such as creating a new document, opening and saving a document are all conveniently placed on the taskbar with the addition of a few others you won't see on the Word task bar by default; I am referring to the "Show/hide formatting marks" icon in AbiWord which by default is placed on the taskbar. Other useful icons include indenting, numbering and inserting an image.

The first feature I spotted in AbiWord is the ability to paste previously copied paragraph formatting onto a selected text. For example, if you highlight certain text and copy it, AbiWord not only copies the text itself but it also copies the formatting; so instead of just pasting the text, you can also highlight text within your document, and apply the formatting of the previously copied text. MS Word also has this feature called "Format Painter".

Another feature I found unique to AbiWord is when you restore the AbiWord application itself, make is smaller, the text within your document is minimized. If you look at the screenshots below, you will notice how the text is made smaller when the AbiWord window is restored. The first screenshot shows AbiWord maximized while the second screenshot shows AbiWord restored; notice how the text is minimized in the restored screenshot. This feature is useful because you don't have to scroll sideways to view the entire text. Also shown below is MS Word restored to show the differences between the two.

Mozilla.org New Site Design

Mozilla.org, homepage of the popular Firefox browser, Mozilla Suite, and Thunderbird, has under-gone a radical new update. The new sites has a revised layout, with a greater emphasis on promotion of it's 3 core products. The new website, code-named Cavendish, was developed by Steven Garrity and his design company, silverorange.

Described by Ben Goodger, chief Firefox developer as "our best site yet", the group hopes that this, combined with a PR / Marketing drive will help propel the 1.0 release of Firefox sky high. So far, browser statistics show that recent media attention and coverage of Firefox has increased it's share of the market, on a variety of measures.

The new design has yet to filter down to the many minor pages on Mozilla.org; this is expected in the coming days.

* Version number incremented to 1.1
* Redesigned user interface
* Added right click context menu to profile list on main window
* Added new services to service help (including new XP SP2 services)
* Added colors and minor modications to text window logging to fsasctl
* Added additional support for terminating the desktop (explorer.exe)
* Added running programs filter to programs window
* Added Tools menu option to allow user to set Program Options and launch the Service Manager
* Added Tool Tip help througout the program (can be disabled via Program Options)
* Added abilty to shutdown or restart the computer after fsasctl has finished execution (not available for Windows 9x/ME)
* Fixed bug where Comments embedded in program executables were not being displayed properly in the programs window

Disable Print Screen Key in Windows

Often abbreviated Prt Scr, the Print Screen key is a useful key supported on most PCs. In DOS, pressing the Print Screen key causes the computer to send whatever images and text are currently on the display screen to the printer. Some graphics programs and Windows, use the Print Screen key to obtain Screen Captures.

1. Maximize the window you'd like to capture.
2. To copy/capture the current window, hold down ALT + Print Scrn at the same time. To capture the entire screen, just press Print Scrn.
3. Open a new document in MS Word, MS Photo Editor, or Adobe PhotoShop.
4. Paste the screen shot by holding down CTRL and V at the same time.
5. Print the document when you're finished pasting screen shots.

Macs prove more versatile because the screen captures are automatically saved as files in the PICT format - Apple's version of Microsoft's BMP. This file is created when one presses Command plus Shift plus 3. To save just the window you want, hold down Command plus Shift plus 4 plus caps lock. Now you can open any window and make a copy by holding down the Control key and clicking inside it.

Q How can I can disable the Print Screen function to prevent users from copying images to the clipboard?

A. Windows implements Print Screen using a registered hotkey. Windows uses the predefined hotkeys IDHOT_SNAPDESKTOP and IDHOT_SNAPWINDOW to handle Print Screen. These correspond to Print Screen, which captures the entire screen, and Alt+Print Screen, which captures only the active window. To disable these functions all you have to do is register the hotkeys, which causes Windows to send your app a WM_HOTKEY message when the user presses either hotkey. Your implementation can ignore the message to bypass the default screen-capture behavior. A good place to do it is in your mainframe class.

The ALT-PRINTSCREEN captures the active window. If you had a dialog box open and wanted that image only, ALT-PRINTSCREEN will only capture that part, while PRINTSCREEN captures the entire monitor screen's view. If there is only one window open (blue title bar at top), then ALT-PRINTSCREEN essentially does the same as PRINTSCREEN.

In Windows, you can capture only the active display by pressing Alt and the Prt Scr key. That key is usually to the right of the function keys at the top of the keyboard. Or, by pressing the Control key and Prt Scr, the entire screen showing the currently selected window and all other stuff can be acquired.

In either case, these moves create a file in the highly detailed BMP format, holding a pixel-by-pixel version of the page at the precise time the keys were pressed. The BMP file is held in the computer's memory, so one needs to paste it into some kind of a program that accepts photos, like the Paint program in Windows or flavors of Photoshop.

Free Clip Art and Templates

Microsoft Office free Clip Art and Media Home Page:

http://office.microsoft.com/clipart/default.aspx

Microsoft Office free Templates Home Page:

http://office.microsoft.com/templates/default.aspx

If you're using MS Office, it's definitely worth a visit from time to time.