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Microsoft has announced the immediate availability of Windows Embedded Standard 2009 Community Technology Preview. The software giant said that the product is designed to be built into hardware including thin clients, point-of-service and kiosk devices. It will be available to OEM customers in the fourth quarter of 2008. The platform features technologies including Silverlight, Remote Desktop Protocol 6.1, and Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5. The latest upgrade also includes drivers for Intel’s latest x86 processor architectures.

View: The full story @ vnunet

Acer has stated that it will be pushing Linux aggressively on its laptops and netbooks. The company is already heavily promoting Linux for its low cost ultra-portable netbook range out later this year, but senior staff have said that Acer will also push Linux on its laptops.
Acer has already started selling Linux in its Media PC business but this should now spread, according to Gianpiero Morbello, vice president of marketing and brand at Acer. "We have shifted towards Linux because of Microsoft," he said. "Microsoft has a lot of power and it is going to be difficult, but we will be working hard to develop the Linux market."

View: The full story @ vnunet

Adobe has just unleashed a new online platform containing a word processor, file storage and sharing, both tied together with a Flash-enabled Acrobat 9.
The free Acrobat.com beta includes the Buzzword word processor. Its ConnectNow Web conferencing and desktop sharing tool enables chatting via text, video, and voice. The hosted services invite file storage and sharing with the capability to convert up to five documents to PDF.
Users of Acrobat.com can join each other in virtual rooms, and all those in the room have access to the same document. This is a great feature for virtual meetings, paper editing, and much more.
Acrobat 9 will include many features aided by the integration of Flash. Some of these features include animation integration and dynamic maps.
For creating online forms, Acrobat 9 adds intelligence to recognize content for conversion to fillable fields. And a forms tracking dashboard will show, for instance, the status of responses to a mass party invitation e-mail and let a user send reminders to guests. Responses can be sorted, filtered, and exported to spreadsheets.
With this Acrobat facelift, we can also expect a speedier environment. Everyone has had the ‘PDF opening blues’, which is hoped to be eliminated with Acrobat 9.

View: news.com
Visit: Acrobat.com Beta

IETester is a free web browser specifically designed for testing web sites in Internet Explorer including IE 8 beta, IE 7, IE 6, IE 5.5 on both XP and Vista.
Like any web browser, IETester has the usual forward and back buttons, refresh, stop, home, and favorite buttons, but it also has a special feature that allows you to launch new tabs which render the web site in different versions of IE. With IE8’s public beta just around the corner, web site owners need to verify that their sites are going to display properly in the new browser, which runs in standards-compliant mode by default. You can download IETester for free (donations accepted) from here. (via Ajaxian)

Download: IETester v0.2.2 | 23.8MB (Freeware)
Screenshot: >> Click here <<
View: IETester Homepage

Glyn Moody hits the nail on the head with his critique of Microsoft’s proposed approach to Windows 7: Say little so that the market expects little.
It’s not an unreasonable approach, and Microsoft did get burned for actually warning the market about what it would be providing, only to have to endure the consequences of not living up to the expectations it set, but I’m not sure it can afford to go back. Stating that it will be “more careful” with Windows 7, Microsoft’s representative noted:
“We know that when we talk about our plans for the next release of Windows, people take action,” [Microsoft] said. “As a result, we can significantly impact our partners and our customers if we broadly share information that later changes.”
Well, yes. But that’s the whole point behind transparency. As Glyn notes, it’s not that easy to do in practice, but it’s increasingly critical in the opening 21st Century.

News Source: C|Net

Students at the Ruhr University of Bochum, Germany, say they have found a way to steal security tokens in Microsoft’s new CardSpace authentication framework. Attackers can apparently get access to protected, encrypted user data – such as passwords, credit card numbers, and delivery addresses – when they are transmitted. CardSpace (formerly InfoCard) is the successor to Passport. In both architectures, users’ personal data are stored locally on the user’s system.
Depending on the web site, users can decide which data they want to transmit. CardSpace is designed to make classic passwords a thing of the past, by replacing them with digital certificates that may be self-signed or signed by an authoritative CA such as Verisign.

Link: heise.de

Set a Guinness World Record, enjoy a better web. It’s the goal of the Spread Firefox group when Firefox 3 goes final this summer.
“Sounds like a good deal, right? All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours - it’s that easy. We’re not asking you to swallow a sword or to balance 30 spoons on your face, although that would be kind of awesome,” the site says.
This will take approximately a week after the attempt date to know if the record was broken. Judges from Spread Firefox and Guinness World Records will need to review download logs and validate the record attempt. This is the first record attempt of its kind so there is no set number to beat, although the group looks to the number of Firefox 2 downloads on its launch day, which was 1.6 million. 5 million seems to be their target for Firefox 3.
One of the biggest hurdles faced is the fact that a “download” is the transmission of the entire, fully functioning Firefox 3 — not just an update.
The official release date for Firefox 3 has not been announced yet, however, Spread Firefox claims to be posting on their site “soon.”

View: Download Day 2008

Some of you with a sharp eye might have noticed something very interesting on-screen during the Windows 7 multi-touch demonstration at the D6 conference yesterday. If you did, you might be curious to understand what you saw. If you didn’t, read on anyway. Update: The new taskbar is superficially called the “Superbar”.

Picture credit: Gizmodo

The picture above comes from the video feed of Julie Larson Green’s (Vice President of Windows Experience Program Management) demo of the multi-touch picture browser demo app. The quality is a little rough, but you can easily notice a few things that are different.

The first being the taskbar is higher than usual, but not as big as double-height. If I were to guess, I’d say its somewhere around 1.75x-high. In the left corner, the Windows orb remains wedged “on top” of the taskbar - sticking its head out a little - instead of in the center like it is today in Vista.

The taskbar also appears ‘divided’ into sections by variations in the color (dark, gray, lighter) to indicate the different areas. Speaking of which, if you look at the far right corner, you’d notice that the tray (icons & clock) is not touching the edge of the screen, and there’s a small lighter gap. I have no explanation for this, but is well worth keeping an eye on.

A double-height taskbar in Windows Vista

Keeping the focus on the right, the tray is also different. The icons sit in the middle of the taskbar, instead of wrapping in two-lines like it does today, whilst the date now wraps on two lines instead of three. This clearly indicates this taskbar cannot accommodate three lines of text.

Most obviously the quick launch icons are now larger in size, but the icon besides it is not a quick launch icon instead an application. I’ve been told this particular Windows 7 build has rendering issues which is why there’s no label or text next to the icon, but there should have been. At the same time, the icon also should have been a smaller version of the “Live Preview” thumbnails you see when you hover over applications in the taskbar today. That would have been pretty sweet. Apparently that feature has been canned .

Now you would probably be wondering why I just spent so much effort writing about a taskbar, and the answer is because this is what Windows 7 is about. They’re going to take existing interface elements like the taskbar and give them a new coat of paint with some sparkles. Different enough so you notice them, like Walt Mossberg did.

During the demonstration (5:25) Walt asks “I can’t help noticing that the taskbar doesn’t look like the taskbar?” Julie responds with, “It’s something we’re working on Windows 7 and I’m not suppose to talk about it now today.” Shutdown.

Source: www.liveside.net

After yesterdays announcements Microsoft finally demonstrated Windows 7 in public yesterday.
Microsoft has been investing in many forms of natural input to enable users to interact with the PC and their devices using touch. Last year at the All Things Digital conference Bill Gates introduced Microsoft’s surface computer. This year Julie Larson-Green (VP, Windows Experience Program Management), who was responsible for the innovative Office 2007 design, demonstrated the multi-touch innovations first previewed in Surface that will ultimately play a part of the next version of Windows.
Could this now be the start of Microsoft slowly revealing more information over the coming months until their grand double of PDC/WinHEC in November?

Video: >> Click here <<

View: Full Demo Transcript

Consistent with our efforts to promote further interoperability across the Web, Microsoft will be releasing Internet Explorer 8 to render content in its most standards-compliant way by default. Giving top priority to Web standards interoperability allows us to help web developers and designers drive toward the ideal of “write once, run anywhere”, freeing up more time to innovate rather than modify content for different browsers. This commitment also addresses several development and design pain points from previous Internet Explorer releases.
However, browsing with this default setting may cause content written for previous versions of Internet Explorer to display differently than intended. This creates a call to action for site owners to ensure their content will continue to display seamlessly in Internet Explorer 8. As such, we have provided a meta-tag usable on a per-page or per-site level to maintain backwards compatibility with Internet Explorer 7. Adding this tag instructs Internet Explorer 8 to render content like it did in Internet Explorer 7, without requiring any additional changes.
We are encouraging site administrators to get their sites ready now for broad adoption of Internet Explorer 8, as there will be a beta release in the third quarter of this year targeted for all consumers. To learn more and get started, please follow the step-by-step instructions located at KB952030

Link: MSDN Blogs.