beta @ amanzi

Yahoo are showing off their next version of Yahoo! Messenger which has been written from the ground up to take advantage of the graphical capabilities of Windows Vista.

You can read more and watch the video here: http://messenger.yahoo.com/windowsvista.php

A new beta version of Google’s toolbar for the Firefox browser has brought integration of Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets service to your desktop. What this means is that you can double-click on an Excel or Word document and have it open directly in your Google Docs site. In my brief testing the service was far from perfect, and didn’t really work at all actually. I could only open documents that had already been uploaded and even then only after I had re-entered my password. Also, any online changes made to the documents are not reflected in the local copy of that document. But it’s still interesting to see the potential this has for the future.

These are the options as displayed in the toolbar settings:

The error message received when attempting to open a document that hadn’t previously been uploaded:

Once you’ve set the options above, the relevant icons change in Windows Explorer to look like this:

Flock recently released their first public beta of their Firefox-based browser which is designed to complement the browsing experience of anyone who interacts with Web 2.0 sites. It’s specifically designed to integrate with popular Web 2.0 services like Flickr, Del.icio.us, and just about all blogging providers.

I tried out one of the earlier releases and didn’t enjoy it that much but since then I’ve become a more regular user of Flickr and del.icio.us. So now the browser seems to make more sense to me and the integrated blogging tools are useful but not as convincing a sell.

Anyway, it’s definitely worth checking out and if you don’t take my word for it, read some of the blogs below for more opinion.

Links:

• Flock — The web browser for you and your friends
• What’s New With Flock?
• Flock Rocks
• Flock 0.7 Beta
• Flock Raises New Venture Round, Launches Public Beta

Socialize:             

Although Altiris’s Software Virtualisation Solution (SVS) isn’t beta software, I thought it deserves a write-up on this site as I’ve realised it’s enormous potential – especially for beta software testers. This software is free for personal use and can be downloaded from one of the links below.

Now before I go on, I should explain that I’m only going to go over a very small capability of this product – I recommend reading the documentation fully to realise the full potential of this.

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