Miro 4 Hopes To Fill Android's iTunes Void

The open-source audio and video jukebox Miro debuts a new version today that wants to be iTunes for Android.Miro 4 for Windows (download), Mac (download), and Linux (download), adds simple and effective desktop-to-Android synchronization to the program, which also offers media file conversion, torrent management, podcast catching, and media discovery. The Android syncing features focus on music and videos and includes built-in app browsing and management via in-program access to the Google Android Marketplace and the Amazon.com Android Marketplace.

Main interface of Miro 4

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

"We set the bar very high. We want to be the open iTunes," said Nicholas Reville, co-founder and executive director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, which publishes Miro and the Miro Video Converter, a separate program that also comes baked into the standard Miro. "Millions and millions of people use iTunes and they do because they accept the restrictions, like with Internet Explorer. We see ourselves as the new Firefox." He also added that Miro has "around two million" monthly users.

Except for the lack of over-the-air synchronization, the new Miro is basically the old Miro plus DoubleTwist. If you haven't checked out Miro in a while, since Miro 3's redesigned interface the feature-heavy program has gotten much easier to use. It heavily resembles iTunes, with a left nav for navigating between your audio, video, connected devices, Amazon MP3 store, and Android marketplaces. The new right nav links to recently watched videos, recently songs played, and recent downloads, while the center of the program is where your media discovery and playback happen.

Music on an Android in Miro 4

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Miro 4 both looks like iTunes and communicates quite smoothly with your iTunes library. Importing more than 10,000 tracks went quickly because Miro recognizes media libraries that are pre-existing on your computer.

Also like iTunes and other media jukeboxes, Miro now lets you stream and share your files to other computers running Miro on the same Wi-Fi network. Basically, you use it to manage media libraries on more than one computer.

App browsing is straightforward. Click the link in the left nav for either Google's or Amazon's market and you'll be able to access full marketplace features from within Miro. The same goes for Amazon's MP3 store.

Android Market in Miro 4

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Miro 4 does not yet support Wi-Fi syncing for Android devices, although that feature is coming said Dave Glassco, President of the Participatory Culture Foundation. Also in the works is an iPad app for media streaming and playback.

Be warned that Miro's installation process not only opts you into the Bing toolbar, Bing search engine, and resetting Bing as your home page, but if you uncheck all three, Miro asks you if you're sure you want to harm their revenue stream. That's fairly aggressive for an open-source program, although this is unfortunately not new to Miro. It's not likely to change anytime soon, either.

Source: http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-20064507-12.html?tag=mncol;title

Pandora Delivers Laughs With Comedy Channels

Pandora now lets you add comedy channels to your listening selections.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jonathan Skillings/CNET)

Get ready to laugh when you load up Pandora.

The company today announced the launch of comedy stations, and just as with music streaming, users can listen to tracks, skip those they don't like, and give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to personalize what they hear.

According to Pandora, a team of analysts have culled through thousands of performances to classify them based on style and content.

Pandora debuted in 2000, allowing users to stream music over the Web. Since then, the company has secured a growing (and dedicated) user base that creates stations on different genres or topic areas, and personalizes those stations to match their tastes.

Though Pandora's comedy service won't feature the same breadth of content available to music lovers, the company said that it has quite a bit available. Listeners can create stations based on a specific comedian or genre, such as political comedy or "working class comedy." Stations are also available by decade, spanning the 1960s through today.

"We are delighted to now be able to give people a mix of familiar and new comic material that they'll love to listen to," Pandora founder and chief strategy officer, Tim Westergren, said in a statement.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20059644-17.html#ixzz1LUpBB473

Hulu Plus Hits Xbox Live April 29, Free For A Week

(Credit: Microsoft)

Xbox Live users can rejoice tomorrow--not just because it's still working--but because Hulu Plus will be hitting the console. Even better, the normally $7.99-a-month service will be absolutely free for an entire week thanks to a spicy sponsorship by Jack Link's.

The initial promotion will available to all Xbox Live subscribers both Gold and Silver, but once it ends only Gold members will be allowed to subscribe on a monthly basis.

Hulu Plus on Xbox will also feature Kinect compatibility, so you can speak and wave your way through content from ABC, Comedy Central, Fox, NBC, and many more networks.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/hulu-plus-hits-xbox-live-april-29-free-for-a-week/8301-17938_105-20058404-1.html#ixzz1Kr8O7Mm8

Microsoft Opens Up Office 365 As Public Beta

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Microsoft has opened the tap on its cloud-based Office 365 and is now offering the service as a public beta for anyone to try out.

Available in 38 countries and in 17 languages, the new beta follows several months of limited testing among a couple thousand businesses that were able to kick the tires on the service. After the public beta, Office 365 will officially launch later this year.

Unveiled last October, Office 365 is Microsoft's attempt to offer businesses a cloud-based alternative to some of its traditional desktop and server products. The service combines Office Web Apps with hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint as well as Microsoft's Lync product, which provides the online communication and collaboration piece.

As such, Office 365 is designed to offer a gamut of features, including document creation and sharing, e-mail, IM, online meetings, and public Web sites. Microsoft is also including protection in the form of its enterprise ForeFront security client and is promising a 99.9 percent uptime for the entire service.

Once it officially launches, Office 365 will be offered as two different plans depending on the size of the company. Smaller businesses with 25 or fewer employees can pay $6 per person per month to receive Office Web Apps and the hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint. Larger enterprises will have to choose one of four different plans at a cost of anywhere from $10 to $27 per person per month.

In addition to targeting the business world, Microsoft is reaching out to the educational market with five different plans geared toward faculty, staff, and students.

Also now available as a beta is the Office 365 Marketplace. Designed to supplement Office 365, the marketplace tries to help businesses find apps and services offered by different Microsoft partners.

CNET reporter Josh Lowensohn took Office 365 for a spin last November to evaluate the service's pros and cons. He found that everything worked as advertised, but that, as things stood at the time, "Google Apps this is not."

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20054852-75.html#ixzz1JzZIuLvG

Must-have Firefox Mobile Add-Ons

One of Firefox's most popular features is its add-on support, with its accompanying deep add-on catalog. The new Firefox 4 Mobile for Android (download) and for Maemo devices (download) also support add-ons, so we've got a collection of Firefox mobile add-on essentials for you that covers the bases, from useful ad blocking to interesting, mobile-specific password helpers.

Adblock Plus lets you toggle ad blocking on a per-site basis.

(Credit: Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

The best-known add-on that's a must-have is Adblock Plus (download), ported by the developer from Firefox desktop to mobile. If you're not familiar with it, it blocks ads by using blacklists to filter out the ads. Once installed, the extension guides you to a list of filters you can install. It will recommend a filter based on which country you're in. If you do want to see ads on a particular site, you don't have to uninstall the add-on. Tap the favicon of the site you're on and an option will appear in the drop-down to toggle ad blocking for that site.

Unfortunately, the mobile version of the excellent JavaScript blocker NoScript isn't ready yet. However, there are other effective security tools for Firefox 4 Mobile.Tapsure (download) is one of those; it provides you with a pattern-based system for typing passwords. Instead of typing out a lengthy password that can be cumbersome to get through on a mobile keyboard, Tapsure lets you associate your passwords with rhythm-based tap patterns.

Another good mobile security extension is Less Spam, Please (download). It creates a partially randomized e-mail address that's both disposable and reusable, thus keeping your primary e-mail free of potential spam and clutter, and lessening the likelihood that your main account will get hacked. The add-on relies on Web mail services like YopMail, MailCatch, Humaility, or Mailinator to create the e-mail address on the fly. Then, until you delete that account, your log-in to that Web site is associated with the new dummy e-mail.

The radius by which Lazy Click determines if your tap was accurate or not can be changed.

(Credit: Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Other mobile add-ons focus on Web site access and readability. URL Fixer (download) autocorrects common typos in the URL bar, so that when you type ".cmo" it knows you meant ".com". There's an option in the add-on to have it ask you to confirm autocorrections before applying them, providing a level of protection against improper autocorrects.

The add-on Bigger Text (download), perhaps unsurprisingly, makes the text of the Web site you're viewing bigger, and it does it in two different ways. In the add-on's Options menu, you can set a new default font size larger than the standard one. It also adds a "Bigger Text" button to the site menu, accessible by tapping the site's favicon. Tap the Bigger Text button and a site's font automatically gets bigger.

Tapsure

(Credit: Tapsure)

Based on the code that powers Readability, Reading List (download) lets you save pages to read for later. It adds a book icon to the toolbar (viewable when you drag your finger from the right edge of the screen to the left), and a Save for Later option to the site menu. Tap the favicon and then the Save for Later button to save a page, and tap the aforementioned book icon to access your sites.

Personally, I find this a bit superfluous to just using the bookmark star, but I know that a lot of people like the Readibility-style features and separate organization of sites to read later from their regular bookmark lists.

There are some excellent add-ons to extend Firefox Mobile's feature set, too. Phony (download) lets you fake a browser's useragent header, which is the piece of code that Web sites use to determine whether you see the mobile or desktop version of a site. This can be useful if, for example, you want to see the Mac version of Download.com instead of the mobile version.

Reading List saves sites to read later in an easy-to-access list.

(Credit: Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Mobile Profiles (download) is a simple little add-on that helps you create multiple browsing profiles in Firefox Mobile. This could be very useful for families and other people who share devices, so that each person's browsing information is kept separate. Meanwhile, Lazy Click (download) could wind up being a sleeper hit of an add-on. It fixes missed screen taps by applying them to the closest clickable link or button. The options let you customize the radius of error, and users who've found their Android touch screens to be inaccurate are likely to get the most out of this.

Got a favorite Firefox 4 Mobile add-on that I didn't mention here? Tell me about it in the comments below.

Source: http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-20052297-12.html?tag=mncol;title

VideoLAN Updates VLC, Improved Language Translation

One of the best video players forMac has to be VideoLAN's VLC Player, now updated to version 1.1.8. This update fixes a number of small bugs and adds more support for several features, including better language translation as well as updating security patches for known vulnerabilities.

Core Security Technologies recognized vulnerabilities in AMV and NSV files when handled by previous versions of VLC.

Two vulnerabilities have been found in VLC media player [1], when handling AMV and NSV file formats. These vulnerabilities can be exploited by a remote attacker to obtain arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the user running VLC.

Updating to version 1.1.8 solves those issues.

Other fixes included in the 1.1.8 update are:

• Security update regarding video width concerning some demuxers
• Support for a new Dirac encoder based on libschroedinger
• Package of the new VP8/Webm encoder 'Bali'
• Notable updates in MP4, OGG, and APE demuxers
• Major updates in most language translations
• Fixes in skins2 supports of Winamp2 skins
• Upgrade on the look of VLC for Mac OS X
• Auto-detection for TXT subtitles is fixed
• Fixes on Windows integration, notably regarding volume keys
• Codecs updates
• Many miscellaneous fixes

If you find that some of your videos, especially AVI files, aren't playing properly in QuickTime Player, try downloading the free VLC Player. What is your video player of choice for the Mac? Let me know in the comments!

Source: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20047123-263.html#ixzz1HdSHOAIi

Still No Google Instant For Opera Browser Fans

In September, Google said it hoped to bring its then-new Google Instant search feature to users of the Opera browser "shortly." A half-year later, there's still no sign of it.

Google still is working on it, though.

"We've encountered some technical barriers that are temporarily preventing us from making Instant available for Opera," Google said in a statement yesterday. "It's difficult for us to estimate when we will overcome these barriers, but we want to bring Instant to as many browsers, platforms and regions as possible."

It's not clear exactly what those glitches are. Opera fans are able to use Google Instant by setting their browser to lie about its identity and tell Web servers it'sFirefox, so clearly the feature isn't totally impossible.

Opera, based in Oslo, Norway, long has had a loyal following of passionate users, and the browser maker has often been eager to embrace new Web technologies, so being stuck in a tech backwater clearly is frustrating to some users.

Opera is continuing to advance its browser. New features emerging in a beta of Opera 11.10, code-named Barracuda, include support for several new standards. You can download Opera 11.10 beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Among them:

• the Web Open Font Format, an attempt to bring better typography to the Web via downloadable fonts.

• CSS's linear gradients, which can create gradual color transitions and fades without requiring images to be downloaded.

• CSS's multi-column layouts to make it easier to provide newspaper- or magazine-like look to Web pages.

Separately, Opera is working on adding hardware acceleration and WebGL's 3D graphics to a future version of Opera. Also in the works is the HTML5 parser, which among other things defines a standard way for all browsers to handle the abundance of incorrectly coded Web pages.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20044576-264.html#ixzz1HFysBk12