Multi-video Skype 5.0 beta now available
Good news Skype fans, the brand new beta version of Skype is now available. The biggest feature in the new version is the ability to chat with multiple people on video.
Download it now (Windows only)
For all the details about the release head over the the Skype blog.
Office Live doc opened in Pages on the iPad
Microsoft this morning held their Office 2010 business launch in Sydney. One of the main focuses in the Office launch was Office Live. That’s the ability to edit Microsoft Office documents in the browser. Having used Office 2010 since the Tech Preview almost a year ago, I figure I’d give you a different angle on the announcement.
While watching the Australia Office 2010 launch news on twitter #Office2010AU on the iPad, I thought why not try Office Live right from the device. Check out the gallery below for screen shots.
Browsing around my documents on http://skydrive.live.com worked fine, not surprising given Microsoft has been very public about their multi-browser support. Upon opening a .docx Word document, I was presented with a ‘Open in Pages’ button in the top-left hand corner of mobile Safari. Pressing on it launches Pages (assuming u have it installed), and your Word document is now fully editable in Apple’s Pages app.
The roundtrip back to SkyDrive fails though. Due to Apple’s restriction on Safari accessing files the iPad, the ‘Choose file’ button on the Add Files page is de-activated. This means you’ll need to email the doc to yourself, jump on a desktop, then upload the file to SkyDrive – A very messy solution.
Maybe we should just wait for an Office Live iPad app.
Click images for larger versions
More info about Office 2010 Australian Business launch available here.
Review: Sobees for Facebook
While we continue to wait for an official Facebook iPad application, a number of developers are taking it upon themselves to create Facebook iPad applications. Sobees is the latest app to do just that, it turns out it’s a pretty nice. 
Home screen
After launching the app, you’ll land at the Home screen. This is a dashboard into your contacts latest Facebook updates. The screen is divided into Latest Updates, Breaking News, Latest Images, Links and Video. Using this as an additional monitor while working on your computer works quite well. The app auto-updates periodically letting you keen an eye on Facebook updates while remaining productive.
People
The People screen gives you an easy way to browse through your friends profiles. The page loads in thumbnails of your friends drawn from their current Facebook profile picture. This is a very nice, visual way to browse your friends list, actually this does a better job of presenting friends than Facebook.com.
Photos
To check out your friends photos, just hit the Photos screen. Probably my biggest issue with this app is the fact you can get a single aggregated stream of photos from your friends ordered by date and time. Hopefully this gets added in the future.
Events
The events page shows a present icon on every day that has on or more events on. Your contacts birthdays are added automatically, again this is a feature that’s actually better than the Facebook website. When you select a day with an event on, a description of each event is shown at the bottom of the screen. I do think having the ability to RSVP to events right from the app would be valuable.
Profile
Naturally the Profile screen shows your latest tweets, profile picture and information, as well as a mini-scrollable thumbnail list of your friends.
From any screen of the application you can update your status by clicking on the ‘Update your states’ icon in the top right hand corner.
Overall Sobees for Facebook is a nice application, providing the best interface to Facebook on the iPad other than going to Facebook.com in Safari. The application doesn’t support notifications, but you can like and comment on friends’ updates. That said once the official Facebook app arrives, I’m likely to jump ship for more functionality, at least they have a benchmark now.
More @ Sobees
Internet Explorer 9 Preview 2 released, improved
Microsoft have released an update (as they promised they would) to the IE9 preview released earlier this year. There’s a number of underlying changes that result in improvements to performance and compatibility.
One high profile test is the ACID 3 test. IE9 preview 1 scored 55/100, in preview 2 this has increased to 68/100 so there’s progress being made. There’s also a bunch of new samples to show off the upgrades.
There’s still no serious UI, so don’t expect to be using this browser day-to-day, most importantly there’s not even a back button or shortcut. After testing a bunch of sites, it does seem incredibly responsive. This is likely due to the IE9’s javascript performance approaching that of the superfast market leader Chrome 5.0 beta.
The future looks bright for IE9, if Microsoft get it right, it should stem flow away from IE towards alternatives like Chrome (my browser of choice) and bring performance browsing to the masses.
More @ Windows Team Blog
Download @ IE9 Test Drive
Adobe CS5 now available
The latest suite of multimedia development applications are now available from Adobe. Including upgraded versions of the popular Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Premiere, Flash and many, many more you can choose to buy straight up or grab the trial versions for 30 days.
Be careful with the trial, there were issues with CS4 trials not being able to roll back to CS3, hopefully these have been resolved, but best to avoid using trials on a production machine.
Adobe CS5 upgrade pricing is essentially the same as it was from CS3 to CS4 Master Collection, A$1,503 inc GST, with the full version costing a massive A$4,344 inc GST. For that you do get Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended, Illustrator CS5, InDesign CS5, Acrobat 9 Pro, Flash Catalyst CS5, Flash Professional CS5, Flash Builder 4, Dreamweaver CS5, Fireworks CS5, Contribute CS5, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 (with Adobe OnLocation™ CS5 and Encore CS5), After Effects CS5, Soundbooth CS5.
A new requirement this time round is for a 64-bit Operating System. As we know the main benefit of running 64-bit is to access more RAM, the Adobe products will use all the resources you have to perform tasks faster, so if you weren’t already, it’s time to go 64-bit.
Personally, I’ll check out the trials before laying down the cash for the upgrade, but based on what I’ve seen there’s a good chance I’ll be making the move. The decision to upgrade is a very personal one, with the list of new features studied intently and weighed up using a cost benefits analysis in most businesses. It’s important to remember Adobe runs on a release cycle of around 18 months between versions, so holding off for a year will reduce the time you have to benefit from this version.
Individuals should look towards the Elements versions of the products. These are much more affordable for the home user, however functionality is reduced. These also run on a different release schedule than the CS5 suite, so you may have to wait a few months for new features.
More @ Adobe
Welcome to the Bing Bar
While most of us simply disable browser toolbars, the new Bing Toolbar is included in the new Windows Live Essentials Suite.
Customization
The Bing Bar contains a number of configurable properties, Color schemes and seasonal scenes. You can also switch out the default shortcuts for a number of other services. These include Windows Live, Sports, Messenger and many others. 
![image[51]](http://www.techau.tv/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/image511.png "image[51]")
News and Weather and more
As with most Microsoft Products, it’s very US-centric, especially initially. That means the sources for this content are things like MSNBC and MSN Weather. The default Bing Bar also offers quick access to Stocks, Video and Hotmail. 
Sign In
As with all the Live Essentials products, the Bing Bar connects with your LiveID account, this allows your preferences to sync across multiple machines.
Windows Live Wave 4 / Live Essentials 2010 (hands-on)
The much anticipated Windows Live Wave 4 suite has landed. I got a chance to get hands on with the new suite of Essentials suite of applications from Microsoft. Rebranded as Windows Live Essentials this version includes:
- Windows Live Messenger,
- Windows Live Writer,
- Windows Live Photo Gallery,
- Windows Live Movie Maker
- Windows Live Mail
- Windows Live Sync
- Family Safety Family Safety
Windows Live Writer 2010
If your a blogging running Windows, then you’re likely using Windows Live Writer, if your not, you should be. Windows Live Writer 2010 supports the new ribbon UI consistent with other Windows 7 applications. In terms of functionality, it’s very much the same as the previous version, The main difference being that your options panel on the right is now in the context-sensitive ribbon. In the top left of the application you’ll also notice the menu bar has been replaces by an office 2010 style menu button.
Another small change is the move from having the category, tags and publish date toolbar up to the top directly under the Ribbon, personally I think this is a great decision. It can be easy to miss these before posting as they were positioned outside of your point of attention.
Windows Live Photo Gallery 2010
There’s a few new very useful features in the 2010 version of Windows Live Photo Gallery
People
Face detection is a feature available in most photo management applications these days and has been in WLPG for a while now. The new version comes with a much improved way to find people. The way you tag people hasn’t changed by the way you display all the photos of that person has. Using the Find Tab you can see the Top People and All People sections, the Top people are the most commonly tagged people in your gallery. Clicking on that person’s thumbnail will create a search filter which shows all the photos that contain that person. 
Location
This is a brand new feature that allows users to add location information to their photos. After selecting one of more photos you can begin typing in the Location section of the info pane on the right. As you type is searches for places that may refer to your location, if it finds multiple entries, just select the one your after.
From here it works very similar to the faces search filter explained above. Clicking on the location will filter all photos taken at that location. Unfortunately there’s no quick access from the Find tab like there is for people, also there’s no mashup of your photos positioned on a map. As you can tell from the orange circle thumbnails, this is still in beta, so we may see that added before final release.
Windows Live Movie Maker 2010
Good news for fans of HD video, Windows Live Movie maker now supports up to 1080p video. There’s also convenient access to publishing your masterpiece on YouTube, SkyDrive and Facebook.
A feature with a lot of potential is AutoMovie themes. If your imagining something akin to what’s on offer in Apple’s iMovie, you’ll be bitterly disappointed. Windows Live Movie Maker’s AutoMovie themes simply add intro titles, closing credits and either transition effects like a fade between clips, or a video effect like colour to your movie. Sure this will be a time saver for people, it’s got a long way to go.
Windows Live Messenger 2010
Unfortunately this build of Windows Live Essentials doesn’t allow messenger to connect correctly. However there are still a couple of new things we can learn. After jumping into Tools > Options we see a couple new and noteworthy additions.
First and foremost, tabbed conversations are coming to Windows Live Messenger in 2010. Secondly there’s a new item under the Sign In section that lists a new Social Mode. Not sure what exactly this entails, however Windows Live already has strong integration with pretty much every social network out there. It’s likely a single view into what your friends have been up to online.
Something interesting to note is the image below of the Windows Live Messenger 2010 login screen is 100% pixel for pixel display of the smallest dimensions you can make the window. This is slightly concerning given that many of us use messenger in it’s tradition long rectangle form at the edge of the monitor. Reminder: still beta and this is by no means a detailed look at messenger, there could be a very good reason for this.
Update
Thanks to the wonders of the internet, there’s a patch available that opens Windows Live Messenger, revealing the following screen. The UI can indeed be dropped back to the traditional sidebar style by turning off social mode in the options. 
Social View
Taking strong influence from the Zune / Windows Phone 7 UI, the new Social view. This works great in Full-screen view. Time to get another monitor, call it the Social monitor.
Windows Live Mail 2010
Mail looks, well, like you expect mail to look. Like the rest of the 2010 Live Essentials apps, the ribbon features heavily in the application’s functionality. You’ll notice the right hand column includes calendar entries of different colours, these represent entries from multiple Windows Live calendars.
Setup was incredibly simple, just sign in and the Live Sync agent takes care of the rest. Windows Live Mail is actually a really capable mail client, the more the application evolves, the less of a reason non-domain users have for Outlook. Although webmail is sufficient in most scenarios, it’s nice to have a rich client or a least a local backup of your mail. 
