~TECH-BYTES~

I am very sorry readers for not posting for quite a long time as i was busy with my final exams{result is out and i got 8.3 sgpa} and project and now training… but now i’ll try to post regularly…

Here are some of the recent top technical stories….

Google’s New Favicon

This is one of the smaller changes to Google – at least if measured in pixels! Google changed their “Favicon.ico”, the 16×16 image file that usually shows in the browser address bar or in bookmarks. The old icon used a square with red, green and blue edges, wrapping an upper-case “G”. The new logo is a bit more open, showing just the lower-case blue “g” from the Google logo, without borders, and a bit of shadow.

Google Sites Available Without Google Apps

Now you can use Google Sites without having a domain. “A few months ago we launched Google Sites exclusively as part of Google Apps for companies and organizations that wanted to use the service on their own domains. Now we’ve made it easy for anyone to set up a website to share all types of information — team projects, company intranets, community groups, classrooms, clubs, family updates, you name it — in one place, for a few people, a group or the world,” says Andrew Zaeske on the Google Blog.

Internet Explorer 8 Coming in August

Microsoft said yesterday it is planning on releasing yet another test version (Beta 2) of its Internet Explorer 8 (IE Web browser in August.
In March this year, the company released IE 8 Beta 1 offering Web developers/designers a preview of the latest iteration of its popular Web browser.

orkut Themes

When orkut doesn’t borrow features from Facebook, it gets inspired by other Google services. This time, orkut added themes, but not all the users can see the new option. The themes should be familiar, since most of them were created for iGoogle. When you select a theme, only you and your friends can see it in your profile page.
Will Gmail Get Themes?
A source is telling me that Gmail will get themes – custom layouts to personalize Google’s web mail client. According to the source, the launch of this may happen within the next months. There will be 12 themes to pick from, according to this information, like a black-and-green “terminal” view, as well as a flowery view.

Orkut Adds Photo Tagging feature

Orkut have just added a photo tagging feature. This allows you to tag the photos of other users in your profile or other’s profile. The tagged photos will then be visible in the profile page next to the messages field.

Cool Features in Firefox 3

If you decide to upgrade from Firefox 2 to the first release candidate of Firefox 3, you’ll notice an improved performance, less memory leaks, a revamped interface and some very interesting new features:* select discontinuous text - press Ctrl while selecting different blocks of text, like you can do in Microsoft Office

Microsoft has released the first public beta of Internet Explorer 8 for Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2.

Following are the download links for IE8 mentioned on the Microsoft IE8 Readiness website.

1. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Window XP SP2

2. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Windows Vista

This release is essentially for people who want to make sure that their websites or web applications do not breaking in the upcoming IE 8 release that contains some key changes.

Microsoft has sent out invitations to select enthusiasts for the first private Beta testing of their upcoming Internet Explorer (IE) 8.

About two weeks back, Mozilla had launched Beta 3 of their Firefox version 3. Seems Microsoft has been under some pressure to come up with their new version as well.

Incidentally, though IE continues to be the most widely-used browser, Firefox has been a strong competitor and has managed to grab a considerable percentage of the market in a comparatively short span of time.

In 2006, both companies had launched new versions of their respective browsers at around the same time. However, users ended up using Firefox 2 more as compared to IE7.

Coming back to the invitations sent out by Microsoft to select Beta testers, they’ve said they will soon be making their Beta available to the general public for testing and downloads.

MORE… 

Microsoft will release the first beta of Internet Explorer 8 in the first half of 2008 that will have full support for web standards. And the new browser will be known as “Windows Internet Explorer 8″.

Website designers will be able to write websites based on standards, insert a flag that tells IE to render in IE8 standards mode, and IE will then switch its rendering engine to use this new mode.

[Source]