The common Windows desktop is about to change into a panoramic pane of glass of thousand of pixels.

The 360Desktop will come to light at DemoFall 2007 in San Diego.
This innovation is meant to bring a new redefined desktop with an extendable viewing area, looking like a continuous pane of glass.
One of the coolest things about this desktop is that you could personalize it at maximum adding for example, as background, a real image from your favored city or place from this world which starts again as you reach the end of the scene.
It is expected that applications like Google Maps to show more details on this kind of desktop.

The 360Desktop is targeting application user interface developers, content authors, and advertisers, being able to run training applications or informational resources with many graphs, charts, and pages of text.

It is planned that the availability of this product to start on November 5.

Read more No comments

Since it seems I didn't pay enough attention to a feature that's very important for the users, as it can be seen in the comment below, I'm getting back to this review for a while to make things right. Now, let's complete the chain of time-saving features that are closely related to the Favorites part...

I mentioned Favorites because Internet Explorer and other Web browsers made this feature notorious, and file managers started to use it too, after a while. XYplorer has Favorites, as well as a Hotlist, both aimed at users looking to achieve things as quick as possible, but the Catalog is another time-saving weapon of this program, so let's check it out!

To display the Catalog, you can go to the Window menu and check the option simply called Show Catalog, but the easiest way to display and hide the Catalog pane is to use the F8 keyboard shortcut. When the Catalog is displayed below the Tree for the first time, it's empty, but you can easily start adding items to it.

While most file managers are limited to managing files and folders, XYplorer's Catalog can also store Web pages, and all items you store here can be easily customized. Anyway, apart from the one-click approach to file navigation offered by the Catalog, the best part is that I just discovered a revolutionary file copy/move solution, since you can simply drag and drop items into the Catalog, about the same way as it is possible in classic file managers that use two panes!

One of the few things that I don't really like about the Catalog is that new items can't be added using drag and drop operations, but I understand that this may interfere with the operation described above, so I can't complain. After all, moving files is something that occurs more often than adding new items to the Catalog...

Regarding the support part, I didn't have the chance to test the speed of response yet, but I must confess the built-in Help system and the online documentation are absolutely amazing, so if you really want to switch to this program, all you need is the desire to study and become an XYplorer (e)Xpert.

As my last words for now, all I can say is that I hardly wait the next version to become available, so I am going to start using this trial as an alternative to the "great classics" until my 30 days trial period run out.

If you missed the previous article about XYplorer, you can read it here.

Read more No comments

Have you ever needed to make screenshots of your Pocket PC and save them to your PC?
Try VITO ScreenCapture, a utility created by VITO Technology, which allows capturing the image of your Smartphone’s or Pocket PC’s screen.

The applicability could be in writing articles with pictures attached, sharing your themes with other people, or when you simply need to post some screenshots of a new program on the Internet.

After you do the screenshot, choose to save the image as JPEG, BMP or GIF file.
As system requirements you only need to have a Windows Mobile 2003 or Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC and Smartphone.

The software price is of 5.95$ and the trial version is available here.

Read more No comments

As computer parts become more and more powerful, their energy requirements grow too, and as a direct consequence of this fact, their cooling requirements also increase. Since only a few people consider investing in high-end cooling systems, having a program able to monitor the temperatures and voltages inside your computer is an interesting alternative for the rest of us, and today's choice is called SensorsView Pro, an extremely "hot" program coming from a software company called STV Software.


Setup

Released two days ago, the last version of SensorsView Pro is labeled 3.1, and works with Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista. The shareware version I have here can be used for as long as 21 days without any other limitation.

The setup package of this program has 1.8MB in size and is very easy to install, as you can see in the screenshots above. In fact, I was expecting for some input from my part to be needed during the setup process, but this program installed itself without asking any questions about my mainboard or the type of sensors it uses.


Interface

What you can see in the screenshot to the left is the window that pops up when you double click the system tray icon displaying the temperature of your CPU, but the system tray can also host the icon of the application or another temperature indicator. The history window looks different, missing the skin applied to the Sensors View window I just mentioned. Anyway, since system monitoring tools are more about checking your system's status and sending alerts than looking great, let's move on and see what can be done with this program...


Features

The best part of this program is that - at least in my case - I didn't have to select anything manually, because it automatically detected the sensors from my mainboard, and did this the right way. The only problem with the detection part is that I have two network connections, a local one, and the PPPOE connection to the Internet, and I wasn't able to find any way to set the one I want to monitor. While I was transferring over 2MB/s on the LAN and about 500KB/s from the Internet, SensorsView Pro was showing a load of 1% on my network interface, and a transfer rate of 20KB/s...

Another small issue is that no matter what I do with my hard drive, the program keeps showing a 0% HDD usage value, which is pretty strange, but at least the voltage indicators work great, as well as the CPU and memory usage meters.

You can set alerts for every temperature threshold or fan speed, and the options available range from a simple notification or playing a sound to sending an email, running a certain file/command or, the final solution, turning off your computer automatically.

The appeareance of the program can be customized, and there's also possible to save alarm logs and even logs for further investigations, if something goes wrong and you're not near your computer when it happens.

Since this is about everything I can tell you about this useful system utility, the time has come to draw the conclusions, as usual.


The Good

SensorsView Pro is a program that looks good, has support for a wide range of motherboards and additional temperature sensors from hard drives and video cards and working with it should be very easy even for beginners.

The Bad

The hard drive usage and network load indicators don't seem to work as they should, and the price of the program is a bit spicy, considering its features and that suites like Sandra or EVEREST are only a bit more expensive, and come with hardware monitoring features and a wide range of additional capabilities.

Conclusion

SensorsView Pro was a pleasant surprise for me, unlike its price. Anyway, since the trial period lasts 21 days and there's no functional limitation, you should definitely give this piece of code a try, and maybe you'll consider that paying $24.95 for your hardware's safety is not too much, after all.

Developer: STV Software
Price: $24.95
Trial Link: Download

Read more No comments

A suspicious warning came from a security expert, Petko Petkov, regarding a security flaw in Adobe PDF format.
This follows his previous bugs discoveries, that you have probably already read about, in the Second Life client, Firebug JavaScript debugger, Windows Media Player and Firefox's QuickTime plug-in.
Petko Petkov recommends us to avoid PDF files, especially those sent by unknown users.
This until a patch will be released.

I will cite the words used in his blog: "Adobe Acrobat/Reader PDF documents can be used to compromise your Windows box. Completely!!! Invisibly and unwillingly!!! All it takes is to open a PDF document or stumble across a page which embeds one."
According to him, the exploit affects Windows 2003 and Windows XP SP2, while Vista and Linux can’t be affected.
Acrobat Reader’s vulnerable versions are 7, 8.0 and 8.1, but other programs such as Foxit Reader can be affected, though less, because they show a confirmation dialog which has to be accepted in order for the exploit to start running malicious code on the machine.

We don’t know for sure how accurate this information is, but Petkov wrote that he informed Adobe about the flaw and that he will publish the code which demonstrates how the attack works, after a patch is provided.
According to him, Adobe has confirmed the problem, "You have to take my word for it," he said.

Read more No comments