Opera 10 beta is available for Download

Earlier today, the Opera desktop team announced the availability of the Opera 10 beta which is the latest build of the Opera browser.

This new build of Opera comes packed with a lot of new features, a fresh look and feel that is much pleasing and smoother than any of the other previous looks, and enhanced speed and performance. Plus it also marks a two-digit version milestone for the Opera browser.

The biggest new feature in Opera 10 beta is Opera Turbo. a state-of-the-art compression technology introduced in Alpha, which speeds up the loading of web-pages and helps the users on dial up make the most out of their Internet connection.

Other features include:

• An Interface-lift - Opera 10 has got a new look and feel, designed by a world-renowned designer.
• New visual tabs - New version has a resizable tab bar, with thumbnail preview of open tabs.
• Better Speed Dial - The most popular feature of Opera is now fully customizable.
• Inline spell-checker - Opera might be late on this one but a fully featured spell-checker is finally here.
• Developer tools - Dragonfly makes it easy for developers to test and debug their websites.

And many more.

Opera has always been praised for the simplicity it offers and perhaps with Opera 10, it will evolve into a full-featured mainstream web browser like Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

The first beta for Opera 10 is now available for download for all major OS platforms including Windows, Mac and Linux. Download Opera 10 beta now.

Download Safari 4 for Windows and Mac

Apple finally released the Safari 4 browser for all platforms today at the World Wide Developers Conference. The 'world's fastest browser' which had been in beta for a long time has now reached a stable milestone.

The stable version retains all the features previewed in the beta, while fixing numerous bugs.

The browser beats all the competition in the JavaScript testing conducted by Apple. Based on the Webkit engine, like Google Chrome, it gives a big competition to the likes of Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 8. Apple however didn't use the most recent builds available for the other browsers like Firefox 3.5 beta and Google Chrome 3 alpha, which have a lot of performance improvements.

Major features of Safari 4 include ultra fast browsing, panoramic home screen with previews of favorite sites, and even Cover Flow in history along with a huge memory footprint

Download Safari 4 for Windows and Mac.

How to Enable Private Browsing mode in Firefox 3.5?

A couple of days ago Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 and the new version of this ever-favorite web browser now brings a lot a lot of new features including a Private Browsing mode.

Private Browsing mode is now a days a standard feature in all of the state-of-the-art web browsers including IE8 and Google Chrome and now with Firefox 3.5, users can surf the web or do whatever they want without leaving any traces.

Here is how to enable Private Browsing mode in Firefox:

1. Make sure you have downloaded the latest version of Firefox 3.5
2. Open the Tools menu and click on 'Start Private Browsing' or use [Shift + Control + P]
3. A popup will ask you to confirm your decision so click on 'Start Private Browsing' again.
4. Now to end the session, simply go to Tools menu and click on 'End Private Browsing'.

When Private Browsing mode in Firefox is activated, all your browsing history, cookies and data is stored temporarily and as soon as the session ends, everything is flushed so no trace is left behind.

Free 90-day License for Norton Internet Security 2009

Keeping a PC clean and free from viruses can be a hard task, not to mention how expensive it is to purchase all those security solutions and products. But Symantec here wants to help you with this by giving you the opportunity to run Norton Internet Security 2009 totally free for 90 days.

The introductory subscription is being offered for a limited-time so get hold of it while you can.Follow this page to continue. It only works for Windows XP and Vista, sadly no support for Windows 7.

Norton Internet Security 2009 gives user access to some of the most reliable security products for PC such as the Norton Antivirus, Norton Personal Firewall, Norton Antispyware and Norton Antiphishing.

To proceed with the introductory subscription, follow the link to the page provided above and click 'Download Now' and install the application. Once the installation has completed, run the application. After a 90-day period, you will be asked to purchase a license key.

Yahoo! introduces a new and more social homepage

If you were not a fan of browser start-pages like iGoogle, Yahoo! and Live, wait till you see the revamped edition of the Yahoo! homepage which now boasts more social and interactive features.

Yahoo! has been working on a new homepage since September last year and finally this new edition of the homepage is being rolled out to everyone, starting from users in the U.S.

What's special about this new homepage is that Yahoo! has removed links to all those useless Yahoo! services in the sidebar and has replaced it with a 'My Favorites' portal which lets you add your favorite social networks, blogs, websites as widgets. This will allow users to synchronize with their social activity around the web, specially social networks like Flickr, Twitter and Facebook.

Yahoo! already provides some of the basic apps/widgets for you to add in the sidebar, however a widget from any URL can be created on the fly even if it does not have RSS. For future, Yahoo! plans to allow users to sync up the homepage customizations between their desktop and mobile.

As of now, the new homepage can be only be tested by logged in users at this address.

Be the first to use Google wave, register now

Desperately waiting to 'wave' through Google wave? Here is your chance to be the member of Google wave's exclusive bugs testing team. Yes! Thats true, Google has started its hunt for users from around the globe to use, test and enjoy the wave experience.

All you need to do is to register here and you can be one of the lucky 100,000 users to use Google Wave, registration process is simple and quick. You are only required to enter your email ID. There are a couple of questions as well which you can answer if you want to but it is strongly recommended that you answer those questions.

Don't forget to write a short message for the Google wave team, it only makes your application more strong. Google has not yet explained the selection procedure but if selected you will be able to test the tool before its public launch.

Widely considered to be the email killer, Google Wave is a personal communication and collaboration tool announced by Google in this year's Google IO conference. A combination of Email, instant messaging and social networking makes Google wave a fascinating tool to use. Google wave comes with a set of very strong APIs and it is open source which means the users can make extensions to Google wave.

In initial phase the tool will be made available to the selected 100,000 users on September 30 this year while the rest of the world will be able to 'wave' a month or two later.

Twitter suffers downtime due to Denial-Of-Service

A couple of hours ago Twitter experienced the longest downtime in history which resulted in a global 'black out' for the online micro blogging website. The site went down on the Thursday morning leaving millions of Twitterers frustrated.

Initially the twitter team was not clear about the problem as it posted on the twitter status blog:

Site is down, we are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.

Upon further investigation, it was finally declared that the server went down because of a denial-of-service attack as posted on the twitter blog:

On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack.

Denial of Service attack is an attempt of paralyzing a server by increasing the work load of a server through external communication methods. This results in the consumption of the server's resources, which bars the actual users from using the 'victim' machine.

According to reports twitter is under a massive hack attack this time. Pertinent to know that twitter had been into the headlines in the past for its security loop-holes. We saw a number of twitter accounts being hacked be some hacker, leaking secret information.

The Twitter team is working on the problem as said by the Twitter blog:

We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.

Though Twitter is back but users are experiencing unusual delays and time-outs. Highlighting the matter, the twitter status blog says:

As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.

Others sites which experienced a similar DDoS attack were Facebook, LiveJournal and YouTube. The attack was generated from some parts of Russia and Germany.

Create a custom font from your own Handwriting

Now here is one useful tool for designers and graphics masters. Its called FontCapture and it lets you create a font from your own handwriting. Means you no longer need to use any complicated software to make custom fonts, this web app does it all.

The idea is simpe and easy. There's no software to download and install, all you need is a printer and a scanner. Simply fill in the font template, scan and upload it to our website, and download your completed font. Fonts created are both compatible with Windows and Mac.

To follow the easy instructions on how to create hand-made custom fonts, visit the website.

Cannot access Gmail online? Try Thunderbird

Gmail is currently facing a worldwide downtime which is affecting both users of Gmail itself and those who make use of the Mail feature in Google Apps. Google has acknowledged the issue and is still working on resolving it, though no wonder how long will it take.

For those looking for a quick solution to send/receive email through their Gmail inbox is to try theThunderbird Email Client.

According to the post on the official Gmail blog:

If you have IMAP or POP set up already, you should be able to access your mail that way in the meantime.

Since Thunderbird automatically configures to run through IMAP, so for now it is the only most recommended email client that will get you running in seconds.

Go download Thunderbird from this link. Once downloaded, select Gmail during the setup wizard, enter your password and you will be able to send/receive email through your Gmail account till the web version is restored. Tested it myself and it works!

The same method can also be used on any other occasion when Gmail is down.

Update: The GMail gadget in iGoogle.com also seems to be working, you can view your mail and compose messages from there.

ImHalal, a search engine made for Muslims

Let's say you are a Muslim and you are totally not satisfied with the search filters provided by Google and other search engines. Here comes a search engine named ImHalal that will give you the ease to search the Internet without coming across any content that might be considered as 'Haram' according to the Islamic Law.

For a test, we entered some queries such as Alcohol, Nudity etc and were impressed to see that ImHalal does exactly what it's supposed to, it blocks the query and warns the user since the results for the query may contain Haram content.

Thats not all! ImHalal even gives you a rating for the searched query if its explicit or contains any sort of Haram content. Moreover, it is able to fetch not only links, but also images and news for any particular query. The search engine uses various techniques to determine which results fetched are supposed to be 'Halal' or 'Haram'.

Now it may not be the best search engine out there but it still comes with a noble purpose. Especially, it can be of great use in Muslim households where the parents are concerned about the types of sites their children visit on the Internet.

Ready to try it our for yourself? Go Halal.

Download Nero 9 Essentials for Free

Good news for all those Nero users out there is that they can now download a free version of Nero 9 Essentials from the Nero website, thanks to AskVG.

The free version of Nero 9 Essentials comes with a little stripped down functionality but would be enough to cater for the average users. Even though now there are a couple of free alternatives available to Nero, it still remains to be best software for CD/DVD burning software and the good part is that now it can even be download for free.

For advance users, Nero 9 Essentials free also provides an option to upgrade to the full and more advanced version. Follow the link to download the software from Nero website.

Download the Yahoo! Messenger 10 Beta for Windows

Yahoo! has finally decided to launch the Yahoo! Messenger 10 IM client in beta for Windows. As claimed, this new release will add more to the features of the world's most favorite IM client for PC users.

The most noticeable new improvements have been made to the webcam feature which now allows the user to make high-quality video calls. Features include the ability to swap video windows, position the video windows side-by-side, mute the call or place it on hold.

Other new features include:

• New "Y! Updates" view of your contact list.
• All-new Yahoo! Insider.
• Choose your language easily.
• New ways to sort your contacts.
• New icons in the IM window.

Can't wait to try out the new Yahoo! Messenger 10 beta already? Download it for Windows.

Easily manage styles for Dock on Snow Leopard

The Dock is one of the signature features in Mac OS X and for those who think it can't be customized in appearance, they need to checkout this new application called Dock Library

Dock Library is a free application that takes the headache out of managing styles for your Leopard dock. New skins amd themes can easily be applied to the Dock in Leopard and Snow Leopard makes it more visually attractive and adds more to the OS X eye-candy.

The interface of the application is simple and easy to use. All one needs to do is download a Dock style from LeopardDocks.com or LeopardDocks.net in zip format and then simply click 'Import' from within the application to add it to Dock Library.

Once a style is added to Dock Library, simply select it and click 'Activate' to see it live. Click hereto download the app, it works on both Leopard and Snow Leopard.

Facebook Lite is now available for slow connections

It has long been in news that a new and lite version of Facebook is in the works and after all this wait, Facebook has finally pushed this new version for users to try.

Facebook Lite, which can now be accessed at Lite.Facebook.com, will let users access a lightning-fast edition of the popular social networking website thus making it easier for users with slow connections to navigate the website easily.

The Lite version actually disables all sort of modules such as Highlights in the sidebar, advertising and applications which not only makes it an ideal solution for users with a slow connection, but also for those who only use Facebook for the sake of checking updates and posting comments.

Its perhaps the first attempt of Facebook in providing a Twitter-like experience to the users which is simple and to-the-point and so far, we believe that it has done a good job on it.

Change the background on Windows 7 Login screen

In the usual case mostly, Windows 7 automatically selects the background for the Login screen which can't be changed unless you hack your way into the system files, but here we have a utility that will make this task easy and simple for you.

Windows 7 Logon Background Changer is a free open source software that let you change the wallpaper of the Windows 7 Login screen. This small program is WPF based decent GPU for the 3D animations to run smoothly.

On the usage part, its pretty straightforward. Run the app, choose a folder that has the images that you want to keep as the background of your Login screen, select the image and click Apply.

It automatically creates a cropped and resized version of the image that you select which is then applied as the background of the Login screen. And the best part is that it does not mess around with the system files so it is completely safe to use.

Give it a try, download it.

Unlock iPhone 2G/3G with Firmware 3.1 on Windows

Oh we have a very good news for all those Windows users out there. You will now be able to unlock the iPhone 2G/3G right away without having to wait for the Redsnow tool.

PwnageTool 3.1 was released earlier today by the dev team but the fact that it can only be used by Mac users and leaves no ticket for Windows users seems a little unfair, so we made things a little easy for you.

We created the custom IPSW for Firmware 3.1 on iPhone 2G and iPhone 3G which lets you update without having to meddle with the baseband. This Firmware comes with the stock Apple logo and Cydia. All you have to do is download it, restore it and that's it.

For the iPhone 3G

Please use the links to download the custom IPSW of Firmware 3.1 for iPhone 3G labelediPhone1,2_3.1_7C144_Custom_Restore.

http://bit.ly/iphone3g-custom31-sizlopedia
http://bit.ly/iphone3g-custom31-sizlopedia-p2
http://bit.ly/iphone3g-custom31-sizlopedia-p3

Once downloaded, join the file parts using HJSplit and extract the ZIP archive to have one file. Now follow the steps.

1. Please down and install iTunes 9, and then run it.
2. Connect your iPhone to the PC.
3. Click 'Restore' while holding SHIFT key and select the custom IPSW.
4. Once everything is processed and OS boots up, install Ultrasnow.
5. Follow this guide (starting from Step-3) to install Ultrasnow on iPhone.

Now you have an unlocked iPhone 3G running on Firmware 3.1.

For the iPhone 2G

Please use the links to download the custom IPSW of Firmware 3.1 for iPhone 3G labelediPhone1,1_3.1_7C144_Custom_Restore.

http://bit.ly/iphone2g-custom31-sizlopedia
http://bit.ly/iphone2g-custom31-sizlopedia-p2
http://bit.ly/iphone2g-custom31-sizlopedia-p3

Once downloaded, join the file parts using HJSplit and extract the ZIP archive to have one file. Now follow the steps.

1. Please down and install iTunes 9, and then run it.
2. Connect your iPhone to the PC.
3. Click 'Restore' while holding SHIFT key and select the custom IPSW.

As no Ultrasnow is needed, so you already done with everything. Notice that no bootloader files are required.

Thats pretty much all of it. Those on Mac can make use of the custom IPSW in case they don't plan to get their hands dirty with PwnageTool which, to be honest, is not easy to go by due to lack of documentation. The Unarchiver can be used on the Mac to join the files and uncompress them.

Note: Please test and give us your feedback in the comments. Make sure not to 'Update' the Firmware at any step, only use the 'Restore' feature.

Update: Good news for iPhone 3GS users, they can now Unlock the Firmware 3.1 on their device with our exclusive tutorial.

PwnageTool for iPhone 3GS on Firmware 3.1 Released

ts Christmas everywhere for iPhone 3GS users today as the dev team has just released the new version of PwnageTool which will now allow them to update to Firmware 3.1 while preserving the old baseband, which means that users will be able to Jailbreak and even Unlock their iPhone 3GS on Firmware 3.1.

Though of course there are some limitations which might not make many iPhone 3GS users happy out there. Follow on to know more.

The new PwnageTool 3.1.3 only has support for the iPhone 3GS and even the iPod 2G, but the catch is that only users with a previously Jailbroken iPhone 3GS would be able to update their phones to Firmware 3.1 and the tool does not have support for ones with Firmware 3.1 out of the box. Likewise for the iPod 2G.

PwnageTool will only work for Mac users but we shall soon post an alternate solution for all Windows users out there. Follow the links below to download the new PwnageTool and make sure to read the release statement by the iPhone dev team.

Download PwnageTool 3.1.3 (At thePirateBay | Alternate)

A complete guide on how to Jailbreak and Unlock your iPhone 3GS on Firmware 3.1 will be available soon on this blog. Keep checking!

Unlock iPhone 3GS on Firmware 3.1 with PwnageTool

Follow the steps below to Jailbreak and then Unlock your iPhone 3GS on Firmware 3.1 without having to update the baseband. Please proceed at your own risk.

Another important note is to remember that the method only works for those who already have a previously-Jailbroken iPhone 3GS on an old firmware. Users with Out-of-the-box device shouldn't waste their time with this tutorial.

Please backup with iTunes before trying this. Here is how it goes:

1. Grab and download the Pwnage Tool 3.1.3 for Mac OS X (At thePirateBay | Alternate)
2. Make sure to update to the latest iTunes 9 before attempting this unlock.
3. Download the 3.1 Firmware for iPhone 3GS and save it on your desktop.
4. Run the Pwnage Tool 3.1.3 and select iPhone 3GS and click next.
5. Select the Firmware 3.1 with build iPhone2,1_3.1_7C144 and click next.
6. Select 'Yes', click next and then select 'No', now the 'Building IPSW' has started.
7. Once completed, select 'Yes' to the prompt and click next.
8. Open iTunes and click Restore (while holding Option key) and select the newly created Custom 3.1 IPSW on desktop.

Voila! the iPhone 3GS has now been successfully updated to 3.1 Firmware while preserving the baseband, now follow the steps on this article (starting from step-3) to unlock it with Ultrasnow.

Here is a direct link to download the iPhone 3.1 Firmware for iPhone 3G.

Note: This method will only and only work for the iPhone 3GS. Also please note that at no point are you supposed to 'Update' to a newer firmware in iTunes, only use 'Restore'. The method we used follows the Simple mode in PwnageTool 3.1.3.

Update: We have tested it and it works perfect. Windows users should expect a solution from us soon.