Category Archives: Software

Category containing all information relating to software.

Amazon changes Windows 7 pre-order price

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Just a quick notification to let you know that if you were planning to get Microsoft’s brilliant pre-order offer from Amazon, you’ve missed your chance on the £50 offer.

Sadly, I noticed yesterday that Amazon has now amended the price to just under £75, which is a big blow.

Obviously the cheap pre-order stock was going a bit quicker than Microsoft and Amazon expected.

Ah well, Microsoft will have to wait for my purchase of Windows 7. I was really hoping I could get it for £50 from Amazon, but £75 is too much at the moment.

For now, I’m quite happy to be on Vista. I know, even if I’d pre-ordered I would have had to wait until October 22nd – but it doesn’t look like I’ll have my copy of Windows 7 on launch day anyway.

First looks at the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview with screenshots

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Well, I was very pleased to receive an email from Microsoft early this morning letting me know that I’d been accepted for the invitation only Office 2010 Technical Preview. So I’ve got my copy, and I’m going to do a little review here so people can get an idea of what they are in for.

Well, to be honest, I’m pretty impressed with it. The GUI is pretty similar to Office 2007’s, but there are some pretty cool new features that have really brushed up the usability of Office. The image below shows a typical new Word document in Office 2010:

office2010

If you view the image full size (click it), you’ll see the ribbon from Office 2007 has gone – hoorah! It’s been replaced with a new button with the Office logo, which is a different colour for each piece of Office software. Click it, and you get a handy little menu of Options. Here’s what it looks like in Word…

2010menu

It’s quite cool. Anyway, that’s enough of a taster for now. Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to do a series of blog posts outlining the highlights of Office 2010, so stay tuned to GEEK!.

VLC Media Player officially hits 1.0 after 13 years of work!

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Wow! After 13 years of long development, VLC Media Player has finally reached version 1.0. VLC is well known as a free media player that can decode many formats of video. It even plays a lot of HD content, and best of all – it’s totally open source.

The project was first started back in 1996, and ever since it has proven very popular to the general public.

I remember when I first started using VLC many years ago – it’s always been great at decoding weird and wonderful video formats. There isn’t any other freeware around that has the capabilities of VLC.

The VideoLAN website claims that the new version fixes a number of bugs, adds a range of new features, and adds even more codecs that can be used with VLC.

I don’t think I’ve ever known a piece of software that took so long to reach version 1.0 – but what a great piece of software to have the honour of taking 13 years to reach a 1.0 version.

I’m very glad that the developers of VLC are going to continue work with VLC – it’s a wonderful piece of software that is continuously expanding.

If you’d like a copy of the new 1.0 version, you can grab it for free (of course) from the VideoLAN website. If you’ve never tried it before, you’ll be amazed at what it can do.

Google Chrome OS looks interesting…

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It has been announced that Google will be releasing a brand new operating system, called the Google Chrome OS. The operating system will be very simple according to many sources, as it will be initially aimed at netbook users.

There hasn’t really been a confirmed release date, but guesses start from as early as tomorrow. However, Google has mentioned on their blog to stay tuned for more updates in the Autumn.

Google has said that they will be launching various web-based apps for the system, which will be great for computers short of hard drive space and RAM. Also, Google wants the apps to run on Windows and Mac too, so their audience should expand even further.

Google already has some brilliant online apps such as Google Docs, so having these available on other operating systems should be easy.

I think having another OS in the collection could have consequences to some other Linux versions such as Ubuntu. Linux version such as Ubuntu have had a big part in the netbook world, but Windows XP has also had increased popularity.

I think Google will have think about the fact that if it was my decision, I’d just install XP. And I think a lot of other people would think the same. Google is going to have one hell of a job to win people other.

But on the other hand, with the success of the Google Chrome web browser (now being regularly used by over 30 million users – according to Google), maybe they have a chance. We’ll have to wait and see.

iPhone/iPod Touch 3.1 already in the making!

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Yep, just a couple of weeks after the release of the might 3.0 software, Apple is already handing out beta code for OS 3.1.

There’s very little information about it at the moment, but as far as GEEK! is aware, Apple is testing the new software and handing it out as a beta to developers.

Hopefully it will iron out a few of the bugs in OS 3.0, because I have found a few and they really annoy me. For example, I have quite a few buffering issues with the YouTube app on the iPod Touch. It seems to work for a while and then stop buffering altogether unless I close and reopen the app. It’s not me loosing WiFi signal or anything… it just seems to be a little bug.

Ah well, hopefully it will be released before too long.

There is a little information about what’s included in the update on Wikipedia, if you are interested. Looks like some interesting stuff…