Mozilla sets June target for Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate

Leave a Reply

Mozilla, the creator of the well-known Firefox, has set a target for the release candidate of Firefox 3.5.

The company claims that they are estimating that the release candidate of Firefox 3.5 will be readily available sometime within the first week on June. This is of course providing that there aren’t any major bugs that get in the way of the release.

Between now and the first week of June, the company will be going through a number of stages for finalising the code. Mozilla claims on this page a schedule for what’s going to happen over the next couple of weeks.

Hopefully this release candidate will be something to look forward to – personally I haven’t heard a huge amount about Firefox 3.5 (other than the fact that it’s been under discussion for ages) but I’ll be testing the release candidate when it becomes available to the public.

A nice app for the iPod Touch – Spawn – create colourful pictures

Leave a Reply

I’ve recently been playing on a cool little app on the iPod Touch called Spawn. The free and paid versions are available from the App Store for download, so go ahead and give it ago.

It allows you to take cool screenshots of wonderful, colourful images. Here are just a few I’ve made…

You can view my full library of images I’ve taken with Spawn here on Flickr.

Have fun with it!

Credit crunch still having shocking effects

Leave a Reply

The credit crunch is still causing problems, even after almost 2 years of battering businesses across the globe.

Sony has today announced the first loss in 14 years, which was a big shock to the company. The loss was caused by the recent fall in sales of Sony equipment because of the decrease in market. 

The Japanese company has reported a £685m loss (98.9 billion yen; $1.04 billion) for the year to the end of March. The company has said that they will be cutting 8,000 jobs and closing 10% of its factories.

So it looks as if the credit crunch has not finished yet. How long will it be before we finally see an increase in the market? The predictions stand that it will be another difficult year for the financial market, but we’ll have to see what happens.

Review: Budget iPod dock

Leave a Reply

With my new iPod Touch going fine, I needed a budget dock for it. I really don’t like spending a fortune on gadgets if I don’t have to, so I tried to aim for something cheap but reliable.

After a lot of browsing round various sites, I found this. It’s a real entry level iPod dock, but it does the job I want it to do fine.

It doesn’t have speakers so it won’t play your music aloud (and frankly for something this cheap I wouldn’t want it to – the sound quality would be relatively poor) but it does have a 3.5mm line out socket so you could hook it up to some external speakers or a hifi. It also has a sync plug so you could either hook it up to your computer and iTunes will sync and charge it, or you could just plug into a mains USB charger which would then charge the iPod when it’s docked (which is what I do).

It also comes with a remote control so you can change the track remotely. Seems to work fine. It has the usual controls you’d expect (change track, volume, play/pause), plus controls for mute, repeat and shuffle. It also has controls so that you can browse for a track and play it, but I think this is relatively unnecessary as when I sit 2 meters away from my iPod I can’t read the screen to see what track I’m choosing – and that’s on an iPod Touch with large text, so it will be useless on something like a Nano.

Overall, I’m very happy with it. It works fine and it’s really good value at £12.99. It comes with a range of dock adapters for the different types of iPod, but personally I don’t use any of them since my iPod has a case on it. Works just as well without them. A good budget buy.

Windows 7: The Release Candidate review.

1 Reply

So now I’ve had a few days to trial out the new Windows 7 Release Candidate, I shall review it as promised. If you haven’t already downloaded it and you feel tempted to, please do so as you get plenty of time to trial around with it. I wouldn’t recommend it if you don’t have much experience in IT, but if you know what you’re doing don’t hesitate to try it out. Don’t forget to think about your internet bandwidth limit as the ISO image is about 2.5GB. You’ll also need a blank DVD to burn the image to.

Anyway, the review.

What do I think of it? Overall, I’m pretty happy with it. The install was very smooth and worryingly fast, but all seemed to go fine and within 30 minutes of burning it to DVD I was up and running in Windows 7. The new Aero updates are definitely well worth it, and I’m very pleased with some of the new features.

Do I have any complaints? A few yes. My main problem was trying to get drivers for hardware, which proved to be an utter nightmare for me. In fact, it wasn’t so much getting the drivers, but trying to get them to function correctly. My SiS M672MX graphics card in my laptop was a right nightmare in Windows 7. Windows Update found a suitable driver absolutely fine, but the driver would not allow me to use a resolution higher than 1024×768. My laptop’s monitor should run at 1280×800 so you can image how skew-if the display looked. In the end, I used SiS’s official Vista drivers for the monitor which cured the resolution problem, but then the Aero interface refused to run. As of today, I haven’t found any way to resolve that problem. I had similar problems with my Realtek HD Audio sound card – the sound was absolutely dreadful with Microsoft’s drivers for the sound card, but this was fixed by installing Realtek’s Vista drivers.

Will I be buying it when it’s released? Most likely, yes. I really love the new ideas that have gone into Windows 7 and hopefully by the time it is released, Microsoft will have fixed most of the driver issues. As long as the upgrade isn’t too expensive, I should think there’s a 90% chance I will get a copy.

Would I recommend the upgrade from Windows XP/Windows Vista? I’m not entirely sure what to say here. I still reckon there are a large chunk of Windows XP users who aren’t going to like Windows 7. Many people are saying that hopefully Windows 7 will encourage some of the users of Windows XP to upgrade, but I’m not entirely convinced. I personally, would recommend the upgrade to most users but you have to consider that many XP users aren’t going to have hardware powerful enough to cope with the upgrade and now many people don’t have the money to be forking out cash on upgrades. So yes, I would recommend the upgrade, but I think we have to consider what people can afford at this point in time. Also, some people just prefer Windows XP, it’s not that they can’t afford Windows 7 – they just have a personal preference for XP.

I think we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. I really like Windows 7 and I’m sure many people would agree that it’s going to be much better than Vista, but in this economic time there just isn’t going to be enough people who can afford to stretch out for it. My verdict is that if you can afford it, buy it. If you can’t, don’t worry about it. Then again, it isn’t going to be out until late 2009 so there might have been a change in economics by then. We’ll just have to sit back and wait.