Personal Computer World downloads Latest updates

Opera 10 Preview for Mac build 6550

Lee Collins — 2009-07-11T15:14:00.000Z

Lee Collins, vnunet.com, Saturday 11 July 2009 at 15:14:00

Take a look at the future of this web browser

Opera is a popular browser with some of the best support for standards. Opera 10 promises even faster web surfing, built in spell checker and HTML emails.

The faster web browsing is thanks to a new rendering engine, this is the software used to create the web pages. It also claims to support web standards properly including the Acid3 test (click the link to see how your current browser fares).

Acid3 is an extreme test, a more visible effect will be the support for web fonts. Most browsers can only use the fonts installed on the computer. Web designers often give the browser a list of fonts. The font they would actually liked used, a similar but more common font and then let the browser choose its own serif or san serif font. Web fonts let the browser load the font from a website.

Auto-update is one improvement we are pleased to see as it is a simpler process than having to download a installer.

Note that this is Mac OS X version of the first public beta preview of Opera 10 and more information can be found from Opera Next, which is information about the new browser.

VirtualBox for Mac 3.0.2

Lee Collins — 2009-07-11T12:00:00.000Z

Lee Collins, vnunet.com, Saturday 11 July 2009 at 12:00:00

Host a virtual operating system

This is the software publisher's description.

Powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction; see "innotek" for more about our company.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.

VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on. VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while innotek ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.

On the VirtualBox site, you can find sources, binaries, documentation and other resources for VirtualBox.

Version 3.0 ships with major enhancements such as support for up to 32 CPUs per virtual guest OS, the ability to use DirectX 9 within a Windows guest, support for Windows 7 and much more.

Opera 10 Preview build 1631

Tim Smith — 2009-07-11T11:54:00.000Z

Tim Smith, Computeractive, Saturday 11 July 2009 at 11:54:00

Take a look at the future of this web browser

Opera is a popular browser with some of the best support for standards. Opera 10 promises even faster web surfing, built in spell checker and HTML emails.

Auto-update is one improvement we are pleased to see as it is a simpler process than having to download a installer.

Note that this is the first public beta preview of Opera 10 and more information can be found from Opera Next, which is information about the new browser.

Soundbase 2009.07.10

Chris Wiles — 2009-07-11T10:20:00.000Z

Chris Wiles, vnunet.com, Saturday 11 July 2009 at 10:20:00

Dedicated MP3 audio player & organiser

This is the software publisher's description.

Created to fill a gap in the large amount of free and commercial mp3 players. We do not pretend to have the ultimate mp3 or audio solution, but it will most likely fit somewhere into your mp3 playing experience. As a player, as a tag editor or as an organizer. It will always give you a quick way of doing common tasks. Give it a try!

Soundbase uses the Microsoft DirectShow architecture. DirectShow provides high-quality capture and playback of multimedia streams. It supports a wide variety of formats, including MPEG Audio Layer-3 (MP3), OGG Vorbis (OGG), Monkey Audio (APE), and FLAC sound files. It automatically detects and uses audio acceleration hardware when available, but also supports systems without acceleration hardware.

You might need to read the help section on installing more sophisticated formats (ape, flac, ogg) to enable playback for those files. The help section provides you with links to free directshow filters and will give you information on how to best install the different pack.

We also added the option to use BASS Audio audio drivers, they can be installed from inside Soundbase.

Of course there is more, you can skin soundbase, organize your music to different locations, edit tag information, search, filter, create playlists, there is a unique history display and Soundbase doesn't use any registry entries but stores all in one ini file, it is completelly anonymous, it can run from any location with limited user access rights, and much more. And we of course never stop thinking of better ways and better functionality, so stay tuned for more updates.

Mozilla Jetpack 0.3.1

Chris Wiles — 2009-07-11T10:20:00.000Z

Chris Wiles, vnunet.com, Saturday 11 July 2009 at 10:20:00

Design your own Firefox add-ons with ease

This is the software publisher's description.

The add-ons community for Firefox is arguably one of the largest, most vibrant sources for innovation on the Web today. If you want to affect people, to reach them and make a difference in their daily lives, the Firefox add-ons platform is hard to beat, with over one billion installs of Firefox add-ons to date.

However, we’ve only scratched the surface of its potential.

Today we’re announcing the launch of Jetpack, a Mozilla Labs project to explore new ways to extend & personalize the Web.

In short, Jetpack is an API for allowing you to write Firefox add-ons using the web technologies you already know.

With Jetpack, we’re building upon our experience over the last four years empowering a community of more than 8,000 developers to produce more than 12,000 add-ons to imagine and build the next generation of the add-ons platform. We want to grow our community of developers by orders of magnitude through making add-on creation much more accessible, and yet more powerful by developing it as an extensible platform for innovation itself. Many useful Jetpack Feature’s can be written in under a dozen lines of code.

Specifically, Jetpack will be an exploration in using Web technologies to enhance the browser (e.g. HTML, CSS and Javascript), with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play.

Most importantly, from a user perspective, Jetpack will allow new features to be added to the browser without a restart or compatibility issues, resulting in little to no disruption to the online experience.

Where Is It? 3.97.710

Chris Wiles — 2009-07-11T09:29:00.000Z

Chris Wiles, vnunet.com, Saturday 11 July 2009 at 09:29:00

Catalogue, store & manage your media

This is the software publisher's description.

Designed to help you maintain and organize a catalogue of your computer media collection, including CD-ROMs and DVDs, audio CDs, diskettes, removable drives, hard drives, network drives, remote file servers, or any other present or future storage media device Windows can access as a drive.

The primary goal for WhereIsIt is to provide access to the contents of catalogued disks, even when they are not available on the system, or even they are not your own. You can browse their contents, search for files or folders you need, use imported descriptions and thumbnails, organize data using categories and flags etc.

WhereIsIt can be used to handle any kind of data, including downloaded programs, magazine CD-ROMs, music collections like MP3s or audio CDs, graphics collections, document backups, etc. WhereIsIt can handle lots of them, too, a couple hundreds or thousands disks in a catalogue is nothing unusual, yet catalogues remain reasonably small, single-filed and easy to transfer or send to other users. You can also create more than one catalogue, and at any time open and work with as many catalogues at once as needed.

WhereIsIt is easy to use for both beginners and advanced users. It features a familiar and well thought-out, Explorer-like user interface, combined with strong searching and reporting capabilities, multi-language support, automated description and thumbnails importing through extendable plugins from more than 130 different sources, and much more.

K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 5.0

Chris Wiles — 2009-07-11T00:00:00.000Z

Chris Wiles, vnunet.com, Saturday 11 July 2009 at 00:00:00

Collection of video & audio codecs

There are three or four key compression formats that most people use to compress video (or audio) for playback on the Internet and users will generally use QuickTime, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer or DivX Player to playback your video.

However, it’s not always as simple as this. Some people avoid the mainstream players, as these players require the end-user to register in order to use their software and people see this as an invasion of their privacy. However, some of the freeware and Opensource video players don’t always ship with the relevant codecs. Indeed, if you try and playback a video compressed in the 90’s, you might find it was encoded with an old Intel codec or other popular codecs that have long-since been discontinued.

The K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of codecs and related tools that will enable you to playback just about any video/audio format you’ll find on the Internet. A codec is short for Compressor-Decompressor. Codecs are needed for encoding and decoding (playing) audio and video. With the K-Lite Codec Pack you should be able to play all the popular movie formats and even some rare formats.

VirtualBox for Windows 3.0.2

Chris Wiles — 2009-07-11T00:00:00.000Z

Chris Wiles, vnunet.com, Saturday 11 July 2009 at 00:00:00

Host a virtual operating system

This is the software publisher's description.

On the VirtualBox site, you can find sources, binaries, documentation and other resources for VirtualBox.

Version 3.0 ships with major enhancements such as support for up to 32 CPUs per virtual guest OS, the ability to use DirectX 9 within a Windows guest, support for Windows 7 and much more.