Trial Extender lets you use Microsoft Office 2010 free for six months

Maybe you like the idea of using Office 2010 for free for as long as possible. Either way, the Office 2010 Trial Extender is the tool for you.

 

It's a simple app which performs the same trial re-arming magic you've seen before with other Microsoft offerings. Fire it up once your 30-day trial period has expired and Extender rolls the clock back to day one. You can repeat 5 times -- giving you a grand total of 180 days of payment-free use of Office 2010!

By then you'll probably have made up your mind and either like Office 2010 enough to pay for it -- or move on to an alternative suite.

 

[Into Windows]

Google Chrome receives major updates to the Beta channel; faster JavaScript, integrated Flash plug-in

The overlords at Google have finally deemed Google Chrome 5 ready for the Beta channel! Along with some fantastic performance boosts to the V8 JavaScript engine, there's also a load of HTML5 features and an integrated Flash plug-in.

Google prepares to launch its own digital bookstore this summer

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google's bookstore could go live as early as next month. The service, called Google Editions, plans to make its books compatible with as many operating systems and devices as possible.

 

To make Google Editions a success, Google just needs to finalize deals with publishers and make sure it can compete with existing bookstores when it comes to selection and pricing

The first step of Google's redesign explanation?

Google posted brief history of their new redesign that had been going through heavy testing over the past few months. Jon Wiley, their senior designer on the project, went into detail explaining the process they went through in deciding on the new look.

 

 

If you’re curious, here are some of the other design prototypes Google Designer Team tried… Blue homepage: They’ve always had a strong affinity for blue — after all, blue is usually the color of web links, so it binds the web together. It became the basis for many designs. Blue button: The big blue button made it all the way to our first external experiment, where it was promptly rejected by users. We heard you loud and clear and changed the button in the next round. Universal bars: This design emphasizes different types of results with labeled blocks in the main results pane, such as books, news and shopping. Blue results: This is one of the final blue designs we created and marks the point when we renamed the "Web" link to "Everything" — a label that gets closer to the intent of our mission to organize all the world’s information.

                                                        By: Jon Wiley, Senior User Experience Designer

Facebook took chat feature offline to plug gaping privacy hole

If you've been wondering why Facebook chat was mysteriously "down for maintenance" during normally high-usage hours, it's because they were alerted to a pretty serious security hole in their privacy settings.

 

The hole allowed for what can only be called one of the easiest exploits in recent memory; it allowed any Facebook user to see his or her friends' live chats and pending friend requests just by typing their names in the site's built-in privacy preview page.

 

Facebook's Reaction:-

"For a limited period of time, a bug permitted some users' chat messages and pending friend requests to be made visible to their friends by manipulating the "preview my profile" feature of Facebook privacy settings. When we received reports of the problem, our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function. We also pushed out a fix to take care of the visible friend requests which is now complete. Chat will be turned back on across the site shortly. We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented.”