Windows Software

The Participatory Culture Foundation's universal video player has finally left the development world with its first non-beta release, Miro 1.0 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. There are very few changes to distinguish this version from the previous beta versions that have come out in the past two months. Beside the fact that you can now delete a video while it's playing with impunity, all the changes are minor bug fixes to sort out stability concerns and other small tweaks.

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ZoneAlarm is offering its CNET Editors' Choice-rated Anti-spyware program for free today, until 7 a.m. Wednesday morning.

The $20 program battles spyware from a different approach than most other antimalware apps. Using its extensive knowledge of firewalls, ZoneAlarm Anti-spyware uses firewalls as a basis for providing protection. Unlike most popular antispyware software, ZoneAlarm scans commonly affected system areas rather than your entire computer.

While this method scans faster than other options and is mostly effective for catching intruders, I find a comprehensive system scan to be more desirable. Still, people familiar with the popular ZoneAlarm firewall software will recognize … Read more

VMware released version 1.1 of its Fusion virtualization software to run Windows on Intel-based Apple computers Monday--along with an offer for free versions of the software to some bloggers.

"I have convinced the powers at VMware central that there's big-time value in having a strong, open conversational relationship with the blogosphere," Peter Kazanjy, senior product marketing manager for VMware's Mac products, said in an e-mail sent to bloggers and seen by CNET News.com.

"I'm...offering an open NFR (not for resale) policy for people who are honest-to-goodness bloggers." There's "… Read more

Now that Mac OS X Leopard has arrived, and Microsoft's Windows Vista slowly gains more acceptance, it's time for another battle of the heavyweight operating systems. Tom Merritt counts down the five biggest differences between Mac and Windows in another edition of CNET TV Top 5.

Today, as promised, the first preview version of the Android Development Kit (download it for Windows or Mac) surfaced on the Google Code site. Last week, Google made big news by announcing Android, an open, cell-phone platform being developed in conjunction with the more than 30 companies that compose the Open Handset Alliance.

If you're a developer of mobile-phone software, you'll likely want to dive right into the documentation for Android. If you're not, you likely won't read about Android again until next year, when (and if) it starts surfacing on consumer-end cell phones.… Read more

As much as I love using Gmail, the Greasemonkey script-based Better Gmail plug-in made my favorite e-mail client, well, better. Integration with Google Reader, colored labels, built-in TinyURLing, and other features really made Gmail that much more useful. Since Google's recreated and upgraded most of Gmail's back-end, those scripts and most other Gmail plug-ins have broken.

To confuse matters, Google is slow in rolling out the new features, so not everybody is using the new interface. If you do have the new Gmail, you can access the old interface Better Gmail 2 v0.1 recreates some of the features in its predecessor, and promises to eventually feature most if not all of the old expanded functionality. For now, though, it's slim pickings.

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Photoshop Elements 6 is a good tool for those addicted to Adobe. It streamlines Photoshop's toolset for photograph editing and organizing, but like its antecedent, it's got some unwieldy bulk and it could be simplified even further. Is it worth upgrading?

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Recently Power Downloader received an e-mail from Kitty Kilobyte who was away at school. Apparently Kitty had amassed a huge amount of digital photos by taking her camera with her wherever she went. She had pictures from birthday parties, school events, and concerts she had attended, and also simple shots of friends at school and other scenery in her life. She had thought about putting them into albums or posting them online, but wondered if Power knew of something new and exciting she could do with her photographs.… Read more

Although it hasn't exactly exploded into the mainstream music-listening population at large, the music-sharing application Simplify Media (download it for Windows or Mac) is a fan favorite of several CNET editors and staffers.

Simplify Media has always allowed you to listen to your iTunes playlists on the road or share them with friends. Yesterday, it announced support for the popular digital-music jukebox app Winamp for Windows.

When you install Simplify Media, you must choose whether it will work with Winamp or iTunes playlists. Those of us who occasionally use both apps and thought we might be able to consolidate playlists are out of luck. You can, however, change your preferred playlist program after installation.… Read more