Webware

The new prototype UI of OpenOffice.org.

(Credit: Sun)

I am possibly the only one among my co-workers who hasn't moved to Office 2007. I just can't stand the ribbon toolbar, which makes working with documents require a lot of mouse clicking. The traditional menus have been working just fine and I prefer being able to move around with keyboard shortcuts.

It's sad that together with Windows 7, Microsoft is forcing this new user interface on all of us. Applications that come with the new operating system, such as Write or Paint, are also using the ribbon toolbar instead of menus.

And it seems Sun is doing the same thing with its popular OpenOffice.org suite, which offers free alternatives to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

According to a blog from Frank Loehman, a developer of OpenOffice.org, Sun is working on creating a new user interface for the open-source office suite. And from the screenshot, the new UI seems very much like the ribbons found in Office 2007.

However, fortunately, the menu bar is still there. Hopefully this means the suite will still offer the menu UI in addition to the ribbon bar.

According to Loehman, the new UI is still in the testing phase and the content of the toolbars and the group labeling are subject to change. Sun is looking for user feedback on the new UI and my feedback is this: just get rid of the ribbon or offer people the option to pick between the two of them.

(Credit: Netgear)

I am not a big fan of parental controls, but that might be just because I'm not a parent.

If you are not like me and have been wondering if paying a yearly fee for the comprehensive parental control feature that accompanies the lackluster iBoss router is worth it, Netgear may have just made your life a lot easier.

Netgear announced Tuesday the release of Live Parental Controls, a comprehensive Web-filtering feature it has developed in collaboration with OpenDNS.

The new feature enables parents and small businesses to restrict Internet access to all the devices that connect via the router, with filtering based on more than 50 categories of content. The Live Parental Controls incorporate a comprehensive set of filtering features including some not available in other parental control solutions, such as remote management from mobile devices and highly flexible settings.

The best things about the new features are that they're free and are included with Netgear's new routers. The first one that comes with this is Netgear's Wireless-N 300 WNR2000 router. Netgear plans on putting Live Parental Controls in its future routers and Internet gateways.

The WNR2000 is available immediately and costs less than $80, which is very good for a Wirelesss-N router and it's a great deal considering the new Web filter, especially when compared with the iBoss.

Hands-on testing and a full review of Netgear's Wireless-N 300 WNR2000 wireless router will be available soon.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

It'll probably still be a long time before people start saying things like "I'd spend some time binging that guy before I go on a date with him," but in the U.S. things are looking up for Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, which was unveiled in May.

Web analytics firm StatCounter released analysis Monday stating that Bing slightly increased Microsoft's share of the U.S. search market in July. It now claims 9.41 percent, up from 8.23 percent in June.

The combined market share of both Microsoft and Yahoo in July was 20.36 percent, up slightly from 19.27 percent in June. The commanding lead Google currently has on the market shrank slightly to 77.54 percent in July from 78.48 percent in June.

Microsoft and Yahoo reached a deal last week, with Microsoft powering Yahoo search while Yahoo becomes the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers.

And according to StatCounter analysis, worldwide is the place where the two companies face an even bigger challenge in the search market. In July, Microsoft and Yahoo combined had just 8.77 percent of the global search market, down from 8.45 percent in June. On the other hand, Google still dominates the search market globally with 89.23 percent in July (slightly down from 89.8 percent in June).

StatCounter's data was based on an analysis of 1 billion search engine referring clicks (of which 258 million were from the U.S.) that were collected in June and July from the company's network of more than 3 million Web sites.

Gmail's Google Maps link to CBSi's address on the iPhone via Smart Links's translation. Instead of the lengthy URL, you now have the actual address with the link embedded to it.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

Chances are that you have seen extremely long links when you receive an e-mail that contains a Google Maps address or driving instructions. This gets annoying, especially on mobile devices, because not only do the links take up a lot of space, but they also make it hard to find out the important information, such as the address, hidden within it.

Now that has just changed for Gmail users who use the iPhone or Android-powered devices to read their e-mail.

On Tuesday, GoogleMobile announced the Smart Links feature, a mechanism that automatically shortens a raw link and converts it into a meaningful phrase with the link embedded. Click on the phrase and the link will open just like with the original raw link.

For example, when you receive a Google Maps link of CBSi's address via Gmail using the iPhone's browser, instead of seeing a long string of characters, you will see the actual like this 235 2nd St, San Francisco, CA 94105. The address is hyper-linked and when clicked on will launch Google Maps showing the location of our HQ office.

Smart Links is part of GoogleMobile's Interative Webapp series that focus on developing and enhancing Gmail features specifically for the iPhone and Android-powered devices.

Currently, Smart Links supports four types of links: Google Maps address queries, Google Maps directional queries (with one destination), Google Sites Web pages, and links to YouTube videos. It's available only in English and, for now, only works with e-mails composed in plain text format.

In the future, Smart Links will also work with more link types, such as Google Docs, according to GoogleMobile.

There's nothing you have to do to use this feature other than checking your Gmail account via the Web browser on an iPhone/iPod Touch (running OS 2.2.1 or later) or an Android-powered device.

Note that you need to use the mobile browser to take advantage of this feature, other mail clients, such as the iPhones Mail app, don't support it.

I tried the new feature with on my iPhone 3GS and it worked very well. However, I wish it also supported e-mails formatted in rich text or HTML formats. That would make it more useful as most e-mails are sent using these formats.

Without Smart Link, this is how the original link looks.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

TOSBack.org Web site.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

It's the closely printed (or displayed in very small font size at a Web page) pieces of text that most of us don't bother to read before we agree to them. Yet it's something that shouldn't be ignored at all. It's called terms of service, or TOS for short.

Remember the time that AT&T sneakily changed its TOS and banned users from streaming media from third-party sites via its cellular network? Thanks to the media outcry (CNET News included) the company retracted the changes a few days later only to reinstate them again, at a later date, in a different language.

If anything, this was a lesson on how important it is to keep track of these terms of service.

And the lesson was really learned Thursday with the introduction of TOSBack.org. This is a new site designed to track changes in policies imposed by popular Internet Web sites such as YouTube, Craigslist, Facebook, Google and so on, with the intention of helping users spot potentially harmful changes.

Currently, TOSBack.org tracks 44 popular sites' policies (unfortunately AT&T is not yet included) and allows for comparing word by word and highlight changes between different versions. The site is capable of noticing any modifications within hours of an update.

TOSBack.org is a project of the privacy advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation. Going forward, the site plans to add more companies, including banks, credit card companies, and so on to its tracking repertoire.

Personally I find this site really helpful as often time many Web sites change their terms of service without notifying their customers, who are entitled to know under what conditions the service is provided to them.

It would be even more helpful, however, if the site provided translation of these terms of service into layman's terms, as not everyone has the legal background to really understand what they mean.

For the companies, hopefully, this will deter them from changing the terms of service on their own account, regardless of users' consent.

TOSBack is a nonprofit membership-funded organization, so if you think this is a useful service, feel free to make a donation or consider becoming a member.

When it comes to backing up your computer, it's probably safest and most convenient to use a cloud storage service where you store data at remote location via the Internet. However, there's a big obstacle: bandwidth. With most existing broadband services, it can take a couple of hours to upload a few gigabyte of information.

This might change in the near future.

Asankya, a network service company, announced Wednesday that it has improved its parallel networking technology to deliver up to 40 times throughput improvement for Internet-based applications. This, if true, would solve the biggest challenge that hinders the growth and global scale of cloud- and SaaS-based services.

Asankya's new networking technology is a set of patented parallel networking algorithms that significantly increase bi-directional Internet Protocol performance and accelerate encrypted traffic delivery for both ICP- and UDP-based applications. It aggregates throughput across the Internet by using multiple available pathways and removes duplicate packet transmission. The breakthrough algorithms were first funded through grants by the National Science Foundation.

The technology has been deployed by the U.S. government for real-time, interactive video applications delivered over wired and wireless IP networks. It now has been commercialized--that means soon you will be able to take advantage of it.

This is exciting news as cloud computing has been on the raise in the last few years. According to the research firm IDC, the cloud computing industry is going to be a $42 billion business by 2012.

The Undelete Plus 3.0 software.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

I've been raving a lot lately about the importance of backing up, and it seems I still haven't done enough to get my point across.

Case in point: since my most recent backup-related post, I have received multiple e-mails asking how to retrieve files that have been accidentally deleted.

The right question is: Is it even possible to retrieve lost files? And the answer is, it depends. Once you have deleted a file (and even emptied the Recycle Bin), the information from the file is still on the hard drive. As long as the same spot of hard disk hasn't been used by another file, it's possible to get that file back. So, the earlier you try to recover, the more likely it is you will be successful.

Note that during a normal operation, a computer does a lot of writing to the hard drive, because it uses hard drive space as scrap notes for different computations. If you need to recover a lot of data from a main hard drive, where the operation system is installed, it's best to put that hard drive into another computer to do the recovery.

There are many software applications that can recover data, and I was given the opportunity to try out the new 3.0 version of Undelete Plus Tuesday. This is the update to the free version of Undelete Plus 2.93, which can be found at Download.com.

Compared with the free version, this update's new interface is much easier to use. ... Read more

The U.S. AirForce's Facebook page.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

Last November, citing bandwidth and security reasons, the military launched TroopTube, a video-sharing social Web site designed for service members, as the alternative to YouTube. Apparently, it now has had a change of heart.

According to the Associated Press, the U.S. military in Afghanistan is launching a Facebook page, a YouTube site, and Twitter feeds as part of a new communication effort. Officials said this would help the military reach those who get their information online rather than via printed materials.

For now, the military's Facebook and Twitter sites in Afghanistan are still in a testing phase. Officials hope to attract thousands more users after a formal launch later this week.

The effort is primarily to counter Taliban propaganda, which some are saying routinely publicizes false claims about how many U.S. soldiers its forces have killed, or how many civilians might have died in an airstrike. This is the information war which, according to U.S. officials, the military has been losing.

The military will also use this new method of communication for other military-related news. For example, it announced on Monday news on Twitter about the death of U.S. service members the previous day from non-combat-related injuries in southern Afghanistan, hours before its formal press statement.

Service members are also encouraged to post photos and stories on Web sites to show daily life in Afghanistan, including content that does not make the news.

It's expected that this will be well-received by troops as many military commands and individual service members have long used social-networking sites to stay in touch with their families and friends. The Air Force and Army also already have Facebook pages.

Nonetheless, this communication effort in Afghanistan, which takes advantage of social-networking sites as a primary tools to release news, is the first that's been implemented in an active war zone.

After almost two years without providing any support, Yahoo has finally decided to shut down its blog-centric social Web site Yahoo 360 Degrees completely on July 13. During its more than four years of existence, the site has never actually been out of the beta stage.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

In an e-mail to its members, the company said, "We will be officially closing Yahoo 360 on July 13, 2009, to focus our efforts on making your new profile on Yahoo the place where you connect with the people who matter to you most. As a result, you will need to move your 360 information to your new profile before this date. After July 12, 2009, your content on Yahoo 360 will no longer be accessible."

Yahoo 360 was launched in March 2005. The site never became big in the United States and in October 2007, Yahoo decided to stop providing support for it.

However, in other countries, especially Vietnam, the site has been the most popular blogging portal. For this reason, Vietnamese users can migrate their Yahoo 360 content to Yahoo 360Plus, a product specifically made for the Vietnamese market that the company announced a year ago.

Last August, Yahoo also shut down Mash, which was another failed attempt into social Web sites.

This is sad news for thousands, if not millions, of people worldwide, since for a lot of them the blogs posted on Yahoo 360 and the friends they have there are part of their lives. Yahoo recommends that Yahoo 360 users immediately move their blogs to their current Yahoo profile to save them and download their contacts onto a computer. There are also options to migrate blogs to other blogging sites.

You can find out more information on how to do that here.