Download Squad Week in Review

Filed under: Weekend Review

Trying to figure out whether to see Indiana Jones or Sex in the City this weekend? Why not just skip the movies and catch up on some of the week's best software news?

• Windows 7 says hello world, then runs and hides away
  After months of speculation, Microsoft has finally lifted the veil of secrecy surrounding Windows 7. And by lifted the veil, we mean one tiny little corner. We now know that Windows 7 will feature multi-touch capabilities. And that's about it.
• Flipping the Linux Switch: Banshee learns to sing
  While Microsoft is busy keeping secrets, the open source Linux media player Banshee is free for anyone to use. The latest beta version adds a ton of features, allowing you to play MP3s, rip CDs, organize your music collection, burn discs, aggregate podcasts, or even connect to your Last.fm account.
• Mozilla - They're unbeWeavable
  Mozilla launched Weave last year as a way to keep your Firefox settings synchronized across multiple computers. But for some reason Mozilla left out one of the most useful features: password synchronization. Fortunately, this week an updated version of the Mozilla Weave browser plug-in was released, which lets you synchronize your bookmarks, saved form data, cookies, and passwords.
• Bubbles single-site web browser updated, adds extensions
  Before there was Mozilla Prism, there was Bubbles, a tool that lets you launch pretty much any web site in a stripped down web browser. Bubbles has been around for a few years, but the developers recently relesed a new beta version that adds support for user-generated extensions that give you more control over how the browser interacts with web pages. Extensions include a Gmail notifier and a Facebook chat application.
• OpenOffice.org keeps getting slower with each new release
  Free and open source office suite OpenOffice.org has a dirty little secret. It's slow. Like, you have to wait 20+ seconds to open a document sometimes slow. And it keeps getting slower. It turns out that OpenOffice.org 2.4 opens documents slower than version 1.1.5. And OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta is even slower still. But you can't beat the price.
• Adocu: Nanoblogging gets even nano-er
  Twitter took the world by storm by launching a blogging platform that limits your posts to just 140 characters. So it stands to reason that the only way to beat Twitter is to launch an even more limiting service, right? Adocu lets users post just a single word.

Download Squad Week in Review originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 31 May 2008 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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