Skyfire 2.0 is labeled as a beta release for Android, but it doesn’t seem as hampered or buggy as some other alternative browsers we’ve tested out (and mostly not posted about). It’s built on the same WebKit back-end as Android’s own browser, and mobile Safari on iPhones, so it renders pages accurately and smoothly. Its key function, though, is converting Flash-based video to H.264 streaming content on Skyfire’s servers, then piping it back to your phone. This usually works, sometimes doesn’t, and every so often seems to cause a crash. Still, it’s a nice work-around for videos you really want to watch, if you can’t wait for (or likely won’t receive) the Android 2.2 update with Flash 10.1.

Skyfire’s also got a handy switcher between full and mobile-formatted versions of a site, and uses Skyfire’s servers for other background processing to speed things up. It’s a free download for Android phones, with Skyfire 1.5 also available on Windows Mobile and Nokia phones.

Skyfire (Android) [via Slashdot]

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When you’re ready to listen to some tunes online, Grooveshark allows you to jump right in. Unlike many services that require a subscription to use, Grooveshark lets you search for music and build a playlist as soon as the site loads. If you want to save the playlist, however, and access other session enhancing features like flagging songs to enable the music suggestion service, you’ll need an account. Aside from manually building a playlist, you can also listen to Grooveshark Radio, their suggestion engine. One of Grooveshark’s most unique features is that if you can’t find a song or artist you love, you can upload the music from your own collection to build the Grooveshark database.

2. Spotify (Windows/Mac/Mobile/Web-based; Basic: Free/Premium: €9.99 month)

The good news is that Spotify is an incredible music service, and we’re always hearing whispers that it’ll soon be available stateside. You can collaborate on and easily share playlists using the service—as easily as you share a link to a YouTube video for comparison’s sake. A premium account adds more features, like commercial-free listening or the ability to listen to your playlists on your mobile phone. Premium service also enables offline mode for local storage of music, higher quality streaming, and travel access—so should you visit a country like the U.S., where Spotify isn’t available yet, you can still enjoy it.

3.  Pandora (Web-based; Basic: Free/Premium: $36 per year)

Pandora is the easy-to-use front end for the massive database of attributes generated by the Music Genome Project. The Music Genome Project analyzes songs with up to 400 different attributes so when you tell Pandora “Play me something like the song Punkrocker by The Teddy Bears featuring Iggy Pop” it doesn’t just return a song that people who liked “Punkrocker” also liked—it returns a song that is also “genetically” related to your suggestion. Pandora may not have the most bells and whistles of the music sharing services rounded up today, but the power of the Music Genome Project and ease with which you can create and rate personalized streaming radio stations has won Pandora many fans. Upgrading from free to premium service allows you to stream more than 40 hours a month, gives you access to a dedicated desktop client, and increases the quality of your audio stream.

4. Last.fm (Web-based/iPhone, Basic: Free/Premium: $3 per month)

Last.fm is another service that not only streams music but generates suggestions for new music based on what you like. In addition to building playlists and enjoying tunes on the web, you can “scrobble” your own music collection to Last.fm—which basically means you let Last.fm track the songs you’re listening to and add them to your Last.fm profile, allowing you to both listen to them and use them to increase the scope of Last.fm’s suggestion engine for better personalized picks. In addition to listening to streaming radio and building personalized stations, Last.fm also allows direct music download—when authorized by the copyright holder—so you can expand your personal collection as you listen.

5. Lala (Web-based, Free with per-song fees)

Lala’s claim to fame is the ease with which you can listen to both your own music over the web and purchase new music inexpensively. Lala has a database of 8 million songs that you can listen to once for free, purchase for online play for $0.10, or buy as a DRM-free MP3 for $0.79. If you have a song in your personal collection—on your computer at home—you can add it to the Lala database to allow unlimited play without paying a fee. Lala doesn’t sport a hefty music recommendation engine like some of the other contenders in the Hive Five—although we didn’t find the one they have lacking—but instead focuses more strongly on connections between people to drive music suggestion. As a result Lala supports easy rating and playlist sharing with friends to encourage organic music discovery.

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Google announces it will soon export its free guidance software to other platforms.

For all the applications you can get for your iPhone, it has always seemed to be lacking a decent free navigation app, being stocked instead by wares from the big names in navigation asking for a fair chunk of your cash. Nokia has Ovi Maps-Android has Google Maps Navigation and iPhone has… expensive alternatives.

This could all soon change with an announcement from Google’s very own Steve Lee confirming to TechRadar that Google Maps Navigation will be coming to “other platforms” in due course.

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On his blog, Wang has posted the source code and explains how the port works. Right now it’s running on a dual-booting original iPhone, but the goal is to get Android OS working on the 3G and 3GS as well.

Check out the video demonstration below. It may not be the world’s fastest Android phone, but it looks fairly responsive overall. Keep in mind that though running third-party OSes on the iPhone is technically feasible, if you want to rig this up you’ll have to do so at your own risk.

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Avira AntiVir Personal – FREE Antivirus is a reliable free antivirus solution, that constantly and rapidly scans your computer for malicious programs such as viruses, Trojans, backdoor programs, hoaxes, worms, dialers etc. Monitors every action executed by the user or the operating system and reacts promptly when a malicious program is detected.

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In general, when a piece of software reaches the release to manufacturing stage, it is ready for mass distribution. Microsoft manufacturing partners and computer makers will get the software first, followed by businesses and then finally general customers. Product downloads for Volume License Partners begin on April 27th, while general customers can expect to see Office 2010 on shelves starting in June.

“RTM is the final engineering milestone of a product release and our engineering team has poured their heart and soul into reaching this milestone,” said Microsoft Corporate Vice-President Takeshi Numoto in a blog post earlier today. “It is also an appropriate time to re-emphasize our sincere gratitude to the more than 5,000 organizations and partners who have worked with us on rapid deployment and testing of the products. Since the start of our public beta in November 2009, we’ve had more than 7.5 million people download the beta version – that’s more than 3 times the number of 2007 beta downloads.”

Microsoft Office 2010 had one of the largest software beta tests ever; it’s the same approach the company took with building Windows () 7, a tactic seems to have paid off for the technology giant.

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Things get a bit more complicated when you want to print something from a mobile device, like an iPad, or from a laptop based on Google’s Chrome OS, which relies entirely on web apps and services. This is why Google (Google) is working on Google Cloud Print, a service that enables “any application (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer.”

Google Cloud Print is still in the early days of development, but Google made the code and documentation public as part of the Chromium and Chromium OS projects. The documentation reveals how Google plans to solve some of the issues it will inevitably face, such as making Cloud Print work with legacy printers.

“The ideal experience is for your printer to have native support for connecting to cloud print services. Under this model, the printer has no need for a PC connection of any kind or for a print driver. The printer is simply registered with one or more cloud print services and awaits print jobs. Cloud-aware printers don’t exist yet, but one of our main goals in publishing this information at an early stage is to begin engaging industry leaders and the community in developing cloud-aware printers and the necessary open protocols for these printers to communicate with cloud print services.

“We want users to be able to print to legacy printers via Google Cloud Print. This is accomplished through the use of a proxy, a small piece of software that sits on a PC where the printer is installed. The proxy takes care of registering the printer with Google Cloud Print and awaiting print jobs from the service. When a job arrives, it submits the print job to the printer using the PC operating system’s native print stack and sends job status back to the printer.”

There are obviously some obstacles ahead, but it’s an amazing idea. If print jobs are handled in the cloud you won’t need drivers, and most of the problems users have with printing from devices like smart-phones and tablets will be solved.

[Source - Mashable]

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Download Spyware Blaster v4.3

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Google Office Suite

Source (lifehacker)

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