• Review

Of all the specialized browsers out there, Flock is perhaps the one best suited to the social-networking scene, with support for a constellation of services such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and so on. To date it's been a nice way of keeping an eye on one's daily flood of information, but serious interaction required that you pop open a browser window. (Such a burden.)

You might find you never need to do so again with the 2.5 version, just released for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Those who closely follow streams from highly prolific twitterbugs may need to go to the main browser window from time to time, but for most purposes, the Twitter reader in Flock rises to the level of the very best standalone readers. (And their new non-Twitter toys aren't so shabby either.)

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It's almost trite to talk about OpenOffice's aesthetics, as if the best way to figure out whether the open source apps suite is competitive to Microsoft Office is to hold a beauty contest. Yes, interface matters, but it's not the only thing that matters, so let's get this out of the way:

Dear person or persons who worked on the anti-aliasing feature that makes the screen look so much nicer: Thank you. It was noticed. It is appreciated. This review required about one-third as much aspirin as usual for her review and I owe those aspirin all to you.

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Download Mozilla Prism for Windows 1.0 Beta 1 from Fileforum now.

Mozilla Labs has been devoted to building ideas into viable code that may or may not become products someday. For a year and a half, one of its tasks has been to build a framework for deploying Web-based applications straight to the desktop, while introducing though not necessarily mandating a new methodology or set of practices for sites to follow. In other words, if an application is already live in a browser like Firefox, let's take it out of the browser motif and move it to the desktop.

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Download Panda Cloud Antivirus 0.9 from Fileforum now.

If the prospect of keeping important data out in the cloud still makes you slightly uneasy, you might get positively lightheaded at the thought of keeping your anti-malware protection up there. But Panda Cloud Antivirus, which entered beta recently, did a decent job of protecting a test system from the bad stuff -- without shoveling our data into the ether, and without slowing our system down.

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Most business books are very much of a particular moment, and when that moment passes -- management changes, stock prices plummet, or the buzz that made the business book-worthy slips away -- the book seems dated. This, then is the moment to grab Bernard Girard's The Google Way. which documents the workings of the search giant.

Girard, a management consultant, has been tracking Google since 2000, and his book analyzes the structure and philosophy of the company even as it's grappled with the current recession. (This means we're more current than the French, who got an earlier version of this text in 2006 as Une Révolution du Management: le Modèle Google.) Girard sees the Sergey-Brin-Schmidt triumvirate as no less innovative than a Henry Ford or a Taiichi Ohno (the man who made Toyota a global powerhouse) or Ikea's Ingvar Kamprad. Google's strength, he posits, doesn't merely come from superior algorithms but from rethinking how a company functions.

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Download Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 from Fileforum now.

Now all Office users will have the option to load and save OpenDocument files, with today's distribution of Service Pack 2 of Office 2007. In something of a surprise -- contrary to what many at Microsoft led us to believe -- upon installing SP2 on our test systems, we immediately located an option for saving files in ODF by default. That means you don't have to "Save As" and export to ODF if you don't ever want to use Microsoft's OOXML or Office 2003 "compatibility mode;" you can at least try to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as substitutes for OpenOffice.

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I'm in the market for a bike, but as a skateboarder of more than twenty years, bicycling has been something of a taboo subject for me. Bikers were the guys who destroyed skate spots with their pegs and caused horrific skatepark collisions that could have been easily avoided if both parties involved were riding skateboards.

But now that I'm older, those prejudices have faded and I find that I know practically nothing about bicycles. I'm clueless about the kind of bike that will suit my needs, much less what brand would be best. However, I do know that I plan to ride more on paved roads than off-road, that I'll be riding for exercise, and that I plan on spending between $500-$900. I will take my case to hunch.com.

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Instant-on capability isn't entirely unknown on Windows machines, but those who spend too much time around Mac or Linux folk may find that its availability -- mostly laptops and tablets, mostly higher-end gear -- is too limited to countenance. To the rescue comes Xandros' Presto Instant-On -- as long as you're willing to apply yourself to a bit of setup effort. (Think of it as making time to save time.)

Xandros has been making a name for itself on various fronts, most interestingly as part of the software that made the first Eee netbooks such a kick in the pants for the PC market. They're good at interoperability across Windows and Linux, and the Presto software takes good advantage of Linux's speed and light system load while behaving -- we found -- as politely as one might hope for a Windows app.

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Google Labs today officially announced the "Similar Images" and "Google News Timeline" tools, which have been deepening the well of useful search apps from the number one search provider since late last week.

Similar Images does exactly as its name suggests. When in Google Image search, queries for common or ambiguous terms frequently yield a lot of undesired results. A search for "colt," for example, could return images of a gun, a horse, a car, or an American football player: quite disparate results. By clicking the "Similar Images" tag under an appropriate picture, the search is narrowed to only the pictures that look similar to the chosen result.

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Zoho may never have the name recognition of a Google or even an OpenOffice, but the company's quest to provide a comprehensive, extraordinarily Web-friendly business application suite continues. Widgets are the latest addition to its stable.

The six Zoho Gadgets -- Docs, Mail, Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, and Planner -- are available for Facebook, iGoogle, and Orkut, as well as sites cognizant of OpenSocial XML (e.g., MySpace, Blogspot, Zoho or other wikis), and there's a generic embeddable version as well. The company says on its blog that more will come.

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The real reason people started buying Windows 3.0 wasn't really because of the wealth of new software made for Windows for the first time. Seriously, that wasn't the reason. By the time people learned about stuff like Lotus 1-2-3G and WordPerfect for Windows -- which were both going to change the world, if you'll recall -- they were already sold on Windows 3.0 for another reason: the smooth on-screen fonts. Because let's face it, Windows/386 looked like it belonged on an 8-bit computer, compared to Macintosh.

Late last night, the BlackBerry System 4.5 upgrade finally came through for users of those older-style units that actually look like BlackBerrys. In it, you'll find relief...in the form of the replacement of the thing that made the 8800s and older units look pale compared to the (slow) Storm, or the iPhone: the disgusting looking default system font.

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T-Mobile, America's sole purveyor of the Sidekick, begins taking pre-orders today for the new LX version of the well-liked, swivel-screen handset. Customers reserving a unit by the end of the month including through this T-Mobile address will receive theirs May 12 -- one day before the device goes on sale to the general public.

Service-provider improvements to the latest version of the Sidekick include 3G support on T-Mobile's HSDPA network and better data-migration options for those switching from another T-Mobile handset. Inside, there's new GPS functionality; integrated Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter support via Skick-customized applications, including the ability to directly upload photos from the camera (now shooting at 3.2 megapixels) to MySpace and video to other social-networking sites; ShoutCast streaming-radio and YouTube video support; upcoming support for Microsot Exchange; and a 3.2" F-WVGA screen with 854x480 resolution.

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Download Trillian Astra beta from Fileforum now.

What next, Duke Nukem Forever? All right, that may be a cheap shot -- we've only been waiting three years for the release of Trillian Astra, the update of the IM software that once owned the multi-service chat realm. The software moved from alpha to beta late last week.

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For a number of reasons, some of them indeterminate, despite all the evolutionary pressure to move it to the next level of its evolution, instant messaging hasn't evolved as an application. One reason I've always suspected is that it's difficult for developers to find the impetus to devote the amount of effort required to evoke revolutionary change, on a platform that's offered to most customers for free. The counter-argument to that is that SMS isn't free, and yet it's stuck even further in the Stone Age.

If IM does resemble one ongoing revolution in application architecture, it's "the cloud" -- the nebulous, always-on service built to respond to user requests from wherever. Whereas at the beginning of the decade, services like AOL, Yahoo, and MSN used their respective IM platforms as weapons against one another, today's strategies -- which now includes Google -- have them opening up those platforms for generally unencumbered use by others. That hasn't exactly made Trillian for Windows and other multi-protocol IM clients the most perfect of applications just yet, but week after week, those of us who work in widely-dispersed offices do manage to get by somehow.

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Thanks to its open API, sometimes it seems as if there are many ways to parse the Twitter tsunami as there are people actually using the service. That said, social-web search site OneRiot has turned its experienced attentions to the microblogging service, and the results -- launching today -- are promising for those seeking to track the viral spread of URLs through the Tweetosphere.

Twitter's own search capacities are becoming increasingly integral to the service, as evidenced by the new homepage design they're working on over there. Third-party sites offer search-based slices of profanity on Twitter (Twittourette, spectacularly NSFW) or mental states on Twitter (twistori) or recurring keywords on Twitter (Tinker and Sideline, both launched earlier this week) or what you will. OneRiot's unique angle is to examine which URLs people are sharing in real time, learning from their tweets what it is people are talking about from moment to moment.

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