The Participatory Culture Foundation has released version 4 of its popular cross-platform, open-source audio and video player. Miro 4 sees the application transform from a powerful video player into a more all-purpose media management tool.

Miro 4 beefs up its music management capabilities with a host of new features. It's now a capable music library, thanks to improved music organization and search tools and the introduction of new features like the ability to automatically import content from iTunes and improved options for creating playlists.

The final version of Firefox 4 hardly seems to be been available for all that long and hot on its heels is the beta version of Firefox 5. As well as being made available for desktop platform, Mozilla released Firefox 5 for Android beta. While there are not major new features to get excited about, there's still enough to make it worth checking out.

Performance is impressive in the beta, and it is clear that a good deal of work has gone into squeezing the best possible page load times out of any connection, be it 3G or WiFi. Mozilla is obviously also very keen to blur the boundaries between mobile and desktop web browsing, and the Android version of the browser does a great job of mimicking its big brother.

DEP, SEHOP, ASLR -- Windows has plenty of interesting security technologies, each carefully designed to help protect you from common hacker and malware exploits. So it's a shame that most of them are so hard to find and use.

Windows has a Data Execution Prevention (DEP) interface, for instance, but it's not exactly easy to spot.  And Structured Exception Handler Overwrite Protection (SEHOP) or Address Space Layout Randomisation (ASLR) are handy at protecting key data structures from attack, but they're normally only available if you know exactly where to look in the Registry.

While it's easy enough to check the time on your computer by looking at the clock in the system tray, and the weather by visiting any of a number of web sites, you may still want to check out Metro Home. This is a Windows desktop widget that displays the date time and weather in a stylish and customizable interface that fits the Windows Phone 7 look.

The widget comes from the same stables as HTC Home, a similar widget that apes the look of HTC's Android widget, but in this case the information is displayed in a form that will be familiar to Windows Phone 7 users as it closely mimics the Metro interface.

The retail experience looks nothing like the rumors, and certainly not two dot oh. But it's two dot something. The shopping experience is different, for sure. Basically, every product in Apple Store now has its own iPad bearing additional information, interactively. The paper placards are gone. I thought Apple couldn't make enough iPad 2s to sell, so why fill more than 300 stores with them? Say, won't the iPads get kind of hot under their plexiglass enclosures?

My teenage daughter and I trucked down to Fashion Valley Mall here in San Diego early this evening to shop for my wife's birthday, which gave me chance to look inside the Apple Store. After weeks of rumors, supposition and innuendo, Apple launched its new retail experience today. Several Mac sites had dubbed the retail makeover Apple Store 2.0. I saw sales associates carting around iPads, and then there were the aforementioned iPads beneath every product in the store (as you can see from the photos above and below).

Well, Apple would be much less than it is today. Much less. The more than 300 retail stores allow Apple to take risks that other tech companies can't, and lets new customers -- the majority Windows PC users -- take chances on Macs and iOS products, too. The stores also nurture a vibrant ecosystem of software and peripherals that might not be there without the stores. Related, Apple learns lessons from the retail shops it extends to its virtual iTunes and Mac OS applications stores. Apple Store may be the smartest thing ever done by the company. The retail stores enable Apple to build better products.

Apple takes a Big Risk on Retail

Mozilla has released the first publicly available beta of Firefox 5, which acts as a halfway house between the final stable, final release of Firefox and the developmental version, Firefox Aurora. The beta version offers a more stable environment than Aurora in which to road-test developmental features before they're implemented into the next final release.

On the surface there's little to differentiate Firefox 5 from Firefox 4 in this beta release, which installs over the top of any existing stable release, but it does feature the new Firefox Channel Switcher that allows users to move between developmental and stable versions of Firefox from a convenient dialog box.

Some people seem capable of organizing everything in their head: the day's tasks, a running to-do list and even when and where all their meetings for the next month will be. For the rest of us, though, we need a bit of help. And your computer or smartphone can help here, by doing all the hard work for you.

Planning apps are ten-a-penny, and the great news is that while there are plenty of powerful commercial tools available, you can put your life in order without spending a single penny. We've dug through our extensive archives and picked out 10 useful to-do apps -- in no particular order -- for those with chaotic lifestyles to consider.

Quickoffice HD
You'd hope an app with a hefty $16.99 pricetag would have a lot of features. Fortunately, Quickoffice Pro HD has the guns to back up the expense. Essentially a cloud-based Office suite, you hook up your Google Docs, Dropbox, Box, or MobileMe accounts to QuickOffice, and then you can create, access and share Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents. One of my favorite features in QuickOffice is its speech recognition, so if you aren't comfortable with typing on a tablet yet, and you don't have a bluetooth keyboard, you can dictate blocks of text.

Spectral Souls
Another expensive app at $14.76, Spectral Souls is a full-scale tactical role playing game that shines especially brightly because it's exclusive to Android. Android doesn't yet have anything quite as graphically mind-blowing as Infinity Blade on iOS, but Spectral Souls is no less impressive thanks to its sheer size. Hyperdevbox Studio says it has "hundreds of hours" of gameplay, 82 characters, and 52 different soundtracks.

All web browsers now feature a search option at the top of the program window, and many have reduced the address bar and search box into a single entity. This is the case with Firefox, creating the unashamedly named AwesomeBar. Combining searching and URL typing into a single location not only reduces clutter, but also helps to keep things intuitive. If you would like to take things a little further, AwesomeBar HD is a free Firefox extension that grants you control over your searches.

Now, rather than just typing in a search term and pressing "Enter," the extension makes it possible to construct powerful custom searches using a range of different search engines. Start to type a search term into the AwesomeBar and a series of labels will appear. These cover common search topics such as news, books, weather and many more. Rather than searching the entire web for your chosen term, click one of the tags to limit your search to this topic.

In a move designed to force those using large amounts of data to pay for it, Verizon will eliminate unlimited data plans and replace them with a tiered system likely similar to competitor AT&T. There is a tradeoff, however: the carrier will begin to offer shared data plans.

Calling it a "logical progression," Verizon noted that while family plans have long been able to share minutes, each line with a smartphone was forced to pay for its own data plan. The new offering would allow for the pooling of data as well.

Microsoft's decision to ditch the menus in Office 2007 didn't exactly meet with universal approval. To put it politely. Some users loved the new "ribbon," but others were annoyed about the loss of a familiar interface, and even today it's still an issue for many.

If you're less than happy with the Office ribbon, though, you don't have to live with it. Install a free (for personal use) alternative like UBitMenu or Classic Menu and you'll immediately gain access to the traditional menus and toolbars, in at least some Office applications: it's like 2003 all over again.

Apple cannot win the smartphone wars, but it could dramatically slow Android's advances by taking a dramatic risk to its handset margins: offer a $99 iPhone 4 available globally, following iPhone 5's release. Such an aggressive pricing strategy could be enough of what Apple needs to win the mobile platform wars.

3GS: Model for Success

Microsoft can't wait for the Class of 2011 to graduate before offering a sweet back-to-school Windows PC deal for the next group of students. Perhaps somebody decided to get in front of Apple's yearly Mac promotion offering free iPods to its customers. Either way, the dueling promos, assuming Apple's comes as expected, will be much bigger than the giveaways. The promotions represent a showdown of younger consumers' digital lifestyles around gaming.

"Starting May 22nd for a limited time, we are bringing students a very special offer. When students buy a Windows 7 PC over $699, they will receive a free Xbox 360," blogs Microsoft's Kristina Libby. That's the 4GB model, which retails for $199.99.

LinkedIn's first day as a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange has been by just about any measure a blockbuster success. After announcing Wednesday that it had raised $352.8 million in an initial public offering, pricing shares at $45, the stock shot up more than 109 percent to a closing price of $94.25.

At that level, the company would be worth a staggering $8.9 billion, and would have had the most successful IPO since Google's in 2004. It also certainly begins anew the talk among financial analysts of a new "tech bubble" developing in the sector.