The lowercase ‘i’ has become rather famous over the years, through the work of the Cupertino based company, Apple. From the iPod, iPhone and iMac to iWork and iLife (and others), it’s certainly a recurring trend. However, Apple CEO Steve Jobs originally wanted a different name for the iMac.
Last November, it was revealed that the iMac wasn’t the original choice for Apple’s main desktop computer. Of course, the title itself wasn’t revealed, but was said to be “blood curdling”, leaving many to speculate. Some pretty bad ones were suggested, but Jobs had one much worse in mind, according to Gizmodo: MacMan.
A company named Midiman held the name back when a title was being chosen, which was used for a serial-to-MIDI adapter. It was said that Apple went to Midiman with an offer for the name, though the owner declined, and thus another name had to be chosen (thankfully). It’s certainly an interesting reveal, providing it is true, and goes to show what atrocities could pop up even in some of the world’s biggest companies. Now with Apple’s supposed upcoming ‘iSlate’, we’ll see what the official name for the tablet really is, though hopefully it isn’t nearly as bad as MacMan.
A new “feature” in Windows 7 has been revealed today, by Ina Fried over at CNET. Being dubbed “god mode”, the “feature” is actually pretty handy for power users. The hack allows you to pull all of your PC’s control panels into one standard class view folder.
Here’s how to enable this hack:
Create a folder in Windows 7
Re-name the folder to this exact string “GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}”
And there you have it, a folder with all of your control panels for your PC. Check it out:
Is this feature really a “god mode”? Not really, as our friend Brandon Live pointed out today:
“First, you’ve discovered a documented feature of the shell whereby filesystem folders can be easily made into namespace junctions, as described here on MSDN. Basically, any folder named . will show up with just the portion visible in Explorer, and navigating into the folder will take you to the namespace root defined by the portion of the name. The second thing you’ve discovered is the “All Tasks” folder. This is a special shell folder which is used as the source of the “Control Panel” search results seen in the Start menu.”
Earlier this month we revealed Microsoft’s upcoming release of Windows Live Messenger 2010 (Part of Wave 4). This week the guys over at Geeksmack have gotten a hold of a few screenshots of Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Photo Gallery. The screenshots are of build 15.0.2403.826, which should be noted is very early versions of Wave 4 and it is expected that much will change before the actual beta early next year.
Not much can be said about the two above screenshots except that both Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Mail both now feature a Ribbon UI.
In an interesting move, it appears that Windows Live writer will now sport a new menu similar to Microsoft Office. The orange icons are currently a placeholder, and will not be in the final build. Not much is known about the current internal builds shown above, but as far as we can tell it appears that no new features have been added at this point.
Polish site CentrumXP has revealed the official box art for Office 2010.
CentrumXP were the first to unveil the Windows 7 box art back in May this year so we’re confident that this latest imagery is genuine. Microsoft confirmed earlier this week that demand for the Office 2010 beta had been strong as downloads hit 1 million in just two weeks.
Microsoft introduced the Office 2010 beta during its now annual Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles late last month. Company officials demonstrated various new features during a keynote on November 18 including social networking integration into Outlook 2010, and Office Web Applications that allow you to read, edit and save documents in the browser.
Earlier last week a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that the software giant will be making Office 2010 available in June 2010. Office 2010 will be released in six different flavours, including a free version that includes Microsoft Word and Excel, but comes with limited functionality and includes advertisements. The editions of Office 2010 will come in Starter, Home and Student, Home and Business, standard, Professional and Professional Plus. No official pricing for the full version or upgrade edition of Office 2010 has been announced yet. Although the retail store date is scheduled for June 2010, users should be able to get their hands on a download-able version through TechNet and MSDN earlier than the street date.
If you’re interested in trying out the Office 2010 beta then it’s available for download for free. If you want to know what’s new then check out BlogoFlux’s Office 2010 top new features guide.
