Beta

It’s been a while since AOL launched an updated version if its instant messenger for Windows Mobile. The new version is still in beta, but it has some nifty features that make it worth checking out. The first thing you’ll notice is that the interface is much more attractive. But it’s also more useful.

When you first login you’re greeted with a buddy list. You can double tap on any contact to enter a chat window. After you’ve initiated a chat you can flip back to your buddy list knowing that you’ll be able to see all open chats and any new messages in the sidebar that now pops up.

You can also manage your buddy list from the client. And the settings menu has a nice array of options letting you customize your notification, conversation, and privacy settings.

This beta supports devices running Windows Mobile 5.0 and 6.

[via The Boy Genius Report]

Qbox is a search engine/media player combo that lets you find and listen to music available from social networking sites including MySpace, Bebo, and YouTube. The interface is a bit more complicated than it needs to be. If you just download the standalone media player for Windows, you’ll be told that you need to sign in if you want to search for music.

Search results are displayed in your default web browser, which is odd because the Qbox media player acts as sort of a stripped down browser for playing web audio and video clips. Don’t ask us why it won’t display search results.

Now here comes the important part: Qbox is not compatible with Firefox 3. If you conduct a search from the media player or the web site using Firefox 3, you’ll get a list of songs. But when you click the play buttons next to those songs, you’ll be told that you haven’t installed the Qbox media player if you’re using Firefox 3. When we logged into the web site with Internet Explorer, everything worked properly. But when we tried to search from songs from the media player interface, the results were again displayed in our default browser, which was Firefox 3. There doesn’t seem to be a way to select your prefered browser from within the software.

You can also click on genre tags to browse for songs within the media player itself. Qbox is currently available as a public beta, so it’s possible the company could improve the interface and adds Firefox 3 compatibility.

[via AppScout]

One of the fundamental tools for developers is not just their development environment of choice, but also their version control system of choice. The debate over just which version control system is undoubtedly set to rage on for eternity, however one of the more popular systems is Subversion. On the Mac, up until now there’s been a number of choices: Terminal (command-line) which is built into the OS and includes Subversion as part of OS X Leopard, svnX - another open-source graphical user interface, or using the built-in Subversion support in Apple’s OS X development IDE Xcode.

For some of us here at Download Squad, a fear of the command-line, compounded with a little loathing of the svnX interface made the announcement of Versions.app - over a year ago - more than a little exciting. Promising an elegant and truly OS X interface to work with Subversion, it’s taken a long time to come to fruition - however the betas to date do appear to deliver.

After having used Versions on a daily basis since its debut 2 weeks ago, it’s certainly showing a great deal of promise - and makes version control far friendlier. As others have noted, the application not only makes working with existing repositories easy, but also has quick links to Subversion web-service Beanstalk, allowing you to easily create a new online repository and add it to Versions.

Pricing for Versions will be set ‘when version 1.0 ships’, and currently all (free-to-use) betas expire on July 1st.

Want to download popular music without paying and without breaking the law? Qtrax is a new advertising-supported service that lets you download music from two of the four major labels, Universal and EMI as well as several smaller labels. The service uses a modified version of the Songbird Media player to let you search or browse for music and download tracks. Some music willbe available through P2P connections while music from Universal and EMI will be hosted on Qtrax servers.

The files use Windows Media digital rights management and are designed to be played with the Qtrax media player. But once you play a song using the Qtrax software and acquire a valid license key, you shold be able to play it using the media player of your choice. The one thing you cannot do is transfer songs to a portable media device like an iPod. That makes sense, since Qtrax makes money by showing ads while you search for and listen to music. There’s no particularly good way to do that on a mobile device.

The music selection is somewhat limited at the moment. Not only are Sony and Warner Music Group tracks missing, but there are plenty of albums that show up in the Qtrax interface even though the songs are not yet available for download. But since the service just launched in beta, we’re willing to cut Qtrax some slack.

The Qtrax client is Windows only for now, but a Mac version is in the works.

[via Silicon Alley Insider]

If you spend a lot of time using social web sites like Facebook, Pownce, Digg, Flickr Twitter, YouTube, or del.icio.us, you’ve probably heard of Flock, a web browser with integrated tools for interacting with those services and many others. The browser is built on Mozilla’s Firefox, so it can render any web page that works in Firefox. But it also makes it easy to share links, photos, and videos or even write blog posts.

But there’s one problem. Up until now Flock was based on Firefox 2 and couldn’t take advantage of the speed improvements featured in Firefox 3. With Firefox 3 set to launch out of beta/release candidate limbo tomorrow, the Flock team has released the first beta version of Flock 2.0 which uses Firefox 3 as it’s base.

What does that mean for users?

• Uses the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine for faster page rendering
• Improved support for web applications like Gmail and Zoho Office
• Reduced memory footprint
• Security enhancements
• Improved password manager that takes up less memory
• Uses the Firefox 3 “awesome bar” which auto-completes URLs based on your history and favories
• New favorites manager
• New download manager

For the most part you won’t see a lot of cosmetic changes in Flock 2.0 It looks a lot like Flock 1.2 under the hood. But it’s worth checking out for the performance enhancements. Keep in mind, this is still beta software though, and if you’re lucky you might find a few bugs worth reporting.

Sure, Mozilla is preparing to release the final version of Firefox 3.0 next week. But that doesn’t mean the development team is going to take a break anytime soon. You can take an early look at some of the features that will be included in the next version of Firefox. Here are a few of the things planned for Firefox 3.1:

• A new visual tab switching feature will work like the Alt Tab switching feature in Windows Vista (in other words, you can see thumbnails of open tabs). If you want to check out this feature before it’s officially added to Firefox, you can download the Ctrl Tab extension for Firefox 3.0 now.
• Download history will be added to Places.
• Support for bulk bookmark tagging and tag autocompletion

Firefox 3.1 alpha is scheduled for a mid-July release.

[via Mozilla Links]

It’s been about a month since Google announced its new Friend Connect platform which lets you add social widgets to any blog or web site. If you’ve been waiting patiently to see these widgets start popping up on the wild, wild web, it looks like the wait is over. Tech blogger Orli Yakuel has added a widget to her blog, Go2Web20.

The widget looks a lot like the recent readers widgets you find from services like MyBlogLog. But Friend Connect offers users the opportunity to interact with their contacts and communities more deeply without leaving the current web page. For example, Yakuel has added a comment widget that lets FriendConnect users who sign up to be members of her blog to leave comments that are visible to other members.

When you visit a site with a FriendConnect widget you can invite your Google contacts or friends from other sites including MySpace, Hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo to join the community.

Yakuel says there are only a handful of Google gadgets available at the moment, but says there is a section where you can grab gadgets from third party developers, much like the gadget gallery for iGoogle and Google Desktop.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Eluma has released a public beta version of its social RSS reader for Windows, which has been in private beta for the last few months. Eluma is basically a desktop application that lets you sift through RSS feeds and bookmarks.

You can also rate individual items with a thumbs up or down button or tag items to make them easier to find later, or share them online with other Eluma users. There are also browser toolbars for Firefox and Internet Explorer that let you add web pages or RSS feeds to Eluma with a single click.

The public version of Eluma has a few new features, including:

• New local search feature for searching local data
• Improved navigation of public web collections
• Improved interface with new menus and desktop alert options
• Support for Firefox 3 and 64 bit versions of Windows

if you’re a fan of desktop RSS readers, Eluma might be worth checking out. One complaint we have is that here doesn’t appear to be a way to view all of your unread items in a “river of news” format.

Want to watch live TV on your iPhone? Pretty soon you may be able to… assuming you’ve got a Slingbox set up at home. While Sling Media has been releasing client software for Windows, Mac, and a variety of cellphones for years that lets you stream live or recorded TV over the internet, there’s been no iPhone version so far.

Update: Check out some hot video action after the jump, courtesy of Dave Zatz:

Text based search engines are all right if you’re looking for text-based web pages. But Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google all have features that let you search for images or videos, because let’s face it, that’s what you’re looking for on the internet much of the time. But the major search engine’s approach toward image and video search feels a lot like the old fashioned approach to text-based search. You get a list of results, a brief description, and a link to the original source. If you’re lucky, you may get the ability to watch a video or view a larger version of the thumbnail without leaving the search page, but that’s about it.

Viewzi is one of a handful of new web sites that’s aimed at making visual search a little more… visual. Like visual search engine SearchMe, Viewzi lets you scroll between screenshots of web pages. But it doesn’t stop there. Viewzi offers over a dozen different ways to view search results. You can pick your favorite view and then conduct a search. Or you can rely on Viewzi to automatically detect the type of information you’re probably looking for and select a view for you.

For example, if you’re searching for a song title, Viewzi will move the MP3 search view to the top of the list so you can find and listen to songs. If you search for “weather in Philadelphia,” Viewzi will recommend a weather view or a news view, which shows associated content like a weather forecast or news stories related to your search.

Viewzi launched a public beta today, which means the service, which we first mentioned last summer is now open to anyone. But it is still a beta, and some search views work better or load more quickly than others.