Awesome Techs

The KDE Community announced the immediate availability of “Caizen”, (a.k.a KDE 4.3), bringing many improvements to the user experience and development platform. KDE 4.3 offers a more stable and complete product for the home and small office.

The KDE community has fixed over 10,000 bugs and implemented almost 2,000 feature requests in the last 6 months. Close to 63,000 changes were checked in by a little under 700 contributors.

Major features of KDE 4.3 include KWin, a 3D graphical window manager, the Plasma desktop panels and widgets integration shell, the Dolphin network and content aware file manager, the KRunner desktop search and command launch system, and improved access to desktop and system settings and controls.

The KDE suite also includes a variety of integrated applications in the categories of networking, multimedia, graphics, personal information management, education, games, utilities and software development.

For those Whoe Dont know What is KDE:

About KDE

KDE is an international technology team that creates free and open source software for desktop and portable computing. Among KDE’s products are a modern desktop system for Linux and UNIX platforms, comprehensive office productivity and groupware suites and hundreds of software titles in many categories including Internet and web applications, multimedia, entertainment, educational, graphics and software development. KDE software is translated into more than 60 languages and is built with ease of use and modern accessibility principles in mind. KDE4′s full-featured applications run natively on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X.

Mozilla has announced that the popular browser Firefox, currently in version 3.5, has surpassed 1 billion lifetime downloads, a nice milestone for the open source software.

The original Firefox was released in 2004. and now it has the market share of 20-30 % of all browsers. The leading one is the inetenet explorer which comes bundled with all micorsoft operating systems. But After firefox is launched the market share for IE always been decreasing. And now it has a market share of 60%. The new and emerging browsers like Google Chrome Apple Safari etc holds a market share of 2-5 % of all.

Just last year, Mozilla set the Guinness world record for most new downloads in a 24 hour period when Firefox 3.0 was downloaded 8 million times in its first day.

The billion download figure, does, by Mozilla’s account, include all types of downloads of the software, including manual updates. It also includes users who download multiple copies, normally to place on multiple computers within a same household
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You can check the milestone celebration site here: Onebillionplusyou

Mozilla developers have revealed mockups of Firefox 3.7 to give users a taster of what that version of the popular open source browser might eventually look like.

The org spun out screenshots of the browser earlier this week, even though it hasn’t released the next iteration – Firefox 3.6 – yet.

Mozilla main man Mike Beltzner confirmed on Monday that the next version of the browser would land around the same time as the “estimated street date of Windows 7”, which is expected in October.

So what can users expect to see potentially added to Firefox 3.7?

The browser nods happily in the direction of Windows Vista/7 Aero Glass design by taking on the same translucent appearance as the OS itself.

“Toolbar and Tabs using Glass. Buttons translucent and slightly glossy to meld with the toolbar. Raised 3D look achieve tactile ‘feel’,” noted Mozilla in a draft wiki post.

Elsewhere, the outfit’s developers have been playing around with the Page Button function so it will connect to the left side of the tab area. The Tools/Bookmark Bar has also been given a nudge over to the side of the window “to emphasise the fact that it is used for customising and changing the UI”.

Of course whether those designs will be locked into Firefox 3.7 remains to be seen. After all, Mozilla has only provided mockups of how that version of the browser, which isn’t expected to land until next spring, could actually look. The big tease.

Credit:Register.co.uk

Although video has been on Wikipedia in a limited way for the past two years, it is poised to take-off with the recent introduction of Firefox 3.5 along with other imminent developments, we have learned.

Over the next few months there will be the introduction of server-side transcoding technology, a new Wikipedia video player, and a set of collaborative editing tools which will allow community members to amend videos.

Videos on the site are uploaded and watched in a format called Ogg Theora.  It is a Flash-like program which is completely open-source.  Video producers can render Ogg files in FinalCut and other editing programs by using various plug-ins. Once in Ogg, these files can be uploaded to Wikipedia.

Later this year, Wikipedia will allow uploads of popular file formats directly with server-side transcoding to Ogg.  This plug-in is called FireOgg.

For some time, these videos have been viewable with certain Java and other plug-ins.  The release of Firefox 3.5 is the first time that Ogg videos can be viewed “natively” on a browser.  Opera and Chrome will support Ogg soon, but not Explorer or Safari.

Credit:Beet.TV