The Microsoft Office 2010 beta was released Wednesday, and though there aren't many major changes from the Technical Preview from July, there are some new features and enhancements worthy of note. This post will focus on the changes to the beta, but if you want a larger overview of new features across all the applications, check out our rundown of the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview.
Outlook is the cornerstone of many companies' communications and daily schedules, and as such received a lot of enhancements in Office 2010. In the beta version, Microsoft has added even more ways to connect with coworkers and contacts. The new Outlook Social Connector is an added information pane that gives you more info about everyday contacts. Once set up, you'll be able to view pictures of contacts (even in large cc lists), previous conversations, attachments shared, meetings attended, and much more. Though not complete in the beta, Microsoft says the Outlook Social Connector will soon be able to connect with social Web sites like Facebook and Twitter, so you can follow status updates and more all in one location.
The Office 2010 Technical Preview introduced the Back Stage view, an enhanced File menu (accessed from the Office Icon tab) that lets you manage your documents, set permissions, and share your projects with colleagues. In the beta version Microsoft has decided to return to calling it the File menu, but with all the functionality and flexibility of Back Stage. They also have made it possible to access all the other tabs in the Ribbon, which were previously inaccessible in the Technical Preview, so you can get to the information you want quickly without the added step of exiting Back Stage.
... Read more
LOS ANGELES--Microsoft announced on Wednesday that the beta of Office 2010 is now publicly available from the company's Web site and from CNET Download.com.
Among the features new to the beta is a social networking connector that allows users to bring in Windows Live and other social networking feeds into Outlook. LinkedIn is the first that will take advantage of it--early next year--but there is a software development kit for others to do so.
"I hope that you will all download it," Microsoft senior vice president Kurt DelBene said at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference here.
Microsoft has posted an article noting that Office Mobile 2010 is also in beta and available for Windows Mobile 6.5 phones via the Windows Mobile Marketplace.
The public beta also includes the ability for businesses to start testing the browser-based Office Web Apps within their enterprises. The beta versions, unlike the technology preview of the Web Apps includes editing in Word as well as the OneNote Web app.
The consumer version of the Web apps, however, remains in technology preview in Windows Live. There's no specific timeframe for when the Office Web Apps will hit Windows Live.
Office 2010 is due out in final form in the first half of next year.
The company is talking more about Office 2010 as part of the Professional Developers Conference keynote that is still taking place. Click here for CNET's live blog of that talk.
The developer preview version of Chrome now promotes an as-yet unworking link to an extensions gallery.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Google is on the verge of launching a Web site to showcase its extensions to customize what its browser can do.
The company's latest developer preview edition, Chrome 4.0.249.0, promotes the feature on its opening screen and its new-tab page. "New! Google Chrome now has extensions and bookmark sync," the page reads, offering a link to a site that's not public yet, https://chrome.google.com/extensions. (Bookmark sync is already available.)
Extensions and support for Mac OS X and Linux are the headline features of Chrome 4.0. It's available as a beta for Windows, with Mac OS X and Linux beta availability expected in early December. According to the Chromium development calendar, the beta is planned for December 8 release and the stable release of Chrome 4.0 is due January 12.
A number of third-party galleries for Chrome extensions already are available, but programmers for the project have said on mailing lists that a Google site is planned. Earlier this year, Google shipped a version of Chrome that pointed to a collection of visual themes before the Chrome themes gallery was actually live to the public.
Extensions are a key asset of one Chrome competitor, Mozilla's Firefox; extensions permit people to customize the browser and add new features without burdening the overall project. Firefox is getting a new extensions framework, Jetpack, starting with version 3.7 due in the first half of 2010, and Mozilla has just launched its own Jetpack gallery.
Visual thumbnails for tabs are all new in Opera Mobie 10 beta.
(Credit: Opera Software)Opera impressed us a few months ago with its beta release of a restyled Mini browser for Java phones. Early in November, they did it again with a standalone mobile browser for Symbian Series 60 handsets that adheres to Opera Mini 5 beta's glossy master design. And on Wednesday, Opera repeats what it hopes to be mobile magic with Opera Mobile 10 beta for Windows phones.
The free Opera Mobile 10 beta starts off with a customizable Speed Dial screen, composed of nine preview thumbnails that whisk you off to a favorite site. Browser tabs receive a new treatment that echoes those thumbnail previews, and other features like the Password Manager get a few behind-the-scenes adjustments.
As with the recent betas for Java and Symbian phones, Opera Mobile 10 beta lacks some features for Windows phones that Opera expects to restore by the time it approves the app for general consumption. Opera Link, its bookmark- and favorite-syncing service, is among the laggers.
Our First Look video of Opera Mobile 10 beta (below) sees the browser tested on a Symbian phone, but it will look and work almost identically on Windows phones. Press "play" to get a good idea of what's in store, including those known bugs.
Note: Since our video, Opera has released an update for Symbian phones that can now handle font for several Asian languages.
Windows Mobile owners can download the mobile browser beta free by navigating to m.opera.com/mobile/ from the phone or www.opera.com/mobile from the desktop. Opera Mobile 10 beta will replace the Opera Mobile 9.7 beta that has previously been available for Windows Mobile phones.
Windows users: how do you like Opera's reworking of the browser? Let us know in the comments.
The beta of Office 2010, expected this week, is now available to developers who are part of Microsoft's MSDN and TechNet developer programs.
Members of the public are also expected to get access to the beta this month, with the announcement likely to come on Wednesday as Office executive Kurt Del Bene gives his keynote speech at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.
As noted by ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft has already set up public Web pages for downloading the beta, although clicking on the download links returns a message that the beta is not yet available.
(Credit:
CNET News)
In addition to the desktop applications, the beta would appear to include the browser-based Office Web Apps (although I am still checking the details on that one).
Also expected at the PDC is the formal launch of Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud-based operating system as well as demos from the Seadragon and Live Labs teams, among other announcements.
Microsoft is already making some news at PDC. The company said on Monday that it is making available as open-source code its .Net Micro Framework.
Two pieces of the framework, though, its TCP/IP stack and its cryptography features are not included in the open-source release. In a blog posting, Microsoft's Peter Galli said that Microsoft is expected to remain involved in the development of the .Net Micro Framework, working alongside the community.
CNET News will have live coverage of the show, including Ray Ozzie's keynote speech, on Tuesday.
Those who can't wait until next week for the beta of Office 2010 can apparently find the code already on torrent Web sites.
According to Neowin, the beta code has popped up on peer-to-peer sites in recent days.
Meanwhile, another enthusiast site has posted screenshots of what it says is the beta of Office 2010 and its source--Microsoft itself. Craving Tech said that it got the code on a flash drive from the software maker, and the site has posted a number of screenshots.
Microsoft is widely expected to release the updated test version at next week's Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles. Microsoft has said that it will have a beta of Office 2010 this month and has hinted on its Twitter feed that it will have big Office news next week, all but guaranteeing the release of the beta.
The beta is an update to the technology preview of the software that was released in July. That version also leaked to the Web ahead of its official release.
In addition to the desktop versions of Office 2010, Microsoft is also prepping browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. It has released a preview version of the Web apps (except for OneNote), but it is unclear if those will see an update next week.
For its part, Microsoft is staying mum. "We have not officially released the beta code of Office (2010)," a representative said. "We recommend that people do not download code from unauthorized sources."
Among the features of Office 2010 is a "paste preview" function that lets people see what different options will look like before they paste text from the clipboard.
(Credit: Microsoft)Google plans to release a Mac beta of Chrome in early December, judging by some chatter on a mailing list for the browser.
Chrome 4.0 is available today as a beta version for Windows but only as a rougher developer-preview version on Linux and Mac OS X. The standout feature of the new version is customization through extensions, a technology that long has been a core asset of another open-source browser, Firefox.
Google has been moving to a new extensions presentation technology called Browser Actions that let people interact with extensions through a small button toward the upper right of the browser window. "We've noticed that many of you have updated your extensions to take advantage of the new UI. We'd like to encourage the rest of you to do so as well," said Nick Baum, a Google Chrome product manager, in a mailing list posting.
But here's the hitch: Browser Actions only work on Windows and Linux right now. That means those building extensions will leave Mac Chrome users behind for a time. But in telling those developers they won't have long to wait, Baum mentioned the deadline for the beta version.
"The earlier you switch, the more time you will have to polish your experience for our Beta launch in early December," he said.
And Google is on the case for adding Browser Actions to the Mac version of Chrome.
"We realize this means dropping Mac support for a couple of weeks, but we already have people working on that," Baum said. "If you prioritize the Windows and Linux versions, we'll bring you cross-platform parity as soon as we can!"
Mozilla, racing to release Firefox 3.6 before the end of the year, has released a second beta of the open-source browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Firefox 3.6 beta 1 introduced most of the new features, most visibly the ability to customize Firefox's look through Personas, less than two weeks ago. But among the 190 patches in the new beta is what Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, described in a blog post as "a mechanism to prevent incompatible software from crashing Firefox."
There also are a number of deeper changes in Firefox 3.6 that Web developers likely will be more interested in. Note that one of them, the ability to use color gradients with formatting technology called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), has changed syntax in between Firefox 3.6 beta 1 and beta 2.
Mozilla is trying to accelerate the pace of Firefox releases; Firefox 3.7 is set for release in the first half of 2010 and 4.0 some time later that year. The project faces new competition from Google's Chrome browser.
Mozilla may have released the first beta of Firefox 3.6 nearly two months late, but the organization believes the final version still will arrive on schedule before the end of the year.
The Mozilla wiki page on version 3.6, code-named Namoroka, listed early September for the scheduled release of the first beta, but it actually arrived October 30. Despite that, Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering, said Mozilla wants to release the browser before the holidays and is sticking by the overall schedule for the open-source Web browser.
"We're still looking at a release candidate in November and (final) release in December at this point," Shaver said in a Tuesday interview.
That means Mozilla has a compressed schedule for producing the final version, but Shaver said coders are working hard. "We're not going to coast into it," he said. "We're going to continue shipping beta updates aggressively."
Those involved in open-source projects, with different motivations and pressures than those in the traditional proprietary software industry, sometimes have an attitude of "we'll ship it when it's done." Mozilla, though, recognizes that time matters even for an open-source project.
"We've always been more quality-driven than time-driven," Shaver said. "But we understand timing in the market matters to our users and our competitiveness."
Right now I'm Web surfing with a browser that's sleek and fast. It has Speed Dial thumbnails to quickly load a favorite Web page and preview thumbnails to help rotate through open Web pages by sight. The app I'm wielding sounds a lot like Opera 10, Opera's desktop browser (Mac | Windows), or even the recently released Opera Mini 5 beta for Java phones. But it's not.
I'm navigating the Internet from a 4.6x2.2-inch screen belonging to a Nokia N97 smartphone using a prerelease version of Opera Mobile 10 beta for Symbian Series 60 phones. Opera Mobile 10 beta is available as of Tuesday morning, Central European Time.
Opera Mobile 10 beta previews tabs in a flashy new design.
(Credit: Opera Software)What's new? The tabbed browsing treatment and speed-dial thumbnails you see when you load the browser anew or launch a new page are the spotlight-grabbing features. The entire interface, in fact, gets a fresh coat of paint using the same brush that drew in Opera Mini 5 beta. The visual encore works. In looks alone, the inviting Opera Mobile 10 beta bowls over Opera Mobile 9.7 beta's design.
While the speed-dial thumbnails and multiple browser tabs were far more impressive in the comparatively resource-light Opera Mini 5 beta, a proxy browser, the design continuity we see in Opera Mobile 10 beta, a standalone Web browser, is a welcome refresh that also joins the two cell phone apps in a unified design philosophy.
Opera's 4MB version 10 beta browser retains many of the features from prior releases, like the password manager, and the abilities to zoom in and out, copy text, save images, download files, and open links in a new tab. Opera says it has improved the password manager in this 10 beta release, including better handling for multiple URLS for a single site, and easier management for deleting passwords.
From Opera Mobile 9.7 beta, the version 10 beta has carried over Opera Turbo, Opera's compression engine that uses Opera's servers to punch up performance (and deliver less detailed images) when the Internet connection is slow.
In addition, Opera claims that Opera Mobile 10 beta is twice as fast as its Symbian predecessor when it comes to downloads and zooming and panning.
Opera's Speed Dial and expandable search box make the jump to Opera Mobile 10 beta.
(Credit: Opera Software)As a beta build, Opera Mobile 10 beta does have several bugs to work out. First, Opera Link, the bookmarks-syncing service available in Opera 10 desktop browser and in the stable builds of Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, is absent from this build (it's also missing from Opera Mini 5 beta.) Opera Link will return by the time Opera Mobile 10 leaves beta.
Other known issues include the virtual keyboard popping up even when you're using the physical keyboard, as it did in our tests on the Nokia N97. The beta browser is also known to freeze at times, and has only partial support for the IMEs (Input Method Editors) that make typing Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean work. As a result, this beta build won't function on handsets with Asian language packs and won't render Asian fonts in this version, says Opera, but the input incompatibility should be fixed in the next release.
Opera Mobile 10 beta is available now for Symbian users on Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson smartphones running Symbian Series 60, 3rd and 5th editions. Try it by pointing the mobile browser to http://m.opera.com/mobile.
