The PC Report

So in a follow up to our original preview showing the latest from the Windows Live Messenger 2011 beta, we now have access to the second beta of the upcoming Messenger update and are here to give you the updates and our impressions. The second Windows Live Messenger 2011 beta comes loaded with bug fixes and improvements including a few new features that we take a look at.

First off, you can download the latest Windows Live Messenger beta from Microsoft’s Windows Live Essentials beta page, and either do a fresh install of Messenger or update, and quite possibly you will want to install some of the other Essentials applications too. Unfortunately regardless of an upgrade or fresh install, you’ll need to restart after you install beta 2.

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What do you get when you put a MacBook Air, a Mac keyboard and a Magic Trackpad together into the one package? Something like The MacBook Air Project above. Bart Reardon decided that he would try and fit his perfectly good MacBook Air under a Mac keyboard and Magic Trackpad just for the sake of a modding project, and the results are looking good.

As it happens, the MacBook Air’s motherboard is slim and small enough to fit right under the combination of Mac accessories and combined with the other components of the ultraportable and a hell of a lot of tape you get the perfect-sized keyboard PC. Thanks to the slimness of the Air, the new modded Apple keyboard computer is apparently still quite ergonomic and comfortable to use, despite this tilt and height.

While the mod still has a long way to go, such as replacing the tape with a more permanent solution and fixing the wireless connectivity interference, Bart sees that the device “will be used much beyond internet/email….maybe as an AppleTV replacement.” This is entirely possible thanks to the better-than-netbook specs that the Air boasts such as the 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

Good luck to Bart for the completion of his mod – it certainly looks set to beat official market products such as the Asus EeeKeyboard in terms of power and battery life. You can follow his project via his blog or his Twitter if you want to see the Air-keyboard-mod to completion.

Over the next few weeks we will be testing the latest and most popular music players to give you a judgement on which music player is the one to use out of the myriad of players out there. For the first in the series we’ll be taking a look at Windows Media Player, the stock media and music player that comes included with Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Windows Media Player has been included with Windows since Windows 2000 with Windows Media Player 7, a media player that has slowly evolved from the original “Media Player” that was included in Windows 3.0. The current version, Windows Media Player 12, is included as a component of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and is not available for standalone download. For those of you not running Windows 7, WMP11 is available for download.

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At some point you’ve probably heard about how Google is under fire from many countries over their collection of data from unsecured wireless networks via their Street View cars. Google acknowledged that this was an “accident” and blames the collection of data on some rogue code from a single engineer, but also believe that they haven’t violated any laws and thus are being investigated by numerous countries including the US, Canada and Australia.

Today this debacle has escalated as South Korean authorities decided to conduct a raid on Google’s Soul office seeking out any data that may have been obtained via the Street View cars and the rouge code. Google says they have been fully compliant with the investigation. The raid comes after “security experts” claim that the data collected by Google could include email messages, visited websites and some passwords, although UK authorities claim nothing meaningful was collected.

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Microsoft has been hard at work in their development labs producing a very cool image manipulation tool called Zoom.it. Basically this is a tool that allows you to share high-resolution images on the web with ease and it works fantastically and looks professional and modern. This new tool is availabe right now at Microsoft’s new website, Zoom.it.

Microsoft uses Silverlight technology, specifically Silverlight’s deep zoom format, to convert any URL (whether it be an image URL or an actual full webpage URL) into a high resolution image that you can share with anyone by a simple URL, via an embed code or via social networks. You can then pan and zoom your way around the image by dragging and scrolling or using the inbuilt controls in the window. Test it out in the above embedded window or by going to this URL for a high-resolution image of The PC Report.

Unfortunately if you try to convert Flash-heavy URLs into high-resolution images you will find that Microsoft’s webpage rendering solution doesn’t support Flash which could be a pain for those trying to review Flash-heavy webpage layouts. It’s surprising to see that the webpage renderer is actually Apple WebKit-based rather than IE9 based, which you would assume it would be considering it’s a Microsoft product. Regardless, it works well save for Flash.

For a really amazing implementation of the technology, check out 70 Billion Pixels Budapest.

After the slow take-up of Google’s web application for real-time collaboration known as “Wave“, Google today has decided to end development on the project and has begun to slowly shut down the service after over a year in business. Google says that they will continue to maintain the site “at least until the end of the year” and could incorporate the technology into other Google products. Source code for the project is available in-case you feel like continuing the project.

Last year at Google I/O, when we launched our developer preview of Google Wave… Developers in the audience stood and cheered…. We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication…. But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product

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In an unsurprising move, Windows 7 has just slipped above Windows Vista in overall market share, just over a year after the full RTM release. Windows 7 usage has risen in this period to claim 19.08% of the operating system market, with Vista sliding down to just 18.37% worldwide. Due to the unpopularity with Windows Vista it is not surprising to see such a quick changeover to the new OS (just look at that rocketing yellow line resembling Windows 7), as you would think these stats suggest.

However, upon closer examination of the above graph you can see that actually Windows Vista market share has been declining rather steadily, but slower than that of XP. XP’s market share is currently sitting at 55.73% having declined from 69.95% in July of 2009, compared to Vista’s 22.71% market share in 2009 slipping to the current 18.37%. This suggests that Windows 7 has consumed proportionately more market share out of Windows XP’s than Windows Vista’s, which is great to see considering XP is a 9 year old and rather outdated OS.

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Today here at The PC Report we are proud to say that it is our 1st birthday! After our mediocre quest with The SDF we transformed the site into The PC Report on this day last year and we have been striving to improve ever since then. We hope that since that date we have been able to provide you with the best computer-only news, analysis, tutorials and reviews around.

Hopefully in the year to come we will be able to expand, improve and be able to provide higher quality analysis, tutorials and hopefully more reviews to you guys. After all, at the end of the day it’s you who we write for and you who keep this site running. We’ve enjoyed the past year, and we hope that we, and you, will enjoy the year to come.

Oh, and watch out for that new Downloads section to be implemented in the next few weeks.

So when we last had a look at Safari 5 we were disappointed to discover that some of the advertised features, extensions support and an extensions gallery, were not included with the original package. It turns out that the support for such extensions has been added in the most recent update to Safari, 5.0.1, so we take another look at the browser today but focus on the included extensions support.

After updating to 5.0.1, which we had to do via the web after we couldn’t find the in-built updater (is there even one?), it’s not immediately obvious where the extension gallery can be found. It’s located at the bottom of the drop down settings menu just above the “About Safari” button, so it’s not the easiest or most obvious thing about the browser. The button for the extension gallery actually just redirects you to extensions.apple.com, which is a bit of a downgrade compared to the fantastic built-in browser in the Firefox 4 beta

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So today we’re seeing monster update from Apple, including a new iMac with bumped specifications, a new Mac Pro with an option for up to 12 cores, a new Cinema Display and a fresh from the labs Magic Trackpad that debuts for the first time. This now means that the entire Apple line-up has been refreshed for 2010, except the Macbook Air which we eagerly await a much needed refresh.

We’ll start with the new iMac. Apple has updated the minimum specifications for the 21.5″ iMac to an Intel Core i3 processor at 3.06 GHz, 4GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive and ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics (a bit outdated really) all for US$1,199. If you fancy the screen real estate or power of the 27″ model you’ll be seeing quad-core Intel Core i5s, a 1TB hard drive and ATI Radeon HD 5750 graphics with 1GB of dedicated GDDR5 as the base model for US$1,999, scaling up to a 2.93 GHz Core i7 and the brand new option of an SSD.

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