Software Contents For The Packages

There are several applications that would be available in every edition of Microsoft Office. They are;

• Microsoft Access 2010
• Microsoft Excel 2010
• Microsoft Word 2010
• Microsoft OneNote 2010
• Microsoft Outlook 2010
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2010
• Microsoft Publisher 2010
• Microsoft Office Communicator 2010

In addition to them, Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 and Microsoft InfoPath 2010 will be available only in Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus edition.

New Features In Microsoft Office 2010

64-bit And 32-bit

Microsoft Office 2010 will be available for the Operating systems came after the Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3. A 64-bit Office 2010 version will be there for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows 7 operating systems. Meanwhile Windows XP Professional edition will not be supported for Microsoft Office 2010.

Office Mobile 2010 And Web Applications

Mobile 2010 will replace the currently available mobile applications that are used to read word, excel and other documents. This will required to have Windows mobile 6.5. There are several updates being done to the Mobile 2010. The new SharePoint Workspace will give the ability to view and edit the document content in offline mood. Microsoft Office 2010 provides the facility to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote online. This gives the user to work in remote machines as well.

Embedded Videos In PowerPoint 2010

PowerPoint 2010 provides a new facility to add the videos embedded inside the presentations. This will encourage the users to give much effective videos to the public without using flash. In addition, PowerPoint will have more techniques to edit the images and videos. Adding fades, reflection will give a much better output.

Office 2010 MAC Edition

Microsoft will release the Office MAC edition in 2011. It will be a 32-bit application and there will be no beta versions according to the statements. This will be a great encourage to the Apple users to bend their necks more to the Windows side for their personal and office purposes.

Appearance

The main eye catching change in the appearance is that applying the ‘Ribbon’ menu system to the every tool in the Microsoft Office 2010. It was not available in Microsoft Office 2007 for some tools such like Outlook 2007 and OneNote 2007. In addition, the big circular Office button has been replaced with a small rectangular Office button.

Open Office vs. Microsoft Office

Open Office is the most popular open source office package that is available in multi language and multi platforms. Sun Microsystems introduced Open Office with the for data interchange in Open Document Format (.ODF). It came very much popular due to the free availability among the users as a promising software package. It also allows the users to save and edit the files in the Microsoft Office formats as well. The Oracle Corporation does a large part of development of this software package.

The latest release of the Open Office is OpenOffice.org 3.0. The Open Office statistics shows that more than 98 million downloads were done by the people all around the world. It is an outstanding performance at the moment. But the number of Open Office users has reduced due to the several reasons. They are;

• The attractive interfaces of Microsoft Office
• New tools availability
• Attractive and in-built fonts
• Cracks and patches availability for the Microsoft Office

Challenges And Threats

There are several challenges that Microsoft has to face and they are already facing. Several countries used to ban some Microsoft Office products due to several issues. Security is one of the most considerable factors. Microsoft has solved several security issues by the results they got in the beta testing. File block, Office file validation and protected view are some of steps taken to assure the security of Microsoft Office 2010. The universities also used to encourage the students to use open source software rather than using the Microsoft Office because of it is proprietary software.

Microsoft Word Banned in USA

Microsoft has been banned to sell Microsoft Word in USA once due to an appeal from a company named i4i. This order was released by a judge of Texas court. This was regarding to an XML format used by the Microsoft Word. ‘i4i’ is a Canadian firm who had the patent for their XML plug-in has appealed that they own the XML plug-in which were used by the Microsoft Word 2007 and Word 2003.

What’s Next?

Microsoft Office has always provided a set of promising tools to the world that can be used for day to day life. There will be a good trend for accounting software and a diary software in the future. As far as the world has tended towards the digital world, the diary book will not remain in the future. There will be a good trend to a digital personal or a business diary in the office. Accounting is another important thing that should be removed from paper based books. Several accounting software exists in the world. Microsoft can provide an excellent tool for personal and business accounting. Microsoft has taken a huge step to develop a mobile application of Microsoft Office 2010 that could be carried with the mobile phone. An inbuilt personal tracking application would be a great implementation for future releases. That might be useful to add a ‘Geo tag’ for the documents.

References

• Cashmore, P. (n.d.). Judge: Microsoft Banned from Selling Word in the US. Retrieved 06 11, 2010, from Mashable: http://mashable.com/2009/08/12/word-patent/
• Protalinski, E. (2009, 12 01). Office 2010 confirmed for June 2010 release. Retrieved 06 11, 2010, from arstechnica: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/12/office-2010-confirmed-for-june-2010-release-1.ars

Version History

• Creative Suite 1 – September 2003
• Creative Suite 2 – April 2005
• Macromedia Studio MX - May 2002
• Macromedia Studio MX Plus - February 2003
• Macromedia Studio MX 2004 – September 2003
• Macromedia Studio MX 2008 – September 2005
• Creative Suite 3 – March 2007
• Creative Suite 4 – October 2008

Editions And Software

Adobe Creative Suite 5 comes in 4 editions. Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium and Design Standard are designed for the professional multimedia printing and designing purposes.  Among them, Premium Edition contains more software than Standard edition. Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web Premium Edition contains the multimedia applications that can be used for web designing and other web development purposes. Adobe Creative Suite 5 Production Premium edition contains the applications that can be used to design rich quality production for movies, cartoons, DVDs, Blu-Rays. Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection contains all the software that comes with the Creative Suite 5 pack.

What’s New In CS5

Adobe Dreamweaver CS5

A set of HTML5 tools comes with the Dreamweaver CS5. It also provides the support for CSS3. There are several other new in-built features also comes with the Dreamweaver CS5. Multi screen preview, which enables the designer or the developer to view the site in three different ways are the one of the most attractive features among them. Media query reports and HTML5 tag library for code hinting are also very much significant features. Live view rendering for CSS3 gives a fresh experience for the developers. Live video updates support both video and audio formats.

Adobe Illustrator CS5

The stroke width can be resized with the new width tool. The special feature in this is that it can be used to resize a specific part of that stroke without changing the whole stroke if the designer tools is not an alter brush tool. The designers can save those strokes and use in the future. The art and paint brushes can be adjusted as it wants to be. Vector images are not that natural in its appearance usually. Bristle Brush can be used to apply much natural effects for the vector images. Attractive web graphics can be done with the text anti aliasing feature in the Illustrator CS5.

Adobe Photoshop CS5

Most highlighted features in Photoshop CS5 are the 3D tools available in it. Adobe Repousse, the 3D extrusion tool gives the ability to convert the 2D images and arts into 3D objects. Depths, scale, bend and shear properties also available with the new Photoshop CS5 edition. A special 3D tools also available for 3D materials. The HDR Pro function gives a great facility for the users to remove the ghost. Ghost means the carbon copy images that are being made due to the slow frame rate of the camera.

Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5

Adobe Flash Catalyst is a tool developed for the people who draw their artworks with tools like Photoshop and Illustrator to transform them into interfaces. It includes more than 250 new tools for users to make their work done simply and smartly. It is a good tool to manage the content without writing codes. This tool is specially developed for the novices who need to provide interactive graphics. The Catalyst projects can be edited with the Flash builder and the used coding language is MXML.

Adobe InDesign CS5

Adobe CS5 InDesign CS5 can be used not only for the printable format of the documents. It can be used for e publishing and apple apps usage as well. This can be a great challenge for the leading multimedia application developer in the world for apple related programs.

Adobe After Effects CS5

There are 4 main new features available with the Adobe After Effects CS5. Rendering high-resolution images, HDR memory intensive feature and easier to use floating-point colors, less re-rendering and virtually elimination of low-memory errors. In addition to those availabilities, the faster functioning is a very much highlighted option in the After Effects CS5 edition.

System Requirements

Windows

• Intel Core 2 or AMD Phenom II processor with the support for 64-bit Operating Systems
• An Operating System later than Windows Vista
• RAM more than 2GB, 4GB for optimum performances
• More than 10GB hard disk space
• Mulicore Intel Processor
• Operating System Released after Mac OS X 10.5.7
• More than 4GB RAM recommended
• More than 10GB hard disk space

MAC OS

• Multi-core Intel Processor
• Operating System Released after Mac OS X 10.5.7
• More than 4GB RAM recommended
• More than 10GB hard disk space

Final Cut Studio vs. Adobe Creative Suite 5

Final Cut Studio is the main competitor from the Apple Inc for the Adobe Systems. The Final Cut Studio consists of 6 new tools that can be used to do the multimedia editing for Apple Products. According to the experts view, those tool are so far minor than the Adobe Creative Suite tools. There are more than 100 new tools available with the latest release of Final Cut Studio. Final Cut Pro 7, Motion 4, Sound Track Pro 3, Color 1.5, and Compressor 3.5 are the tools for the Final Cut Studio.

Future Development

There will be a very much better future for the Adobe Products as they display a rapid growth of development. The next implementation would be an HTML code generator in Photoshop. The whole structure of the webpage will be coded with HTML as the designer designs it with boxes and other shapes. This will reduce the design time of the web pages. The next best implementation will be the internal server including in the Adobe Dreamweaver. It is a common factor in other IDEs such as Netbeans and Visual Studio. Most of the Dreamweaver users question why they do not provide an in-built server. The edition based release would be a great marketing strategy and its already been implemented up to some extent. Because of that the people don’t have much strong financial background also will be able to afford a scale down version of these exceptional software for a start. At the same time it will reduce the software piracy as well.

History

This IDE has made its birth on year 1997 with two editions called Visual Studio Professional Edition and Visual Studio Enterprise Edition. Visual Studio 6.0 was the next release of this IDE and it was released in 1998. The highlighted thing in this edition was that they have removed support for some languages and focused on the .NET platform. In year 2002, Microsoft released their next edition named as Visual Studio .NET. Compile and Execute method was introduced in this version. With the support for mobile devices, Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 2003 came into the operation. This edition did not become that much popular but, it provided a huge facility for the enterprise level architects. Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is developed with providing support for the .NET framework 2.0. It was released in October 2005. Visual Studio 2008 was released in November 2008. It became the most popular Visual Studio IDE as the .NET developers’ population became over 4 million. Lot of new features ware attached to this version and it was based on the available Microsoft OS for the moment which was Vista. Update availability in regular periods made this IDE looks better than any others. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, which was the latest release, includes number of new features in it.

What Is New In Microsoft Visual Studio 2010?

Visual Studio 2010 is developed targeting the .NET framework 4.0. The applications were targeting the Windows 7 operating system. This has come up with so many promising features compared to the previous versions of the Visual Studio. It is much personalized IDE compared to the others. The developers will not have to waste their time on the IDE. It provides multi monitor support and a new editor that could makes things much easier and reliable for the developer. Availability of plenty of platforms gives the programmers an opportunity to select the most suitable one at the time. The Application Lifecycle Management Tools make the team works much easier than it was before. Testing and debugging tools are much better than the Visual Studio 2008. Another feature that is newly available in Visual Studio 2010 is that it supports F# language. It is a highly recommended language by Microsoft Research Center for the Parallel I/O programming, Parallel CPU programming and algorithm development.Lab management is one of the innovative features available in Visual Studio 2010. In the developing environments, the developers take much time on setting up and tear down processes. This time wastage is minimized by the Lab Management feature available in Visual Studio 2010.

Editions Of Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 is available in four editions in the market.

2010 Professional: The 2010 Professional edition comes for the basic development tasks while making it available for the individual use. Creation, debugging and deployment of applications are simplified through this edition.

2010 Premium: This is recommended for both individuals and teams with the complete toolset for quality application development.

2010 Ultimate: With the addition support for cloud computing and parallel computing, Visual Studio 2010 ultimate comes for the team works for the quality application development.

Test Professional 2010: Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is for the quality assurance and proof reading teams for test planning and manual test execution.

Advantages Of Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft Visual Studio comes with several new and improved features to support the development processes. Among them, there are two mainly highlighted features available are Enabling New Trends and riding towards Next Generation Platforms.Visual Studio 2010 users are facilitated with Windows Azure Tools for building debugging and deploying the services and applications for the cloud. The Live Developer Portal provides the facility to send them to the cloud. Native C++ libraries and Visual Studio IDE Support for Parallel Development provides facility of running the same code across several processors. The new tools enable making MVC websites. In addition, Visual Studio 2010 provides tools for SharePoint development.

Bugs, Errors And Suggestions

There were several bugs and errors reported in the Beta version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. The Microsoft Site for reporting bugs, Microsoft Connect states that there are 5463 reported bugs have been reported so far for the .NET Visual Studio. In addition, there are 2361 suggestions made by the Visual Studio users.Some of the users suggest that there should be built in support for IronRuby. Implementing a common interface for arithmetic in generics is another well voted suggestion. Also there is a request for allowing unloads assemblies. It is said that data contract static checking is not available in Professional Edition. Users request that feature for that edition also. Microsoft has provided a solution for the request for new templates from the customers as the available templates are old ones. In addition they have promised for removing bugs through the updates.

Further Implementations

Microsoft has not declared any further activity about the Visual Studio 2010. Experts and several viewers guess that Microsoft will look towards promoting their newly provided language F#. It will be a good Parallel programming language that could provide excellent features in the future. A research has shown that 30% of the time of software development is being used for setting up the project and tearing down it. Microsoft’s next aim will be improving the Lab Management features in the Visual Studio to another extend. Creating an Open source programming bridge like previously available JIT will be another option that Visual Studio Project team will be looking for. JIT was concluded subsequently the Sun Microsystems opposed. At last everyone is waiting for a much advanced, Robotic Studio plug-in in it. It will be a great advantage for the individual users who like to find everything under one roof. Then it would become a rich IDE such like Netbeans which provides facility to all Standard, Enterprise and Micro editions.

References

• F# @ Microsoft Research. (n.d.). Retrieved 05 20, 2010, from Microsoft Research: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/fsharp/
• Joybhatt. (2009, 10 11). VISUAL STUDIO 2010 FEATURES AND ADVANTAGES . Retrieved 05 20, 2010, from JOY’S WEBLOG: http://blogs.msdn.com/joy/archive/2009/10/11/visual-studio-2010-features-and-advantages.aspx
• Microsoft Visual Studio. (n.d.). Retrieved 5 20, 2010, from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products
• Somasegar. (2010, 04 11). Announcing availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. Retrieved 05 20, 2010, from Somasegar’s Web Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2010/04/11/announcing-visual-studio-2010-and-net-framework-4.aspx
• Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management. (2008, 12 22). Retrieved 05 20, 2010, from MAOR’S BLOG: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/maordavid/archive/2008/12/22/visual-studio-2010-lab-management.aspx

Getting Started

Installation

If you don’t have MySQL server installed, download it from here and install it. If you have WAMP server installed its already contain MySQL server. Once you make sure that MySQL server is installed and properly configured you can proceed with the installation of MySQL workbench. Download the setup file from here and simply follow the steps in installation process. In addition to that you can uninstall if you have any previous versions of MySQL GUI tool since MySQL workbench going to provide same and better service than those. Finally you can start MySQL workbench and open its main user interface.

Configuration

As the first step you should connect MySQL workbench with MySQL server. In order to do that follow the path Main menu -> Database -> Manage Connections. In there you can start new connection and provide the required parameters including Hostname, port, username and password of your installed MySQL server. Finally test connection, if its giving message “Connect parameters are correct” you are done. If not you have to check whether the parameters are correct and matching with MySQL server configuration.

Features

Graphical Data Modeling

This is one of the most important features in MySQL Workbench which was not there in previous versions of MySQL GUI tools. In order to start a new Entity relationship diagram you should go to the section “EER Diagrams” in the main GUI. There you can add diagram and start designing. Same as all the other tools you can add an entity, relationships, choose cardinality etc. The highlighted features in this tool are once you add an entity it automatically adds the primary key named as ID + entity name. You can easily develop relationships and foreign key management is automated. Most importantly if you add a Many to many relationship it will automatically adds an associate table to simplify the relationship. Once you double click the entity you can enter its specification. There you can easily add columns with data types, assign indexes, assign foreign key actions on update and on delete etc. In addition to these general features it provides advance features including role management and Partitioning to improve the performance of the databases. Finally you can create the physical data base by following the path Database -> Forward engineer. Once you do that, it will automatically create the physical database as you designed in ERD.

Reverse Engineering

This is providing feature to reverse engineer currently existing database and get the ERD out of that which is a very useful feature. In order to do that you must follow the path Database -> reverser engineer. In there you can select currently deployed data bases. You can select one of them and get the ERD out of it. Most importantly you can alter the design and recreate the data base using this tool.

Other Features

In addition to above features it provides MySQL instance control, scrip executing and various other MySQL operations. One of the most highlighted features here is Plug-in support. There are various Plug-ins provided to extend the features of MySQL workbench. In addition to that as always there is a good supporting community to back up this software, provide solutions, share knowledge and further development.

Disadvantages

Though this is very sophisticated GUI tool for MySQL databases there are some minor disadvantages as well. Mainly compared to other Database designing tools including Visual Paradigm, MySQL work bench provides limited facilities to design ERDs. The way it creates relationship is not that user friendly and the designer has made many clicks to get it done. In addition to that there is no way to reverse engineer a SQL script. If the developer can only reverse engineer a live database. Finally some times it’s giving a error on close in windows 7.

Releases

The current stable release of MySQL workbench is 5.1.18. In addition to that there is beta releases, latest one is  5.2.20 beta 10. According to their change log you may notice they are in very active development process in order to release a new stable version.  All the releases are free and provides cross platform compatibility.

I think this is the GUI tools which all the SQL developers were waiting to use. It provides solutions to almost all the problems which were there is previous GUI tools. Most importantly it saves lots of time and money in the database design and development. Actually this great tool completes the MySQL server like never before.

References

• Handelman, M. (2009, September). MySQL Workbench Functions On Snow Leopard. Retrieved May 2010, from infosecurity.us: https://infosecurity.us/?p=10916

New Features in OS 4.0

Multitasking

iPhone’s multitasking solution allow several third party apps to run in the background while the user working with another application. It is handled with a simple task switcher by double click the home button. When click the home button, it will show a list of currently running applications. You have to select the application and it will switch to it. The system gives preferences to running tasks and less preferences to others as needed. It allows the user to pause some applications, while enabling some special service to allow some types of tasks such as answering calls or playing music on the background. Apple has listed seven kinds of services that will give the user the kind of multitasking without choking the system

Background Audio: This can be done apps like Pandora, where user can listen to music while doing another task.

Voice over IP – VoIP: Before multitasking implemented, VoIP applications were limited as they were not active all the time to receive incoming calls

Background Location: There are two kinds of applications—turn-by-turn direction GPS applications like TomTom would run this service in the background to tracks where you are, while you are working on another app, and social networking application like Loopt.

Push notifications: This was already a background task, but it has been expanded in OS 4.0.

Local notifications: These notifications are generated by the iPhone applications and can be sent between the applications. If something important happened in background, a notification will popup whatever the app you are using at the time. This is an effective way of keep tracking between the applications.

Task completion: This will allow applications to finish the tasks started before switching to another application. It pops up an alert when the app task is done, even when you are using some other apps

Fast app switching: This will allow currently running applications to available instantly rather than start them up each time. All the application can now be frozen in full, so when you reopen them, they are restored exactly to the previous state.

iBook

The iBook, which was only available for Apple’s iPad, is now available for iPhone, now you can take your books with you wherever you go as oppose to iPad. iBook now available for iPod Touch as well. Currently it is only available in United States only as it has some complexity of geographic distribution deals with publishers.

iAd

iAd, Apple’s newest interactive advertisement platform. According to Jobs, it offers ‘interaction and emotions’ which is middle of where web ads and TV ads to the app users. Those ads are going to be served without leaving the current app you are working on, and then you can close the ad at any time and return to the app where you left it. It offers variety of interactive options like sounds and video clips and games within the advertisement. According to Jobs, one ad every three minutes would lead to 1 billion ad impression per day over Apple’s 100 million devices. Apple will host the ads and developers will receive 60% of iAd revenue. The iAd is based on HTML5.

New Mail App

Unified inbox with multiple email exchange accounts with fast inbox switching with a few taps. It allows users to open attachments using specific applications. Organized by thread and groups together messages by date.

Application Folders

For better organizing, OS 4.0 has a folder feature. Now, user can create folders according to App Store category, and users can rename it as well.

Game Center

Apple’s going to start a centralized gaming service such as Xbox Live to connect players online and the scores can be viewed anyone on the network. This service will be available by the end of this year.

Bluetooth Keyboard Support

This is another feature taken from the iPad. Now, iPhone 4.0 support Bluetooth Keyboard.

Custom Backgrounds

Now you can choose different backgrounds for your iPhone 4 and not just for the lockscreen

Enterprise Features

• Better data protection: Encrypted emails and PIN coded attachments
• Mobile device management: Lets IT managers to deploy iPhone and manage them remotely
• Wireless app distribution. Companies can push out custom apps over the air instead of relying on iTunes sync.
• Support for multiple exchange accounts
• Support for Exchange server 2010
• SSL VPN support from Juniper and Cisco

Disadvantages

There are many hardware compatibility issues when migrating to iPhone OS 4.0. You cannot have multitasking features in your iPhone 3G and if you want to have that experience, you have to buy a new iPhone with OS 4.0. Even in 3GS model, it does not have a front camera yet, so you cannot take video calls nor do video chat though it is a multimedia phone. These features are mandatory and people are expecting them on upcoming editions. iPhone OS 4.0 does not support Java. There are number of free Java applications available all over the net but you cannot use them. They have HTML5 as an alternative for Flash. This might be a good idea but you cannot watch flash videos or browse flash sites. Only few sites support HTML5 Currently such as YouTube.

Competitors

While Apple is trying to implement the multitasking, the windows mobile has implemented it years ago. From the services and enterprise level, Windows mobile is in a leading level around the globe. There are no free things in Apple, if you want a book, you have to buy it from iBook, and for music, you need pay and download it from iTunes. But in windows mobile, there are large number of sites and lot of applications available for free. People love Apple, because of its multimedia features, and it has a great support for gaming. But the future of the Apple’s stability is depends on what are the enterprise level services it offers, how much it supports for free and open source software, and how much its applications support world wide. Most of its features limited to United States. Even though it has many wonderful features, not everyone can get benefit out of them.

After all, there is a question mark in my mind. Will iPhone OS 4.0 be able beat its competitors even with these upgrades?

References

• (2010, April). Retrieved April 2010, from media.techworld.com: http://media.techworld.com/cmsdata/products/3219758/iPhone%20OS%204.jpg
• Iiphone OS 40 All The New Features. (2010, April). Retrieved April 2010, from Gizmodo: http://gizmodo.com/5512635/iphone-os-40-all-the-new-features
• iPhone OS 4.0: Multitasking arrives (live blog). (2010, April). Retrieved April 2010, from Cnet: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20001876-37.html
• New iphone os 4 features. (2010, April). Retrieved April 2010, from The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/08/new-iphone-os-4-features_n_530401.html#s79663

Getting Started

Before you start the Dropbox service you have to install the PC software which is provided by them. You can follow this link to download it. Once you download and install the Dropbox software it will create a folder name “My Dropbox” in you’re my documents folder. Before you start using the service you must create a Dropbox account and it’s a part of the installation process. Then all you have to do is move your important files to “My Dropbox” folder. All the files there will be copied to your Dropbox account space. Furthermore all the changes you will make to the files inside the “My Dropbox” folder will be updated to your Dropbox account space. Those files will be saved in your Dropbox space in the case you need a backup. The total process is automated and you don’t have to bother. You can treat the “My Dropbox” folder as any other local folder in your computer.

There are two pre created folders inside you’re my Dropbox folder. You can use these folders to share your files easily. When you put a file in the Public folder, it will create a URL for the specific file. So that can be share with any one even outside the Dropbox. Once you put your some images in the Photos folder, it will create a online photo album. You can create your own folder in side and that will be the name of the Album.

Options For Users

PC Software

Dropbox PC software provides the file backup and sharing service on a personal computer. Once you install it on your PC it will create folder locally and synchronize it with the web copy of files. To indicate the Dropbox is running there will be an icon in system tray and that icon will display the state of the system. From that icon you can access preferences and in there you can do changes to the application including My Dropbox folder location.When you go and right click on a folder My Dropbox there will be a sub menu related to Dropbox functions including sharing and show delete files. And by double clicking on the system tray icon you can open you’re my Dropbox folder.

Mobile Software

There is a free iPhone application provided to interact with Dropbox. In there is doesn’t keep a local copy of files but give a listing. By clicking on a file you can open it. In addition to that, like in the PC application there is the facility to share a folder and the content of the folder will be automatically synchronized with the web copy of files.There are some special features in iPhone Dropbox application. In there you can take a picture or record a video and put it directly in a Dropbox folder. After that you can share it with your friends. For that you can use Public and Photos folders as well.

Web Interface

The web interface provided is having most updated and comprehensive features. In there you can manage the web copy of the files. It’s given the facility to upload, download, create new folder and share files inside that. Furthermore there is an option to download a whole folder as a ZIP file.At the top navigation bar there are links to display recent activities and shared item status. If you click on the show deleted files it will display the files you deleted recently and yet you can undelete. This is a really a important feature. Using this you can recover a file you delete from your PC which was in you My Dropbox folder. You can see the undelete link in the drop down menu in the specific deleted file or folder.

Portable Version

There is a portable version of Dropbox and its provided by the Dropbox community. Using that software you can have a copy of My Dropbox folder in your portable data storage device, like your USB pen drive. You can download Dropbox Portable here. When you start it for the first time closely follow the instruction given by the installation process. Once you successfully set it up in your USB drive, you can have a copy of Dropbox files in there which is synchronized with the web copy.

Features

Backup Space and Synchronizing

Dropbox Is going you 2GB of space and you can upgrade it up to 5GB by introducing new people. You will get extra 250MB per head up to 5GB. If you need further space you can purchase it. And the My Dropbox folder will be automatically synchronized to the web folder as a background process. It’s looking for changes that the user going to do for files and once you do some changes it updates it in the web folder. In this process latest edited version will always get the priority. For a general user, he doesn’t have to bother about anything, but work in My Dropbox folder like in any other local folder. It appears to be Dropbox is using some compression to transfer files over the internet and it will save your bandwidth. When you move files in your local folder, it won’t be re uploaded to save bandwidth. In addition to that like in any other SVN server you can recover the previous versions of the files (Sub versioning) and undelete the recently deleted files.

Sharing and Security

And Dropbox provide advance collaboration features. You can share a folder with a give a person and all the parties who share it can have a copy of file and Dropbox will synchronize it. In addition to that there are predefined folders to share files easily named Photos and Public. Using that you can have online photo albums and public links to your online files. And it uses SSL to transfer files and advance encryption when they save it in the web folder to ensure maximum security.

Technology

Dropbox follow few steps when it synchronizes files.

• Upload all the files in the local folder to the web folder.
• Make an index of all the files and save it locally and in web folder as well.
• Continuously compare the file index in web folder and local folder.
• Use compression and encryption to save bandwidth and ensure security.
• If there are any changes in index update the latest edited files in all the copies.
• Save copy of deleted files and previous versions in the web folder for recovery purpose.

This technology seems simple but the outcome is outstanding. This is the general functionality in the entire SVN servers, but Dropbox has made it easy to all the general users.

Future Of Dropbox

I have identified some problems in Dropbox system. The main drawback is there is no way to put folders which are on different location on the hard drive in to the Dropbox. In that case I have to move all of them to the My Dropbox folder. Its better if the user can add folders to Dropbox which are in different location in Hard drive by right click on them and “Add to dropbox”.  And in the PC software there is no way to accept the Sharing invitation. For that user must go to web interface of follow the link in the mail notification. When someone shares a folder, there is no way to limit the privileges. All the shared parties can make changes to the files in the folder. I wish if there is a feature to control sharing and editing privileges. In addition to that there is no way to restrict accessing an album in the photos folders. Basically any one can access it. There must be a way to share an online photo album with specific person or group. And it’s better to introduce a compression to transfer files or improve the current compression. I hope Dropbox development team will be concern about above issue in their future development.

Once you install Tweetdeck you can add your entire online social network accounts in to that. In the main interface you can have many columns. Each column display selected updates from given community network. When you press the Settings button at the top right corner in the main interface you can access general settings and control the general behavior of the software.

Tip: Set Minimize button should and Close button should to Hide to notification area. When you set this TweetDeck will be always there in system tray though close it. If you really want to close right click on the system tray icon and exit.

Next section is about Twitter. It configures how many Twitter API request should send by the TweetDeck. This better to be below 100% or you will reach API requests limit means no updates after that. In Notification area you can select the notification style, enable or disable them and Sound if you need. But the sound can be annoying some times, choose it as appropriate. In the Colors/Fonts, I recommend you to choose international font if you going to use some external Unicode fonts. In the account section you can add user accounts you have as many as you need.

After this configuration done you can select what are the things you need to be displayed on the main window. For that you can click on Add column button at the left top corner. In there you can select different update streams in all your accounts in all networks. In Addition to that you can update status, comment of photos, tweet and many more in this application. When you take your mouse over a Profile picture of someone it will display various things you can do including reply, write on wall etc. The most beautiful and my favorite feature in this is you can update your status in Facebook and at the same time in Twitter as well. If you have many accounts you can do the same with just one click. This saves lot of time for me. And Tweetdeck having advance and very user-friendly imageviewer.

Download the application and have fun. There is a special version of TweetDeck for iPhone as well.  Share your comment about new stuff you discover in there.

References

• (n.d.). Retrieved from http://rgptechblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/TweetDeck-v0.32-1024×607.png