Well now the official release of the much awaited, much touted and much debated Windows 7 is around the corner and Microsoft has shown itself to be THE magnanimous by offering the product to students for a measly $30! Unbelievable isn’t it?This is a limited time offer which will actually end on 3rd January 2010. There is also a provision for students to buy the Professional version in case their institution offers Domain Join, thereby allowing them to make use of HomeGroup and Remote Media Sharing features. To purchase a copy though one will require a valid College Email address, for confirmation purposes. Similar plans are expected for Canada, Australia, Korea, Mexico, Germany and France with slight variations in price. Well done Micro-Soft keep it up!  For more info explore the following links…

Pre-order and register here http://www.win741.com/

Students in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Korea and Mexico can also enroll for this offer on October 22nd when Windows 7 launch event occurs.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/

Finally, Good news for .NET developers, Thanks to open source efforts of Novell ( the force behind the .NET runtime port to Linux, unix and mac ), .NET developers will be able to develop applications for Apple iPhone touch using their favorite tools i.e. Microsoft Visual studio,, C# and .NET framework. Man I’m excited about this one.  Why this is a exciting news because previously iPhone development was only possible using Apple’s Objective C or Javascript widgets.

Novell today announced MonoTouch 1.0 , a first tool from Mono Project which targets a mobile platform and lets developers compile their code for IPhone and IPod devices.

“We are seeing a lot of iPhones work their way into the enterprise, yet the number of people willing to make the commitment to bring in people with Objective-C skills is low,” said Joseph Hill, a Novell product manager.

MonoTouch is a software development kit that can be used to develop software for iPhone using C# or visual basic languages available for .NET framework. MonoTouch supports most .Net features like object services, garbage collection services, threading services, but it is not a traditional .NET runtime, with some differences due to the different security model of the iPhone. Also none of the dynamic features of .NET are present on this. That’s the limitation that Apple has imposed at legal level and at a technical level. The iPhone developer license forbids scripting engines or just-in-time (JIT) compilers, which .Net needs to run code. Additionally there is no support currently for Silverlight or Moonlight, the media delivery and scripting functions of .Net as of yet, although there are plans of bring silverlight to MoonTouch later on.

Behind the scene, .NET dynamic code which compiles at runtime using JIT Compiler is used to output static code, using a static compiler. What it means is that there will be no JIT compilation in MonoTouch applications.

MonoTouch will cost $399 per year for an individual license and $999 per developer for an enterprise license.Five Enterprise licenses in bulk can be bought for $3,999 . An evaluation version will be made available later this week

More at Main Page – Mono

The Web never ceases to amaze me. Every passing day we have a new innovation that is more enchanting, impressive and cool. The latest that I came across on the web was a way to create custom fonts based on your very own handwriting! And the best part is that the whole procedure is hassle free. Simply log on to fontcapture and download the font template. Next fill it in your own handwriting and scan it. Finally upload the scanned document and within seconds you will be presented with a font type matching your hand writing. Download the file and add it to your Windows/Fonts folder.and presto! there you have your very own personalized font matching your handwriting.  As a caution use black color while filling your template and read the guidelines carefully. Happy typing! Oh and by the way it works well for Windows and Macs both.

Microsoft MSDNDev Labs has released a new tool “Microsoft Doloto” which can potentially make your AJAX sites and applications 40% faster. This optimization tools helps in loading Web pages faster on client browsers, thus making them more responsive and snappier.

Existing AJAX web 2.0 applications have lot of complex code and requires this code to be downloaded in client browsers before application pages can be loaded, resulting in making the AJAX experience slower. Doloto which stands for Download time optimizer is here to rescue developers.

“Doloto analyzes AJAX application workloads and automatically performs code splitting of existing large web applications. Doloto enables applications to initially transfer only the portion of client-side JavaScript code necessary for application initialization. The rest of the application’s code is replaced by short stubs; their actual function code is transferred lazily in the background or on-demand on first execution. Since code download is interleaved with application execution, users can start interacting with your web application much sooner without waiting to download code that implements features they’re not currently using.”" according to S. Somasegar senior vice president of Microsoft’s Developer Division in his blog post.

How it actually works is by analyzing the AJAX application workloads and automatically performing code splitting .Application will initially transfer only the portion of code necessary for application initialization, Doloto determines which code segments are to be loaded initially. Rest of the application’s code is replaced by short code segments and sent to client browser either when request ( on-demand) or lazily transmitted to client asynchronously.As this code transmission is asynchronous or is happening in  parallel, users can start interacting with the Web application interface much sooner, without waiting.

As a software engineer who is working on microsoft technologies to craft high performance enterprise web application, I can see big advantages of this optimization too for Developers and Architects, It  can also help in improving their code structure and increase performance two folds.

DevLAbs Team is claiming that in experiments across a number of AJAX applications and network conditions, Doloto reduced the amount of initial downloaded JavaScript code by over 40%, or hundreds of kilobytes resulting in startup often faster by 30-40%, depending on network conditions. Here is a screenshot from their results :

Download Doloto from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/ee423534.aspx there is walkthrough guide available below the download link which should get you started.

For a blogger easy to use tools and quick content editing is one of the main requirement, although blogging engines and web apps do provide very powerful WYSIWYG editors which provide many capabilities, but having a dedicated, powerful and proven word processing software for blogging cannot be beaten.

Microsoft Word is worldwide adopted word processing software and with availability of Powerful Microsoft OneNote which makes taking notes and keeping journals very simple, bloggers can use OneNote and its features to continue writing multiple blog entries at a same time, without need to save them as OneNote does not need explicit saving of content. Maintaining blog entries in OneNote is really simple. In addition to regular word style content formatting and editing, OneNote provides many additional tools such as free style pens, Video and audio recording and insertion and most important Screen clipping. There is a tagging feature as well, allowing you to tag content as required. I have been using OneNote for all my note taking and content writing activities ( blog and technical content writing included) for long time .

After you are done writing the blog post follow these simple steps to publish the post to your blog site.

• To select only a part of your notes, drag the pointer over the text and images you want.
• To select notes in specific note containers on the current page, hold down CTRL while you click the note containers you want.
• To select a single page of notes, click its page tab.

• To specify your blogging provider, click Register Now, and then follow the steps in the wizard.

Easy Blogging using OneNote – snapshot

If you are a Wordpress user and blogger then here is yet another good news for you, Automattic ( parent company of Wordpress) has acquired “After the Deadline” spell checker tool and has integrated it into all Wordpress.com hosted blogs. This is one important update since existing spell checker was not that robust and did not provide features available in After the Deadline. After integration of this spell checker tool the content editing will become faster and smarter, using the spell checking, grammar improvement and suggestions

Automattic has recently acquired other third party components in a wave to improve its blogging tool “Wordpress” even better.

“the technology is learning from millions of blog posts on WP.com to make the contextual parts of the checker smarter and smarter,” says Matt Mullenweg  founder Automattic.

If you have a self hosted Wordpress blog you can also leverage this spell checking using this pluggin.

Watch the video below about After the Deadline spell checker in Wordpress.

Microsoft is just stepping up marketing efforts for its upcoming windows 7 launch. The effort includes unveiling of several very cool concept ads available on YouTube. These ads are going to be part of Microsoft’s world wide marketing campaign.

The ads are showing several key features of Windows 7 including Live Movie Maker, Aero Shake and windows 7 personalization. These ads are touting windows 7 usage by students and teachers in a college environment.  We are hopeful that Microsoft will elevate the standards and quality of these ads to new height as the campaign sets in. We have only three out of five ads for you just now and we’ll post rest as soon we get our hands on them.

Interestingly in of the ads Netbook can be spotted running Windows 7

Enjoy!!

The Movie Maker Ad – Nice one

Windows Aero Shake – Windows 7 College spots to shake

Windows Personalization  – Windows 7 College spots 3 personalization

Let us know of your thoughts about these ads.

Original ads posted on istartedsomething

If you are blogger, then you must be aware of the advantage of publishing RSS feeds. One of the shortcomings of RSS feeds is that a subscriber usually have to pull the feed from source and syndicate it, the pulling duration varies for everyone based on their preference. Similar to that of pop3 email checking where your email client software polls the pop3 server for new emails.

This is where twitter and Friendfeed services come in handy where there is no delay and your content/message is distributed to masses in “real time”.

RSSCloud makes checking of update spontaneous, by client telling the RSS distributer that let me know as soon as update is available rather than polling at frequent times for updates

This is the same concept of push email, supported by Microsoft exchange, Black berry push mail and other push email services. The end result will be that as soon you publish a post on your blog, all subscribers will be notified of it in real time, sounds exciting doesn’t it.

Well hold on, not so fast,  I know you want to leverage this feature just right now, but please continue reading.

Wordpress supporting this feature does not mean anything, unless the feed clients or consumers can handle RSSCloud feature. Clients like Google Feedburner, Microsoft Outlook does not support RSSCloud feature and will not be able to fetch updates in real time.

Although advantages of real time updates are enormous and are evident, but it will take time for big client softwares to implement this feature. If you are enthuse enough you can try RSSCloud feature by using clients like Dave Winer’s River2 or LazyFeed .

RSSCloud has been around for a while and its about time Wordpress has started to this feature, additionally

Wordpress also intends to support other ways to make RSS more real-time, which could include integratio nwith “Jabber, email, Weblogs.com pings, SUP, pubsubhubbub, Twitter” and more.

RSSCloud is active on every blog hosted on Wordpress.com. If you have a self-hosted blog then there is   RSSCloud Wordpress plugin available for you to become real-time blogger using Wordpress.

If you are an Microsoft Office user this might be an interesting update for you, i.e. Microsoft is looking good to deliver its latest and anticipated Office suite next year. The most anticipated feature is Web based office but no leaks thus far.But we have had several leaked builds of Office 2010 suites in past. This yet another Office 2010 Mondo build 14.0.4417.1000 has spread in the wild lately. Interestingly this build has been labeled “beta”.

Its the holy month of Ramadan and we all seek Allah’s blessings in this month. Reciting Quran is one of most common way or worship after Salat. Usually recitation is without meanings and without understanding. 

Understanding Quran is the utmost important requirement from Muslims of Allah Almighty and then comes the implementation of Quran in our lived, and understanding Quran requires knowledge of Arabic. With the technology available in this era we can learn and recite Quran simultaneously and understand it pretty quickly.

Quranreciter and QuranTrans are freeware soft wares available from Sha Plus Software, which servers the very right purpose in a very efficient way.

Quranreciter is a windows software allowing users to listen to whole Quran in voice of Saad Al-Ahamdi verse by verse accompanied Arabic text and translation in 25 languages ( multiple at a time). It supports English translation by Picktal, Yusuf Ali and Shakir. Other translation languages available are Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bosnian, Chinese Simplified, Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malayalam, Malaysian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Urdu). Apart from translation it also support Quranic commentary ( Tafseer ) in English by Yusuf Ali.

There is also a functionality which displays the meaning of each Arabic word in English with mouse hover, which in my opinion is very significant and can help us learn Quranic Arabic.

It supports many settings and configurations which assists in Quran memorization, with the support of two modes Range mode ( for reciting set of verses ) and verse mode ( verse by verse recitation ).

This is perhaps one of the first software which allow free full Quranic recitation in mp3 format, with language translations.

I hope this software will give us more reasons to listen, recite and most importantly learn the Quran which is the divine book and instructions from Allah and one true book.

If you want a more simpler Quranic version please download the full Quran Kareem (1.7 mb) text in Microsoft excel format, this is one amazing form of Quran.

In addition to that if you are looking for mobile Quran please consider these two sources :

1. www.pocketquran.com
2. http://www.asgatechshop.com/en/  ( with amazing Islamic applications which are also distributed by Nokia )