Microsoft has released a new update to there virtual desktop / synchronization tool.

Fixes:

• Increased the reliability of Live Mesh folder behavior in Windows Explorer.
• Fixed a problem with the ‘Save As’ dialog in Internet Explorer when downloading video files from the Live Desktop.
• Enabled syncing of files greater than 2GB in size.
• Greatly increased the speed of P2P synchronization.
• Implemented a number of reliability fixes for backend services.
• And, of course, a bunch of additional general performance improvements.

The build number for this version is 0.9.3103.13

View: Live Mesh

Flock is a social Web browser, open source, cross platform and based on Mozilla technologies. Currently, the browser implements support for del.icio.us and Flickr. Users can also install alternative hosted bookmarks or photo sharing services. In the search box and the blog manager, Flock offer users a number of choices and the ability to install other services using open standards. Expect the same, over time, for hosted bookmarks, photo-sharing and other services Flock integrates. Flock is based on the open source Mozilla code base.

Flock is focused on fundamentally evolving the browser, bringing a refreshing new approach to how people use and participate on the web and simplifying social and web-based applications by bringing them one step closer to the user and integrating them directly into the browser.

When using Flock, people can easily discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites.

Changelog:

• Users of the New Facebook pages can now set their status in the People Sidebar.
• Drag and drop behavior to Facebook Wall posts in New Facebook pages is corrected.
• Twitter Mecard Status and Friend status’ in the People sidebar will now be up-to-date with the Twitter site.
• The media bar will now properly display mini views for Youtube search results.
• The media detection icon beside the URL bar will now function properly for detected Picasa media streams.

Download: Flock 1.2.5
View: Flock Home Page

From the makers of CCleaner. Recuva (pronounced “recover”) is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses!

Changelog:

• Duplicate files are now numbered sequentially.
• Added sort arrows to list view.
• Added Croatian translation.
• Minor updates to translations.
• Improvements to FAT32 routines.
• Various UI tweaks.

Download: Recuva 1.18.344
View: Recuva Homepage

Earlier today Microsoft released the second public beta for Internet Explorer 8.
This new beta (2) is packed with new features, such as:

Accelerators (formerly known as Activities) allow users to perform some tasks with a simple righ click context menu item. Select text on any page and select an accelerator, for example select text and click on translation, it will immediately translate that text and the translation appears in a bubble.

InPrivate Browsing Keep Internet Explorer 8 from adding any sites you visit to Browsing History with InPrivate Browsing. Now you can shop for that special gift with confidence knowing your family won’t accidentally find out.

Web Slices allow you to subscribe to portions of your favorite websites and, with a single click in the Favorites bar, view and interact with the latest updates you care about most.

Crash recovery If one or more of your tabs do crash, your tabs are automatically reloaded and you are returned to whatever page you were on before the crash.

Compatibility View Internet Explorer 8’s built-in Compatibility View button enables you to display websites that were designed for older browsers. Simply press the Compatibility View button if you see display problems on a website like misaligned text, images, or text boxes. It’s located next to the Refresh button on the Address Bar.

Search suggestions Search smarter with detailed suggestions from your favorite search providers and browsing history. See visual previews and get suggested content topics while you type in the enhanced Instant Search Box.

Internet explorer 8 Beta 2 is available for Windows XP and Vista in 4 different languages ( English, German, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese ).

Download: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2
View: Internet Explorer 8 Home Page
View: Release Announcement

By now you have probably heard that Windows Live wave 3 is comming soon.
A new Windows Live Wave means that everything in the Windows Live suite/service is updated. Microsoft has a hidden page up, and LiveSide has found some of the new features:

Speed: The coming soon page says that for broadband users, the new Hotmail will be up to 70% faster on sign in (50% for non-broadband users). That’s a pretty big claim, and one which should provide for some interesting testing once the beta is open to the public.

Ever-increasing storage: Microsoft have carefully avoided using the phrase “unlimited storage”, as Yahoo has done, but in a sense this is what is being offered. The figures we last heard for this were the the existing 5GB free accounts would be getting growth of 250MB per month, but this is pre-beta and could have changed and so our usual disclaimer applies. Obviously the PR definitely looks better leaving the figures out, but a free inbox of 8GB by the end of year 1 gives us a warm feeling. (For comparison, Gmail is currently on 7GB and still growing.)

New UI: Along with the new Wave 3 UI, in particular the new header and themes available shown below, the new promotion site suggests that the classic and full versions of Hotmail will be combined together. This potentially means that full functionality could be available across all browsers. Also worth mentioning here are improvements around deadling with spam.

WebIM built-in: This feature doesn’t really need much explaining and should be a popular addition. From what we’ve heard it’ll support most of the basic needs such as presence, notifications and chat via the WebMessenger dogfood. Yes its been a while since we’ve spoken about that!

Integrated Calendar: No surprise if you’re on the new Windows Live Calendar beta to hear there will be integration between the two services.

Easier to send group emails: Thanks to the new Windows Live Groups service (go ABCH!) it’ll be easier to email all those contacts in one go.

Source: LiveSide

Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple tool for photo and image editing.

Click to view Changelog

Download: Paint.NET 3.36
View: Full Changelog
View: Paint.NET Home Page

BurnAware Free Edition allows you to easily perform the most common disc burning tasks: write to all CD/DVD media types, including Blu-Ray; write Audio CDs and DVD-Video files; create and burn disc images; write multi-session discs and much more.

BurnAware Free Edition has a modern interface and supports Windows 98/NT/2000/XP and Vista (32 and 64 bit). The application is free and contains absolutely no adware or annoying banners.

Features:

Absolutely FREE. No spyware, no adware, no banners
Writes to all CD/DVD media types including Blu-Ray (BD-R/BD-RE)
Writes discs from disc images
Writes DVDs from DVD-Video files
Writes Audio CDs from WAV, MP3, or WMA files
Creates disc images
Supports all current hardware interfaces
On-the-fly writing for all image types
Writes Multi-Session to all supported media formats
Auto-verification of written files
Supports unicode for multi-byte languages
Clean, flexible, easy to use interface
Supports Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista (32 and 64 Bit)

Download: BurnAware Free Edition 2.1
View: BurnAware Home Page

Rainlendar is a customizable calendar that displays the current month, events, and reminders. It is a very lightweight application that doesn´t use much system resources or take much space on your desktop.

Features:

• Small and lightweight
• Different type events can have different appearence
• Supports Windows transparency
• Synchronizes events between several clients
• Localized for multiple languages
• Shows an alarm when an event is due
• Supports iCal files.
• Shows Outlook’s appointments
• Includes a todo-list
• Works als
• as Litestep plugin
• Displays the current date in tray icon
• Can stick t
• the desktop (i.e. doesn’t hide with Show Desktop)
• Hotkeys for quick access
• Easy skinning with an UI
• Can be controlled from 3rd party applications with !bangs
• and more…

Changelog:

• Added updaterate to xml skins which allows the skin to define how often the window should be redrawn.
• Added version and duplicate check to the skin addons.
• Calendar control didn’t show the selected date. Fixed.
• Window’s settings are kept now when they are changed in the advanced skin options.

Download: Rainlendar Lite 2.4 (Windows)
View: Rainlender Home Page

CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) is a freeware system optimization tool. That removes unused and temporary files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster, more efficiently and giving you more hard disk space. The best part is that it’s fast! (normally taking less that a second to run) it’s free and contains no Spyware or Adware.

CCleaner has been tried and tested with Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP/2003/Vista. It’s currently partially compatible with 64bit XP and Vista, there are a few non-critical issues which are still being worked on.

Click to view changelog

Download: CCleaner 2.11.636
View: CCleaner Home Page

FileZilla is powerful Open Source FTP/SFTP client with many features. It includes a site manager to store all your connection details and logins as well as an Explorer style interface that shows the local and remote folders and can be customized independently. The program offers support for firewalls and proxy connections as well as SSL and Kerberos GSS security. Additional features include keep alive, auto ascii/binary transfer, download queue, manual transfers, raw FTP commands and more.

Click to view changlog: