So if you are anything like me you will be a little sick of seeing the same Microsoft blue everywhere you look. Don’t despair I just worked out how to change the appearance (i.e. Skin) of Outlook 2007. It is actually very easy but not obvious – probably why I only discovered it today.

Now you can choose a nice black theme to match your Vista Transformation Pack or Nasa Night Launch theme for Firefox. That rocks!

Outlook Skin Screenshot Black

• Open Word 2007 (you see why it isn’t instantly obvious?)
• Press Word Start
• Select Word Options
• Select Popular Category
• Select Color Scheme – Black
• Press OK
• Close Word
• Open Outlook and there you go – nice dark Outlook!

The full release in now available. If you get it today you’ll contribute to Mozilla’s World Record attempt if that sort of thing appeals to you.

I have installed it and apart from some plugins not being available all is well. A bug I’ve had since 2.x is still apparent which I was hoping would be fixed – an issue with my bookmarks toolbar which extends off the side of the screen. The bug is that the little double drop down arrow (the one that reveals the bookmarks that wouldn’t fit in the bar) still isn’t visible until I have clicked one of my bookmarks. It’s probably because my Stumble bar shares the line. Oh well the awesomeness of the awesome bar makes up for that!

linkage: download firefox 3.0

Another nice photo viewer based around spherical image walls or ‘planets’ I guess. Check it out anyway.

linkage: tag galaxy

Cooliris (already known for their webpage preview when you hover over a link) have a plugin available for you browser called Piclens. After installing, with a single click you will be able to transform your flickr or youtube browsing to a beautifully rendered fullscreen photo wall.

Before

After

update July 2008: WordPress does not currently support the Piclens plugin – however you can still leverage it simply by hosting your pics somewhere like Flickr

It’s is actually pretty simple to get Piclens working on your blog. Simply host all your photos on Flickr (or similar piclens supported website). That way the little piclens play button is just visible and working.

So instead of uploading your picture directly to wordpress – upload them to Flickr (there is a good Batch Uploading tool if you upload photos all the time).

Once on Flickr browse to your photo
Right Click – Copy Address (firefox anyway – Internet Explorer may be a little different). Make sure you have the correct picture size selected ie Not the thumbnail
In WordPress create new post
Insert Image
Paste the URL you just copied from Flickr
Add a description
Add a Caption if you want
Insert Image into Post

Thats it! When you publish your post you’ll now see the Piclens icon for any/all pics you have hosted on Flickr.

linkage: download piclens plugin

Succeeding in staying a step behind Google’s platform Android, but releasing an SDK anyway, Apple will be opening up their phones for developers to generate apps for them free of charge. They have decided to take on Blackberry and friends by moving to the corporate market with support for Exchange and ActiveSynch and Cisco providing IPSec secure VPN tunneling over WPA2 Wifi encryption (That’s all good news if you were wondering).

I don’t know if we’ll see Outlook/LiveMail apps but it’s a possibility I guess

linkage: via apple.com, download SDK (you’ll need apple ID)

Looking for a FPS game where you won’t be shot in the face repeatedly by a swearing ultra skilled 15 year old boy who plays the game for 8 hours a day? We’ll the forthcoming release of Battlefield Heroes from EA Digital Illusions might just be your thing. It promises FUN! Remember that from the days of the C64? And it’s FREE.

Free to download AND free to play. I wonder what their scheme for making $ is then? We all know EA aren’t Altruists. I guess they will have purchasable upgrades or something of the kind. Anyway it looks like it could amuse me for 15 minutes. Due out summer 2008

linkage: battlefield heroes trailer video

Now this looks interesting. The sooner we can loose the keyboard and mouse the better. Speech control has never really taken off so maybe we should skip that and go neural? With the demo at GDC (Game Developers Conference) of the Epoc headset by Emotiv (planned for late 2008 release) thought controlled PC may be closer than we’d suspected.

linkage: via kotaku.com

Version 0.4 (developer edition) of Mozilla’s new integrated media browser is out so I decided to take it for a spin through my music collection to see how it is coming along.

The immediately obvious likeness to firefox means that the interface and options are intuitive, but also means that it can easily become a memory hog. I observed it around hovering close to 200 MB’s at times and this was very noticeable in sluggish performance overall. If you can get over the performance of a slug, the application gives hope of a nice integrated media player and web browser which suits me fine – as these are my primary apps on my media centric workstation.

The slick mozilla look aside, Songbird 0.4 is missing too many of the features I find essential for day to day media playback like auto playlists, and even built-in playlists like “Recently Added”. I have no doubt these will come but at present Songbird falls well short of my expectations for an all encompassing media player. Songbird seems to hover dangerously close to a “Marketable Model” with tight integration to internet provided [sponsored?] content which gives me a bit of a chill being as this is Mozilla and not Apple… times are a changing.

Stil take it for a test drive yourself and see how you like it. I’m going to add it to my watch list – but won’t be making the transition from Media Monkey in the foreseeable future.

linkage: download songbird developer edition

This is a nice way to look at a collection of photos,  like a pile of Polaroids on a desktop.

Go here and get your flickr id

Paste it here and generate your own stream 

Download v3 of this fantastic flash animated screen saver clock and calendar.

linkage: download via pixebreaker