There are any number of products promising to restore the start menu to Windows 8, but there are not so many to help you customize the tiles that have replaced it. You can give the animations on the Windows 8 grid menu a bit more zip with Start Screen Animations Tweaker. This nice little free portable piece of software allows you to dictate the speed of the animations and the background wallpaper to have it exactly the way you want it. It may seem like a small insignificant thing to accomplish, but if you are looking the grid and using it all day long, making it go faster will matter. It makes the screen load faster, which enables you to open programs faster. It may only amount to a gain of a few seconds, but add those seconds up over the course of a day or a week, and you will start to see why using this app may prove beneficial. And it's also quite entertaining, pressing the WIN key and watching the tiles fly across the screen. It's less entertaining when File Explorer crashes after repeated WIN key presses. The developer claims this is not a bug of the software, but a bug from Windows 8. Since this is a portable app, no installation is required. Just unzip the contents of the downloaded zip file into its own folder. It is worth pointing out that the download link on the website is a bit camouflaged. The gray "download" button sits next to a green "download" button. The gray one is the one to click. The green one is a Google Adsense advert. Whether this is an honest error from the developer or an underhanded way to make some Adsense money is unclear. But nevertheless you should be careful and click the correct button: gray, not green.
Microsoft is making a big mistake. Assuming the leaked roadmap is both legitimate and accurate, it appears that neither Outlook RT nor Office for iOS and Android will arrive any time soon. By the time they do, it’s possible nobody will care. Mary Jo Foley—a respected and reliable source of inside information from Redmond— on what we can expect from the Microsoft Office team. According to a leaked roadmap, Office RT apps will be available this fall alongside the expected launch of Windows “Blue”, followed by a refresh of the Office RT apps, and a new version of Office for Mac in early 2014. The last bit of the leaked roadmap is the perplexing part, though. The highly-anticipated Office for iOS and Android apps and Outlook RT apparently won’t arrive until late 2014—yes, a year and a half from now. If the information is accurate, Microsoft is missing a huge opportunity. By the end of 2014, Windows RT may not even exist if it doesn’t start gaining some traction. The Mail client on Windows RT is OK, but it’s not Outlook. The CEO of Nvidia, for one, recently blamed anemic sales of Windows RT tablets at least partially on the .
If you're a Firefox user, you may have noticed a few changes in the latest version of Mozilla's browser, which "turned 20" last week. , not everybody appreciates sudden and unrequested changes. ), you'll see a new Downloads button. When you're downloading a file, that button changes to a progress meter, showing you the time remaining. And if you click it, you'll see a drop-down menu with your three most recent downloads. That's pretty handy, in my opinion.
Cloud-storage provider Dropbox announced today the introduction of , a team-oriented version of the service with a particularly IT-friendly feature: single sign-on (SSO). Dropbox, of course, allows users to archive, share, and access files across multiple devices: desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and so on. Over the years it has grown synonymous with online file storage, arguably beating out every other service for mind-share, if not actual number of users. The new Dropbox for Business is actually a rebranded Dropbox for Teams, which launched in 2011. Pricing continues to start at $795 annually for up to five users, though you now get "as much storage as you need" rather than a fixed amount. Back in February, the company unveiled for the service. But the marquee feature accompanying the new launch is SSO, which, as described by Dropbox's Anand Subramani, "works behind the scenes to let users sign in just once to a central identity provider, like Active Directory, and securely access all their business apps, like Dropbox. With SSO, companies can put their existing trusted identity provider in charge of the authentication process."
Today Bing Ads announced on its Developer blog that they plan to roll out Product Ads in the U.S. sometime early this summer. The ad unit follows AdWords Product Listing Ads format with thumbnail image, merchant information, price and optional promotional text included in the ad. Bing says they are...
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, posted a video answer to the question “Can I buy a domain that used to have spam on it and still rank?” Matt explains that there can be two penalties here, one on the manual side and one on the algorithmic side. If this was a manual...
In January, Facebook unveiled its first major move into the search space: Facebook Graph Search. Graph Search is not just another index of the Web, however. Rather, it’s powered by what people are liking and sharing, leading to vastly different results than you’d see on Google. And...
As advertisers, we’re bombarded daily with new ways to work with our data, many of which promise to streamline and maximize our efforts. Yet, while all of the tools and possibilities for digital advertising can lend significant potency to our marketing strategies, they can also result in frenetic...
This morning, Foursquare is rolling out version 6.0 of its app. It puts a new search box “front and center” at the top of the screen to emphasize the local search capabilities of the app. It also adds or enhances other features to make it easier to find places and things to do. The...
The proliferation of tablet devices has begun to lower the value of the tablet segment overall for paid search marketers, even as competition heats up. That’s according to the Q1 Digital Marketing Report by RKG, which finds that tablets generated 15% lower revenue per click than traditional...
Google’s Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced on the Google Webmaster Central blog a new annotation designed to help communicate redirects and languages to Google for multilingual and multinational web sites. The annotation is designed to work with homepages of multinational and...
Google announced on Google+ that the Knowledge Graph now supports searches for non-profit organizations. Now, when you search for some non-profits by name on Google, Google will show on the right hand side, in the Knowledge graph box the nonprofit’s financials, cause, assets, tax ID, tax...
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: The Date: Enhanced Campaigns Rollover Starts July 22 Paid search managers: mark your calendars. Buried toward the bottom of today’s announcement on ad...