· Filed under Design·
Sometime after the launch of XP, somewhere in Redmond, someone on the Microsoft design team was in the progress of    developing something for Media Center. It was believed to be too powerful for public consumption and forever archived in    the servers at 1 Microsoft Way. Now 3 years later, a young hobbit man by the name of W3bbo saw light of this unheard    of   theme, and traveled far and wide to uncover its mysteries. One theme to find. One theme to upload. One theme to    rule them all.
Alright, enough Lord of the Rings talk for one day. Devoted Channel9 member W3bbo spotted an interesting theme on       one of the “people_ready†television commercials airing in the States. After some dedicated searching, he finally uncovered    this mystery XP theme by Microsoft. W3bbo writes,
During Royale’s development (the XP Media Center theme), the graphic artists also produced a black version of the skin, sans the overused “glass†effect. The result is an aesthetic black skin named “Royale Noirâ€, it even works with Office 2003.
Since the skin was never released (or reached final adjustments) there are a few issues with it: some of the colors don’t meet the overall “feel†(they’re too purple-ish compared to the greys of the bitmaps) and the inactive titlebars are a little too dark.
You’ll find it’s been signed by Microsoft and doesn’t require a custom UxTheme.dll in case there are any doubts as to its authenticity.
If you already have Royale installed, you’ll need to remove it as both of these skins share the same name.
This skin has not been released to anyone outside Microsoft, until now.
Screenshots
Download links:
http://www.gigasize.com/get.php/142770/royalenoir.rar
http://www.savefile.com/files/201988
http://rapidshare.com/files/1044522/royale_noir.rar.html
· Filed under Wordpress·
“It’s new release time. The latest in our venerable 2.0 series, which now counts over 1.2 million downloads, is available for download immediately, and we suggest everyone upgrade as this includes security fixes. We’re breaking the tradition of naming releases after jazz musicians to congratulate Ryan Boren on his new son (and first WP baby) Ronan.
What’s new? We have about 50 or so bugfixes, which you can review on our dev tracker here, mostly minor bug fixes around feeds, custom fields, and internationalization. If you’d like a nitty-gritty view, check out Mark’s blog post on the changes.“
· Filed under Internet·
First of all I’d like to say that Firefox 2.0 is a great improvement as far as I can see.
But there’s a little annoyance that’s still bothering me after using 2.0 for 2 days. The developers changed the way you close the tabs. I was used to the nice and shiny X on the far right side of Firefox 1.5. But they thought it would be better to move the close button to the active tab.
I found an easy way to change it back to the way it was.
1. Type about:config in your address bar and hit the enter button
2. Look up browser.tabs.closeButtons , as you can see the value right now is 1
3. You’ve got to double click on the 1 and change the value to 3
That’s it!
· Filed under Wordpress·
The much awaited WordPress Mu, for those of us that want to host our own website similar to WordPress.com just for friends and family without having to install separate installations of WordPress for each user.
Also, bbPress, the forum ready to mix and mingle with the big boys, and fully integrate with your own personal weblog, with a WordPress backend of course.
For more information head over to the WordPress Development Blog.
· Filed under Internet·
When the folks from Mozilla prepared to launch their open-source Firefox 1.0 browser two years ago, their hope was to gain enough market share to compel Web sites to adopt open standards–rather than standardizing on Microsoft’s proprietary Internet Explorer browser technology. Job done. Firefox has anywhere from a 10% to 18% worldwide market share among browser users, depending who is counting, and almost every Web site that matters makes it possible for Firefox users to fully access their pages. The turning point came earlier this year when banks and financial services outfits including American Express and Fidelity switched over. Now, with the impending arrival of the Firefox 2.0 browser, you can expect Firefox to gain even more share and make it even more difficult for Microsoft to call the shots, technology-wise, on the Web.
Firefox 2.0 is expected to arrive in late October or early November–whenever it’s ready. But demand for the older version doesn’t seem to be slackening in advance of the release. Chris Beard, vp of marketing and product management, reports that Mozilla is averaging about 350,000 downloads a day from its site, up from about 200,000 per day a year ago. Mozilla figures it has about 70-80 million active users. Most of them are in the early-adopter and Web 2.0 crowd, but there’s also evidence that people within large enterprises are using the product. The peak use day for Firefox is Wednesday–indicating that people are using it at work.
One of the keys to Firefox’s initial success was its community marketing initiative. People signed up to help market and distribute the software via their Web sites or blogs, and contributed to help pay for advertisements in mainstream media outlets. The organization now has 180,000 registered community marketing volunteers. One contest last year resulted in 300 video commercials being produced–some of which have appeared on YouTube and other popular video sharing sites. Beard’s now trying to figure out how to get some of the commercials aired on cable TV and other video outlets.
Firefox is one of the best proof points I have seen that viral marketing works.
