YouTube mobile now available for everyone

By Josh Lowensohn
YouTube's mobile site has been live and available as of a few days ago. The service offers a hand-picked selection of videos users can watch on their mobile devices. Users have access to just the bare essentials, such as running time, rating, and a link to a video's page with more details. There is, however, no community aspect--no user comments, ratings, or video responses--the kind of things that make YouTube so interesting. Also missing is a dedicated video uploader, as mobile users are still required to submit their mobile videos via MMS messaging.

Instead of running in Flash, like regular YouTube videos, the clips have been downscaled and converted to the 3GP format for streaming. Despite this, I've had a heck of a time trying to get them to run on two of our test phones. It seems that instead of playing right in your browser, the service will simply piggy back on to your phone's built-in media player.

YouTube mobile was previously relegated to Verizon V-Cast subscribers in the United States under the guise of an exclusivity deal between the two companies. Considering there are no ads in the mobile version (yet), any kind of money being made is likely on the carrier side from cellular subscribers who are paying for premium data plans.

You can give it a spin in your browser at m.Youtube.com, although the videos won't play.

Anyone can now access the mobile version of YouTube, although you might stumble into a few problems along the way.

iPhone to feature special YouTube player

Apple's made it official: the iPhone will have full-blown YouTube integration. According to the iPhone Web site, the much-anticipated handset will include "a special YouTube player that you can launch right from the home screen." iPhone owners can now load and browse videos from the video-sharing site as well as e-mail them to their friends.

This comes less than a month after Steve Jobs announced that the company's Apple TV set-top box would also have built-in integration for the wildly popular YouTube.

The iPhone, as we all know by now, hits stores at 6 PM ET on June 29. That's next Friday!

iPhone campout guides on GridSkipper

On your way to REI to pick up a camping equipment and provisions for your long wait in the iPhone line on June 29? Also check out travel community GridSkipper, which has city-specific campout guides for your expedition.

The guides include all-important food and restroom locations near the stores, plus recommended nearby hotels, and locations of nearest free Wi-Fi hubs.

I imagine it won't be long before store-specific Jaiku groups will form up, too, so people waiting in lines can talk among themselves. And organize revolts when their stores run out of phones.

If your local store isn't covered by the guides, you might want to double-check that it will be selling the phone. Only certain AT&T stores will. See AT&T's store directory. Search for "stores," not "kiosks." Or just call your store today, fanboy, and ask.

Zoho optimizes office suite for iPhone

Zoho, the suite of Web-based productivity tools that's often considered the most formidable challenger to Google Apps' domination in the field, has entered the iPhone app blitzkrieg. It just announced iZoho, a version of its software that's been optimized for the iPhone's touch-screen architecture. Currently, you can only view existing Zoho documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, as well as edit the Zoho Notebook documents.

You can check out iZoho's Web site from your PC and see the neat sliding interface whenever you click on anything. No, it won't rotate if you turn your computer sideways!

The third-party iPhone applications, as we've seen, haven't been rolling out nearly as quickly as, say, Facebook Platform apps or even Wii browser apps. That's understandable, though, because none of the developers have actually been able to use the iPhone yet (to our knowledge). In a quick statement, Zoho's management team said that more features will be on the way as soon as they actually have an iPhone to work with.

Why, Wyzo?

A company named Wyzo recently released the first public version of its flagship product, the Wyzo browser. Built off the open-source Mozilla Firefox base, Wyzo is notable for incorporating the ability to download torrent files directly from the browser interface without a separate BitTorrent application.

Wyzo offers the ability to download torrent files only because of an extension named FireTorrent that comes pre-installed with the browser. The FireTorrent add-on uses technology such as iP2P, STUNT and unP2P to translate a torrent file into the actual download that the torrent represents. Unfortunately, one big problem I had with Wyzo was that I wasn't able to kill/remove any torrent downloads that stalled because of a lack of peers.

Because Wyzo is basically a skinned version of Firefox, most of your favorite Firefox extensions will work with it, including two of my favorites, All-in-One Sidebar and Tab Mix Plus. I did encounter a problem with tab displays in both Wyzo and Firefox with FireTorrent enabled. New tabs were sometimes condensed to a tiny width that couldn't display the tab title at all. I fixed the problem fairly easily with the tab-width setting in Tab Mix Plus, but the problem keeps resurfacing, so I'm assuming there is a bug.

Don't be fooled by the 596K file size for the Wyzo installer. It might seem like a dream to true to those of us waiting for a lighter weight and speedier version of Firefox, but that dream quickly dissolves during installation when Wyzo connects to a server to download another 8,876K of files. When running Wzyo, I also found that it used as much or more system resources as Firefox with the same number and type of tabs open.

I had much more success with the FireTorrent add-on for Firefox than with the full Wyzo client, though I honestly prefer the Web interface of FoxTorrent better than either one of those options. Rather than clog up your download manager with extra torrent downloads, FoxTorrent redirects you to a Web page that displays the progress of your download. With FoxTorrent, you can also actually play music or movies directly from that browser page using a Flash interface.

To be honest, I don't see much point in the Wyzo browser. I can understand why they might want to release a separate product for marketing reasons, but I can't imagine many users will adopt it. According to press releases, Wyzo is targeted users who are interested in downloading torrent files but aren't advanced enough to be familiar with Firefox extension. How many of those people do you know? Exactly.

Do you use any Firefox extensions to search for or download torrent files? Is it any easier than using a separate BitTorrent application?

Make Internet images good

I'd put money on the probability that most Internet users have had to grab and optimize screenshots for cyber use. While some of us are lucky enough to have professional graphic artists on our side, it's important to know how to quickly create and touch up an image for the Web. For example, you might want to create your own avatar from a real-life photo or digital graphic.

Editing images for the Web is a different process than editing for print, and it therefore calls for its own approach. That's primarily because screen resolution can affect how easily the eye can interpret graphics. Ever noticed that faint flicker on the screen? Eyes have to work harder to overcome that subtle interference and process a clear image.

Image capture
The "print screen" button standard to most desktops and laptops takes a full-screen capture that copies into Word and text documents. It's OK in a pinch, but the technology is simply outdated. Other programs utilize more-advanced capture and editing features, including SnagIt and Ashampoo Magic Snap. Interestingly, more publishers are integrating proprietary screen-capture software into their applications. The popular virtual world Second Life and GOM Media Player, for example, let users take screenshots without having to stop what they're doing to launch an external app.

Image editing
Though many screenshot programs contain editing tools, few are as powerful as dedicated image editors. Adobe Photoshop Elements has excellent tools for touching up and resizing photos within your chosen ratio. The free, much more focused Paint.NET is also great at preserving image ratio, though weak red-eye tools make it less than ideal for publishing portraits.

Whichever of the many image editors you choose for importing the graphic, the important thing is to save it in the right format and with the right quality. Adobe products differentiate with a "save to Web" mode, which presents a window for previewing the image when it's published.


As users' Internet connection speed varies, images are best saved at medium or medium-high quality. They should appear smooth in the preview window, not grainy. The JPG format is really ideal for photos, whereas images with limited colors present better as GIFs.

Analysts: Vista SP1 Delay Won't Hurt Businesses

Any delay shouldn't affect adoption of Windows Vista by enterprises, analysts say.
Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service
Although Microsoft Corp. may not have the first service pack for Windows Vista ready at the end of this year as some expected, financial analysts say that a delay should not have a negative effect on enterprise adoption of the OS.

Many large enterprise customers have said they will wait for the first service pack for Vista to deploy the software across their companies. Some were expecting SP1 before the end of the year after Microsoft Senior Vice President Bob Muglia said in a published report last November it would be released with Windows Server code-named Longhorn, due by the end of 2007.

However, rumors swirled last week that the release of the pack would be pushed into 2008 after Microsoft said in a court filing dated June 19 it would have only a test version of Vista SP1 out before the end of the year. According to the document, filed as part of the ongoing antitrust case with the U.S. Department of Justice, the software is to be released by then to answer a complaint by Google Inc. that claims the OS' built-in desktop search capability interferes with the use of Google's competing search technology.

The rumors caused investors to worry about enterprise adoption of Vista being pushed further out, and company stock declined 2.4 percent Friday, opening at US$30.03 and closing at $29.54.

UBS Investment Research analyst Heather Bellini tried to allay investor fears in a research note published Monday, saying that the end of the year release of a beta listed in the document "probably represents a 'drop-dead' date."

"The company most likely has accounted for the possibility of unforeseen delays in this timing," according to Bellini's note. "As such, we believe Vista SP1 could be available sometime before the end of the year barring any material delays."

Andrew Brust, chief, new technology, for consulting firm and Microsoft partner Twentysix New York, who is familiar with the company's plans, said he also believes Microsoft will have SP1 out the door before the end of 2007. He would not disclose specifics, but Brust said that what he's heard "contradicts the chatter."

"Microsoft is quite aware of the need to get an SP out there; I promise you that," he said in an e-mail interview Monday.

Through its public relations team, Microsoft said Monday that it has never committed to a release date for SP1, and confirmed the company will be releasing test builds of the software from now throughout the end of the year. Despite Muglia's comments last year, even a 2008 release for Vista SP1 should not be considered a delay because the company never announced a firm date for release, Microsoft said.

Enterprises are most likely waiting for the release of Windows Server Longhorn -- now known by its official name, Windows Server 2008 -- before deploying Vista, making SP1 less relevant to enterprise deployment than some think, according to a research note from Citigroup Global Markets.

100 Blogs We Love

By the Editors of PC World
Here are our favorite stops in the blogosphere, covering everything from high tech to low comedy and all manner of pursuits in between.
How big is the blogosphere? In April the blog search engine Technorati reported that it was tracking 70 million blogs, with 120,000 new ones arriving every day. In such a huge universe, the signal-to-noise ratio is bound to be daunting, but we'll share with you the ones we've found worthy.

In compiling our list, we realized that reasonable men and women may disagree on the definition of a blog. For example, we quickly discarded the notion that a blog must be the work of an individual: Some of the best, including--and we hope you'll agree--our own Today @ PC World, are the work of many people. But we all agreed that a good blog has at least some element of voice: The people who write it express an opinion in the words they write and the images they include.

Of course, lots of the blogs we read deal with technology. But hey, we have personal lives, too. We like the recipes at Slashfood, the animation at Cartoon Brew, even the adorably over-the-top photos at Cute Overload.

Know a gem of a blog that we missed? Let us know in the comments below. We're always ready to expand our reading.

Best Downloads for Hacking Firefox

by Preston Gralla
Want to bend Firefox to your will, keep yourself safer while you surf, and customize how Google works? These great Firefox extensions will let you do it.

n the battle of the browsers, Firefox clearly beats Internet Explorer in one area--the number of adds-ons (called "extensions") available for strengthening, focusing, and directing the software's power.

You can download hundreds of free extensions to make Firefox do just about anything you can imagine. But I think that the following four stand out from the rest. Give my favorites a try; they may well become yours, too.

Cooliris Previews

Surfing the Web is like walking past a series of dark alleys--before you click on a link, you can't be sure of what lies ahead. But Cooliris Previews shines a light into the dark.

Hover your mouse over a link on a Web page, and a small blue icon appears. Click the icon, and a popup window displays a thumbnail preview of the page, so you can decide whether to go there.

The popup window includes a number of useful tools, including one that lets you lock the preview window so that it stays open, another that lets you open the preview in a new tab, and another that lets you e-mail the link to a friend.

Cooliris Previews is particularly useful during searches: It helps you narrow your search results down to the most useful ones. And it really shines at video sites such as YouTube, because the video plays right inside the popup window when you click the blue icon.

The software has several other nifty features. Select any text on a Web page, right-click, and your selection becomes the basis for a keyword search of various sources, including Google and Wikipedia.

Firefox Showcase

When it comes to tabbed browsing, Firefox falls short of Internet Explorer in one area: the ability to display all open tabs in thumbnail view. Firefox Showcase fixes this shortcoming--and outdoes Internet Explorer's Quick Tabs thumbnail feature.

After installing the extension, you'll find an entirely new Showcase submenu beneath the View menu, with various options for displaying your open tabs in thumbnails, such as by arranging them in a large window that appears on top of Firefox, or by displaying them in a new tab. Or you can forgo the menu in favor of keyboard shortcuts such as - to open the thumbnails in a large window and --Y to display them in a tab.

The thumbnails are pretty to look at, and they're functional. Hold your mouse over one, and you can move forward or back through that tab's browsing history, reload the page, or stop loading the page.

There are dozens of options for changing how Firefox Showcase works, including ways to alter the size of the thumbnails, the thumbnails' borders, and the behavior of the mouse with regard to thumbnails. The defaults are perfectly fine for most users, however.

NoScript

The Web is a dangerous place. As you surf, malicious sites may use JavaScript and Java to exploit security holes in your browser and perform a drive-by download of malware, for example. You may not even know what hit you.

NoScript solves the problem neatly. It disables JavaScript, Java, and scripting on any Web site you visit, but lets you enable it on sites that you know are safe--such as Gmail and your online bank.

When you visit a site that has scripting on it, NoScript will post an alert at the bottom of Firefox, informing you that it has disabled scripts on the page and identifying them. If you want to overrule the program in this instance, click the Options button that appears on the lower right-hand portion of Firefox, and in one additional click you can order NoScript to let the scripts run on the site a single time or permanently.

You can also add pages to the NoScript whitelist--a list of sites that you allow to run scripts--without having to visit each site individually. Choose Tools, Add Ons, and click Options in the 'NoScript' entry; then click the Whitelist tab, and type in URLs of any sites that you want to add to the list.

NoScript comes with a starter whitelist containing Google.com, Gmail.com, and several others. Interestingly, Microsoft.com isn't on the list, though a number of Microsoft-owned sites (including Live.com and MSN.com) are.

CustomizeGoogle

Google has become many people's de facto entry point to the Internet. If you want to tweak how the search site works, you'll love CustomizeGoogle, possibly the most useful Firefox extension you'll ever see.
For example, if you don't like the ads that appear on the right-hand side or at the top of the page, you can use CustomizeGoogle to make them disappear; do a search, and they're gone. The extension can also add links to other search sites, so you can use other search engines directly from Google. And if you add a History link to each search result, it can find old versions of a Web pages. Click the link, and you'll be sent to the WayBack Machine site, which caches old versions of Web pages.

Worried that Google may invade your privacy? The extension can block cookies from being sent to the Google Analytics service, which web site proprietors use to track visitor behavior on their pages.

There's plenty more here as well, such as the ability to customize Gmail by removing ads. You'll find dozens of ways to change how Google and all its services work.