Showing posts with label features. Show all posts
Showing posts with label features. Show all posts

Sunday, November 3, 2013

ConnectedText 6 review: Personal wiki adds long-requested features

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AppId is over the quota
ConnectedText 6 screenshot ConnectedText 6 $40.00 If you've used and liked older versions of ConnectedText, this upgrade is well worth it. If you think you might need a personal wiki, check out the trial.

Download Now

Offline personal wiki tool ConnectedText is ideal for college students, researchers, writers, and anyone else who needs the ability to mix freeform text with keywords and structure, or to perform queries and aggregations based on arbitrary criteria. The new version 6 adds long-needed enhancements to content aggregation, display, and searching.

ConnectedText 6 screenshotAt long last, you can open multiple views of the same project in ConnectedText.

With ConnectedText ($40. 30-day free trial), you create projects composed of topics. Editing a topic requires toggling into edit mode and using a simple markup language that rapidly becomes second nature. Flipping out of edit mode renders the topic according to a style sheet. Those who know CSS can edit the style sheet or enhance it in many ways, but I've found the default to be perfectly fine.

Enclosing any word or phrase in brackets marks a link. Click the link to create a topic (if it exists already, you just jump to it). This makes content creation highly dynamic, for people who tend to think while they write. At the same time, those with more organized minds can create a topic fully, then go back and mark up keywords that deserve topics of their own.

ConnectedText 6 screenshotThe built-in browser lets you drag URLs into your topic.

Flexibility is a watchword in ConnectedText. You can use attributes, categories, and properties to organize or find topics, or rely on full text queries. You can create very long topics, or split information into dozens of small topics, which can then be displayed as a single large topic by using queries or by explicitly including a set of topics, or both.

ConnectedText 6 adds a new feature named "blocks." You can surround a block of text with tags to give it a name, then include this block, by name, in another topic—or all blocks with the same name. For example, you might have many topics which all contain some text relevant to "London". You can enclose those blocks in the "London" tag, then create another topic which shows all the blocks with that name (or only the blocks with that name, which also appear in a topic in the category "England", or a wide range of other options.)

ConnectedText 6 screenshotConnectedText allows you to view your project as a web of connections.

For any given project, you can only have one editing window, but you can now open multiple views into a single project in floating windows. This much-needed enhancement makes working with large projects much easier. Anyone who has used ConnectedText extensively would probably find this feature alone worth the upgrade.

There are many other enhancements as well, such as a "trash can" to allow recovery of deleted topics, and the usual round of bug fixes and small upgrades.

ConnectedText is not intended for group or online use. Its primary audience is individual users who manage a lot of non-tabular information (though clever use of properties, attributes, and queries can produce an approximation of a structured database, doing so is like using a screwdriver as a hammer). As a consequence, it really shows its strength in how many ways it offers to present, organize, and collate disparate bits of information, and the features in ConnectedText 6 play to those strengths.

ConnectedText 6 screenshotIf you prefer, you can view your project as an ordered tree.

A 30-day trial with no feature limitations (just a watermark and a startup reminder) should provide anyone curious about the potential of ConnectedText to test it thoroughly.


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Saturday, July 13, 2013

Exciting new BI features in Excel

Yesterday during the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference we have some exciting new business intelligence (BI) features available for Excel. In particular, we announced the extension of the BI offered as part of the power bi-findings analyze a cloud-based BI solution, easily attract customers from their data in Excel and work visualizing data in a self-service manner.

Power BI for Office 365 now consists of:

Power query, the customer to easily search and public data and your company data, all within Excel (formerly known as "Data Explorer").  Information about downloads here. Power card, a 3D data visualization tool for mapping, to explore and interact with geographical and temporal data (formerly known as code name "Geoflow").  Information about downloads here.Power pivot for create and customize flexible data models in Excel. Power view for the creation of interactive charts, graphs and other visual representations of data.

Head on over to the Office-365-technology blog, to learn Office News Blogand power BI website to find out more.


View the original article here

Monday, June 17, 2013

Outlook.com: 400 million active accounts, Hotmail upgrade complete and more features on the way

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When we launched the preview of Outlook.com, our goal was to build the best email service in the world, capable of scaling to over a billion active customers. When Outlook.com came out of preview, it was already the fastest growing email service thanks to your support. The last two months have seen the release of a new, modern Outlook.com calendar, a refreshed Outlook.com app for Android devices, two-factor authentication for your account, new international domains for people around the world, and the release of a preview of Skype calling in Outlook.com.

Today, we're excited to announce that we've completed upgrading all Hotmail customers to Outlook.com. Coupled with the growing organic excitement for Outlook.com, this has pushed us to over 400 million active Outlook.com accounts, including 125 million that are accessing email, calendar and contacts on a mobile device using Exchange ActiveSync.  We're also pleased to announce that we're adding two new features to Outlook.com: SMTP send, so it's easier to send mail from different email addresses, and deeper integration with SkyDrive.

When Outlook.com came out of preview in February, it already had more than 60 million active accounts. However, Hotmail was still one of the most widely used services, with over 300 million active accounts. This made the magnitude of the process incredible, maybe even unprecedented. This meant communicating with hundreds of millions of people, upgrading all their mailboxes--equaling more than 150 million gigabytes of data--and making sure that every person's mail, calendar, contacts, folders, and personal preferences were preserved in the upgrade. Of course, this had to be done with a live site experience that was handling billions of transactions a day.  With your help, we were able to do all of that in just about 6 weeks. We've spent the last few weeks ensuring that everything was completed in line with our high quality expectations. 

We've been focused throughout the upgrade on ensuring that every customer has a great experience. We've been overwhelmed with the response so far, based on the comments we've received.  Here are just a few of the verbatim comments that were sent through the in-product feedback tool:

"Oh my goshwow!!! This is gorgeous! I didn't see this coming - this is a very welcome experience. Thanks for the new outlook.com!" "This is awesome. I'd like to say these changes will definitely make me come back and delete my other accounts like google and yahoo! This is much smoother to navigate and transitioning between skydrive and mail is awesome. This is such a big improvement. I have not played with much of the features yet, but thank you thank you. Alias setup was painless and ease of use is bar none. I'd definitely recommend to my friends." "Wow!! The interface is perfect, modern and feels like Windows 8. I'm really enjoying the new UI approach from Microsoft."

To underscore the differences between the two services, here's a screenshot comparing Hotmail to Outlook.com. You can instantly see the difference in the clean new look. The chrome is minimized so your content is front and center, information is organized so that you can easily see what's most important, large display ads are gone and the entire visual aesthetic is designed to be fast and intuitive. 

 Hotmail inbox

BEFORE: The final look of Hotmail.com

 Outlook.com inbox

AFTER: The modern look of Outlook.com

Of course, whenever a widely-used consumer service makes any substantial change, there will always be some folks that don't like it, and that shows up in the feedback, too. It's gratifying in a sense because it means those customers loved the previous set of changes we made. With a communication service that is constantly evolving, we try to strike the right balance between bringing out major improvements and keeping true to what our customers love. Our belief is that as people start using the new experience, they will come to love it even more than they loved Hotmail. We are keenly listening to what our customers have to say, and we'll make the right set of adjustments to ensure that we make the experience as great as it can be. So to all those providing feedback: thank you and keep it coming. In addition, during the upgrade period we experienced a few service interruptions, and we've worked hard to respond quickly to each one. We know you rely on your email and for those who were impacted we apologize and appreciate your continued support.

Here are a few of the most common things we've heard about:

Do I have to change my email address? No, you will always be able to use your Hotmail address. No need to ever change,Do I need to update settings on your phone or other apps? No, since you keep using your same email address, there is no need to change any settings on your devices.What happens with Hotmail Plus? Your Hotmail Plus account will continue to work with Outlook.com, no need to make any changes. As before, your account never expires and you don't see any ads.

You can find answers to other frequently asked questions and more on this page. 

With the upgrade complete we've turned our energy and attention to future innovation and to making Outlook.com even better based on your feedback. You've seen a number of these updates over the past few weeks, and today, we're starting to roll out a few more. We'll be releasing the new SMTP send and SkyDrive integration gradually, so it may take a few weeks before everyone using Outlook.com sees those new features.

You've always been able to send and receive email from other accounts using your Outlook.com account. But, in the past, when you sent email from Outlook.com using a different email address (say, because you switched from Gmail and are still using that Gmail address when you reply to folks), the recipients would see the email being sent "on behalf of" that other account. For instance, this could look like this:

We knew this was a pain point for some people, and could be a real problem if you had a hidden alias, e.g. when Bruce Wayne wanted to send email as Batman. So now we've made it so that email sent from a different account goes through that account's SMTP server. That way, the recipient just sees that account's email address, like this:

This should work for any email provider that provides POP or IMAP access. If you want to take advantage of this feature, in the Options menu , click More mail settings, click Your email accounts, and then scroll down to the section titled Add an email account:

From there, you can add a send-only or a send-and-receive account, and we'll configure the SMTP server settings as part of that. This new SMTP send capability will be available worldwide in the coming weeks.

There are a number of ways we've integrated Outlook.com and SkyDrive: a single Microsoft account for signing in, a shared contact list and set of connected networks, the ability to send large attachments, a shared header, and much more.  Today, we're excited to release the direct integration of SkyDrive into the Outlook.com compose experience. When you're sending an email message, you can select files from your SkyDrive and we'll automatically turn those into the right thumbnails with links that have the right permissions tied to people that receive the email. When you insert pictures from SkyDrive, you automatically get a beautiful photo mail. And it's easy to edit the message, and add or remove files and pictures right from the new message compose experience.  This new integration is starting to roll out today and will be available worldwide in the coming weeks.

Here's what that will look like:

We want to give a huge "Thank you" to all of you who have supported Hotmail over the years, for some of you, that's going back as far as 1996.  It has been an amazing journey and we've been honored to provide you with a great mail experience for many years. When we launched the original preview of Outlook.com, we knew that we were committing to building the world's best email with a brand and product experience that spans from consumers all the way to the largest organizations. We're excited to have you join Outlook.com as we write the next chapter in modern email from Microsoft.

Thank you for all the feedback along the way and everything you did to help make Outlook.com the best and fastest growing personal email out there.  We're excited to keep hearing from you and there's a lot more to come.  Welcome to the new Outlook.com and onwards to a billion inboxes!

-- Dick Craddock, Group Program Manager, Outlook.com

(This post was updated to clarify that the SMTP send capability would also be rolling out over a period of a few weeks.) 


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Review: Chameleon Window Manager has many features and a few too many bugs

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AppId is over the quota

Snapping and tiling windows isn't everything. In your daily use of Windows, you may need more advanced features if you want to really tame your desktop. You might want windows to always open on a certain monitor or in a certain size. You might want easy access to transparency or always on top toggles. You might want certain program windows to automatically snap to one side of the screen every time you open them.

Chameleon Window Manager's interface takes a little getting used to.

Chameleon Window Manager offers all these features and quite a few more, in one of three packages: a very limited free version, a $25 Standard version, and a $30 Pro version. Surprisingly, basic features such as drag to snap are included only in the Pro version, while the other, more advanced, features are part of the Standard version as well.

The custom title bar buttons look awkward, but they work.

Chameleon Window Manager's somewhat cluttered and confusing interface includes a multitude of options which you can set for all your windows, for specific programs, or even for specific windows within programs. For each window, you can include various title-bar buttons for actions such as basic snapping, monitor switching, transparency toggling, etc. After spending quite a while setting everything up, you can save your configuration so you don't lose it, or switch between several different ones that you've saved.

The window-snapping layout is completely customizable.

All this is great on paper, but in reality I found that Chameleon Window Manager is a very inconsistent performer. My settings worked some of the times and not in others, windows became transparent when they shouldn't have, and the title bar buttons disappeared without a trace for no apparent reason. Not a great loss, considering these buttons are not the most attractive thing I've ever seen. You can try the 30-day free trial and see how you fare, but considering other options, Chameleon is not the best value for money out there.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Yaara Lancet

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
More by Yaara Lancet


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Thursday, May 9, 2013

Review: Actual Window Manager 7.5 is packed full of features

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AppId is over the quota

The Actual Window Manager ($50, 60-day free trial) includes every imaginable desktop-management feature, and then some. Assuming, of course, that you manage to find your way through the complicated, confusing, and rather unattractive interface.

The interface teems with never-ending options and tweaks.

Divided into 9 different tabs, Actual Window Manager offers everything from specific window settings, a customized set of title bar buttons, and a configurable desktop grid for dragging and snapping windows, to dozens of keyboard shortcuts, window mirrors, virtual desktops, and to top it all off, a flexible Start-menu replacement. Unlike most Start-menu replacements out there, Actual Window Manager has the option to add just a Start button, and have the new Windows 8 Starts screen pop out of it, full size or half size.

The Start screen's Apps section can be tamed into a functional Start menu.

The program supports multiple monitors ably, giving you full control of multiple taskbars and their content, and even going as far as wallpaper setting, resolution controls, and other options you would normally control through Windows's native settings.

Create your own desktop grids and dividers, and use them to arrange your windows.

Actual Window Manager includes more options than I could use in a year, and the confusing interface doesn't make these easier to discover, but you can rest assured: It's all there. All you need is the will to spend $50, the need for such an abundance of features, and the patience to figure them all out. The 60-day free trial could help you there.

Note: The Download button will download the software to your system.

Yaara Lancet

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
More by Yaara Lancet


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Monday, February 18, 2013

Join us on Monday's Premium Edition Webinar: favorite new features in Office 365 on-site at MVP Conference

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You can visit us Monday for a special webinar on the MVP Conference in Redmond, where we spotlight customer of favorite new features in Office 365 Home Premium and a live Q & A with Office 365 and we create to engage webinars on Office.com. We start this Office MVP-15-minute Webinar to follow Pacific time, with a Q & A 16:30. Click on the link below to join.

https://join.Microsoft.com/meet/dougt/F274WBQZ

There are two ways, you can join: you use the free download of the Lync participants to full video and sound, or use your Web browser and call audio get: Pamet.MP3 320. 3585, Conference ID: 84172528.

Go to http://aka.ms/offweb more information, how to join the series. A video of the webinar will be posted shortly after the webinar. We organise regular Webinar Tuesday spot on the MVP Conference with tips from MVPs.

What do you learn at Monday's Webinar:

New features in Office customers tell us their tips for Timeto365.com a bit Office 15-minute Webinar series A peak at Office 365 small business (coming February 27)

References for this Webinar:

--Doug Thomas


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Friday, December 28, 2012

Outlook 2013 deprecated features and components

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AppId is over the quota

As much as we love adding new features to Outlook, for the maintainability of our product we sometimes need to remove those that are out of date and aren't utilized by a large number of users.  This allows us to focus on improving the Outlook features that most of you, our customers, rely on.

The following are some features that we've removed from Outlook 2013, and we want to make sure you are aware so there aren't any surprises when you go to use or deploy the new version. 

In Outlook 2013, we will no longer support "Classic Offline" Mode for Microsoft Exchange accounts.  Users in this configuration will be upgraded to Cached Mode when they install Outlook 2013.  For the vast majority of users this will mean no change to your Outlook experience.  Details of Cached Mode in Outlook can be found here:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj683103.aspx

Exchange accounts will no longer be able to have their delivery location be a PST file (rather an .OST).  Users in this configuration will be upgraded to Cached Mode (with an .OST file) when they install 2013. See the previous article for details about cached mode. 

Users will no longer be able to publish calendars publicly to Office.com using Outlook 2013, and the Office.com calendar sharing service will be shutting down for older versions of Outlook as well.  We will publish a follow-up blog post detailing the timeline for the service changes, as well as ways to get the same feature set using Exchange or Outlook.com.

VPN and dialup preferences are no longer independently configurable in Outlook.  These options were previously located on the Send/Receive tab in Outlook 2010.  As a workaround, affected users are encouraged to set these options system wide in the Windows Control Panel. 

Outlook 2013 will no longer surface search results for mail and calendar items in Windows Explorer (or via the start menu).  Users can still utilize all of Outlook's search functionality from within the app itself. 

The Journal as a top-level module no longer exists in Outlook 2013.  Journal entries can still be accessed via the Journal folder in the Folder List module.   Also, the ability to 'auto-journal' your Outlook actions is gone in 2013. 

Outlook has traditionally supported importing and exporting data to and from many different file formats.  Many of the formats Outlook has supported are outdated and are no longer in mainstream use.  Outlook will continue to support comma-separated-value (.csv) files as well as .PST files, but other file formats are no longer supported.

 This list includes:

-          ACT! Contact manager files

-          Word 97-2003 (.doc)

-          Excel 97-2003 (.xls)

-          Outlook Express archives

The Contact Activities Tab is removed from Outlook 2013.  This previously provided a way to "link" contacts with other Outlook items, and have them all roll-up in the Activities Tab.  The Outlook Social Connector (introduced in Outlook 2010) replaces much of this functionality in a faster, more user friendly fashion. 

--Justin Mahood, Outlook Program Manager


View the original article here

Saturday, September 22, 2012

New Creative Cloud Features Available

New Creative Cloud Features Available « UK and Ireland Channel News function clearSearch() {document.search_form.s.value = "";} .recentcomments a{display:inline !important;padding:0 !important;margin:0 !important;}adobe.com      UK and Ireland Channel News / New Creative Cloud Features Availableby mabearCCM (7)Creative Cloud Membership (6)New release (7)  

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Friday, August 31, 2012

LayerVault adds new features for Photoshop collaboration

LayerVault is a PSD-savvy service for versioning & collaborating on design work, and it’s just added a swath of cool new features (the “Wormhole” mechanism for inspecting changes being especially neat).  News site BetaKit writes,

Users can now view edits happening in real-time, and open compatible files directly in the browser, meaning less popping in and out of apps just to make a few minor tweaks. Tools added now let them pick colors and create transferable palettes on the fly, for instance, as well as measure design components with a click.

Here’s a 1-minute tour of what’s new: 

Posted by John Nack at 8:56 AM on May 09, 2012

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Friday, February 10, 2012

Office 365: New features for kiosk workers

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Die aktuelle Produktivitäts-Tools sind nicht für Arbeitnehmer mit einem Schreibtisch oder einem Büro reserviert. Unternehmen müssen ihre UMSCHALT und Einzelhandels Arbeiter mit dem Rest des Unternehmens zu verbinden. Als solche sind wir unserem Kiosk Arbeitnehmer Pläne neue Funktionen hinzufügen. Diese Pläne können verbesserte Kommunikation und Zusammenarbeit für 'arbeitsplatzungebundene' Mitarbeiter, Schichtarbeiter oder Einzelhandel Shop Mitarbeiter, die gemeinsam genutzten Computer verwenden.

Diese neuen Funktionen gehören:

Hinzufügen von Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) für mobile Geräte, die Exchange Online Kiosk und Office 365 Kiosk Plan. Praktisch alle Smartphones unterstützen EAS sowie Windows Phone, iPhone, Android, Nokia.  Eine vollständige Liste der EAS unterstützt Telefone ist verfügbar hier. E-Mail-Speicherung von 500 MB bis 1 GB verdoppelt in Exchange Online Kiosk-Plan und der Plan Office 365 Kiosk.  Exchange Online-Archivierung (EOA), einschließlich rechtlich relevanter Daten und unbegrenzte Lagerung, als Add-on für jeden Exchange Online Plan, einschließlich der Kiosk und "E" Pläne bieten.

Die Preise für die Exchange Online Kiosk ($2 pro Benutzer / pro Monat) und Office 365 Kiosk Plan ($4 pro Benutzer / pro Monat) bleiben unverändert. EOA wird jetzt als Add-on für jeden Exchange Online Plan, einschließlich Kiosk und Exchange Plan angeboten werden.  Preise für Exchange Online-Archivierung Add-on ist $3.50/user/month.  Zum Beispiel:

Ein Exchange Online Kiosk-Benutzer kann Exchange Online-Archivierung, rechtlich relevanter Daten Funktionalität zu erhalten, wären die Kosten $2 + $3.50 für ein total Cost of $5.50/user/month hinzufügen

Wir bieten Informationen über die allgemeine Verfügbarkeit von dieser neuen Funktionen Sobald sie verfügbar sind. Weitere Informationen über wie die verschiedenen Office-365-Pläne zugeschnitten werden können um Ihre online Produktivität Anforderungen erfüllen, finden Sie hier. Oder erfahren Sie mehr hier über die zusätzliche Dienstleistungen, die einen Plan Office 365 hinzugefügt werden können.


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Friday, May 20, 2011

Video2Brain video series about Premiere Pro CS5.5 new and changed features

Video2Brain video series about Premiere Pro CS5.5 new and changed features « Premiere Pro work area function clearSearch() {document.search_form.s.value = "";} adobe.com      Premiere Pro work area / Video2Brain video series about Premiere Pro CS5.5 new and changed featuresby Todd Kopriva  

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Tuesday, May 3, 2011

OneNote Mobile for iPhone 1.1 adds new features, improves the user experience

[Editor's Note: this blog post was written by OneNote Mobile team member and technical writer of Mona Azarians.]

As the OneNote Mobile app for the iPhone in the United States made its debut in January, it has high in the free app and productivity classified categories in the iTunes app store have been.

Combined with the passion, the OneNote fans for their favorite product, many great proposals have enormous interest in the mobile app, and requirements have created. We have tackled some of this customer feedback into the latest upgrade to OneNote Mobile for iPhone, version 1.1, which is now available.

OneNote Mobile 1.1 for iPhone screenshot   OneNote Mobile 1.1 for iPhone screenshot

Delete unwanted notes and pages with others to share in e-Mail only even easier with
the OneNote Mobile 1.1 for iPhone version update, available now in the iTunes app store.

Available on the App Store


Whether you download OneNote for the iPhone for the first time, or upgrading your current app, some of the new features and improvements in version are here 1.1:

The ability to email your notes directly from your iPhoneAn easier way to get comments you delete no longer shroud more intuitive symbols and a home button, makes it easier to select or move between multiple NotebooksA sign-in scene and more simplified help synchronize with a Windows Live ID AccountFaster notebook and better overall app PerformanceA always more OneNote Mobile for iPhone help page in an easy to scan-FAQ-format

On the last element, The new OneNote Mobile for iPhone help page answers to your most the frequently asked questions - how you your mobile notes with OneNote notebooks synchronize on your computer now includes for example. You come to the help page from within the new app, go to settings, tap Help and support, and then tap on the first link on the screen.

Just for the record: the OneNote team reads all comments and reviews in the app store and the OneNote Forum on the Microsoft answers site, which is actively monitored the official support forum for all versions of OneNote, including OneNote Mobile. Their ongoing feedback helps us create a better app, so please Download this latest version and let us know what you think!

--Mona Azarians
 


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