Open Source Email Client Thunderbird 3 Released, Universal Mac OS X

Mozilla has released her open source Thunderbird 3 email client. The software is available for download now and comes with a number of new features. Thunderbird 3 has been in development for two years. Available as a free download, the new version includes features like tabbed email, improved search, and organisation tools.

Accompanying material adds, “If you like Firefox’s tabbed browsing, you’re going to love tabbed email. Thunderbird 3’s tabbed email lets you load emails in separate tabs so you can quickly jump between them. Search results open in a new tab too. New tools like our timeline and filtering tools will help you pinpoint the email you’re looking for, whether it’s the one from yesterday, last month, or several years ago.”

Archiving is simple, according to Mozilla, and requires little more than a pressing of the A key, or selecting the Archive button. Once archived, emails are easily searchable, and overall the whole experience should be a lot faster. Any tabs open when you close the application will still be there when you sign back in, while the main toolbar has been simplified.

So-called Smart Filters and a one-click address book should further improve the user experience. In addition a new user set up process removes the bothersome requirement to know a lot of POP type information, letting you create access to an existing email account simply by adding in your name, email address and password.

Perhaps most useful for overworked emailers is the Attachment Reminder, which works something like a backseat driver, looking for the word ‘attachment’ in text and reminding you to add the relevant document before you hit send. We know that’s going to save us occasional embarrassment.

What’s New In Thunderbird 3?
Tabs
If you like Firefox’s tabbed browsing, you’re going to love tabbed email. Tabbed email lets you load emails in separate tabs so you can quickly jump between them. Perhaps you’re responding to an email and need to refer back to an earlier email. Tabbed email lets you keep multiple emails open for easy reference.

Double-clicking or hitting enter on a mail message will now open that message in a new tab window. Right-clicking on messages or folders will open them in a tab in the background.

When quitting Thunderbird, visible tabs will be saved and will be restored when you open Thunderbird the next time. There is also a new Tab menu on the Tab toolbar to help you switch between Tabs.

Message Archive
If you think you’re going to need an email in the future but want it out of your inbox without deleting it, archive it! Archiving helps you manage your inbox and put your email into a new archive folder system.

Selecting the Archive button or hitting the ‘A’ key will archive your email.

Search
The new search interface in Thunderbird 3 contains filtering and timeline tools to pinpoint the exact email you’re looking for. Thunderbird 3 also indexes all of your emails to help you search even faster. Your search results are displayed in a tab so you can easily switch back and forth to your search results and other email.

Release Name
Thunderbird3.0.1.dmg Universal
Size
19.1 MB
Links
Homepage
Download
Open Source Full Download Universal Mac OS X

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iPad Has Custom 1GHz Apple A4 Chip

Apple just unveiled that the Apple iPad is powered by their own CPU. The 1GHz Apple A4 chip. The display of the iPad is a 9.7-inch IPS Display. Storage capacity ranges up to 64GB flash. The iPad has Wifi 802.11n and there will be 3G iPad devices.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the design is that the iPad will be powered by an Apple CPU. Called the Apple A4, Steve Jobs referred to it only briefly in yesterday’s keynote speech, confirming it was clocked at a nice, round 1GHz and that the A4 is a system-on-a-chip with a CPU, GPU, I/0 and memory controller. A picture of the chip appears in Apple’s video for the iPad, and iFixit – the firm responsible for the teardowns you see of new gadgets – has some slivers of information on it, and a nice HD still.

Apple all but announced its intention to create its own chips when it purchased P.A. Semi in April 2008 and then became an ARM licensee. P.A. Semi was known for producing low power chips based on the Power Architecture (which has found its way into many devices, including the PPE part of the PS3’s Cell CPU). In addition to P.A. Semi, Apple also hired Bob Drebin who was the Chief Technology Officer of AMD and ATI’s Graphics Products Group.

It seems unlikely that Apple has invented something completely new with the A4, and while P.A. Semi’s experience was with the Power architecture, the iPhone, with which the iPad has much in common, uses an ARM CPU. It’s likely then that the A4 uses an ARM core – rumours reported by Bright Side of News and iFixit suggest that it’s the Cortex-A9 MPCore. This is the same ARM core used by Nvidia in its upcoming Tegra 2 SOC design (and it means our guess on Twitter that the iPad would be Tegra 2 powered is pretty close!) Little is known about the A4’s graphics, although as with the iPhone 3G and 3GS, it will be compliant with Open GL ES.

At 1GHz, the A4 is 400MHz faster than the ARM CPU in the iPhone 3GS, so it’s perhaps not surprising that videos of the iPad in action show an interface that’s snappy and apps that are quick and responsive.

Apple iPad is official and starts at $499.

This is the first fruit of the PA Semi acquisition and could be the defining differentiator to other Tablet computers powered by Android or Windows.

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Popcorn 3, Universal DVD Copy and video conversion for Mac OS X

Even there is Roxio Popcorn 4 is out there, we post Popcorn 3 because it is an universal and support PowerPC Macs. Roxio’s Popcorn 3 uses the same core engine and many of the same interface techniques adopted by Toast Titanium, the 800-pound gorilla of CD and DVD burning software for the Mac. At $50, Popcorn costs $30 less than Toast does, and it caters to a more specific audience: those users who simply want to transform video so that it works on different devices, rather than those who need all the heavyweight capabilities of the heftier Toast product.

If you have a personal media player like an Archos handheld device, video iPod, Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP), multimedia-capable BlackBerry smartphone, or one of the myriad other devices that can play video, chances are you’ve sought a way to convert the video you already own to something that can work on these gadgets. There certainly are enough solutions out there, ranging from freeware products like Handbrake to the $23 VisualHub. Popcorn fits the bill for people who feel more comfortable buying a commercial application.

Popcorn features some of the same interface elements you can find in Toast Titanium, and it uses the same core video transformation engine found in Toast, too. What’s missing, of course, are the disc burning capabilities. What Roxio has substituted instead is a wide range of preset output options—for the Apple TV, for example, or for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PSP, iPhone, or other devices. And, like Toast 8 Titanium, Popcorn 3 adds support for TiVo—if you have a TiVo digital video recorder (DVR), you can use its networking feature to send shows over to your Mac and have them ripped to different formats using Toast. It’s a supremely easy-to-use and—thanks to some clever automation support—convenient solution. You can have Popcorn grab the latest episode of Heroes as soon as your TiVo records it. For example, you can have it ripped overnight, and it will be waiting for you in iTunes the next time you sync your iPod. That way, you can watch it on your iPod when on the way to work or during your next business trip.

Popcorn 3’s easy-to-use interface makes converting videos to different formats a snap.
The application’s video conversion quality has been improved in this release. You don’t get results quite as dark or artifact-ridden as those I saw in Popcorn 2, although I did experience one or two stalled conversions. (Oddly, when I went back and tried to convert them again, the videos worked fine.) There’s also a built-in Media Drawer that makes finding movies on your Mac a snap. And, thanks to a long-standing close relationship between Roxio and Elgato, Popcorn 3 works great with videos recorded using Elgato’s EyeTV 2 () DVR software. Also dovetailing with Elgato, Popcorn 3 has support for Elgato’s H.264 Turbo, a USB device that acts as a video coprocessor, lowering your own CPU’s load when it’s converting video (and, in the cases of slower Macs, speeding up the process too).

What Popcorn doesn’t allow you to do is to rip content from a copy-protected DVD, such as a movie you might rent from Blockbuster or purchase from Best Buy. That’s a Digital Millennium Copyright Act no-no, and while there are ways around such copy protection, you won’t get any help from Roxio. It is worth noting, though, that you can rip any unprotected VIDEO_TS folder with Popcorn. Popcorn also won’t work with the copy-protected videos you’ve bought from the iTunes Store, for what it’s worth.

If you’ve ripped various VIDEO_TS folders to your hard drive, Popcorn 3 also includes a batch feature, which lets you convert all of them together and burn them onto a single recordable DVD for backup. You can create custom DVD menus and use your own pictures as the background images. You can even create Director’s Cut compilations, excising the extra stuff from DVDs you’ve ripped, like language tracks, special features you don’t care about, and more.

A version of Disc Cover, from BeLight Software, is also included (marked as RE, for Roxio Edition). This lets you create your own disc covers and disc label artwork.

Release Name
Roxio.Popcorn.v3.0.2.MACOSX-NoPE
Size
59.7 MB
Links
Homepage

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