Microsoft quietly announced Friday that it plans to kill off its Office Accounting products, beginning Nov. 16.
"After evaluating the product over the past few years, we have determined that other Microsoft offerings, such as free templates in the Office system used with Excel and the Dynamics product, are able to meet our customers' needs," a Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement.
The package, the current version of which is Office Accounting 2009, provides templates, tools and other add-ons to support small-business accounting within Microsoft's Office productivity suite.
It has been a head-to-head competitor to Intuit's QuickBooks packages, among other rivals.
Office Accounting Express, which is free, was introduced with Office Accounting 2007.
Microsoft said, however, that although customers may be orphaned, they can continue to run the products during the support lifecycle.
"Existing customers will receive five years of mainstream support and five years of extended support," the spokesperson said.
Meanwhile, some services supported in the software will expire Dec. 15. For instance, online sales from eBay as well as credit profile information from Equifax will be discontinued after that date, according to the FAQ.
Other services are expected to continue -- at least for now. These include the ability for customers to pay e-mailed invoices via PayPal, support for credit card processing services, and the ability to order checks and forms that are compatible with the software.
"The Office Small Business Web site has links to free templates for small businesses, such as invoices, expenses, time sheets, budgets and more," the spokesperson added.
In addition, it's not too late to get a refund for users who recently purchased an Office Accounting package. Returns will be valid within 30 days of purchase, according to the FAQ.
Microsoft has posted additional information for Office Accounting users online. ( By Stuart J. Johnston)
In February, Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu 9.10 would be codenamed the "Karmic Koala". Today, after months of development and buzz, the Karmic Koala is being officially released into the wild.
The open source OS's developers are simultaneously releasing the server, desktop and netbook editions of Ubuntu 9.10 today, offering what Shuttleworth earlier this week referred to as a complete platform that he hopes will become the default alternative to Microsoft's Windows operating systems.
The first thing that new users are likely to notice about the Karmic release is the speedier boot process.
"The boot process is now substantially faster in Karmic than it has been in any previous Ubuntu release," Shuttleworth said in a conference call with the media earlier this week. "We have a goal to get to a 10-second boot, and Karmic is a nice step in that direction."
Among the new features of the Karmic releases is the Ubuntu Software Center, which is an attempt to revamp the add/remove software function in Ubuntu. Shuttleworth explained that Ubuntu is headed in the direction of opening up the software delivery mechanism both to empower third-party ISVs and to make it a smoother experience for users.
Shuttleworth is also hoping that the new Ubuntu release won't give users "paper cuts," either. As part of the release cycle for Karmic, Ubuntu started a project called 100 Paper Cuts, which aimed to eliminate bugs and trivial annoyances that users had identified. Shuttleworth reported that for the final release, there had been some 80 "paper cut" fixes.
With Karmic, Ubuntu is also opening up a new effort to deliver network services to the user's desktop with the Ubuntu One service. Ubuntu One provides users with 2 GB of free backup storage and cloud synchronization, housed on Amazon's S3 cloud storage service and paid for by Shuttleworth's company Canonical, which is Ubuntu's lead commercial sponsor.
Ubuntu One also offers an option to purchase 50 GB of cloud-based storage.
In Karmic, Ubuntu One is focused on file management as well as some contact and address book management. But in the future, Shuttleworth said that Ubuntu One will move into other areas, such identity management.
"We really are starting to combine the idea of free software with services direct to the desktop and shifting the emphasis from the personal computer to personal computing," Shuttleworth said. "This is blurring the lines between traditional desktop software and what people are referring to as computing in the cloud."
On the server side of Ubuntu, enabling the cloud is also a key goal, courtesy of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), another enhanced feature of the Karmic release. UEC made its initial Ubuntu debut in the Jaunty Jackalope release in April with full enterprise support services following several months later. In the Karmic release, UEC is being more tightly integrated into the server as well as being enabled with a UEC store for applications. The application store packages cloud-ready application for easy consumption and deployment by enterprise users -- similarly to models like Apple's App Store for the iPhone.
While Ubuntu has added features and performance improvement on its server OS, it still faces a strong competitive battle against Linux rivals Red Hat and Novell in the enterprise space. One area that Ubuntu has focused on with past releases is server certification for enterprise hardware, though that wasn't a key focus in the Karmic release.
"The general server story continues to improve, it is wonderful to see the rate of adoption of adoption of Ubuntu on the server generally," Shuttleworth said. "Our relationships on the hardware front are improving, but we have no new server certification announcements to make with this release." ( By Sean Michael Kerner)
Click on the image above (or here) to see the video Google just posted to YouTube to promote its new theme library for the Google Chrome browser. The themes, which are designed to give your browser’s skin a splash of color and personality, were developed by famous artists and designers.
The video in the link shows some of them off, but be sure to watch until the end, when the browser skin literally explodes out of the video frame and takes over the page. Once the video is over, there’s more cool page-skinning trickery to be had — the video player window turns into a theme browser you can click through, altering the design of the YouTube page itself.
Chrome is only available now in stable form for Windows users. Mac and Linux versions are still in development and will be finalized later this year.
Google first began developing themes for Chrome in August, as we noted in a previous report. Firefox has a similar theming architecture for its browser called Personas, which you can explore at Mozilla’s dedicated Personas site. (By Michael Calore)
Next up in our continuing look at the new features available via Google Experimental is the keyboard navigation experiment. The beta version of keyboard navigation adds GMail-like keyboard shortcuts to the Google Search results page.
When using the new shortcuts page you’ll see an arrow icon to left of the active result and you can scroll up and down through the results, as well as jump in and out of the search box and open links all without leaving the keyboard (screenshots after the jump).
The keyboard shortcut navigation options are summarized in the table below.
Key
Action
J
Selects the next result.
K
Selects the previous result.
O
Opens the selected result.
Enter
Opens the selected result.
/
Puts the cursor in the search box.
Esc
Removes the cursor from the search box.
Unfortunately this feature isn’t as easy to get to as the Timeline and Maps tools with their operator shortcuts. In order to land on the keyboard beta page you’ll have to go through the Google Experimental page or append the param &esrch=BetaShortcuts to the end of your search URL.
So far I haven’t been able to locate one, but this seems like the perfect place for a new Google Search plugin for Firefox.
All that’s necessary is to take the existing Firefox Google Search tool and modify it so that it appends the above param to the URL. If you run across such a thing be sure to let us know.
The biggest downfall to the new shortcuts is that they don’t seem to follow the preference setting to open results in a new window. A quick glance at the code shows that the links carry a target=nw which means at least some of the page is aware of the new window setting. Unless someone can explain otherwise I would call that a bug.
Still, for keyboard junkies like myself, the new options are a godsend. Hopefully Google will sort out a way for the open command to respect the new window setting in the near future.
Be sure to check out the previous Google Experimental coverage of Maps and Timelines. (By Scott Gilbertson)
Between e-mail, tweets, news feeds, FriendFeeds, Facebook updates and a barrage of other messages, you’ve probably got a lot of conversations to track and sort through. Mozilla thinks the web browser might be able to help make sense of it all.
As part of the ongoing Mozilla Labs project, the company has released Snowl, a new plugin designed to help you keep track of and participate in online discussions — regardless of where they’re happening and what delivery system they pass through.
The idea behind Snowl is that there’s a common thread between our seemingly separate online conversations — they’re conversations — and ultimately is shouldn’t matter where the messages originate. As Mozilla says, “they’re alike, whether they come from traditional email servers, RSS/Atom feeds, web discussion forums, social networks, or other sources.” Snowl’s goal is the bring them all together in one place — the browser.
Unfortunately Snowl currently only supports two message sources: RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter. When limited to RSS and Twitter, Snowl doesn’t offer many advantages over Google Reader or similar services, but if Snowl reaches its loft goals, it may well change the way you use your browser.
For now though, you’ll have to make do with some imagination. One very nice feature I did like is the ability to browse through Twitter messages by person, something I can’t do with my Twitter feed in Google Reader.
Snowl’s standout feature is that it offers two different browsing interfaces. The first is a traditional three-pane window like your average desktop mail app. Presumably this is where you would read potentially import stuff like email, key RSS feeds and the like.
The second interface is a “river of news” view that looks a bit like a newspaper. Built on some of Dave Winer’s ideas, the river of news view is designed for quickly scanning through casual messages — your Twitter friends and perhaps eventually Facebook feeds and more.
Differentiating the two views sounds like a great idea, however, in practice the river of news view was somewhat ugly and felt clumsy. Of course Snowl is still highly experimental and definitely has a few quirks and bugs to work out (if you don’t see the river of news view right away, refresh the page and it should load). Warning: Snowl doesn’t play nice with Google Reader, the two created some sort of reloading loop that crashed Firefox repeatedly until I closed the Google Reader tab.
However, despite being an early and very rough prototype, Snowl definitely has potential. If and when Snowl can handle other forms of data — email, SMS, Chat, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc — it’s not hard to see how it could end up changing the way you use your browser.
If you’d like to take it for a spin, you can download Snowl from the Firefox Add-on site (registration is required for experimental add-ons). (By Scott Gilbertson)
Most everyone acknowledges Google Chrome is both lightweight and lightning-fast, but the browser often falls short in the features department when compared to other offerings like Firefox and Safari.
However, several improvements will be showing up soon in Google’s web browser that bring it further up to speed with the competition in the features department.
Google is adding some rather sophisticated cloud-based data synchronization capabilities to its browser, according to a post on the Chromium mailing list (an e-mail list for developers working on Chrome’s code, which is open-source) from Friday.
The new features will let users sync their Google Accounts to Google Chrome. At first Chrome will just sync bookmarks, but looking at the documentation, it’s clear Chrome will be able to sync other user data — user preferences and more sensitive stuff like login credentials — in future releases. The sync features could start showing up in Chrome developer releases as early as this month, according to Ars Technica.
So, you’ll soon be able to load any instance of Chrome on any computer, log in to Google, and have access to all of your bookmarks. Firefox has a similar system called Weave, which is made by Mozilla and is available as an add-on along with a server-side component that can be run privately. However, Google’s sync plans involve “push” style notifications that provide instant updates, whereas Weave and sync tools like it rely on polling, so data is updated only when a button is clicked.
It was revealed last week that Google is also adding a theming system to Chrome, so users can apply skins and custom color schemes. Again, Firefox has its own themeing system called Personas.
In the world of web browsers, raw speed and useful features have always been a trade-off. Make a browser as lightweight and devoid of unnecessary features as possible, and it will require fewer system resources to get its job done faster, feeling snappier to the user and rendering pages more quickly. But people have come to expect more than just a blank window to the web, so browser makers have added things like bookmark and history managers, skinning and theming options, identity managers and bug reporting systems to their browsers’ default installations.
It’s a game of balance — add too few features and users feel cheated on what they’ve come to consider basic functionality. Add too many features and you start to slow the browser down.
The biggest browser makers, Microsoft and Mozilla, have gone the route of constructing plug-in architectures so people can add whatever extra third-party features they want. But Google and Apple have largely shied away from plug-ins so far — though there are some for Safari and Google is taking baby steps.
So do these latest developments mean that Chrome is slowly going to bulk up and become a contender? If so, signs point to the “filling out” kind of bulking up and not the “bloating” kind. Maybe it’s moving from featherweight to middleweight, at least.
Chrome’s svelte frame is why its proponents love it, though those same evangelists will also admit they keep Firefox around simply because of all the cool stuff it can do that Chrome can’t.
To take advantage of all the latest features showing up in Chrome, you need to download the Channel Chooser and make sure you switch to the developer’s stream. That’s the only way to get the latest experimental updates. (By Michael Calore)
Earlier this year Google Labs rolled out some new experimental search features like keyboard shortcuts and alternate views for search results, however, when they first launched, the new features were only available through the Google Labs interface. Thankfully, Google has now made it possible to join the various experiments and use them on the normal Google Search homepage.
To join an experiment just head over to the Google Labs page and select which features you’d like to use. Regrettably it’s only possible to add one feature at a time, but that’s still better than visiting the Labs page every time you want to search.
Personally I’m a keyboard junky so the very GMail-like keyboard shortcuts are now enabled on my Google Search page, which means I can click through to returned search results without taking my hands off the keyboard — a great time saver. The only drawback is that the first “selected” link is invariably the ad, but it still beats reaching for the trackpad or mouse.
Other options include right and left hand navigation menus and alternate search views (the latter can also be triggered by using some search operator keywords). For more details on how each of the experiments works, check out our earlier reviews (listed below) or just try them out for yourself.
By Scott GilbertsonMozilla Labs has debuted a new web-based tool for integrating all your online communications — such as e-mail, Twitter, Skype and Facebook — into a single browser window. It uses a series of intelligent filters to highlight what’s important to you, bringing the conversations with people or updates from services you care about the most to the top, and keeping the stuff that can wait out of sight until you’re ready to look at it.
It’s called Raindrop, and it fetches all of your communications from different sources like mail servers, Twitter and RSS feeds. Then, Raindrop intelligently surfaces the “important parts,” giving them priority and allowing you to reply or interact with the communications inside your web browser. Like all Mozilla projects, Raindrop is open-source software — it’s actually a mini web server that you run locally and access through your browser. At the time of Thursday’s launch, Firefox, Safari and Chrome are supported, with Internet Explorer notably absent from the list.
While Raindrop is rough around the edges in this early release, Mozilla is hoping to build a one-stop communication platform that will give you a single place to view all your messages, e-mail, shared photos and other social tools.
The “intelligent” part of Raindrop would allow, for example, direct messages and @replies from Twitter to be highlighted over regular incoming messages not directed specifically to you. E-mails that come in can be sorted to give priority to messages from your closest friends, replies and active threads you’re participating in. The idea is to make Raindrop a people-centric communication tool that emphasizes your friends over mailing lists, rote announcements and other not-quite-spam messages.
That might sound a bit like Google Wave, which is also trying to re-imagine web-based communication from the ground up. But while Raindrop and Wave share some similar features, including the ability to view images and videos inline, Google Wave is a much more radical departure from the status quo. Raindrop is more familiar, since it essentially melds a few things you’re already using — an e-mail inbox, a Twitter client and an RSS reader — into a singular, streamlined interface. Raindrop is also similar to Mozilla Lab’s existing Snowl project, which puts a river of news and e-mail messages in Firefox. But unlike Snowl, which is a Firefox plugin, Raindrop is a standalone system that even features an API that will allow developers to build their own add-ons, extending Raindrop as they see fit.
So, Raindrop will only gain functionality over time through widgets, add-ons and media-specific enhancements for services like YouTube and Flickr. In that sense, Raindrop could be seen as a logical extension of where Google has been taking Gmail recently by letting users add widgets for chat, calendar, RSS updates and other communication tools to Gmail’s browser-based inbox.
At the moment, Raindrop is a developer release, which means there’s no installer to download. The Labs team is making a downloadable installer one of its top priorities for the project. Interested developers can check out the code and run the startup script manually (see the Mozilla wiki for details). It’s not a plug-in or a desktop client — once Raindrop reaches the packaged installer stage, you’d set it up and then visit a local URL to see your messages.
I was able to install the developer code with no problems on my local machine. After telling Raindrop my Gmail and Twitter account info, the script dutifully fetched my messages.
Raindrop’s overview of your Inbox. Click the image for a larger view.
As you can see in the image above, Raindrop retains Gmail’s threaded conversation view, however, in this case Raindrop failed to filter out a message from a local wine shop, which, while not spam, is nevertheless not something I would want prioritized.
Still, Raindrop is clearly a work in progress and despite not being perfect, it did do a pretty good job of filtering out less important conversations.
Raindrop inline e-mail and Twitter messages. Click the image for a larger view.
As you can see, Twitter updates are shown inline with e-mail threads. Other messages, like mailing list subscriptions, are filtered out of the main conversation flow and given their own boxes so you can see what’s new without fully disrupting your more personal communications.
At the moment, any filtering or message deleting in Raindrop does not appear to sync back to your mail server. This is a serious flaw that we expect will be addressed before Raindrop reaches the downloadable stage.
This early developer release of Raindrop isn’t much to look at yet. But I should note that Mozilla has already spun out a new design that looks a bit more like Snowl:
Raindrop’s newer interface (image courtesy of Mozilla). Click the image for a larger view.
The newer look is a bit cleaner and abandons the traditional e-mail-style layout in favor of something more free-flowing.
Raindrop is clearly still very experimental and not meant for even casual usage, but we’re looking forward to seeing where Mozilla Labs takes the project.
Wrapping your head around Raindrop is difficult to do without actually using it and, due to the lack of an installer, using it is beyond most users at this point. Thankfully, Mozilla has posted this video which gives you nice overview of how Raindrop works.
Google has added a new social-search tool to its experimental search options.
Google Social Search, which went live Monday afternoon, finds results from your social network, pulls a list of your contacts from sites like Twitter, FriendFeed, Picasa, Blogger, Google Reader and other social networks, as well as your Gmail contacts, to find results for search terms from people you know.
Facebook’s friend data isn’t shared publicly, so results from your Facebook friends won’t show up unless you’re also friends on other networks.
To enable the new experiment, head over to the Google Experimental Search page and add the new Social Search option. As with other experiments, you’ll need to be logged in to Google to see the social results.
Once the experiment is enabled, you’ll be able to search for something like “potato chips” with enhanced results. Along with the regular Google results showing top hits for the entire web, you’ll see a link to a write-up about potato chips from your friend’s food blog, as well. You might also see a friend’s tweet about potato chips, or a link to a Yelp review written by somebody you know where they talked about how good the potato chips are at the Lulu Petite sandwich shop.
While Google’s intro video (embedded below) shows search results from the social tool inline with other results (under the heading “Results from people in your social circle…”) that didn’t happen in our testing. To see the personalized results from our social graph we had to click the “Options” button and then filter the results by “social.”
As for the results, well, Social Search leaves a little to be desired, but the results depend heavily on how large your social circle is and how closely your interests match your friends. For example, a search for “Webmonkey” turned up a number of hits, since the past and present Webmonkey staff members are part of our social graph. However, two of us have been passing around a link to a (NSFW) McSweeney’s article about decorative gourds Tuesday morning, but a social search for “decorative gourds” returned nothing from our social graph. We seem to be alone on that one.
It’s important to note that Google Social Search is not a real-time search engine. The quality of results may suffer a little if you’re searching for things that your friends have only started posting about very recently.
The quality of results will also depend on how many services you’ve added to your Google Profile — the more social sites Google knows you hang out on, the more friends it has to draw on, and thus the more results you’ll see.
The exclusion of Facebook may seem like an egregious oversight, but it comes amidst a very public battle between Google and Facebook to become your hub on the social web. The recent push behind Google Profiles was the search company’s first major attempt to create a central place for you to store information about yourself and link to your profiles on other social networks. But Facebook is still the more popular place to build a profile, and Facebook struck a deal with Microsoft last week to let the Bing search engine index user activity on the site — a deal Google was left out of.
Compared to using the search features on social sites themselves, like Twitter and FriendFeed, Google’s Social Search comes in a distant second. But it does offer the advantage of finding everything in one place. It also acts as a very welcome filter. Try searching for “Where the Wild Things Are” on Twitter, and you’ll see thousands of tweets from people commenting about the movie or the book. Run the same search in Google Social Search, and you’ll just see what your friends — and the people they chat with publicly — are saying.
All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is already available publicly on the web — with a bit of Google hacking you could find it yourself. But what’s social about that?
To see Social Search in action, check out this video from Google:
To enable Social Search, make sure you’re logged in to your Google account and head over to the Experimental Search page. (By Scott Gilbertson)
Between e-mail, tweets, news feeds, FriendFeeds, Facebook updates and a barrage of other messages, you’ve probably got a lot of conversations to track and sort through. Mozilla thinks the web browser might be able to help make sense of it all. 
Mozilla Labs has debuted a new web-based tool for integrating all your online communications — such as e-mail, Twitter, Skype and Facebook — into a single browser window. It uses a series of intelligent filters to highlight what’s important to you, bringing the conversations with people or updates from services you care about the most to the top, and keeping the stuff that can wait out of sight until you’re ready to look at it.
Google has added a new social-search tool to its experimental search options. 
