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Posts Tagged ‘ gadgets ’
Top 10 Christmas gifts
Monday, December 8th, 2008
The second Monday in December has become known as “Cyber Monday”, when internet shopping levels peak ahead of Christmas.
In the current issue of PC Pro you’ll find a full Christmas gadget guide, with 41 products tested and reviewed, from photo frames to cameras to USB guitars. But to help you beat the rush this year, we’ve plucked out ten of the best from the feature and from our A List.
Samsung NC10 – £300
Hands-down the best netbook on the market right now. It feels as sturdy as a proper laptop, offers a hefty seven-and-a-half hour battery life and features an almost full-width keyboard. Stylish, strong and hugely portable – and all this for less than £300.
Tags: Christmas, Creative, gadgets, gift, HYmini, panasonic, Pure, samsung, sony, TomTom
Posted in: Hardware
Windows 7: the user interface
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
The most obvious change to Windows 7 is the revamped Windows desktop. The Taskbar has been completely redesigned, with the text descriptions of open windows replaced with large icons of the open applications. It’s an idea that has clearly gleaned more than a little inspiration from the Mac OS X Dock, but it goes further than the Apple concept.
Right click on an application’s icon – or swipe a finger upwards from it if you’re using the new touchscreen controls – and a “jumplist” opens. The jumplist provides a list of recent documents accessed in Word, for example, or recent sites visited in Internet Explorer, allowing you to open them with a single click. The jumplists can also be populated with commands, such as selecting a playlist from Windows Media Player. Microsoft has published a new API that will allow software makers to tailor the jumplists to their applications, and this has the potential to become a great timesaver.
The new Taskbar also comes into play when you plug a digital camera, MP3 player, or other peripheral into the PC. Instead of the old Autoplay prompt, a digital camera icon will show in the Taskbar. From here you can select options to import photos into editing software, for example, or kickstart a slideshow of your pictures.
As well as the thumbnail previews of tabs that were first introduced in Windows Vista, the new Taskbar provides full-screen previews when you hover over the thumbnail preview with the mouse. This feature could be pretty handy for a quick glance at an email, whilst you enter data into a web form for example, although it doesn’t really save much time compared to simply switching Windows if you’re proficient with keyboard shortcuts. More useful is the option to simply drag programs from the Start menu straight on to the Taskbar.
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