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07 Sep 2010 
Skype updates latest beta with 10-way video calling

The latest release of Skype's 5.0 beta will let you make video calls to as many as 10 people at the same time, according to details posted on the company's Thursday blog.
The 10-way calling is an upgrade from the first 5.0 beta, which offered only 5-way video chatting. But beyond tweaking the video calling, the engineers at Skype have outfitted beta 2 with other new features and tweaks.



Skype invites you to try out its latest beta.




Skype's new Home area will offer updates about the service, details on your call purchases, and videos to help newbies get started. The new offline IM feature will let you send messages to and receive them from other people who are offline. The messages are kept on hold and delivered once you or the other person is back online.


Beta 2 has also tried to improve both the quality and reliability of Skype calls. A built-in client messaging service tells you about any potential problems with a call and offers suggestions to improve its quality. Should your network connection go down, the new Skype beta will try to quickly re-establish that connection so the call doesn't get dropped. If the call is lost, Skype will quickly redial it for you.


The gurus at Skype have also tweaked the software's interface by displaying photos of your contacts and a history list of previous conversations.


You can learn a bit more and grab Skype 5.0 beta 2 at Skype's Web site. To install the beta, you'll need to be running Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7. (Sorry Mac users, an OS X beta won't be available until later this year.) And if you want to try out the 10-way calling, your Skype friends will need to install beta 2 as well.





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13 Aug 2010 
New Firefox beta tweaks JavaScript, gains multitouch

Support for multitouch on Windows 7 computers and cross-platform improvements to how the browser handles JavaScript were the biggest changes brought by Mozilla to the third beta of Firefox 4, released Wednesday. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Firefox 4 beta 3 doesn't make any changes to the interface but does make some important adjustments to how the browser handles JavaScript, an essential component of modern browsers.


The new beta adjusts how C++ represents JavaScript, which will allow Firefox to run numeric-heavy code more efficiently. In a blog post announcing the new version, Firefox said the end result of this change will be more streamlined graphics in Web apps. Firefox developer Rob Sayre offers more specifics on how this change affects the development of the JaegerMonkey JavaScript engine that's meant to debut in Firefox 4.


The beta also introduces native multitouch compatibility on Windows 7. This means that developers will be able to take advantage of the new multitouch API, which is expected to eventually filter down to users through add-ons.


On a note related to the ongoing development of the beta, some readers might have noticed that all of the options are missing from the Help sub-menu under the unified Firefox menu in the upper left corner of the interface. A Mozilla representative said that the developers are working on a fix for the bug, which includes the menu missing the "check for updates" option, the "About:" sub-menu that provides quick links to Firefox configuration menus such as "about:addons" and "about:config", and the "about:firefox" menu that provides current version data.


You can access it by forcing the menubar to appear under the Customize option. Users who only want to see their current version information can also type "about:" without the quotes to check which version of Firefox is currently being used.


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