The Unofficial Apple Weblog has posted screenshots of the forthcoming Office suite for Mac OSX. The new “My Day” application (the “control centre” for tasks and appointments) is pictured, along with Word, PowerPoint and Excel. There are no screenshots of the new Entourage unfortunately (in my humble opinion, the best email client on any platform).

Microsoft have confirmed that Office 2008 will be released in the second half of 2007.

Firefox is now the browser of choice for 12% of Britons, up from 1% in 2004. The figures, released by internet research company Nielsen//NetRatings, also reveal that Britons who use Firefox as their main browser spend 28% more time online, viewing 41% more pages than the average Internet Explorer user.

It’s good to see that people are open to using alternative browsers, but Firefox evangelism can be tiring. Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera: they’re all perfectly adequate, but they’re all susceptible to security exploits and crashes, and now that IE has finally added tabbed browsing, the core features are very similar. I’d like to see some real innovation in the browser market in the coming year!

UPDATE

Microsoft have announced that IE7 reached 100 million installations on 8th January 2007.

Adobe have released a beta version of Photoshop CS3. Available as a universal binary, this is sure to come as good news to users of Intel Macs that have been enduring the painful performance of running Photoshop under Rosetta emulation.

Download the beta from Adobe Labs by clicking here.

Unfortunately, the beta only runs for two days once installed, so don’t get too attached to it! Adobe, if you’re listening - surely a week-long beta wouldn’t be too much trouble? If you’re asking people to test your software following a 685mb download it’s the least you can do!

Clearly not wanting to be accused of dragging their heels following the recent Firefox 2 release, the team has just released version 3 of its browser for alpha testing. Details of the release and a link to the download site can be found on the Mozilla website.

As well as the usual assortment of bug fixes, the dev team is focussing on increased stability and performance. With the later in mind, the graphics and text rendering engines have been given a thorough overhaul.

To accommodate the planned updates, Firefox 3 will no longer be supported on Mac OS X 10.2 or Windows 95, 98 and ME.

The new beta of Skype 3.0 is available for download, boasting Firefox and IE browser extensions for click-to-call SkypeOut functionality. If you’re happy to miss every third word of a conversation that sounds like the caller is underwater, I encourage you to download this immediately.

Skype is certainly very popular, and as a solution for cheap or free non-essential calls it is a viable option. However, having tried SkypeIn and SkypeOut for business purposes when our phone line was out of action, we experienced massive problems with call quality and reliability.

Bog-standard landlines - they’re low-glamour, but you can’t live without them.

Microsoft have released the beta version of Windows Live Writer, a desktop application for composing blog entries.

The software features WYSIWYG authoring, photo publishing, map publishing using Microsoft’s Live Local maps and compatibility with a range of weblogs including Blogger, TypePad and WordPress.

If you haven’t tried a desktop blog authoring package you could do far worse than try the cross-platform Ecto.

I’ve used SmartFTP for a good few years now and am very happy with it. It transfers files both up and down from the internet; I couldn’t ask for anything more from an FTP client. However every time I install it I have the same problem - I can’t for the life of me find the setting that disables the auto connect feature on start up. Only a small thing I know, but the small things do seem to matter in life.

Being a simple kind of chap, I’d have expected to find a checkbox in the Tools->Settings->Connection options with a useful label such as “disable auto-connect”. However that’s just not how it works. Instead go to Tools->Settings->Interface and deselect the “Restore Workspace on Start” option. Simple really, just not particularly logical. Ok, I can *just about* see the logic but it’s definitely blury round the edges ;)