Opera — The Fastest Browser In The World

Opera browser is a very good piece of work. Billing itself as “The fastest browser on Earth!”, it is a free browser with great number of powerful and useful features.
Opera has clean interface that is very easy to use and understand. It has everything you need to browse the internet and even more.
Opera allows you to open several Web pages in different tabs within a single window. This is called tabbed browsing. You can easily drag tabs, duplicate them and even restore closed tabs. In Opera, you can resize pages and tile them next to each other on the same workspace to compare or work with several pages. The browser has very useful preview tab feature. Just place the mouse arrow over the tab and you will see a thumbnail preview.
The behavior of tabs can be easily configured to satisfy your needs.



Standard toolbar includes six basic buttons used to navigate within a document, address field, the search field for quick searching on the Web and the «View» button to toggle the view bar.
The search bar offers you several search engines to choose from. You also can add your favorite search engines to the search bar.



The view bar allows you to find a specified word in the active Web page, and provides you quick access to voice management (if available) and features that affect the display of the page, such as shortcuts to turn off stylesheets and images, zoom and so on.
Zooming in Opera applies to the entire page at once, instead of just the text. I found this very useful.



Another great feature of Opera is the sidebar which is placed on the left of the screen space. You can toggle it by pressing F4 key or clicking on the left side of the Opera window.
This sidebar gives you quick access to different panels such as bookmarks, widgets, history, notes, transfers, links and some others. These panels make the work with Opera even easier. You can configure sidebar by adding and removing panels of your own.



Opera has highly customizable interface that allows you to personalize it by using beautiful skins, removing and adding panels and buttons.



Opera is designed to be the fastest, smallest, and most full-featured browser available. It is really very fast in loading pages. It is definitely faster than Internet Explorer and smaller than Firefox.
The advanced fraud protection of Opera and its anti-phishing detection keeps your browsing safe and secure.
The very interesting feature of Opera is mouse gestures that allow you to do frequently performed browse operations with small, quick mouse movements.



Speed Dial is the new and unique feature of Opera that assigns bookmarks and tabs any digit from one through nine. When you enter one of those numbers into the URL bar, the corresponding site loads when you hit enter.



Opera includes support for BitTorrent so you don't need to download and install a separate BitTorrent program to download large files. Just click on torrent link and start the download.
There are many others features in Opera such as widgets, notes, Wand utility, simple integration with your favorite e-mail and chat clients, RSS feed reader and sessions management. The Opera browser supports many languages and operating systems.
Overall, I think Opera is one of the best browsers for power users who keep many pages open at once and perform frequent downloads. I like it.
You can download the latest version of Opera here.

Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.0 - The Best PDF Viewer

The new version of Adobe Acrobat Reader has been released recently. This free program is designed for viewing and printing PDF files. Acrobat Reader also allows you to fill in and submit PDF forms online.



The new release is almost identical to Adobe Reader 8 though it does load slightly faster and has some new important features such as built-in multimedia support, a quite nice integration with Acrobat.com for enhanced web-based collaboration, improved security, support for searching all PDFs on a hard drive, and more.
The release of Adobe Acrobat 9 brings new Web relevance to PDF documents by enabling embedded video and animation. In turn, every user of new version of Acrobat Reader can watch movies and play interactive games without opening a third-party media player.
Acrobat Reader 9 has a completely redesigned interface that increases the efficiency of the viewing experience.
The program is integrated with Acrobat.com, an exciting new set of online services from Adobe.



That means you can now upload and share PDF files and other types of documents or even create and coauthor documents with others using the PDF writing engine of Acrobat.com



Another interesting feature is so called PDF Portfolios that provide easy navigation when you work with multiple PDF documents and other document types. They also allows you to work with a collection of materials such as drawings, e-mail messages, spreadsheets, and videos as a single file, which makes distribution, storage, retrieval, and collaboration easy for end users.
Acrobat Reader 9 adds more security to your documents by using new digital signature functionality and 256-bit AES encryption.
The program supports many languages and has multilingual user interface.
I think Acrobat Reader has always been the best software for viewing and printing PDF files and now it has become even better.
You can download the latest version of Acrobat Reader here.

Web Based File Managers for Amazon S3

There are quite a few good desktop clients for Amazon S3 that make managing your S3 account almost as simple as using Windows Explorer. Like with any other desktop software, the downside is that these S3 clients require installation, they are often platform specific and won’t work on mobile phones.

Web Clients for your Amazon S3 Account

If you need quick access to your Amazon S3 files on the go or are looking to upload documents and other files to Amazon S3 from a computer that doesn’t have any S3 client installed, you can consider going for a web based file manager. Here are some good choices:

S3fm.com - This is an AJAX based online file manager for Amazon S3 that can be used from any JavaScript enabled web browser on any platform.

With S3fm, you can browse existing files inside S3 buckets through a convenient dual-pane interface or click the upload button to transfer multiple file from the local hard disk to your S3 cloud in one go. It is integrated with Scribd so you can easily preview documents hosted on S3 in the browser itself without having to download them first.

Like your regular Windows Explorer, you can just right click any file (object) in S3fm to view and edit properties of that file. You can change file access permissions (ACL), set the Expires header (so that the download link expires after a set time) or grab the full public URL to share that file on the web.

The S3fm service doesn’t require registration and your Amazon S3 login credentials get stored in the browser itself (via a cookie).

Baconfile - If you use Amazon S3 to upload public files (like documents, videos, PDFs, etc.) that anyone can download with a direct link, you should try Baconfile.

It’s a simple service where you can upload files from any web browser and they’ll land straight into one of your S3 buckets. The difference is that your uploaded files will instantly become public so just about anyone can download them from the web.

The Baconfile service may therefore be very useful for bloggers, twitter users and even podcasters - you can upload the media file to your S3 account via Baconfile and then add the direct link to that file in your blog post. And it’s a great alternative from uploading files to S3 from a mobile phone browser.

Here are some more tips for Amazon S3 users:

• How to host your blog images on Amazon S3
• How to lower your Amazon S3 bills
• Find Sites that are hotlinking to your Amazon S3 files

Create a Virtual Business Card with all your Social Profiles

You have profiles on almost every social networking website from Facebook to Flickr to LinkedIn. The next part is how do you create a single web page (let’s call it your virtual business card) that will help people easily explore your various online social identities and also connect with you on common networks where they too may have a presence.

Display all your Online Social Profiles on one Web page

If you have already have a blog, creating a virtual business card is almost as easy as dragging some icons in your sidebar and linking them to your respective social profiles. But for people who don’t have websites or need an all-one-page to showcase their social profiles without any clutter, here are some web services that might come really handy.

Chi.mp - You normally have to pay around $10 per year to buy a domain name on the Internet but with chi.mp, you get a free domain name (like amitagarwal.mp) to display all your social profiles and other online activities in one place.

Chi.mp will be the owner of you reserved domain though you can buy it from them anytime for a fee of course. Your chi.mp URL is OpenID enabled so you can use it to log into other websites like Yahoo! or Google Friend Connect.

OnePage - You may use this service for creating your virtual business card as well as for sharing your lifestream or what you do online - see example.

The interface of OnePage is pretty awesome but they are yet to add support for Facebook and some popular IM services. The service is in closed beta but you may use the code "labnol" to get yourself an account.

FriendFeed Badge - FriendFeed offers an extremely customizable widget that can have any width and you can completely remove all the branding from the profile badge before embedding.

If you know a bit of CSS, you can hack this badge to make it look the way you want.

Retaggr - If you are looking to embed your social business card in your website or your email signature, Retaggr is probably a good choice.

With Retaggr, you can import profiles from almost any social networking site on the web and share them either as an index card or as a life stream. There’s a email option in the profile card as well so other may reach you without you having to reveal your email address.

MyBlogLog is another good service that offers these "about me" widgets both in JavaScript and plain HTML for use in Outlook emails and social profiles.

Card.ly - The services that we discussed so far are actually life-streaming applications that also offer a way to share your social profiles from one place. Card.ly is different.

It’s purely for creating "virtual business cards" that now only look attractive (see example) but you can also embed them in web pages. Go for the premium version to remove all the branding or for hosting the card on your own domain.

Google Profiles - Grab a vanity URL for your Google Profile if you haven’t done so already and what you get is a personal portal that has your recent photos plus links to your blog and other social profiles.

You should also enable the ‘Send a message’ option so that anyone with a Google Account can email you without knowing your email address - see example.

Create a Google Profile Badge

Here’s an undocumented trick that will help you create an embeddable badge for your Google Profile very similar to FriendFeed.

Log into your Google Reader account and view the HTML source code of that page. You’ll see a JavaScript variable called "USER_PROFILE_ID" - select the value of that variable and copy it to the clipboard. Replace xxx in the following URL with that value.

http://google.com/s2/widgets/ProfileCard?uid=xxx

You can now embed the profile badge in your web pages using the IFRAME tag - see example.

Related: Build a Lifestream with Google Reader

Remotely Control your Mac from Anywhere with a Simple Tweet (or a Text Message)

TweetMyPC, a free utility that lets you control a Windows computer from anywhere has just been ported to Mac. The new app is called TweetMyMac and, like its elder Windows cousin, you can use TweetMyMac to send commands to your Macbook over the web from any other computer or even a mobile phone (via a text message).

The Mac-Twitter Workflow

It works like this. You install the app on your Mac and associate it with your Twitter account*. Now you can send a regular tweet with the command wrapped in (for example, shutdown or sleep). The utility running on the Mac will check for your tweets at frequent intervals and will perform the required action on the remote Mac computer as soon as it finds some command in the twitter stream.

*It is recommended that you create a separate Twitter id (with “protected” updates) for sending remote commands to your Mac.

Send Remote Commands to your Mac

Here are some useful commands that you may send to your Mac via TweetMyMac:

1. Shutdown (to shutdown your Mac immediately without saving any files) or Sleep (for putting your Mac in sleep mode).

2. iSight - This is great if you want to know what’s happening in the surroundings. Send the iSight command and the app will take a picture with the built-in iSight web camera and will upload it to Twitpic.

3. Screenshot - If you want to know what applications are open on your Mac desktop, send the “screenshot” command - the picture of your desktop will again be uploaded to twitpic.

The app is in beta (so expect some bugs) and obviously it should always be running on your Mac computer for receiving commands.

A Student’s Guide to Microsoft DreamSpark

One of the benefits of being a college student is that you get discounts on lot of stuff especially computer software.

Almost every software vendor offers educational discounts but Microsoft took that idea to the extreme when they introduced the DreamSpark program that allows students worldwide to download certain Microsoft tools for free.

Am I eligible for the DreamSpark program?

If you are attending an accredited high school or college in any of these 124 countries, you are eligible for the DreamSpark program.

How do I enroll in the DreamSpark program?

High School students must obtain an access key for DreamSpark through their school administer, who in turn will receive the keys when they first register the high school with DreamSpark.

If your high school is not registered with DreamSpark, the school administrator can fax copies of the accreditation certificate to Microsoft and, after verification, Microsoft will send your school a set of Access Keys for distribution among the enrolled students.

The DreamSpark program is open to home schooled students as well but in this case, you parents must sign up through the same program that high school administrators sign up with.

You can also use DreamSpark if you obtain an ISIC card to prove that you are a student.

College and University students have it slightly easier. Just select your country followed by the name of your college and verify your credentials using the email address that has been assigned to you by the institute.

Most colleges are listed directly on DreamSpark, which will make your signup very easy. If you college is not listed, check the Options page which tells you who to contact about registration for your country.

What software programs do I get with DreamSpark?

Once you join the DreamSpark program, you will have to option to download the following Microsoft software tools for free :

• Expression Studio 3
• Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition
• Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition
• .. and more - see full list.

Additionally, DreamSpark also offers free ebooks, up to 22 hours of free e-learning courses on Microsoft technologies and 1 free Microsoft certification exam.

Will Microsoft ship the software DVDs?

Unlike MSDN or TechNet, Microsoft won’t ship you DVDs but you can download the software installers from the DreamSpark website itself. If you are located in India, you can also walk into your nearest Aptech or NIIT center and request the software on a DVD.

Ok, but isn’t there a catch?

Microsoft licenses the software to you for educational use. This means that you can use the software without restriction for school assignments or personal projects. If you write or design something that you wish to sell, however, you need to purchase a standard licensed copy of the Microsoft software before you sell your product.

Is the software like a trial that will expire when I graduate?

No! The software from DreamSpark is the full version, and according to Microsoft, “You may continue to use the Software you obtained prior to termination of your student status subject to the terms of this license.”

This is taken from the license agreement that you accept before you download the software, so you can be sure that any software that you download via DreamSpark will be free for personal and non-commercial use forever.

When you graduate, however, your DreamSpark membership will terminate so you won’t have access to new software release but the software that you may have already downloaded will continue to work.

Should you have any more questions related to DreamSpark, please ask in the comments section.

An Open Source Download Manager for Multiple File Hosting Sites

If you ever tried downloading files from file-hosting sites like RapidShare, you know how unfriendly that process is.

You click on a link pointing to some RapidShare hosted file, wait around a minute for the timer to complete and then you get a direct link to download the corresponding file. And if you don’t download within the next minute or so, the link expires and you need to repeat the whole cycle in order to download that file.

Things get even more confusing if you are trying to download files during peak hours or need to download multiple files in one go.

For obvious reasons, none of these file hosting sites provide “official” download managers and the ones you already have on your machine (like GetRight, Orbit or FlashGet) aren’t quite compatible.

If you are a frequent user of these file hosting sites, here’s a new open-source app hosted on Microsoft’s CodePlex that might interest you. Called MDownloader, this Windows-only utility will let you download files in the background without you having to wait in the browser for the timer to complete.

You can either copy-paste the file links manually into the downloader window or supply the URL of a web page and the utility will scrap all the possible file links that may be listed on that page. Once the downloads are added to the queue, it will do everything for you in the background - if you exceed the download limit, the utility will wait and re-queue the download.

In addition to RapidShare, you can use this utility as the default download manager for a dozen other file hosting sites including MegaUpload, Uploading.com, DepositFiles and more.

Share a Network Printer between x86 and x64 Windows Machines

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The problem: You have a network printer attached to a Windows 64-bit computer. How do you send files to that shared printer for printing from a laptop that is running the 32-bit version of Windows.

For the most part, the transition from 32-bit (x86) to 64-bit (x86-64) computing is seamless; old software applications will usually install and run fine, and the average user will notice no difference in the 64 bit version.

Device Drivers are however the only thing that can hamper a successful transition to the 64 bit world, especially if you use hardware devices that are shared over a network from a computer running a 32 bit version of Windows. For example, if you have a computer running a 64 bit version of windows and try to install a network printer that is connected to a computer that is running a 32 bit of Windows, you will receive an error message saying that Windows cannot find the drivers for your printer.

If the printer vendor provides 64 bit drivers, you can still use the printer with your new 64 bit computer but it might take a bit of extra work.

Is Your Computer Running 64-bit version of Windows?

To find out if you are running a 64 bit version of Windows, click the Start button, right-click on the entry that says Computer and click on the Properties button. This will tell you whether you system is running a 32 bit or 64 bit version of Windows.

Get your printer working on both editions of Windows.

By default, when you install a printer, only the drivers for the version of Windows you are using are installed on the computer. So even if the installer contains the 64 bit drivers, these will only be installed by default if you are installing them on a 64 bit computer.

But in the situation of a printer that is shared over a network, the computer that the printer is directly connected to supplies the drivers to any other computer that tries to print through that printer. Thus it needs to have both the 32 bit and the 64 bit drivers installed if both types of systems are running on your network.

Install 32-bit & 64-bit Device Drivers

There is a way to get the extra drivers installed on the computer, however; it just takes a little more work.

First, make sure the printer is installed and running correctly from the main computer that it is connected to. Then download the 64 bit (or 32 bit drivers if the computer that is connected to the printer is a 64 bit system) driver for your printer. Most printer manufacturers (HP, Cannon, Epson, Lexmark, etc.) list drivers for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows, and often both drivers are in the same installer.

Next, run the installer on the host computer (the one the printer is connected to) just like you were going to install the driver on the computer. Then when it asks if you want to update or uninstall, click cancel.

Now, you need to find the folder that driver was extracted to. Open Run (Win+R), and type in “C:\Users\your user name\appdata\local\temp” without the quotes, and substitute your user name where I have the user name in italics. Now find the folder that was created most recently and doesn’t begin with a parenthesis.

On my computer, after installing an HP printer the folder name started with a “7z” and then had a half dozen other random characters. The folder should contain folders that say things like drivers, images, and a couple of other things, and it should also contain a lot of files that have the model name of your printer. Now click on the address bar, select the entire line, and copy it (Ctrl+A and then Ctrl+C).

Now the instructions change a little depending if you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7.

If you are using Windows Vista (or Windows XP), open the control panel, click on printers, then right click on the name of the printer that you want to add the drivers for. Click Properties, sharing, then click “Change Sharing Options.” Check the box that says “Share this printer,” and then click the button that says “Additional Drivers.” Skip the next paragraph, then follow the remaining directions.

If you’re using Windows 7, open the start menu, click on Network, then double-click on your computer’s name. Now click on the link in the top menu bar that says “View remote printers.” Right click on the name of the printer you wish to share, click properties, and then click the tab that says sharing. Check the box that says “Share this printer,” and then click the button that says “Additional Drivers.” Now follow the remaining directions.

After clicking the “Additional Drivers” button, check the box beside the version of Windows you wish to add drivers for (x86 for 32 bit or x64 for 64 bit). When you click Ok, it will ask you for the location of the drivers. Paste (Ctrl+A and then Ctrl+V) the name of the folder that you found in the step before last. Close the dialogs when they are finished. Congratulations; you have now installed the additional drivers!

Finally, return to your computer that you will be using to print over the network, and add the network connected printer. It should install easily now, and you should be printing in minutes.

Related: How to Reduce Printing Cost of Documents

Find Emails with Large Attachments in your Gmail Mailbox

This article describes how you can free up space in your Gmail mailbox by removing bulky email messages and large file attachments. If you are on Windows (2000, XP, Vista or Win 7) and use Google email, this may be worth giving a shot.

The Gmail Advantage

While Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Hotmail offer POP3 access to your email, GMail (and Google Apps for Email) is probably the only free web mail service that also provides free offline access to your email messages via the IMAP route.

The benefits of using IMAP4 far outweigh POP3 - the primary feature being instant synchronization of the action with the mail server. As an example, if you have configured Outlook or Thunderbird with your Gmail account using IMAP4, you can delete messages in the local client and they’ll get moved to the Trash folder in Gmail as well automatically.

Free up Space in Gmail via IMAP - The Strategy

Now the more interesting part. Let’s see how we can free up some important disk space in our Gmail inbox using a simple strategy:

Step 1: Track down bulky email messages in your Gmail inbox that contain large file attachments.

Step 2: Save these attachments to the local hard drive.

Step 3. After the attachments are saved locally, remove them from the online mailbox without deleting the corresponding email message(s).

Unlike Outlook, Gmail doesn’t offer a “sort by size” feature so you would normally assume that to implement such a strategy, one may have to configure his desktop mail client with Gmail’s IMAP, perform the operations locally and then do a sync. Well, that’s not required anymore.

We’ll use a portable (meaning it doesn’t need to be installed) and freeware utility called IMAPSize - at the outset, let’s be quite clear - this isn’t an email client per se. This Windows only application has been created solely to perform maintenance tasks on any IMAP mailbox from the desktop.

Find space-hogging Email Attachments in Gmail

Let’s start off by adding a GMail or Google Apps for Domains mailbox.

Usually, on first starting the IMAPSize program, a dialog box pops up asking if you’d like to add a new email account. If it doesn’t, one can always add an account from the Account > New menu option.

To configure your Gmail account, fill in your email address as the username and your Gmail password. Enter imap.gmail.com as your server and the port number as 993. Be sure to check the SSL secure connection option so that data sent between your computer and the GMail server can’t be intercepted.

If you are a Google Apps user, please enter username@your_domain.com for the username field.

You’ll now see a tree indicating the size of individual Gmail folders (labels). Even with the exceedingly generous storage quota offered by GMail, if you have an IMAP account with another provider like FastMail.fm, VFEmail.net, 1and1.com or RackSpace, it might be worth noting which folders in particular are occupying the maximum space.

Now the next step - double-click any Gmail folder in the tree to see all message within that folder. IMAPSize will only download the headers and not the entire message so the wait may not be that long.

Once your message list is available locally, invoke the “Advanced Search” function to filter out large emails (or ones that contain huge attachments). You need to specify the size in kilobytes so 500000 would filter out emails that are larger than 0.5 MB or 500 KB.

Go through the filtered list and select emails messages that you either want to remove completely or just need to detach the attachments. You can do that by right clicking the selected messages and choosing “Save Attachments locally” - this will save of copy of file attachments to the local drive.

Now use the Delete Attachments option for the same selection. This will make a copy of the original email in same the Gmail folder buts sans the attachment while the original message is moved to Trash after you choose “Expunge this mailbox”. (Outlook has such a feature by default).

All this happens without the main body of the email getting downloaded thereby saving on bandwidth as well as on time. And this may be neat option for saving those images and media files for offline use when GMail is not available.

Last, but by no means least is an option to backup your IMAP account to your local disk while preserving the folder structure. Use the Account > Account Backup [CTRL+B] option to select the folder you want to backup - most GMail users would be better off backing up the All Mail folder to archive everything locally.

Naturally, expect a great deal of time to elapse if you have lot of messages and a slow Internet connection. Incremental backup is an in-built feature, so your next backup shouldn’t take as long as only the changes made to the mail account will be taken into consideration.

For Desktop Mail Clients

If you are already using Outlook or another desktop client with Gmail, seee this guide on how to reclaim lost space in Gmail using a similar approach. And if you aren’t happy with speed, here’s another guide on improving Outlook performance with GMail IMAP.

Use Facebook Chat without opening Facebook.com

Facebook includes an awesome chat feature that lets you instantly start conversations with your Facebook buddies without installing any IM software but the only small issue is that you need to be on the Facebook.com website in order to use Facebook chat.

If you find this a bit inconvenient, here are some good workarounds that will let you chat on Facebook from anywhere without even having to open the Facebook site in your browser.

Facebook Chat Inside the Web Browser

If you have Google Chrome or Prism for Firefox, you can open this address in your browser address bar and then create an application shortcut to Facebook chat on your desktop.

Firefox users may bookmark the above link and set the “Load this bookmark in Sidebar” property to true in order to use Facebook chat from the Firefox sidebar.

If you an IE user or hate to use Facebook chat from the sidebar, try Gabtastik - this is a minimal desktop client for Facebook that looks exactly like the web version of Facebook chat but will also send you notifications of new messages and chat requests from the system tray.

Meebo, the very awesome web based instant messaging service, now supports Facebook chat as well. You can connect your Facebook account with meebo via the Facebook Connect service (so there’s no need to share your Facebook credentials with anyone) and instantly chat with your online buddies inside the web browser.

There are two advantages here - you can use Facebook chat even if the main Facebook.com site is blocked in your office and two, you can simultaneously connect with friends on other IM networks from the same website.

Facebook Chat Clients for your Desktop

ChitChat - If Facebook were to develop a standalone messenger on the lines of Yahoo! or Google Talk, it might look something like ChitChat.

ChitChat is a Windows-only desktop client for Facebook that provides a tabbed window to make it easy for you to talk to may friends at once. It will also show notifications in the tray when your friends go online or when they have signed out. The application is in RC stage so expect a few bugs.

Digsby - This is again a very useful all-in-one app that helps you stay up to date with everything happening on your Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, LinkedIn and other online accounts.

If you have multiple accounts on Facebook (like you and your spouse), you can associate all of them with your Disgsby messenger and chat with the combined buddy list simultaneously. Facebook doesn’t allow audio or video calls but Digsby indirectly brings that feature to Facebook Chat via tokbox.

There were reports (1,2,3) that Digsby’s installer can add some crapware to your computer but that should not hold you back as there’s an alternate installer (direct link) that will bypass the non-essential stuff.

Pidgin - While Facebook Chat is not officially supported in Pidgin, there’s a free plug-in that lets you connect to the Facebook chat server from Pidgin. And like Digsby, Pidgin too would let you chat with buddies on multiple Facebook accounts from the same interface.

Pidgin vs Digsby - Pidgin will show all your Facebook contacts in one giant list while Digsby will group contacts under logical “Friends list” just the way you have them on the main facebook.com site. Also, Pidgin is purely for instant messaging while Digsby will also display notifications like when a friends sends you a message using Facebook email or writes something on your wall.

Also see: Hide Yourself from Select Facebook Friends

Tahiti - Microsoft Screen Sharing Software Review

Microsoft today launched a free screen sharing software for Windows XP and Vista users. The software ("Tahiti") can also be used for providing remote tech support or co-authoring presentations and documents with far-away colleagues. [Tahiti invites closed now.]

The workflow is simple - download and install the Tahiti software (~2.5 MB), login with your Windows Live ID and you are ready to share your entire desktop, web browser or any program application with the world.


The desktop screen can be simultaneously shared with upto 15 people at a time and the person sharing can give control to anyone else who's also part of the screen sharing session. And each participant has a personalized mouse pointer to point out specific items or highlight an area of shared screen.

Tahiti is tighly integrated with Microsoft Word and it may even be an attempt by Microsoft to counter the GTalk chat feature of Google Docs. With Tahiti, you can share a Word Document and every edit made by a participant can be identified with the participant’s name and timestamp.

Not just the screen, Tahiti will also let you share files, presentations or images which other participants can download during the screen sharing session. That's a useful feature because you don't have to upload files to a third-party site like rapidshare or send them as email attachments.

The shared portion of the screen is brighter than everything else to visually suggest what is curently being shared.


Microsoft may be planning to add audio features in Tahiti but until that happens, you can use your VoIP software like Live Messenger or Google Talk to share and speak at the same time.

Unfortunately, there isn't a way to record the screen sharing software without using a third-party software like Camtasia Studio or Wink.

Some may think Tahiti as a poor cousin of WebEx or Microsoft Live Meeting but it is still useful and powerful enough for most non-corporate users.

Microsoft Codename Tahiti | Download Tahiti [Thanks Abhishek]

Related: Live Screen Sharing with Skype

Update: Microsoft has closed the Tahiti beta program for new users. If you are already running the pre-Beta release, the service will continue to be available. An official version of Tahiti is expected in mid-April.