Windows Made Easy

Brandon LeBlanc just posted about the coolest little gadget I’ve seen in a while – the Mars weather gadget for Vista. Thanks to the Phoenix Mars Lander, this gadget displays the maximum and minimum daily temps on Mars as well as the Mars weather. Hint: It’s sunny a lot there. And for even more Mars fun, the Lander is also on Twitter so you can get quick and humorous updates from the mission throughout the day, like this:

The gadget looks like this:

Source: Channel 10

Want to see the same images that scientists at NASA use for their research or perform your own research with those images? Or do you want to see the Earth from the same perspective that astronauts see as they descend to Earth? How about taking a 5 minute break and viewing a panorama of a different city? Install WorldWide Telescope and start your explorations.

Source: worldwidetelescope.org

Download: http://content.worldwidetelescope.org/update/wwtsetup.msi

Microsoft just released Silverlight 2 Beta 2, which is available for download here.

If you don’t know what Silverlight is, check out its website. There are a lot of demos, presentations and video tutorials to get you started.

Microsoft released a Technical Preview preview of Windows Live Writer that can be downloaded here.

You can see some improvements on Windows Live Writer’s blog, which basically are: tabs for better accessibility, a word counter, image cropping and support for some services like LightBox.

A post on Nick MacKechnie’s blog reminds us that the public beta of Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8 Beta 2) will be available in the third quarter of 2008.

IE8 is standards-compliant by default, which means websites that have been coded to work with previous versions of IE may not display properly. If you’re a webmaster, make sure your site is ready, so check out the Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit.

Windows XP SP3 includes all previously released Windows XP updates, including security updates, hotfixes and select out-of-band releases. For example, the Service Pack includes the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) 3.0 and the Microsoft Core XML Services 6.0.