Software : Mozilla releases Firefox 14, more secure with OS X Lion full-screen support

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• Mozilla releases Firefox 14, more secure with OS X Lion full-screen support
• Microsoft explains minimalist Office 2013 interface
• Instagram is coming to Google Nexus 7 thanks to app update
• Interview: Microsoft on the 'Metrification' of Office 2013
• Microsoft begins building Skype into Office 2013
• OneNote for Windows 8 is Microsoft's first serious Metro application
• Microsoft Office 2013 leaves Windows XP and Windows Vista in the dust
• Microsoft Office 365 relies heavily on SkyDrive cloud functions
• Microsoft CEO reveals Microsoft Office 365, preview available now
• In Depth: Office 2013: everything you need to know
• Steve Jobs called Yelp boss to warn against Google buy-out

Mozilla releases Firefox 14, more secure with OS X Lion full-screen support Posted: Browser security is more important than ever for computer users, so it's no surprise that it's one of the key features in Firefox 14, which made its debut on Tuesday. The Mozilla Project continues its fast development pace today with a Firefox release aimed at adding new features, while tightening up security at the same time it spices up web-based games. Front and center is security, with Firefox 14 now automatically utilizing HTTPS for Google searches "to protect your data from potentially prying eyes, like network administrators when you use public or shared Wi-Fi networks," The Mozilla Blog explains. "Google is currently the only search engine that allows Firefox to make your searches private, but we look forward to supporting additional search engines with this feature in the future," Mozilla adds. Better gaming, video playback Developers will also find plenty to love in Firefox 14 with support for a Pointer Lock API for allowing web-based apps to better control the mouse - perfect for first-person games. Firefox 14 also supports full-screen mode with OS X Lion 10.7, promising a better experience for both video playback as well as web games such as Mozilla's own BrowserQuest. Last but not least, Mozilla has changed the way it displays the icon to the left of a URL in Firefox 14, making it easier to see if a website's identity is verified at a glance. Firefox 14 is now available for download from the Mozilla website for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Microsoft explains minimalist Office 2013 interface Posted: Microsoft has talked more about its reasoning behind the minimalist design for its Office 2013 desktop apps. Naturally, the suite follows the plainer, Aero-free design of the Windows 8 desktop, but there's much more to Office 2013's Metro-style design than that. "We thought a lot more about different screen sizes and different devices, we really wanted to maximise the real estate," explained Microsoft technical product marketer Julia White, responsible for Office, Office 365 and Exchange. The flatter ribbon icons on a white background do seem overly stark at first, but make more sense in use, especially on a touchscreen. White continues: "It's about getting the content front and centre and trying to get the application content out of the way – there when you need it, but out of the way when you don't. On tablets and RT devices, you want to put the application stuff [to one side]. Office 2013: everything you need to know "The other aspect is thinking about touch, how do we ensure great navigational elements for touch too, so we've got bigger targets, more white space, that type of thing. So together those two things influence how the UI was adapted and how it's the clean and simple look." The most impressive thing about new Office is how efficient it is – you can start using the apps before they've even installed, while the movement of the cursor is smoother. Even the way Outlook 2013 places an active email draft alongside its parent has already made a difference to us. More on Office 2013 Metro Office 2013 will include both Metro and desktop applications but so far we've only seen Metro versions of OneNote and Lync. These will be available at the same time as the desktop apps - but it's "just a matter of time" for the other Office apps Christ Pratley told TechRadar. White elaborated on this for us. "So we've started with the two apps because it's really about note taking and on the go and communication and so that's why we picked those two to start. As we think around all the apps, we certainly have a roadmap about how we want to think about the applications across the new Windows 8 experience as well as the Desktop. "[We have] no firm plans to share on that front, but it's something we're realty thoughtful about and working without customers about what makes sense and what timeline."

Instagram is coming to Google Nexus 7 thanks to app update Posted: Much loved filter-tastic photo sharing app Instagram has had an update so that it shall go to the Google Nexus 7 ball after all. The economical tablet doesn't have a rear-mounted camera, so the onus is on applying washed out retro-style filters to existing photos, or taking low-res MySpace-style snaps with the front-facer then filtering and blurring them until they look halfway decent. You'll also be able to post pictures directly to Flickr using the sharing options, a little treat that wasn't on the Android app before. Filter no filter There wasn't exactly outrage and uproar and rioting in the streets when it emerged that the Nexus 7 wasn't compatible with Instagram due to the absence of a camera on the back. But at the very least, a couple of people were mildly disgruntled and may have expressed distress to one another via the medium of pictures of coffee with heart-shaped chocolate sprinkles and fingernails painted in zany colours. Those people can now rest easy. (And the rest of us can say stuff like, "If not having Instagram was a dealbreaker for you - well, maybe you need to have a word with yourself.")

Interview: Microsoft on the 'Metrification' of Office 2013 Posted: Office 2013 is the Office you know, just Metrified, modern – and all yours, says general manager Chris Pratley. "We didn't mess around with the ribbon; we Metrified it but we didn't change a lot of stuff. Instead it's all about connecting to the cloud, making it your Office regardless of device. Making it Metro and smooth and live and digital. That's the theme of what we're trying to do here; it just becomes modern, your modern office." Microsoft and the Office team have plenty of ideas for futuristic technology; look closely at last year's Productivity Future Vision video and you'll spot augmented reality glasses recording and translating several months before Google Project Glass was announced. Those videos and the Envisioning Lab they come from are part of the Research, Experimentation & Design team that's just one of the areas Pratley is responsible for. Pratley knows the history of Office (he worked on Word for eleven years and ran the team that launched OneNote) but recently he's been concentrating on the future. He set up Office Labs, which produces prototypes and tools like Ribbon Hero and Search Commands for Office (and is also behind The Garage; an internal incubator for hardware and software ideas at Microsoft). "We do a lot of things that may or may not pan out," he explained to TechRadar. "The Office team is very keen on doing things that are going to succeed so Office Labs is sort of like the bleeding edge of Office advanced development." When that development pays off, he says, "Some things from Labs and Envisioning make their way into the Office 15 apps". That makes him the ideal person to ask about the future of Office - especially Metro, as he's also in charge of the design team for Office who have been working on what he calls the "Metrification" of Office, from the look and feel to the new icons. What does he think the most important feature in Office 2013 is? He enthuses over new tools like the finger-friendly contextual radial menu in the full Metro version of OneNote, the in-place email replies in Outlook, Excel's Quick Analysis lens for suggesting chart and pivot table layouts and the Flash Fill tool that makes it easy to get information out of badly formatted data (a collaboration with Microsoft Research for handling repetitive behaviours and pattern recognition which he calls "probably the single coolest thing I can show you"). PDF Flow in Word is a feature he says the Office team has been planning for some time. "PDF is where documents go to die," he complains. "Once something is in PDF, it's like a roach motel for data. I could print it but that's not so useful. I copy a table and take that back to Word with high hopes and what I get is not that great." PDF Flow lets you open a PDF directly in Word as a live, editable file. "Now it's a Word file; it's not an image of a word file, it's not a dumb translation of letters to words, it actually is Word structure. We look at the structure of the PDF and say 'there's a one here with an A and B below; that should be represented by a multi-level list', 'here's a bunch of lines and squares, that looks like a table'. Even things like page numbers. It says page one of five in the corner; if I add a bunch of text it will say page one of six." Then there's the ability to put videos in Word documents. "Word started out being intended for print. People increasingly don't print, they read on line, on whatever device they're on. If they're not going to print, then we can make it possible to put videos into word and let them play. So Word becomes a bit more like a Happy Potter newspaper…" Your Office, everywhere But what he singles out as a fundamental improvement is the way you get Office 2013; a combination of subscription, cloud sync and streaming that puts Office on every device you use – PC, Mac, phone and tablet, for one price. "What you used to do with Office is you would buy it for a machine and maybe you'd get a licence to put it on two machines, but you were essentially connecting it to a machine; you were buying it like you would buy a peripheral. You can still buy Office the old way and you will perpetually own it - and it will not get any better over time (except for bug fixes and security fixes). But when you choose to buy the subscription, you're buying Office for yourself, not for a device. That means it's available on all the devices you love and most importantly you have a connection to the cloud service. You have your documents and settings. It's your modern Office, not buying a piece for your PC and sticking it on there and letting it get old. You stay up to date, you stay connected to it." "You will get it with your phone or you can add it to your phone if you have a phone from another company, it will be on your tablet, it will be on your PC, it will be on your Mac. You've already seen a taste of this with OneNote; it's on Android and iPhone and iPad and so on. Any devices we make local client bits for, you have those. "You don't buy Mac Office or Windows Office, you're buying the subscription. If you happen to have Mac, you have Office on Mac, if you happen to have a PC, you'll have Office on PC. It'll will be best on Windows, but it won't be crappy on the other places; it will also be leading on those platforms. We'll make it really good." What he didn't say is what applications you'll get on other devices; whether it will stay with just Lync and OneNote or whether we'll actually see Office for iPad. Settings like recently opened files and even where you were in a document travel with your Office account, and apps stream to a new PC fast enough to make it worth doing on any PC you happen to use. "I want to open this document so I say open in Word and the PC goes 'I don't have it, I'll go get it'. It starts to pull the first blocks of code for Word off our service and it pulls them in the order it will need them to start up. "It's one step ahead of you; you get your document loaded and it starts pulling down all the other parts of Word. We have all these metrics on what people do next after they do one thing so we're pulling down the next most likely pieces of code until the whole thing is on the machine and it only takes a few minutes (depending on the speed of your Internet connection)." And Office itself will get updated far more often. The businesses that refused to reinstall Office sooner than every three years are happy with incremental improvements that stream down automatically. "Improvements, bug fixes, new capabilities showing up; that kind of things can happen much sooner. We already do this at a faster cadence with the Web; Web apps updated every month or quarter. They get better over time with new features and new capabilities. The mobile apps are updated yearly roughly, right now, and Office is going to move to something faster than that." It's not just that Microsoft wants to keep you paying the subscription month after month, Pratley says convincingly. It solves the perennial problem of people complaining about a bug or missing feature that's fixed in a version they don't want to pay again for. "It would drive us nuts as software designers because we would make new things and no-one would be using them." Modern, Metro, minimal Even in the desktop apps, Office 2013 has the clean, chromeless look of Metro. "We adopted the Metro design principles. We cleaned things up, we took away all the old cruft; the heavy boundaries, all the bevelled edges and shadowed are gone. The icons are flatter. It's just really clean. The principles of Metro are things like 'content over chrome' so we minimise the chrome as much as possible. Let the text and typography be the user interface. "You don't have giant icons for everything, because in Metro icons are largely redundant compared to the old style of interfaces where people started going nuts and adding icons for every single thing. An icon is supposed to be some recognisable object. When you've got 4,000 of them and they're for abstract concepts like mail merge, an icon is not helping you." The cleanup means some tools have gone missing and there's often less to see on screen. Is there too much white space for a program as powerful as Office? Pratley suggests taking the time to get used to it. "This is one of those areas where people are tuning their interpretation of Metro. Some people would say Metro means just the thing and everything else is blank and other people react and think it's too blank so you're tempted to put more in and then you get clutter again. "You have to make sure how much of your reaction is [that it's] not what you're used to versus it's really a problem

Microsoft begins building Skype into Office 2013 Posted: Microsoft has announced that it will be integrating its newly acquired Skype VoIP service with Office 2013. The company finalised the purchase of Skype last October, paying $8.5 billion for the service that draws around 65 million customers. At that time it was too early to tell exactly how the Redmond software giant would use its new acquisition. Finally, details are beginning to emerge and Microsoft is putting Skype behind the "presence" feature in Outlook, making it a standard feature of all Office 2013 versions. Linking up with Lync Office already uses the Lync communications platform, with which Microsoft says that Skype users will be able to integrate their contacts. In a demonstration of Office 2013, Lync was being used to power a video conference call which suggests that the inclusion of Skype will be to subtly add features rather than replace existing functionality. Users of the new Office 365 subscription version of Office will also get 60 minutes of Skype credit each month that should see them chatting free to landlines across the world.

OneNote for Windows 8 is Microsoft's first serious Metro application Posted: OneNote is the Office app Microsoft has already put on more platforms than anything else; you can get OneNote for iPhone, iPad and Android as well as Windows Phone, on the web (and of course for Windows). Microsoft announced today that it's the first Office app coming to the Metro interface on both Windows 8 and Windows RT, as a companion app to the desktop version of OneNote that lets you take notes or view the notes you've created in other OneNote apps and synced via SkyDrive. OneNote for Windows 8 will be the final name; it still has its MX codename in the Windows Store though. Install it and you see a clean and simple Metro interface; on the left are your notebooks, synced from SkyDrive and the lists of sub-notebooks you organize them into, and list of pages. When you select a page and start looking at content or adding information, the notebook panes slide off to the left to leave more space on screen for your notes. Tap on the notebook name to get them back on screen, or open both the notebook lists and see other handy commands like forcing a notebook to sync or copying a link to your notebook by swiping up from the bottom of the screen to open the App Bar. That's a standard Windows 8 gesture – if you don't have a touch screen, it's right click on a mouse, but Microsoft is keen to push OneNote for Windows 8 as a touch app. Access several files and recording with OneNote Anything that you've put into a OneNote notebook with desktop OneNote or one of the smartphone apps, you can see in OneNote for Windows – images clipped from web pages, printouts from PDFs, audio and video recordings, text and handwriting. Embedded Excel spreadsheets and Visio diagrams show up as tables and images because you can't run the Excel and Visio functionality inside OneNote for Windows 8 the way you can in the desktop app, but you can still see them. You can play back an audio recording, but you can't make a recording. But you can still write into OneNote – and that's true digital ink with handwriting recognition that happens in the background, not just shapes you draw with a pen. And OneNote for Windows 8 has the full search features of the desktop app; if you have a picture of a document or a sign, the text in the picture is recognized in the background and you can search for it in your notes. Most of the OneNote features aren't in the App Bar; instead when you tap on your notes you see an icon that launches the new radial menu (which may be familiar from the Microsoft Research InkSeine project). Be careful, it's sensitive This is a context sensitive menu; if you select text using the touch handles before you tap it, you go straight to the text formatting tools. And it makes great use of touch; pick a color from circular swatches, drag the pointer round the dial to get smaller or larger text. You can insert tags to organise your notes from the radial menu; undo and redo actions; cut, copy, paste or copy formatting, insert, edit and sort tables and bulleted lists or insert images, from the file picker or by snapping a photo with your webcam. Windows 8 tablets are all going to have cameras; we're not sure how convenient it's going to be to pick one up and take a snap with it but it's nice to have the option. Radial Menu offers more options The icon in the middle of the radial menu changes to give you a hint about what tools you're going to get, depending on what you have selected. The Picture radial menu lets you copy, tag or delete an image – you don't see the text formatting commands because you can't use them with an image. Another nice touch feature is how you can organize notes; you can finger drag them from one notebook to another. Some features are a little hidden on the App Bar – like being able to delete a page of notes. Owen Braun of the Office user experience team told TechRadar that the arrangement of these context sensitive commands on the App Bar and even on the radial menu isn't finalized and the OneNote team will be tweaking how they work for the final version. The OneNote MX Preview is free in the Windows 8 Store during the technical preview of Office 15. When Office 2013 goes on sale, if you buy the Office 365 subscription to Office 2013 you'll get OneNote for Windows 8 free as part of that (along with OneNote for all the other platforms). If you're a OneNote fan, it could be a good reason for considering Windows 8.

Microsoft Office 2013 leaves Windows XP and Windows Vista in the dust Posted: Microsoft is finally leaving Windows XP and Windows Vista in the dust, as the just-announced Microsoft Office 2013 will only support the Windows 7 and Windows 8 operating systems. Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Kirk Koenigsbauer took center stage at a press conference in San Francisco today to introduce the 15th version of Microsoft Office. The Consumer Preview is available today, but not for XP or Vista users, who'll have to upgrade their OS to use Microsoft Office 2013. Out with the old Microsoft Office 2010 provided support for both Windows XP and Windows Vista. But Office 2013 will drop the old operating systems in favor of a sleek new touch UI, cloud and social functionality that is available through the Office 365 subscription. CEO Ballmer said during today's presentation that Microsoft Office is "the flagship application from Microsoft" and "the most important application" the company sells. That makes it an even more devastating loss for devotees of older OS versions. Corporate VP of Office Koenigsbauer further stressed the importance of cloud functionality, a function that would have likely taken extra effort to implement in older systems. Ballmer emphasized that Microsoft Office 365 "is a service first," and an application suite second. The new Office is expected to release in 2013, although the Consumer Preview is available now.

Microsoft Office 365 relies heavily on SkyDrive cloud functions Posted: During a special press conference today, Microsoft unveiled Microsoft Office 365 - the premium home subscription service. Along with a touch-friendly interface and social interactions, cloud functionality via Microsoft SkyDrive is one of the most important elements of the new Office suite, said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Microsoft's Corporate VP of Office Kirk Koenigsbauer then took the stage to demonstrate exactly what Ballmer was talking about. The cloud is "hugely important" "This is a hugely important part of the release," Koenigsbauer said. "SkyDrive is incredibly fundamental to this release of Office." Koenigsbauer demonstrated SkyDrive functionality between multiple devices, including a Samsung laptop and a Windows Phone device. He opened up Microsoft Word, where his sign-in name "Kirk" was displayed in the upper-right corner. Signing in to Microsoft Office 365 applications gives you easy access to your settings, recently used documents, templates, custom dictionaries, and more, Koenigsbauer said. When he switched devices, Word asked him if he'd like to pick up in the document precisely where he left off on the previous device. He showed how easily images, video and other multimedia can be inserted into documents from the web or from the Cloud. Koenigsbauer also demonstrated how Microsoft Word will automatically resize for the size of your device, be it a laptop, tablet or smartphone, using the all-new "reading mode." Office 365 will store data in the SkyDrive cloud "by default," he said, though local storage remains another option. Cloud functionality also allows users to easily share documents with others via SkyDrive or post them to social media. Microsoft Office 365 is looking to compete directly with Google's emerging sweet of Google Docs apps, so watch out for more news as the rivalry rages on.

Microsoft CEO reveals Microsoft Office 365, preview available now Posted: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took the stage at a special press conference in San Francisco today to announce the new Microsoft Office 365. The Microsoft Office 365 customer preview is available to try now. This cloud-based version of Office 2013 "is a service first," Ballmer said, rather than a simple set of applications. Ballmer added that "your modern Office" focuses on cloud, social, and other new scenarios, and that it's been optimized for touch and other important emerging input interfaces. Exciting times "These are certainly exciting times," he said, beginning the presentation with a brief recap of Microsoft's current undertakings, including Windows Phone 8, Xbox 360, Bing, Windows 8, and more. Ballmer called Microsoft Office "the flagship application from Microsoft" and "the most important application" the company sells. Microsoft Office 365 has been designed with the Metro UI in mind, he said, and touch controls will be an important element. Office 365 is meant to be a catch-all service for a modern, social workplace environment, with elements like Skype integration facilitating social interactions in a professional environment. And cloud functionality will allow both home and business users to save progress and settings for Microsoft Office applications between devices. Even meetings can be done digitally through Microsoft Office 365 as an alternative to teleconferencing. Microsoft Office 365 will compete directly with Google's emerging suite of business apps, so watch out for more news as the rivalry continues to heat up.

In Depth: Office 2013: everything you need to know Posted: Office 2013: it's here, so what's new Microsoft has announced a preview of the next release of Office - Office 2013 - that you'll be able to try out officially. The Office 15 Technical Preview includes desktop versions of Access, Excel, InfoPath, Lync, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher and Word, with Metro-style interfaces - collectively they're all part of the Office 2013 suite. One major difference with Office 2013 is that there's a new way of buying it. Although boxed copies and online downloads are still available, you can also get an Office 365 subscription that gets you all Office core apps for all the platforms you use (there are Home, Small Business, ProPlus and Enterprise plans to choose from). Instead of having to pay again for Mac Office or the iPhone OneNote app, you just get them all. Read our Hands on: Office 2013 review Office 2013 release date and price Microsoft isn't yet talking about price, or when we'll see these new Office apps. We do know that the Windows RT version of Office will be included when the Surface tablet ships, which Microsoft said would be when Windows 8 is generally available (so sometime between July and October according to our predictions) – but those could be preview versions of the apps, and the expectation is that Office 2013 itself may not be launching until (as the name suggests) early 2013. Office 2013 is on demand "You're buying Office for yourself, not for a device," Office general manager Chris Pratley told TechRadar. No news on whether that includes new Office apps for iPad, but if it does, you won't pay any extra for them. And on Windows at least you don't have to install the apps the traditional way; when you open a document, the application streams down automatically from the Internet and installs itself - starting with the code to open the document and then adding the features you're most likely to use first, until you have the whole program. The plan is for this to be fast enough that it works on a PC you use at a friend's house or in a hotel business centre; you'll get your Office apps 'on demand', with your settings - and your recent documents, synced courtesy of SkyDrive (whether they're online or on a computer, as long as it has the SkyDrive app on). Those show up in a new 'welcome' view, along with templates for new documents and links to jump back to the page you were on when you last edited a document. Office 2013 Metro and desktop apps However you buy it, Office 2013 will include both Metro and desktop applications. In this release, the only Metro apps are OneNote and Lync - which will be available at the same time as the desktop apps - but it's "just a matter of time" for the other Office apps Christ Pratley told us. OneNote really shines in Metro, taking advantage of touchscreens to make it easy to navigate between pages and notebooks or to have the whole page for taking notes on. Even if you don't use a pen to take notes, touch comes in handy for editing; when you select text with your finger a radial menu opens with contextual tools for formatting text, undoing edits, applying tags or snapping pictures with the camera on your tablet. Office 2013 Lync in Metro The Metro Lync client bears some similarities to the People app, showing a list of frequent contacts and recent conversations, as well as showing details of any upcoming online meetings. You can combine video and IM conversations, sliding the video to the side if you want to have more room for text chat. And you can have HD video calls with more than one person at once. The familiar desktop Office apps have had a Metro makeover; not just taking away interface chrome like shadows and bevelled edges and adding a touch mode that puts more space between buttons and key tools on the right side of the screen where your thumb will be, but also simplifying the layout of elements and getting rid of windows that pop up and hide what you're doing. So when you hit Reply in Outlook, the new message opens in the same place. You can also switch between all, unread and flagged mail the way you can in the Windows Phone mail client and you can 'peek' at contacts and calendar appointments right from the main Outlook screen. There's better social network integration, with a feed from multiple social networks and links to start video and VOIP calls directly. Office 2013 interface tweaks Word's reviewing and track changes features get the Metro-style simplification and you can finally reply to comments. You can also open PDFs and turn them into Word documents you can copy data from. You can embed videos in Word documents; they show up well in the new two-page reading view (which has a white-one-black view for reading at night and works nicely in portrait mode on a tablet). And layout is generally easier, with DTP-style guides to help you snap elements into place so they're precisely positioned. Office 2013 smart fill and layouts Excel is smarter about filling in repeated information like lists; if you start retyping parts of a messy table you've pasted from a Web site (like a credit card statement), it will extract the data neatly and fill it in for you. And the new Quick Analysis lens suggests the best chart to use and automatically creates pivot tables to help you analyse data. PowerPoint shares features like layout guides. It also has a new presenter view with great touch features for swiping through slides or using pinch zoom to see your whole presentation so you can jump directly to a slide. Don't forget to read our Hands on: Office 2013 review

Steve Jobs called Yelp boss to warn against Google buy-out Posted: Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman has revealed that, following an offer from Google to buy the company, Steve Jobs called and urged him not to sell out. The online reviews service was was interesting Google back in 2010 and although Yelp had already rebuffed the search giant's advances, Jobs called just to make sure. The late, great Apple co-founder and CEO, presumably feeling particularly annoyed about Google's Android advances, told Stoppleman to "stay independent and not sell out to Google." "At that point, we had already turned down Google. But Steve liked Yelp and wanted to make sure about Google. It was a moment where I said, 'This is crazy. What just happened?'" Success story After turning down Google's offer, Yelp has continued to grow from strength-to-strength and even floated on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this year. Yelp has 70 million monthly unique users and is worth around $1.3 billion. It turns out, once again, that Steve's instincts were right.

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