Songbird 1.0 Release Official, Fixes Bugs, Plays iTunes Purchases [Featured Download]
The first release candidate had a lot to be excited about, but unfortunately it was rife with errors in my tests. The official 1.0 release fixes most if not all of the bugs I came across in my initial review, which is very promising. The footprint is still a little unwieldy, weighing in at just over 100MB of RAM on the Windows PC I tested it on.
The default installation also suggests installing a new add-on (new in the sense that it wasn't suggested in the release candidate I tested) called QuickTime Playback that supports playing back music you've purchased from the iTunes Music Store—a killer feature that, in conjunction with the iPod sync add-on, would allow even the hardcore iTunes user to switch.
If you want a closer look at what you can do with Songbird and what sets it apart from your stock media player, check out our previous screenshot tour and Songbir! d's demo screencasts. Whether you're a regular Songbird user or you're trying it out for the first time today, share your Songbird experience in the comments.
Last year 
Mobile phone operating systems and a reheated web browser war: that's how we'll recall the year 2008 when it comes to software. From brand new to revamped browsers and mobile platforms and apps, 2008's been good to technophiles who like their data in the cloud and accessible wherever they are. Let's take a look back at this year in software, and some of the best new and improved applications, web services, and mobile platforms that were born in 2008. Looking back at the last 12 months, these are the apps that get a gold foil-wrapped chocolate coin from us this year. Photo by 
Not only did you swoon over the release of Firefox 3 because of 
While Mozillians and Firefox users celebrated across the globe over! the sum mer, no one knew that search powerhouse Google was in the software development lab cooking up their own lean, mean browsing machine that would forsake all of the fox's bells and whistles (and extensibility) to run Javascript-based applications lightening-fast. On September 2nd, Google released the first beta of 
Yeah, yeah, the iPhone launched in 2007, but this year the iPhone 2.0 software and the new iPhone 3G model with a faster data plan and GPS came out to hype almost as big as the original iPhone launch. The combination of an operating system that finally ran third-party apps officially plus pinpointy GPS goodness set the bar for what users can expect to get from the next generation of smartphone with a fast internet connection, full-on browser, and spot-on location-awareness. Plus, dozens of the apps available for the phone are free. At first, we were 
What with the App Store limitations and Apple's insistence on ruling over what you can and cannot do on your phone, it's not surprising the enthusiastic "jailbreak" community soldiered on this year, continuing to offer installers and non-Apple-approved applications for your iPhone even in the face of the mainstream iTunes App Store. We take our hats off to these intrepid hackers, who offer such lovely functionality as the ability to SSH into, theme, and download video clips to your phone; if you haven't jailbroken your iPhone or iPod touch, here are a few of our picks of best 
Google's answer to Apple's proprietary iPhone hardware and software came in the form of their very own touch mobile phone operating system, Android, which launched this past October. Unlike the iPhone, this new mobile platform is open source and will run on various handsets going forward. Right now Android's first release is only available on the HTC G1 handset; you can see o! ur 
One of the few software apps on this list that's not open source or made by a ginormous company, new instant messenger client Digsby took chatters by storm with its ability to 
We were really late to the Xbox Media Center (XBMC) party when we showed up last year and 
Another year, another TWO Ubuntu releases, and they just keep getting better. You have to love the free, open source operating system that manages multiple releases within the span of a year—something Apple and Microsoft, companies you pay hundreds of dollars to for the privilege of using their software, can't pull off. If you've tried Linux on your desktop before and killed the partition in frustration only to slink back to Windows, it's time to give it another go. This year we thought 
Our favorite web application on the internet, Gmail, continues to burn down barns and rip up the competition with continual iteration and feature adds. This year, Gmail added a "Labs" section to your account, a safe way for power ! users to enable "experimental" power features to their email while keeping everyone else's safe from harm. Truthfully, when I 
Windows only: Photology steps away from tag based searching and allows you to search through your pictures with a variety of filters. There are filter functions for colors, dates, times of day, photo orientation, exposure, text of captions/file names/folders, and even filters for things like plants, sky, faces, beaches, flowers, snow, sunset and water. The simpler filters like the color picker are a bit more accurate than the more advanced ones like clouds. In the screenshot above I had searched for the color blue and snow. Photology kicked out a ton of blue skied and snowy wallpapers I had saved earlier in the holiday season but it also returned a picture of Wonder Woman standing on a cloud. In the defense of Photology clouds and snowbanks are quite similar. Filters can be stacked, so if you need to find a picture from October, predominantly yellow, and taken in the morning you can use all three filters. In addition to helping you search through your photos, Photology has tools for photo adjustments like color correction, red eye removal, cropping, etc. You can also upload your pictures from the application to a site hosted by Enoetic, the parent company of Photology. Pictures will be stored there for 7 days to share with friends. For a more permanent upload, you can also use Photology to upload to Flickr. Photology is freeware, Windows only, requires .Net 3.0+ framework. Thanks 
Windows only: Portable application Toucan backs up and syncs your data between two locations (like your hard drive and your USB drive). Weighing in at just over 4.10MB installed, Toucan offers several advanced backup and syncing settings, like incremental backup with compression (supporting 7-Zip format), portable drive variables, scripts and advanced rulesets. Similar to SyncBackSE but smaller and portable, Toucan is a nice option for making sure you've got everything on your thumb drive. Toucan is a free download for Windows only.
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