Techno Babble

Firefox 3 is now available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X as a free download from

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

Lots of news reports about the release of Firefox 3.0 with apparently more than 8,000,000 downloads in the first 24 hours, and to-date the number of downloads stands at 10,557,198 (9:30 GMT)

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

With over 14,000 improvements, including the revolutionary smart location bar, malware protection, and extensive under the hood work, Firefox 3 delivers the Web without compromise. It uses significantly less memory and is overall two to three times faster than Firefox 2.

First impressions

One of the things you notice right away is the Smart Location bar. As you enter your location, the system displays matching sites from your browsing history, bookmarks and tags as you type. This can make it easy to find the site you want to visit.

You can bookmark pages with a single click on the star icon in the location bar. If you return to a bookmarked page, the star icon  will illuminate to remind you it has been bookmarked. Two clicks on the icon allows you to assign tags (labels) to the page. Then you can use improved features in the new Library for managing and searching your bookmarks.

In an attempt to make your web-browsing experience safer, security has not been forgotten with extensions to the existing anti-phishing mechanisms introduced in Firefox 2, easy access to site identity information, a re-engineered Password Manager and additional security for Add-ons

One feature of the improved User Interface includes the Full Page Zoom that allows you to zoom in or out of the entire page you are viewing. Firefox will recall your zoom state the next time you visit the page.

Built on the Gecko 1.9 engine, Firefox 3.0 is 2 to 3 times faster overall than the previous version, and hundreds of memory leaks have been fixed which will help to keep memory usage under control.

See Firefox in action HERE or visit the web-site at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/ to download and enjoy the Firefox 3.0 experience for yourself.

iTunes U is a service, from the Apple iTunes Store, that provides access to a collection of educational course materials from hundreds of leading Universities across the world and is available to anyone with a Mac or PC (and of course iTunes). Users can download and play course content just like they do for music, videos and TV shows. Some of the courses are on-going and you can subscribe to automatically receive each new episode whenever it becomes available.

http://www.apple.com/education/itunesu_mobilelearning/itunesu.html

iTunesU

To date, this service has been used by many Universities in the US including Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, amongst many others, to provide course materials and lectures to students.

The UK’s Open University has recently added more than 300 items of video and audio course material to the iTunes U service.

http://www.open.ac.uk/itunes/

Open University on iTunes

Professor Brenda Gourley, the Open University Vice-Chancellor said:

The iTunes U project is an exciting new opportunity for anyone, anywhere in the world to gain easy access to Open University courses. Our aim is to partner our established distance learning expertise with the power of the internet to provide as mobile, flexible and personalised learning as possible, whatever your current educational level, personal circumstances or technological abilities. We are delighted to be joining with leading institutions around the world to pool curriculum and content to suit your needs, and hopefully to offer you useful accreditation and recognition at every stage of your studies.

Other Universities to join iTunes U recently include University College London and Trinity College Dublin.