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Windows 8 News & Themes

Windows 8 will have some great new features, among them a completely new interface. You should definitely check out the Windows 8 concept video as well, it’s simply amazing.

If you are still on Windows XP or Vista you’ll also find some great themes on the site!

We’ve also added a Windows 8 Wishlist to the site. If you have any suggestion for Windows 8, add them there.
If you want to send in feedback simply use the DISQUS comment forms! Top commenters will be rewarded.

IPhone Emulator vs. IPhone Simulator

Make sure that you know the difference between simulator and emulator. An emulator can run the real iPhone applications while a simulator only simulates functonalities. If you want to play the iPhone games, you will need an emulator!
Difference between emulator and simulator

iPhone Emulator Firefox:

At one of the sun.com blogs I found an emulator simulator for Firefox. It basically allows you to simulate the iPhone browser. You can download the firefox plugin here: Firefox iPhone Emulator Simulator. The file you can download at that site is a .xpi the firefox plugin file format. To install the plugin simply unpack the zip and then drag and drop the file into the firefox. It will then automatically install the iPhone emulator simulator.

This comes in handy when you want to find out how your own website looks on an iPhone. Be aware of the fact that this simulator does not change your user agent. To do that you will need another plugin that allows you to switch the user-agent.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59

User-Agent info for the iPhone:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)

Online iPhone Simulator

Don’t want to install another firefox plugin? There’s a great alternative! You can simply go to http://www.testiphone.com/ and then browse to your own website or do whatever you want to do.

iPhone Emulator for Mac:

You can get a real emulator for MAC.
There’s an SDK (Software Development Kit) for the MAC that lets you emulate the iPhone for real.

What you can do is to install MAC OS X and then dual boot Windows Vista and Leopard. Boot Leopard, install the SDK and you can run your emulator. Because that is a lot of trouble to emulate an iPhone, there’s a great alternative

Download iPhone Emulator Torrent (MAC)

iPhone Emulator for Windows / PC

There’s a tool that allows you to really emulate the iPhone on Windows. There’s no need to install the iPhone SDK, although it would be pretty interesting! The tool I’m talking about can not only emulate the iPhone but also the Palm Pre.

Go to http://www.genuitec.com/mobile/ and download the emulator. Install it and start developing applications for the iPhone.

• iPhone emulator and development environment – no need for the iPhone SDK
• iPhone application development for Windows
• Palm Pre emulator and development environment
• Mobile Web development environment
• PhoneGap support for cross-device compatability
• Other popular smartphone emulators (coming soon)
• Blackberry Storm simulator (coming soon)
• Google G1 emulator (coming soon)

Note Mobione only works on Windows XP and Windows Vista not Windows 7!

Play iPhone Games Online

Don’t want to check your website on the Iphone or develop an iPhone application? If you want to play the iPhone games online, simply go to

http://www.ipfun.org/

The site is loaded with iPhone games that you can play online without downloading anything.

Unlock your iPhone 3G

To unlock your iPhone simply download RedSn0w 0.9 – it’s the best iPhone Unlocker that you will find anywhere. 100% working solution.

Download RedSn0w 0.9 – Unlock iPhone

Once the best tool to do that would come with your graphic drivers (if you had a NVidia graphic card).
Nowadays there are some better tools to do it.

DisplayFusion is one of them.

The free version does not offer as much as the pro does, but it’s enough to do some really fancy stuff.

Above, you can see my setup. All you have to do is to open your display properties to detect a 2nd monitor and select “Extend these displays”, after that simply do a right-click on the litte tray icon of Display Fusion and click on “Desktop Wallpaper”.

You are almost done, pick a wallpaper (load from) and set a size mode. Apply it and your wallpaper should now stretch over 2 screens. Easy, huh?

WindowBlinds is a program that enables Windows users to completely change the look and feel of Windows users interface. Users customize Windows by using visual styles (skins) created for WindowBlinds. With these skins, WindowsBlinds can change the look of titlebars, borders, buttons, taskbars, Start menu, progress animations, toolbar icons, Explorer views, and virtually every other part of Windows!

To use the very common .WBA format you will need WindowBlinds . For a cheap fee of $19 bucks you are getting a lot of content. By now there are whole sites that offer thousands of WindowBlinds themes. Let’s see what’s available out there.

Content

WindowBlinds is the most popular skinning tool that is available, therefore there are thousands of themes that are *exclusively* available for WindowBlinds.

There are many resources where you can find premium themes for WindowsBlinds:

- Customize.org

- Stardock’s Library 500+ Premium themes

- DeviantArt WindowBlinds themes

Most themes I would consider as premium, the quality is extraordinary high! A great community creates new and fresh themes 24/7.

Content: 10/10 Points (Big advantage here)

Installation / Usability

The installation is very easy and there is not much you have to do to install a theme. In WindowBlinds you only have to do two clicks to apply a theme, but if you try to apply a 3rd-party Windows theme it will usually be a lot more difficult and will require several tweaks before it will even work (e.g. patching the uxtheme.dll). Of course it’s more challenging to install a 3rdparty theme, but most of the time you will get better results using the easy WindowBlinds-method simply because there are so many great themes available and you can still fine-tune every detail!

Usability: 9 /10 points.

The latest WindowBlinds release is 6.3 by now:

WindowBlinds 6.x [CD]

Version 6.3 adds new layering effects to windows, faster performance, and texture options for skins.

Want to see 6.3 in action - click on image to enlarge

One of the real advantages of WindowBlinds is that you can style stuff your normally can’t. For example you can add background images to the Explorer, which would be nearly impossible without WindowBlinds.

Click on image to enlarge:

This is also a short review of SoundPackager from Stardock, which is a nice tool to manage your sound schemes in Vista or XP.

SoundPackager

Ultimate Extras

First I didn’t find any sound themes for vista at all, but I knew that Microsoft offers a few alternative sound schemes to Ultimate users. If you don’t have Ultimate, you can download them here:

Download: x86-Vista | x64-Vista

What are they like? Source: WinVistaClub

One is the Glass Sound Scheme, which makes the sound seem like they are made with glass instruments. The second is the Pearl Sound Scheme, which further extends the intentionally subtle design of the Vista default sound scheme with a richer, milky palate.

You will have to right-click on “UltSound.inf” and select “install” to add the sound scheme.

XP Users:

I’m sure that many here still use Windows XP, so I will first let you know that there is an easy way to get that vista sound scheme for XP, which might be a clear improvement. Simply use the following tool:

Vista to XP Sound Theme

How to apply a sound scheme

Alright, now back to Vista. I found a useful description how to apply a sound theme at microsoft.com

To apply a sound scheme

1. Open Audio Devices and Sound Themes by clicking the Start button Picture of the Start button, clicking Control Panel, clicking Hardware and Sound, and then clicking Sound.
2. Click the Sounds tab, and then, under Sound Scheme, select the sound scheme you want to use.

Sound Packager

Well, still no sound scheme! But then I stumbled on

SoundPackager

SoundPackacker is a little tool that was exactly created for tuning the sound appearance of your PC!
Stardock offers 13 pages(!!) of sound packages for that tool.

Actually, I was quite impressed how easy it was to add a soundpackage. All you have to do is to click on “Import” and locate that sound package you downloaded from one of their pages. After that click on “Apply” and you are set.

Preview of your sound scheme

Open the “control panel” and double-click on “Sound”. Under the tab “Sounds” you can now hear a preview of every sound assigned to a program event. In this example I chose the rock theme, so let’s rock!

You can now easily create your own sound scheme using all the sound themes from Stardock. Restoring the default theme is also much easier with this tool and requires only a single click.

I decided to grab this tool, because it’s pretty cheap (around 19 bucks) and very easy to manage your sound schemes. Rock on!

Initialize – partition – format!

Once you connected the hard drive and you boot the PC the HDD should be instantly recognized. Windows Vista will automatically install all the drivers. Now we have to initialize the disk, setup a partition and format it.

1. First of all open up your Explorer (Windows-Key + E)

2. Now on the left side find:

3. Do a right-click on it and click on “Manage”. A new window will open “Computer Management”.

4. Yep, you guessed right, select “Disk Management”:

5. You will see something like this:

A window should automatically come up saying that you first have to initialize the disk. Since Vista you can initialize disks as a GPT, which will be necessary in the near future. Scroll down to (6) if you want to read about the details later.

Ok, hold on! Why does it only show me 931.51GB ?

Some people will already know this, hardware vendors advertise their products with this formula in mind:

1 terabyte = 1000 gigabytes

The reality says:

1 terabyte = 1024 gigabytes

1000 GB = 931 GiB

Does it mean, they ripped me off?

Yes, actually it does! They are advertising it in a wrong way, but they do not intend to change that anytime soon.

So what the bloody hell is GPT ?

Quote from tomshardware.co.uk

GPT disks are new, and are readable only by Windows Server 2003 SP1, Windows Vista (all versions), and Windows XP x64 Edition. The GPT disk itself can support a volume up to 2^64 blocks in length. (For 512-byte blocks, this is 9.44 ZB – zettabytes. 1 ZB is 1 billion terabytes). It can also support theoretically unlimited partitions

I don’t want to imagine what you will need 9.44 ZB for, but hey the sky is the limit.

Because I was kind of curious and didn’t know the exact numbers I looked them up:

Facts

(I hope this is not too boring for you! If it is then skip this part):

- GPT disks support unlimited partitions, although Windows restricts this to 128 partitions

- Windows XP and the original release of Windows Server 2003 have a limit of 2TB per physical disk

- For Windows Server 2003 SP1 Windows XP x64 edition, and later versions, the maximum raw partition of 18 exabytes can be supported.

Limit: Windows file systems currently are limited to 256 terabytes

Source: Microsoft

Conclusion:

GPT disks will be needed soon, because they allow a greater disk space and more partitions.

For now just initialize the disk as MBR!

6. Do a right-click on the initialized disk and select “New Simple Volume”.

That’s how you can setup a new partition!

7. Follow the wizard and define a partition size, e.g. 500.000 MB

8. Define a free partition/drive letter:

9. Assign a drive name and allow file/folder compression. Also don’t forget to check “quick format”.

10. Once you try to access the disk (open the Explorer Windows-key+E and select the drive), it will remind you to format it before you can use it.

Wait, hold on for a minute! What is the allocation size?

Allocation Size:

Allocation size is also known as cluster size. It defines the smallest amount of space of a single file. Therfore a small size means more space and a large size less space:

A large allocation unit size can improve your disk performance, but will give you less available space. A low allocation unit size will give you more disk space, but less disk performance. If you have a lot of large files on your HDD a large cluster size is recommended. This might be the case if you are editing movies (e.g. if you are frapsing stuff regulary) or if you download a lot of big files. Actually, you can waste a lot of disk space if you have a big cluster size, therefore I would recommend a medium size.

11. You are done! Enjoy your new HDD. Little piece of advice: Create a system to save your files in specific folders in advance! It’s very common that one day you will get lost if you save your files in random folders.

Wait, I need help to connect the HDD!

If you need help with this, I suggest you to read this guide (includes pictures).

Overall it’s a very simple thing to do. Brief description: Connect the red S-ATA cable with the S-ATA connectors on your motherboard (read your motherboard manual for help on this) and connect the other end with your HDD. Then there should be a black power-cabel somewhere in your PC (*laughs*), which you will also have to connect with it. If it does not fit, then don’t force it to fit simply try another cable and it should work in the end.