Keeping an eye on stylish
gear and technology.

Here it is, Microsoft’s first ad for the shiny, black Xbox 360 Elite. It’ll tell you that it’s black, features HDMI and 120 GB of storage and that it’s.. uuh.. black.

More on ‘Xbox 360′

(Via Kotaku)

Here’s Microsoft / Razer Reclusa, a pitch-black keyboard designed specifically for gaming. Among the features we find Razer Hyperesponse Gaming Key Action put in place to reduce the dreadful key latency, blue LED backlit keys for late night sessions, two 360° jog-dials, six programmable gaming hot keys, gold-plated USB ports and a detachable and padded wrist rest.

I4U did a full review of the Reclusa and found it pretty appealing (7.5/10), while reporting on some issues - could be worth a read if you’re about to buy one.

Microsoft.com: Reclusa Product Page
Amazon.com: Microsoft Reclusa ($69.95)

I wrote about Barbarian Software’s Magnetosphere earlier and claimed that it was one of the most beautiful audio visualizations I’ve seen ever (see the original video here). Now (finally!) they’ve managed to convert it into a free, interactive and absolutely stunning Mac / Windows iTunes Visualizer.

Barbarian Software: Magnetosphere iTunes Visualizer (Mac, Windows)

Check out a video of it in action after the jump:

(more…)

Version 2.0 of the free e-mail client Mozilla Thunderbird is now available to the general public.

As usual it’s available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and the new features include:

• Advanced folder views (different ways of organizing and display your folders)
• Message tagging (tags that can be combined with saved searches)
• Message history navigation
• Improved search (including a quick search that starts searching as you type)
• Saved searches
• Improved “You’ve-got-mail!”-alerts
• Phishing protection and improved privacy features
• Easy access to popular web mail services (Gmail, .Mac etc)

… and much more. Read more about the new features here.

Mozilla.com: Download Thunderbird

Adobe presented the Adobe Media Player (formerly code-named “Philo”) at the NAB 2007 conference in Las Vegas today - a desktop media player designed to stream, download, manage, queue and play Flash video. This application skips the whole idea of storing the media locally and uses RSS and other feeds to help you find on-line media to watch or subscribe to (no more pesky web browsers between you and the media). If you want to you’ll still be able to store some media locally for later off-line watching as well.

Adobe Media Player will be available for both Windows and Mac with support for Linux to follow.

Adobe Labs: Media Player

Microsoft just announced their new browser plug-in Silverlight (formerly known as WPF/E to developers) in Las vegas. This plug-in is obviously designed to compete with Flash in the areas of video, interactivity, animation and other rich media experiences on the web but this puppy is High Definition-ready right from the start.

Also, the plug-in won’t be exclusive to Windows and Internet Explorer, it’ll be available for Safari (Mac) and Firefox as well.

Microsoft.com: Silverlight
SeattlePi.com: Big names back Microsoft’s Silverlight browser plug-in

Update: So what does the Adobe CEO think of Microsoft Silverlight?

“Even though they say Silverlight is going to be cross-platform, and maybe the first [version] will be, I’m not sure our customers or the people that are trying to deliver that content will have the degree of confidence that if they go with Microsoft, they’ll be able to provide them with a complete cross-platform solution forever,” he said.

(Via On10)

According to the Japanese website Famitsu Capcom and Nvidia just announced that Lost Planet: Extreme Condition will be available for PC gamers as well in June 2007.

Apparently it’ll feature improved visuals through DirectX 10, which might render it a Windows Vista exclusive (check out this DirectX 9 vs 10 comparison while you’re at it).

Read

The Windows, Linux, Mac, cell-phone and Wii-running web browser Opera has been updated to version 9.2 and one of the new features in this version (except that it’s now available in 31 languages) is the Speed Dial function.

When you open a new tab you’re presented with nine empty slots instead of the usual blank page. In these slots you can put quick-links (along with automatic thumbnails) to the websites you visit the most. Later you can either click on the thumbnails to navigate or just press ctrl/apple-1-9 to jump right away - it’s actually very usable as soon as you remember the numbers.

www.opera.com

Good news Guitar Hero-fans, the guys over at Joystiq tried connecting the USB-guitar bundled with the Xbox 360 version of Guitar Hero II to a Windows-running PC and after a little software calibrating here and there they actually got it to work.

Since there’s no Windows version of Guitar Hero they tried using it with the freeware clone Frets on Fire and apparently that worked like a charm.

Read

The multi-protocol instant messaging client Gaim is from now on known as Pidgin after legal issues with AOL (the same company that made them switch names two times before as well).

If you wonder what a Pidgin is Wikipedia says:

“A pidgin, or contact language, is the name given to any language created, usually spontaneously, out of two or more languages as a means of communication between speakers of different tongues, and usually a simplified form of one of the languages. Pidgins have simplified grammars and few synonyms, serving as auxiliary contact languages. They are learned as second languages rather than natively.”

Gaim.. sorry, Pidgin, is a sweet piece of free software running on Linux, BSD, MacOS X and Windows which can connect to multiple AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus Sametime, and Zephyr accounts at the same time. Try it if you haven’t already - the 2.0 version will be released sometime this week.

www.pidgin.im