I've been running TeamViewer as my go-to remote support app for a couple years now, and I don't see myself switching any time soon. It's fast, requires no configuration, and the additions of the Flash-based web viewer and partner list in version 4 were solid upgrades to an already good app.

Version 5 is now ready for beta testing, and it looks like Teamviewer is once again set for some solid new features and yet another boost in speed.

In addition to getting quicker, Teamviewer 5 now includes a major communications improvement. You're no longer limited to text-based chatting - v5 supports voice and video chat. Quality is good - about on par with Skype in my testing. It's still at the mercy of your ISP, of course, so the more bandwidth you have at your disposal, the better it will work.

Besides being a great app for remote support, Teamviewer evolved into an excellent screen-sharing and presentation tool in v4 and has just got even better with v5.

You can download the TeamViewer 5 beta right now and take it for a spin. As with previous releases, you can expect version 5 to be free for personal use, and there will be a portable version available as well.

If you're a fan of the AVI or xVid formats, you're out of luck with this release of Handbrake. These formats have been dropped in favor of pushing H.264. The good news is that you should now be able to rip DVDs in real time, or darn close. There's also a time-saving Live Preview option, so you can check the quality of your rips without waiting until they finish.

[via TUAW]

You may be more focused on picking up holiday gifts for friends, loved ones, and co-workers right now, but maybe it's time to treat yourself. If you're a PC gamer, you need to check out Steam's THQ pack.

It's loaded with excellent titles like Red Faction, Warhammer, and Company of Heroes - 18 titles in all. If you bought them separately, it'd run you just shy of $400. Right now, however, you can score the whole bundle for $49.99.

$2.77 per game? Come on, the energy drinks you down while staying awake for an all-night session will cost you more than that.

Don't want to shell out the fifty bones yourself? Email a subtle hint to your pals and maybe one of them will gift you the pack. Chances are good they'll end up buying for themselves, but you never know.

One thing about laptops that drives a lot of my customers nuts is the touchpad. If I had a nickel for every time someone brought a laptop in complaining that their mouse pointer suddenly jumped somewhere else on the screen and messed up their typing, I'd have at least $10.15.

Hey, I'm in a small town - that would nearly count as an epidemic.

TouchFreeze is a tiny, open source program designed to fix this problem once and for all. Once you install it, TouchFreeze sits your in your system tray and waits for you to begin typing. When you do, it temporarily disables input from your touchpad.

Be forewarned: TouchFreeze may not work with your laptop's touchpad. It worked on my two Acer test systems just fine, but certain brands may be a bit less cooperative.

You can download TouchFreeze over at Google Code.

[via Addictive Tips]

There's little to add to my glowing review of the Livescribe Pulse smartpen I wrote for TUAW last year. This is one of those gadgets that you show people and it looks like magic. It kinda is magic, I think. But this year's model introduces an app store for the pen (plus some nifty paper products), making it a desirable platform for anyone who takes their notes seriously.

Read my review for the hardware scoop; the newer models now have an improved cradle. You can now charge and keep your computer asleep, for example. The desktop software, which allows you to sort and annotate your notes (plus many other tricks covered in that earlier review for the Mac version of the software) is similarly the same but slightly upgraded. What matters is what's in the pen, since that's what you'll be using every day.

The pen runs Java applications specifically made *for* the Pulse smartpen. Now, earlier there had been some tech demos for 3D audio (the pen records in 3D, and it is very cool) and what amounted to built-in utility apps. Stuff like calculators and a simple piano that you draw and tap to play. Like Apple launching the iPhone with a limited set of pre-built applications, the Pulse had only a few "apps" but that was fine. The app store for the pen opens the doors to a huge variety of other applications, much like Apple's store does for its mobile platform.

The Livescribe Store also looks and feels nearly identical to Apple's -- at first. There's more than just apps here; there are paper products (you use special paper with the pen) and pens themselves. When you go to check out, you notice the lack of polish. Every purchase, even the free stuff, requires about three times as many clicks at it takes to buy something on the iTunes App Store. I'm not sure why people don't understand this seemingly obvious notion that consumers want to consume quickly. Especially for a pen, you know? But the entire store is a website, really, so perhaps app purchasing can be streamlined later. For now, it is catering to the physical side of the store by requiring shipping info with your orders.

With the aid of a tiny little program -- of the juicy, sub-100-kilobyte freeware variety -- you can get those cute little blinking-blue screens back onto your system tray in Windows 7.

In yet another case of inspired naming, Network Activity Indicator for Windows lets you re-attach the network activity indicator to your system tray. It's been sorely missed in both Vista and Windows 7 by many users, and now... you can have it back! Yay! No longer must you wonder if your router has crashed -- you can see it right there on your desktop!

I wish I had more to say, but... that's it really. You can set a blink duration (though it doesn't seem to make much difference), and you can tell it to load at startup... and that's it. Quick and simple, just how I like my, er, apps.

Visit the site, if you really need more information -- or download it directly (57KB).

Opera have released version 10 of their browser, now with Opera Unite and Opera Turbo included.

Opera Unite gives your web browser the ability to deliver content as well as consume it. The standard download includes a number of Unite applications, with more available for download from the application directory. The bundled applications include a file sharing server that allows you to make files available to the world (as well as allowing the world to upload content to your machine), a virtual fridge door for you to share notes with friends and family (pictured), a media player that allows you to play content from your Unite equipped machine remotely, an instant messaging server, a photo sharing application and a web server for serving your own web content.

The inclusion of Opera Turbo in the new browser marks the migration to the desktop of a technology that has long been a key feature of Opera's Mini product. Opera Turbo speeds up your browsing session by compressing content at Opera proxy servers before delivering it to your machine - particularly useful for those on low bandwidth connections.

Opera 10.10 is available free from www.opera.com for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

We're intrigued to hear what you, our lovely readers, think about Opera's advancements. They have an excellent, solid browser base and some truly unique additional features... are you tempted to make the switch?

Gladinet is an excellent way to plug your Windows desktop in to a number of cloud storage providers - like Amazon, SkyDrive, Google Docs - as well as your own FTP and WebDAV servers. They also recently added a nifty cloud-to-cloud backup feature.

In the update to version 1.4, Gladinet has built in the ability to selectively back up specific file types to your remote storage. Want to make sure you have a current set of your local files at the ready on Google Docs? Maybe zip all your photos up to LiveDrive? It's a breeze in the new version.

From your system tray, just right-click the Gladinet icon and choose backup my files online, and in addition to folder and Google Docs backups you can now select Documents/Photos/Videos/Music as options.

Pick one, and Gladinet quickly scours your hard drive for the appropriate files. You can exclude anything you want - for example, stray .GIF images that might be selected by default.

The new task options make backing up your most essential personal files a breeze.

If you're a believer in the cloud, Gladinet is a must-have free download and the pro version is well worth a look at $39.99 (home) or $59.99 (commercial).

John Haller is pretty well-known in software circles - he's the guy behind PoartableApps.com. What you may not have known is that he's a big Billy Mays fan. And like a lot of Billy Mays fans, John was a little misty when Billy shuffled off this mortal coil earlier this year.

What better way for a coder to commemorate a fallen icon than with an awesome app? Enter BILLY MAYS CAPS LOCK!

While it won't make your whites whiter or fix the broken handle of your coffee mug, it is one of the greatest remedies I've ever found for computer-induced boredom. Need a quick, random jolt to break you out of your ennui? Hit your caps lock key, and virtual Billy Mays will chime in with one of his trademark catch phrases.

It's probably worth noting that the app does override your caps lock's real functionality, but only overexcited douchebags on Twitter use it anyway, right? Haller does build in shift + caps lock as a workaround in case you do need to enable cruise control for awesome.

HERE'S HOW TO ORDER:

Sorry, I got caught up in the moment there. It's a free download and is available as an installer or in PortableApps format - so you can take Billy with you and fire him up wherever you've got Windows and a CAPS LOCK key.

Microsoft has finally made downloads of Office 2010 beta available, for both Windows on your desktop and Windows Mobile 6.5. Project 2010, Visio 2010, and SharePoint Server 2010 are also available on the Office 2010 download page, and you can get the mobile version of Office via the Windows Mobile Marketplace. Microsoft says the portal for all things 2010 is http://www.microsoft.com/2010/, but the first live download links I've found are right here.

Because we apparently need social networking in every app these days, one of the things Microsoft is pushing about Office 2010 is the new Social Connector, which "brings communications history, business collaboration and social network feeds directly into Outlook, with support for Windows Live and SharePoint Server." LinkedIn has been announced as the first social network that will plug in to this new feature.

More on Office 2010 soon, as Microsoft is getting ready to demo it at their Professional Developers' Conference as I write this. Happy downloading!

Adobe has done a lot to improve Reader in recent versions. I'm more than happy to run an open source alternative, however. Sumatra PDF is ridiculously small (a 1.2Mb download), lightweight, and handles the PDFs I throw at it without skipping a beat.

Today, Sumatra has finally hit version 1.0. Sumatra's a pretty bare-bones application, so don't expect any mind-blowing changes. What the new update boils down to is better compatibility, bug fixes, and performance tweaks.

Installed, Sumatra barely makes a dent in your drive space (not that you're counting at a few cents per gig), and it's very light on memory usage as well. The 277-page ebook I've got open is using just under 20Mb.

There's also a portable version available - an excellent way to make sure you've got a slim, speedy PDF reader with you wherever you take your flash drive. Both the installer and zip file are available for download from the author's site.

Seesmic sure picked a weird time to announce a new Windows-native Twitter client. It's one of the most popular clients running on Adobe's cross-platform AIR platform, which just hit version 2.0. AIR was everyone's biggest complaint about Seesmic, so it makes sense that they'd want to ditch AIR on at least one OS. Creating a native app also allows for drag-and-drop Twitter list management and plug-ins for various third-party Twitter services.

Plugins so far include the user recommendation service MrTweet and the index of popular links, Tweetmeme. Other Twitter-like services will also be able to integrate with Seesmic through the new service. This doesn't necessarily mean the end of development for the AIR version of Seesmic, unless they come out with a native Mac client too. The Mac Twitter space already has a lot of great apps, though, so I'm not sure that'll happen.

To get beta access to the new Windows client, you'll have to sign up for Team Seesmic.