If you have ever built an HTPC, chances are that you have come across XBMC- one of the best ways to playback movies from your PC. XMBC has been in that space for a very long and the way it works is that it looks at your media folder and scrapes information of movies present in it such as posters, actors, fan art and synoposis.

The new version, as described by the team that makes the app, includes Addon Rollbacks, vast improvements in Confluence (the default skin), massive speed increases via features like Dirty-region rendering and the new JPEG decoder, a simpler, better library, movie set scraping, additional protocol handling, better networking support, better handling of unencrypted BluRay content and structures, adjustable display refresh rate in OSX (to match the already available feature in Windows and Linux), AirPlay support, an upgraded weather service with geoip lookup, and much, much more. Check out the highlights in the summarized changelog.

You can download this latest release from here.

Adobe has gone ahead and released a beta version of their super-popular photo-editing application. Moving up from SC5.5, Photoshop CS6 beta is available for downloading for free on both the Mac and the PC and brings with it a redesigned UI as well as over 65 features. New features include a new crop tool, ability to search for specific layers and auto-saving of projects in the background. We’ll publish a nads-on preview some time next week as wel get more time to play with it, but here is the official press release.

First Major Release Since April 2010 Packed with New Features and Huge Performance Enhancements
SAN JOSE, Calif., – March 22, 2012 – Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced Adobe® Photoshop® CS6 beta, a preview of what’s to come in the next release of the industry standard in digital imaging, is available as a free download from Adobe Labs. Customers can download the beta, try out the experience and provide feedback to the product team. Packed with groundbreaking new innovations, features and incredible performance enhancements, Photoshop CS6 beta is available for the Mac OS and Microsoft® Windows® platforms. The final release is expected in the first half of 2012.

“Photoshop CS6 will be a milestone release that pushes the boundaries of imaging innovation with incredible speed and performance,” said Winston Hendrickson, vice president products, Creative Media Solutions, Adobe. “We couldn’t wait to share this beta of Photoshop CS6 with our customers and are looking forward to hearing from them and seeing the ways they are incorporating the beta into their daily creative workflows.”

New Features in Photoshop CS6 Beta
Photoshop CS6 beta demonstrates Adobe’s focus on huge performance enhancements, imaging magic and creativity tools that offer customers a new experience in digital imaging. Key features include new additions to the Content-Aware tools: Content-Aware Patch allows greater control by letting users select and duplicate an area of an image to fill in or “patch” another. Content-Aware Move lets users select and magically move an object to a new place in the image.

Customers will experience incredible performance, powered by the new Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine*, enabling near-instant results from popular editing tools including Liquify, Puppet Warp, Transform and Lighting Effects; and a refined, modern interface featuring dark UI options to make images pop. New and re-engineered design tools make creating designs faster and more efficient. Vector layers allow users to apply dashed lines and gradient strokes, searchable layers help quickly zero in on any layer you need, and new type styles let designers quickly apply type treatments to their designs.

In addition, the Photoshop CS6 beta offers all the features of Adobe Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Photoshop CS6 Extended, such as new 3D editing features and quantitative imaging analysis capabilities. These features will be included in the shipping version of Photoshop CS6 Extended when it becomes available.

Pricing and Availability
The Photoshop CS6 beta is available immediately as a free download in English and Japanese. At installation, users will be required to provide an Adobe ID to complete a one-time login and online product activation. For information on how to install Photoshop CS6 beta visit . Customers can submit feedback via the Photoshop CS6 beta forum: http://www.adobe.com/go/pscs6_forum. Users can also connect with the Photoshop team via the community-powered site: http://feedback.photoshop.com; on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Photoshop; YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/photoshop; Photoshop.com blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/photoshopdotcom/; or via Twitter: http://twitter.com/photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop Family
Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Extended are at the heart of the Photoshop family, joined by solutions for users at every level who want to bring out the best in their digital images either at home, in the office or on the go. Coupled with Adobe Photoshop, the recently released Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 addresses the workflow needs of amateur and professional photographers, helping them create, manage and showcase images in impactful ways. Adobe Photoshop Elements provides consumers with powerful yet easy-to-use tools that organize, edit, create and share photos memories. For mobile devices, the Adobe Photoshop Touch app transforms images with core Photoshop features custom-built for tablets; and Photoshop Express is a free app for simple photo fixes and enhancements, and sharing to social networks.

The long awaited Tbreak Developers Conference starts off today at 10am.  The agenda for Day 1 of TDC is as follows:

- 9am: Welcome and on-site registrations
- 10am – 10:05am: “Introducing the Tbreak Developer Awards”, Abbas Jaffar Ali, Publisher, Tbreak Media
- 10.05am – 10.15am: “Opportunities with Nokia Store and business models”, Praveen Prabhakaran, Head of EDX, Middle East, Nokia
- 10.15am – 10.25am: Blackberry Keynote
- 10.25am – 10.35am: Google Keynote
- 10.35am – 10.45am: Qualcomm Keynote
- 11am – 12pm: Discussion Panels
- 12pm – 12:30pm: Developers Choice Awards
- 12.30pm – 1.15pm: Lunch Break
- 1.15pm – 5pm: Classroom Sessions

The whole day is jam packed with interesting panels and informative classes from some of the leading experts in the industry. In case you haven’t registered and think you can make it down to the Knowledge Village Auditorium, head on down there as we’re also accepting on-site registrations. Today’s highlights, apart from the Developer Awards, will include the keynotes from Nokia, RIM, Qualcomm and Google.

Do you remember last year when Razer showed off their amazing Switchblade concept laptop during CES ’11? The same concept of touch based keys which change according to the game being played has carried over into the new Razer SWTOR keyboard and the Razer Blade gaming laptop, both of which have yet to come out. The Razer Switchblade itself is probably lost in concept PC peripherals history at this point.

What if we tell you German peripheral maker ROCCAT beat Razer to the punch and has created an iOS App that does pretty much all the Switchblade’s customizable keys did? For free no less! Say hello to the ROCCAT Power-Grid application.

The Power-Grid is an app that basically syncs up to your PC over WiFi and provides some extremely useful features. First off all of your external communication through 3rd party programs like Skype, Facebook, TeamSpeak, etc. all go onto the ‘Incoming Center’ grid of the app. Think of it like a rolling Twitter feed with inputs from multiple social media communications. You can type on the iPhone directly to communicate with your friends, while gaming on your PC remains uninterrupted.

Secondly there’s the ‘Stats Control’ grid which shows you your computer’s stats, such as CPU and RAM usage, HDD available space, Network usage, etc.

Third, there’s the ‘Sound Control’ grid, whereby you can set in-game audio settings as well as those programs outside of the game, like Skype, Windows Media Player, etc.

Last, but not least, is the most exciting feature of Power-Grid, that draws many similarities to Razer’s Switchblade: the ‘Custom Tab’ grid. This is where you can create custom macros and commands for different games to be used in-game in addition to your keyboard. Think of it like additional customizable macro keys for each of your games. Of course, many keyboards come with customizable macro keys, but how many of them change their icons on the keyboard itself?

Roccat will, of course, be releasing a keyboard by the end of the year, called ‘Phobo’. Basically the Project Phobo will have a built-in area where you can insert your iPhone and use Power-Grid in tandem with the keyboard. You can use the keyboard itself to communicate using Power-Grid, while it also charges your smartphone.

Of course, for those who don’t want to upgrade their existing keyboards can use the upcoming Apuri 2.0 USB hub, that will set your smartphone at an inclined angle.

While both the Phobo and Apuri 2.0 will be out towards the end of the year, people who want to try out the Power-Grid app right now on their iOS devices can apply for the beta. Android owners will have to wait a good number of months until Gamescon later in the year.

When VLC was originally launched back in February 2001, not many people expected it to become one of the most used video players on the internet. VLC’s popularity was born from the fact that it required minimal system resources, played almost every format available on the internet, and most importantly, it was free. After many betas and testing, the official version 1.0 was released in July 2009. Now, 12 years after the original release, we’ll be getting the long awaited version 2.0 due out this week.

Apart from the slick black interface, one of the major new updates to VLC 2.0 is Blu-ray playback support. Furthermore, multiple files within RAR archives are also supported. The whole user experience is also more streamlined now, with Playlists and Video Outputs merged into one window. Mac OSX will now have native full screen support as well. Finally, the lua framework support means users can fetch file information and subtitles from the internet. The best part is that it will also be ported over to the Android and iOS platforms.

If you want to go through the exhaustive list of changes, check out official change log here. Otherwise keep checking out the official VLC site to get v2.0 that should be out any day now.

According to the guys over at StatCounter, their latest global report on web browser usage shows that for the first time ever, Google’s Chrome browser has overtaken Mozilla’s Firefox. Though both browsers still don’t hold the position of top dog, an honour reserved for Internet Explorer for now, it still marks a milestone in the growth of Chrome.

The stats go on to show that during November, google’s market share went up to 25.7% a rather large number considering that back in 2009 chrome only had 4.66% of the market. Firefox raked in 25.2% for november while both browsers were dwarfed by Internet Explorer who boasted a comfortable 40.6%.

Engadget goes on to show that Chrome seems to be the only browser experiencing such drastic growth with both IE and firefox seeing their numbers dwindling.

BlueStacks have released their Android app players which allows you to run Android apps in a virtual environment on PC in full screen. This software for Windows, comes preloaded with many android apps and you can install more via their service. There is also BlueStacks Cloud connect app on Android market which will allow you to push your mobile apps to your PC so that you can run those apps and games on the big screen too.

Since the virtual environment runs like Google Android emulator, so you will get 100% of same results as on android phone but controls would suffer as most of the apps are made for touch screen and using a mouse and keyboard may not feel just as easy. But the app does support multi-sense touchpads of laptops so that may feel a tad bit better.

Although this software may not be ideal for news or software apps, as PC has alternate of those already. But it does come in handy for exclusive apps and especially games that are released only on android.

Download Android app player @ BlueStacks official site

Eset is one of the biggest names in the antivirus industry, and no trip to GITEX would be complete without checking out their latest offering. Today we talk with Mr. Aji Joseph about some of the latest features in Eset Smart Security 5 and also their new antivirus for the Android platform that provides some very smart anti-theft features too.

During GITEX 2011 we got an in-depth demonstration of the new Control Panel that Kaspersky has introduced in their 2012 antivirus software, launched at GITEX. The new Control Panel gives users a complete overview of their system with multiple layers of security and analysis that they can then use to dig in deeper and fix problems, as well as customize how the antivirus behaves on a daily basis.

uTorrent has become an industry standard for downloading torrents of the internet. Its small size, clean interface and no non-sense features do attract lot of users. But now uTorrent aims to brings you all those extra additions to their basic version and ask you money for using this “PLUS” version.

But what features will be there in uTorrent Plus that will make you pay around $25 when it launches? Check out the list of those additional paid features below:

• Drag-and-drop file conversion for transcoding files and then transferring them to other device. The list of supported device profiles right now is: iPod/iPhone, Apple TV/iPad, Xbox 360 and PS3. But you can expect more devices (default profiles) to be added later.
• A built-in media player.
• Remote file transfers.
• Customer support.
• Antivirus protection provided by Bitdefender.

The software has entered alpha stage and is being tested for a near future beta and final release. But real question is that are these features really enough for you to pay out extra for a software that does its main job well and for free? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Disclaimer: tbreak media doesn’t support using torrents or other p2p software for downloading illegal or copyright files.