Look ma, no textbooks

Students at an Arizona high school started class this year with no textbooks, and this wasn`t because of a funding crisis, reports Wired.

Instead, the school issued iBooks, laptop computers by Apple, to each of its 340 students, becoming one of the first US public schools to shun printed textbooks.

School officials believe the electronic materials will get the Empire High School students more engaged in learning.

Schools typically overlay computers onto their instruction "like frosting on the cake", says Calvin Baker, superintendent of the Vail Unified School District, which has 7 000 students.

"We decided that the real opportunity was to make the laptops the key ingredient of the cake ... to truly change the way that schools operated."

Melodeo, which makes peer-to-peer software that allows mobile users to listen to music on their cellphones, now offers software for podcasting on cellphones, CNET reports.

The new software, called Mobilcast, will allow people to find and download podcasts on mobile phones.

While podcasting has gained popularity over the past year, its distribution has been limited to PCs and music players.

Melodeo believes its software can expand the reach of podcasts to millions by allowing them to be downloaded on mobile phones.

"The mobile phone is the perfect tool for finding and listening to podcasts," says Don Davidge, senior VP of sales at Melodeo.

Google has released Blogger for Word, a free add-in, downloadable from the Web, that allows users of the Web log service Blogger to post directly to their sites from MS Word, reports Microsoft Watch.

Once the add-in is installed, three additional buttons appear on a user`s Word toolbar: Publish, Open Post and Save As Draft.

These allow users to publish new posts directly from the text document, open and edit their last 15 posts in Word, and save posts without publishing them.

In order to use the Blogger for Word add-in, users must have a free Blogger account, and be running MS Windows 2000 or higher and MS Word 2000 or higher.

"There are millions of people who live in Microsoft Word, especially people who write stuff for a living. What doesn`t make sense is that if you want your words to wind up on the Web, you have to trade this writing environment, and the tools you`re comfortable with, for a flaky text area," says Evan Williams, a founder of Pyra Labs.

Although generally known as a provider of open source development tools for Java, the Eclipse Foundation will release an upgrade to its C and C++ development tools platform, reports InfoWorld.

The organisation is making available the Eclipse C Development Toolkit 3.0.

Version 3.0 improves scalability, performance and extensibility for developers working on embedded systems and Linux environments.

The free Eclipse platform can provide a base of functionality for vendors who want to add their own specific functions in commercial products.