Borland Software announced Borland® Delphi™ 2005, previously codenamed “Diamondback” and the newest version of Borland’s Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment for Windows® and .NET applications. Delphi 2005 combines Win32, .NET, Delphi and C# support all within one environment, significantly advances developer and team productivity and integrates with Borland’s leading Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions.

Below are some of the most significant Delphi 2005 enhancements:
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Hyperlinks are the basic building blocks of the web. Almost any web page contains hyperlinks, and with the browser’s help the users can navigate the web by clicking on a link.

Most users use their mouse to find and click the hyperlinks, but most browsers also allowing users to use their keyboard to navigate the hyperlinks.

Pressing the TAB key on a web page jumps from one link to the next, and pressing the Enter key will trigger a hyperlink action which then takes the user to another page. This functionality is built in many browsers and used by many people.

In May 12, 2004 Microsoft filed for a patent (20040210830) called “Discoverability and navigation of hyperlinks via tabs” which does exactly that.

The patent abstract say “A user may discover and navigate among hyperlinks through the use of a keyboard. For example, a user may press a tab key to discover and navigate to a first hyperlink that is part of a hypertext document. The first hyperlink is, in response, given focus and a focus shape is drawn around the text or graphics for the hot region of the hyperlink. If the user again presses the tab key, the next hyperlink is given focus and a focus shape (i.e., an outline that surrounds the next hyperlink) is drawn around the next hyperlink. A user may also tab to a placeholder for an image in order to make a decision whether the image should be downloaded or not.”

If Microsoft gets this patent they can potentially ask all browsers manufacturers to pay license fees for this navigation feature, which is being widely used by almost all major browsers.

Yahoo has quietly purchased e-mail software company Stata Labs, in what could be an investment in a coming PC search tool to rival Google and Microsoft.

Stata Labs, a privately held company based in San Mateo, Calif., sells an e-mail application called Bloomba that lets people search message text and attachments. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo apparently bought the underlying technology of Stata Labs and does not intend to continue sales of Bloomba.

The acquisition comes only a week after Yahoo rival Google unveiled new technology that allows people to search data in e-mail, Word documents and Web pages. Microsoft also has designs to integrate desktop, e-mail and Web search from the operating system, and toward that end it recently bought a small e-mail search company called Lookup.

Yahoo executives have said previously that the company plans to introduce a desktop search tool.

Lycos is upping the amount of storage available to its free email subscribers to 300MB while those paying for its premier service will get a whopping 10GB. Subscribers pay £3.49 a month for 10GB storage. This beats Yahoo which offers 100MB and Hotmail which is still offering just 2MB, depsite promising an expanded service this summer. Google’s Gmail service offers 1GB.

Wessel van Rensburg, Lycos Email and Mobile Product Manager, said: “People’s use of data has changed considerably with the growth of digital media such as music and photography. The LYCOS UK FreeMail 300MB service means there is a free webmail product on the market with sufficient storage for medium email users to be able to share images and documents - something they would struggle to do on Hotmail’s paltry 2MB service.”

The service is branded the “Online Drive” - it can be synched with Outlook to make appointments, contacts and other documents available online from any computer.