Windows, Mac, Linux and even Firefox offer more now than ever before in terms of software pre-installed and ready to make your life easier and the experience on a computer better. While each newer version offers more, sometimes it’s not enough to really make your computer experience as smooth or fulfilling as it could be. Here’s 20 apps you probably never heard of that will help make using your computer more efficient, fun and better.
Sapiens (Mac) – Probably the most intuitive apple launcher I’ve ever used, Sapiens is accessed from either a circular motion from your mouse / touchpad or a keyboard shortcut and actually learns which programs you use the most and anticipates what you’ll need. Sadly, it’s still not working with 10.6.
SuperDuper! (Mac) – The easiest way I’ve ever cloned a hard drive, ever. Want to upgrade to a larger hard drive in your Mac, get SuperDuper, connect the new hard drive via an SATA to USB adapter, run it. Pull the existing hard drive and replace with the new one and turn the power on. Brilliant!
PixelStick (Mac) – If you do web design or web graphics, PixelStick is an amazing little app to measure distance and angles on the screen. I can’t tell you how often I use this for laying out sites, creating banner ads and doing alignments of web graphics.
Paparazzi!(Mac) - A small and unobtrusive app for taking screenshots of web pages.
XXCLONE (Windows) – The Windows version of SuperDuper! and it does an excellent job of cloning hard drives.
CutePDF (Windows) – Create PDF files from any printable document, for free!
EASEUS Partition Master (Windows) – Create partitions, resize, format and merge on nearly all Windows platforms, for free!
SpinRite (Windows) – Hard drives aren’t perfect, when you need to do maintenance on them or recover data, SpinRite can help.
PhotoRec (Windows / Mac / Linux) – If you’ve ever formatted the memory card in your digital camera by accident, PhotoRec will be worth it’s weight in gold. Best photo recovery tool ever, and it’s free!
DVD Flick (Windows) – Convert nearly any video file into a playable DVD.
Mac The Ripper (Mac) – Quickly and easily rip any DVD movie to your hard drive. This application is great if you travel a lot and need to extend the battery life between charges. Using your built in DVD slot consumes far more battery juice compared to playing a movie from your hard drive.
HandBrake(Mac / Windows / Linux) - An open source video transcoder for all platforms, you can now extract video or audio or both from any video source and convert it into nearly any other source.
Vixy (Mac / Windows) – Vixy is an online service to rip YouTube videos to your hard drive, but the site can be somewhat unstable due to high traffic. To resolve this problem they’ve released the desktop app. Still in Beta with a few quirks, the options to save as .avi, .mov or just extract the audio as .mp3 are nice.
Pidgin (Mac / Windows / Linux) – Possibly one of the best chat clients available that loads nearly all formats of chat available, from AIM to Gtalk, Facebook to Yahoo.
FireBug (Firefox) An add-on for Firefox, FireBug is essential for anyone who does web design to quickly and efficiently track down errors with web page development.
SciTE (Windows) – Based on the Scintilla text editor, SciTE has extensions built in. This is hands down one of the best text editors available, and it’s free!
Audacity(Mac) – Going further than GarageBand, Audacity gives you a level of fine tuning and editing that is second to none. This open-source project is also free!
FireFTP(Firefox) – If you need to FTP data, chances are you probably already have a web browser open, so why not do it right in Firefox? FireFTP is a small add-on that is simple to use and provide rock solid stability.
Keyfinder (Windows) – This tiny little app does one thing, sniffs out the product key of nearly any version of Windows. Very helpful when you need to reinstall the operating system but the sticker has been scratched or worn off the case.
Foxit (Windows / Linux / Firefox) – Simply the fastest PDF reader I’ve ever used, period. Uninstall Acrobat reader and install this free PDF reader, period.
In this article we wish to supply you with 8 ways to simplify your home network. These solutions are readily available and easily implemented on any home network. The basic goal is to reduce and remove the total number of wires and gadgets used on a desk or in your home office to make it a more productive environment.
Since the goal is to help remove cables and clutter, the first and most obvious step is to use a Wireless Keyboard and Mouse (KVM). These come in a wide range of colors, layouts and styles to fit just about everyone’s needs.
Most homes now have more than one computer and a need often arises to share files between them. The fastest and most efficient way to both backup data that is accessible to all users on the network and share content is with a network hard drive. The My Book World Edition by Western Digital is a great choice, easy to configure and is very flexible to fit just about all needs. A full tutorial on how to back-up files can be found here.
If your desk has more than one computer on it, it’s pretty silly to use separate keyboards, monitors and mice, especially when the IOGEAR KVMP will reduce the number of peripherals on your desk. This an advanced KVM that also allows sharing of HDMI and USB devices, so it’s much more expandable, while removing duplicate input devices from one’s desk.
Most computers come with enough USB ports to fill the need of anyone, but sometimes certain USB powered devices are just a bit too far away to neatly and cleanly run a cable. Not only does this look bad, it also opens up the possibilities to snag it, trip on it or have it pinched along the path. A wireless USB hub from IOGEAR is a simple solution to eliminate the wires and get four open ports anywhere you may need them, up to 30 feet away from the computer.
Cords are simply a part of computers and accessories; sadly we can’t eliminate all of them. Power cords are the most common ones, but using a cord organizer from 3M will allow you to secure them under your desk, run them down a leg and neatly to the power outlet on your wall. Not only does hiding the cables have a cleaner look, it greatly reduces the chances of accidentally kicking one loose while working.
Part of the clutter in most home offices and desks is a stack of paperwork and bills that tend to build up. Reduce and eliminate this stack with a Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner. This compact document scanner duplex scans and outputs directly into PDFs, allowing you to transform your former paper cluttered home office into a paperless, searchable workflow fast and efficiently. Combine this with the network hard drive for backing data up and you can fast and easily keep two copies of important data, easily found using the search function on your computer (Windows or Mac).
From the time I was a kid until about 10 years ago, I remember my Mom always having a calculator, sticky notes and other assorted office supplied cluttering up her desk. There are electronic ways to simplify your desk and home network that can replace many of these items. In both Windows Vista and Mac osX, sticky notes and calculators come standard in either the Side Bar on Windows and the Dashboard on Macs, use them! They are put there to replace clutter on the desktop. I’ve found it far more useful to use the calculator on my computer than open up my desk drawer and fish for one, or have yet another power cable on my desktop. Additionally, Google has done such a great job with their Documents that I keep notes for myself online, easily accessible from any computer that has an Internet connection for me.
Most home networks never start out being cluttered and messy; they are a result of poor planning or constant add-ons to expand needs. This has always been the nature of computers, home offices too. Taking a step back, evaluating your current situation and making some smart investments will not only clean up the cluttered mess you stare at daily, it will also help you be more productive.
Finally, a reward for having a messy, out of control computer desk or Home Theater setup in your home. IOGEAR is running a fantastic give away that will help you get your rat’s nest of a cable pile-up under control with their award winning prizes.
We’ve all been there, doing an un-boxing of shiny new tech gadgets, so excited to get them plugged in and hooked up that the cables just get thrown everywhere, only to add more stuff to the pile as the weeks go on, never making time to organize and put into order the slew of cables connecting everything.
The unsightly ball of cables under your computer desk or draping between your TV and components not only looks bad; it makes tracking down problems or doing upgrades very difficult. IOGEAR has a great line of products to help reduce and eliminate these cluttered cables and are giving them away to your un-organized, messy self!
The contest is easy. Take a photo of your current setup and describe how these IOGEAR products would help improve your quality of life.
First place is the Wireless USB to VGA Kit (valued at $209.95) that allows you to connect your laptop to your monitor (or TV) with no cables. Hello streaming Internet media made easy!
Second place is a USB Laptop KVM Switch (valued at $99.95) that will allow you to connect your laptop or netbook with your desktop computer and transfer files seamlessly. Great for netbook users who want to use a larger screen or need to move files off their smaller hard drives.
Third place is IOGEAR’s Wireless Desktop Keyboard and Mouse (valued at $59.95) – a no brainer for eliminating cables from any desktop. The sleek keyboard features hotkeys for launching specific applications and the mouse comes with a charging cradle.
Get the full details and submit your photos on the IOGEAR blog here. Hurry, the deadline is April 30, 2009.
I adore WordPress, so much so that I use it to design websites that don’t even require a blog, just solely based on the CMS, ease of installation and abundant supply of options and plugins available for it. With all that being said, now and again I run into an issue with some stupid coding somewhere along the lines that won’t let me do exactly what I want. Today I ran into a problem implementing a plugin that would allow me to place a Google Maps map onto a client’s website. Google is nice enough to give the code out to hard code their maps into any site, but it requires the iframe tag which does not play nicely in WordPress.
After 10 minutes of searching the web and three more failed map plugins, it dawned on me that this was really stupid, I should be able to use whatever HTML code I want in WordPress, including the iframe tag. This is how I found the EmbedIt Plugin. According to their site, EmbedIt is a,
simple plugin that allows you to embed any html code in a post, deciding precisely where to embed it, allowing you freedom of coding your html without being annoyed by the wysiwyg editor.
embed Youtube videos into wordpress
embed ustream into wordpress
embed a custom Google Map into wordpress
embed whatever html code into wordpress
embed specific Adsense code into wordpress posts deciding WHERE it should go inside an article
The appeal to this plugin is that it will allow anyone to use any code they want without a funky plugin or breaking the framework in their WordPress theme. EmbedIt utilizes the custom field in WordPress and is fully documented with screenshots on the official page.
My only complaint about this plugin is that you must submit a valid email address which grants the publisher of this plugin to send you an email now and again about new WP plugins he is working on. I got the email instantly which has the link to download, but I still don’t like it. I fully understand people take time to create these free plugins and never really get a lot of credit, but I think he’d be better off allowing free downloads and putting a Paypal donate button on his page instead of collecting email addresses.
Less than a week after iGoogle had a facelift for the worse, die-hard users have started to revolt. Like myself, many other users have complained about the shift of tabs from the top to the left, the lack of support for what were fully functioning apps and the total lack in ability to go back to the old version. A quick twitter search for iGoogle and hate shows that this is still a very hot topic and most are not a fan of the changes.
Going one step further, there has been an online petition started asking Google to roll back changes, or at the very least, an option to roll back changes. Seems that when software or application vendors make changes without full market research, users will stand on their soap boxes and let everyone know how much they dislike them.
My start page of choice is iGoogle, which was reviewed here earlier in the year. I’ve been using iGoogle since it was released and didn’t even have a real name, and loved it. My love changed about 10 minutes ago when Google did an update to the page, changing the pleasing top navigation for tabbed pages to left sidebar navigation with a + / – button to see the site feeds in text format, but not recent articles. Take a look:
That’s how my iGoogle page looks currently. Sadly, the tabbed names are now cut-off, the last one should read Photography / Art, it doesn’t. Furthermore, this new sidebar eats up 128 pixels of space. Reading article titles when the + is expanded is a joke and it’s now wasted space. I’m angry, real angry. This sucks. Google, give me my horizontal tab navigation back!
The only attractive thing to the new update is the rounded edges, which is so 2006 already.
Update: It seems the real purpose for this update is to integrate Google Reader with iGoogle and, possibly, become your bookmarks portion instead of storing them in your browser. Seems if you click the blog name from the left side, the content from the RSS feed loads, as seen here:
Here’s the other really crappy part, Google has added in content to my tabs that I didn’t have there before! I never had moviesor The New York Times in my iGoogle, now I have to go through and edit their crap out, Google, I hope you are listening because I’m loosing my trust.
From a user perspective, it’s not terrible I suppose, but I still would much rather read an article on the original website than a stand alone reader which is why I never used Google Reader. From a blogger’s perspective, this is horrible. If you choose to publish your whole RSS feed, you have now have potentially lost unique visitors to your site, they can read it all right here in iGoogle. Additionally, .htaccess pages used to help prevent people from hotlinking graphics means that your article that has photos in it won’t display properly, as is the case now with my blog.
As a blogger, I need to seriously consider if I want to continue to publish full articles via my RSS feed or just snippets and have the reader come to my site to read it all. What’s more fair? What serves the reader the best? As a reader, what’s better for you?
Yesterday friend and fellow blogger Daniel Scocco posted the 16th part in a series about generating website traffic, Promoting your content on social networking sites. Outside of Twitter, Daniel admits he doesn’t do much in the form of utilizing social networking or media sites to drive traffic to his site, but I have. Leaving a comment in the article about my experience with MySpace specifically spawned a conversation of sorts in the comments of the article.
There is some validity to using MySpace as a way to generate traffic to your site, but as I explained in the comments of Daniel’s site, it’s very short lived, but a nice spike when it happens. The drawback however is time, it simply takes a lot of time to make blog posts on MySpace linking back to your own blog’s article, same goes for bulletins. Being the wonderful thing that is the Internet, I set out to find a way to have WordPress automate this for me, and that is what this review is about.
A very short and quick search on Google led me to the MySpace Crossposter v2.0a plugin for WordPress. It is almost totally what I was looking for. As described on their site,
The WordPress to MySpace Auto Crossposter is a WordPress plugin that publishes all of your WordPress blog entries to your MySpace blog at the time of publication. This allows you to publish as usual on your WordPress blog, but to also capture and retain your MySpace audience without any extra effort.
Each time that a new WordPress post goes live it will automatically be sent to MySpace for publication.
Users of the plugin have the option of publishing a notification or a whole story to MySpace.
Perfect! The download is just like any other plugin, in a zip file. Extract it and FTP it into the \plugins directory of your web server. Login to the admin panel of WordPress, activate the plugin and then go to Settings > MySpace Crossposter to configure it. I will warn that this plugin is not nearly as simple or clean to install as most all other plugins are. Once you land on the configuration page you need to enter the Database settings from when you originally setup WordPress. The settings are located in your root directory on your web server in the config.php file, which I had to download because I honestly didn’t remember them.
Once that is taken care of, enter both the URL to your blog and your blog name, along with your MySpace login email and password. Lastly is the option to post Notification style, which is a link to your blog, the title of the article posted and a direct link to it, or Whole Blog Entry, where the entire blog post will be republished on your MySpace blog. Default setting is to Notification sytle, which is what I’d suggest leaving it as, it will help drive more traffic to your site and you won’t have to worry about formatting issues.
Click Submit and the settings are saved, you don’t have to do anything else besides write new content. I tested this out and it worked flawlessly, posting a new blog post on my MySpace page mearly seconds after it was published on my site.
The benefits of doing this are many, most importantly it exposes your articles to more people right away and it also helps create back links into your site. While I don’t foresee this as being a huge source of traffic, it is none the less a source. For those people who are active on MySpace and have a lot of friends, it couldn’t hurt at all and it takes no time to do, since it’s fully automated.
Hopefully they can automate the need during intial setup to have the database information already inserted as I think a few bloggers might be turned off by the thought of screwing up their MySQL table information. The whole process took only a few minutes to install and configure though, so I can’t complain.
Now if only I could find a WordPress plugin that would do the same with bulletin postings on MySpace, I’d be fully automated and could spend more time writing. This is a plugin I’d recommend to anyone who is looking for an easy way to cross post articles to the largest social networking site on the internet right now.
While going through the RSS feeds this morning, I saw a great write-up on CNET about the interface redesign on Twitter. Great in that, it’s well written and covers all the positive points, but it seems that Twitter has pushed more emphasis on making their web app look pretty as opposed to actually stable.
Here’s a summery of what is new and changed:
Smaller tabs that were on top of the timeline to the right sidebar, where they can occupy more space, making them larger clicking targets. They also moved the following/followers/updates stats to the top of the page and made them larger, so now I can really see how deflated my follower numbers are.
The most important change, in terms of functionality is the addition of AJAX to the “Home” and “@Replies” pages. Their new implementation allows you to refresh the items in your timeline without having to reload the whole page.
New design customizer with this release, which allows you to change the colors on your Twitter profile with the help of a color wheel.
Great, new ways to make it look pretty, but still barely works properly. I’ve been using Twitter on and off for a year now (follow me at twitter.com/mikepanic) and while I did manage to crack 12,000 text messages by subscribing to some major news outlets and having them sent SMS to my cell phone, most of what I’ve found is that it’s just noise, even from people I know in real life. For more than 3 months now I haven’t had tweets coming into my cell, I’m very happy about this and do not miss it one bit. I also rarely go to the official Twitter site, rather I use Twitterific on my Mac to read and update tweets.
What is most frustrating, outside of the noise and constant “read my new blog post” tweets that I myself am guilty of sending is the lack of stability. The service seems to be going down, still, several times a month. How can I stand behind and love an app just because it’s pretty looking when it isn’t stable?
The new web browser that everyone is talking about and not using, Chrome, just got an update to it. This update is kind of unusual though in the fact that you now have a choice of how beta and unstable you want it to be. If you are into trying out new things, reporting bugs and getting fresh updates daily or every few days, this is for you. If you use Chrome on a regular basis though, the update is kind of mandatory as it
fixes bugs with areas including Microsoft’s Silverlight software, tab behavior, video playback with YouTube and other Flash players, and scalable vector graphics, and it suppresses full-text indexing of sites accessed with encrypted Web connections
Cnet News has all the information on how to do the update, to me the killer is you can’t even update from the software itself, you need to go to another website. Then you have to choose which updates you want to receive, Beta or Dev, and then watch as it updates. I have no problem with software being released and not being finished, it happens all the time, but with Google’s track record of keeping apps in beta for years and years, why put so many users through the growing pains of both Dev and Beta versions? Me thinks Chrome should have been a private invite only release like Gmail was originally to get most of the issues flushed out in the first place.
Chrome is nice, it has a lot of cool features and has everyone who uses the internet interested, but as reported earlier, no one is really using it and no one on a Mac can even start to use it. It pains me when major companies rely on the free labor of their own users to finish building and fixing software that shouldn’t be released yet, much less make them jump through hoops to get the update.
One of the popular web celebrities who blog about blogging and making money from blogging is John Chow. His personal site was launched for no other real reason other than to see how much money he could make from blogging about, well blogging and making money. He’s a very successful tech blogger and media network owner, so he knows the ins and outs, but a year or two ago, blogging about blogging really started to take off, so why not jump on board, share some tips and tricks and profit. He’s done well, real well, nearly $30,000 a month well and has a cult like following.
I was a daily reader of his site up until he switched to version 2.0 maybe a year ago. At that point, it was clear that the focus was on ad placement and started to make reading the content that much harder. John’s primary readers are bloggers and creative writers who are looking for ways to turn a profit on their own sites, they want information, not blatant advertising. The overall layout was clean though with good graphics, but I stopped reading daily.
Today, Version 3 launched and John has moved the index of the site to be similar to one of the other super popular bloggers, Darren Rowse of Problogger.net with respects to being more of a magazine style with snippets of current articles, more ads and some static information. Inside the site is supposed need less scrolling to read the articles and be cleaned up even more; I can agree to disagree with that. He did finally do away with having exotic cars in his header, but that only appears to be because others ripped the idea and so he could fit more advertiser space in. On my 1280×1034 screen I count 13 ads plus the top half of two more ads and one more ad promoting his e-book. It’s a bit much. The footer takes on the trends of other larger Web 2.0 sites with what must be close to 500 pixels high worth of information, sadly there is no button to take you back to the top of the page
With more than 30,000 RSS subscribers, 2,000 more following on Twitter people listen to what he says, but I think more is being emphasized on how it looks instead of better content. John is still posting up photos of food and other random things and shares his insight on how to run a blog for money, but getting to the content for me isn’t worth the trouble anymore.
