Whatever the case, if you are one of these people you might be wanting to make your computer a little more user friendly. Here are a couple of handy tools to help you along.

NoSquint

Are you tired of having to squint your eyes at the computer screen? Do you find yourself unable to turn the font size up high enough? This Firefox addon allows you to zoom in and out of sites either globally, or on a per-page basis. You are able to override the default of the site on text only and full page formats, and change foreground and background colors to your specifications.

Readpal

Whether you have poor eyesight or difficulty focusing on text, this program for Windows can really help you. It isolates text and restructures it in an easier to view format that will keep you concentrating and reducing eye strain. It can be applied to compatible Windows applications such as Word, Notepad, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express.

Size Firefox Addon

URL’s are hard to read at the best of times, but when you have trouble with your vision it is especially difficult. The address bar can be increased, however, using this nifty little add on. It is compatible with the latest version of Firefox, and there is no configuration needed. Just download it and enjoy the larger URL bar.

Vischeck

Are you making a website and you want to make sure colorblind users are able to view it? Vischeck is an excellent program that simulates colorblindness in various forms, showing you want sites and images look like for someone who cannot properly process certain tones and shades.

Readable

This is a default format override addon for Firefox. It allows you to choose the layout, background color, font color and size of text and images. They have a manual select feature for simplified versions of the same text, as well.

Conclusion

You don’t have to strain your eyes or avoid certain sites. These tools are great for increasing the readability of any web page. What are some of the tools you use? Let us know in the comments.

Annie is a geeky blogger for Direct Sight, the premiere supplier of cheap glasses based in the UK.

• Phone Apps for Your Next Road Trip – January 11, 2012
• How to Download Spotify App Clients for Windows and Mac – December 2, 2011
• Why Mobile Apps Need Cloud Support – June 29, 2011
• Fences Organzies Your Desktop – June 27, 2011
• Infographic: Smartphone Apps – June 15, 2011

5 Tools to Make Your Computer Friendlier For Those With Poor Eyesight originally appeared on: Crenk
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Besides, in the world of satellite radio and in-car MP3 players, who listens to the AM/FM format while driving anymore? But I, like most, still love traveling by car, and so traffic jams are always a risk. Checking the net for traffic information isn’t helpful if you can’t do it on the road, with conditions changing through the day and a sudden accident enough to lock up a freeway for hours.

That is why I have turned – as I so often do – to my Android phone and the many apps that have been created to maximize convenience in today’s busy world. It is great that they now have traveling and traffic apps, because this smartphone is in my hand so often that my family probably thinks a prankster has super glued it there.

Here are some of the best apps for avoiding traffic jams to download onto your Android phone:

Google Maps For Mobile

Price: Free!

This can officially be labeled a classic choice. Google is the single largest web company around, and they are famous for their many products. One of their most used is their Google Maps, which you can now get on your phone.

You get the usual features of looking up any area on a map grid, but there is also a navigation aspect that they have on the program itself, which will give you good directions. It will also let you know of any traffic problems in the area so you can find and follow an alternative route.

Waze Mobile

Price: Free!

A handy GPS unit, Waze is socially based, just like all of the biggest Internet products. It works by allowing you and other drivers to build interactive maps based on the on-board GPS unit in your Android phone.

They have a navigation tool to plan rroutes for walking, running and driving, as well as real time traffic updates to avoid trouble spots. But it tends to have more information than some other apps, such as information on local areas and a social networking feature.

WHERE

Price: Free!

Where is like an all-in-one travel app. Not only does it give you current traffic conditions updated in real time, but you can find local restaurants, events, places of interest, deals and offers from nearby businesses and more.

You can save personalized ”favorites” that keep track of spots you visit often to target results when accessed, such as any accidents or slowdowns on the way there.

There’s a similar app for iPhone coming later this year from Cheaphotels.org.

Conclusion

Don’t get stuck in traffic, or stuck listening for a quickly-spoke traffic report on the radio. If you have an Android phone, the details are just a few clicks away. What are some of your favorites? Let us know in the comments.

• Fences Organzies Your Desktop – June 27, 2011
• Raptr Is the Ultimate Gaming Service: Connects PSN, Xbox and More – May 16, 2011
• Give Away Of The Day gives you free software everyday – May 5, 2011
• Design Android Apps with DroidDraw – October 24, 2010
• How to Create 3D Desktops in Windows – September 26, 2010

Phone Apps for Your Next Road Trip originally appeared on: Crenk
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All you need to do is select from these beta clients:

• Windows users download here
• Mac users download here

• Infographic: Smartphone Apps – June 15, 2011
• Windows Phone 7 Numbers: Over 11,500 Apps with 36,000 Developers – March 31, 2011
• How to Build Real-time Apps with Backbone.js Models, Node.js and Socket.io – February 22, 2011
• Make your Applications Portable with Cameyo – September 11, 2010
• Portable Linux Apps – July 23, 2010

How to Download Spotify App Clients for Windows and Mac originally appeared on: Crenk
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A study conducted recently by ABI Research discussed this very issue and found big problems with limited processing power, battery life, and data storage. These concerns will further limit application growth among much of the mass market if Cloud computing isn’t applied with greater strength. No smartphone is save, it seems, and even Apple’s iPhone has shown to perform at a deficit when factoring in these same concerns. It’s been shown that applications that are connected to cloud resources are far more likely to run successfully than if they were run solely from the mobile device alone.

Factoring in these issues, it’s likely that cloud-computing services will become a new market and will deliver annual revenues coming in the range of an annual 20 billion within the next five years. These are big numbers and it’s getting a lot of attention. It’s also thought that it could further drive innovation among cell phone development. Researchers and developers will no longer have to concern themselves with finding new ways to adapt a mobile devices’ processor to meet increased application demand. If this were the approach, people would likely have to have a separate device just to run their applications. However, cloud services offer developers a way to free up the processor and focus on other innovations.

Cloud computing software is likely to introduce an unprecedented sophistication to the world of mobile applications that has proven to be an industry all its own. Businesses are already benefiting from collaborations and data sharing through similar approaches. Users will be able to gain remote access to apps that could do anything from monitoring their home security to social networking. You’ll be able to do everything you already can, and more.

It’s not likely to be a touch decision for mobile device developers. It’s a win-win situation. This will create a new market for cloud services and free up companies to find better and more efficient ways to mobile their products. Every company, large and small, will likely be utilizing the power of such services, which will probably become a benchmark of the mobile community in a very short space of time.

• Diacarta Offers Unique Scheduling Mobile App – August 8, 2010
• Jolicloud Reaching Final Version this Week – July 13, 2010
• Mobile App Developer Ousted by Apple – December 10, 2009
• iTouch Acting as Gateway Drug to iPhone – December 8, 2009
• MMO Set to Change Mobile Gaming – October 13, 2008

Why Mobile Apps Need Cloud Support originally appeared on: Crenk
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Fences found here is a simple program that you download and install and then  your desktop looks brand new. Fences allows you to make boxes on your desktop to organize you files and folders. You can label each box and make it as big or as small as you would like. It also has a couple prebuilt boxes so if you don’t wanna make a design it will do it for you. Another cool features is that if anything ever happens to your desktop you could restore it if you saved it prior. It does any auto save before fences is installed. One way it helps you is if you double click on your desktop it will hide all the icons and boxes. You can choose which boxes/files you do and don’t wanna hide. The last neat feature is that you can change the color of the boxes and even the transparency. All in all if you  desktop is messy your gonna want this. There is a free version and a paid but I am fine with the free version since the paid doesn’t offer much else.

• Give Away Of The Day gives you free software everyday – May 5, 2011
• Raptr Is the Ultimate Gaming Service: Connects PSN, Xbox and More – May 16, 2011
• How to Create 3D Desktops in Windows – September 26, 2010
• Chat with Your Followers with Twee.li – September 12, 2010
• 26 New And Awesome Web Apps You Probably Don’t Know About – March 3, 2009

Fences Organzies Your Desktop originally appeared on: Crenk
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The graphic is created by XCube Labs.

• Intro to New Apps Thanks to AppGiveaway – June 28, 2009
• How to Download Spotify App Clients for Windows and Mac – December 2, 2011
• Windows Phone 7 Numbers: Over 11,500 Apps with 36,000 Developers – March 31, 2011
• How to Build Real-time Apps with Backbone.js Models, Node.js and Socket.io – February 22, 2011
• Yahoo: The Rise and Fall: Infographic – January 20, 2011

Infographic: Smartphone Apps originally appeared on: Crenk
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Here are all the vital numbers from the WWDC 2011 keynote by Apple.

• 5200 developers are attending WWDC this year
• The Mac App Store is now the #1 retail channel for PC software over Best Buy and Walmart
• Mac sales rose 28 percent year-over-year during Apple’s last quarter, while PC sales declined 1 percent
• There are now 54 million active Mac users around the world.
• Mac sales have outpaced the broader PC market for 5 years, 22 straight quarters
• Apple has sold 200 million IOS devices to date …
• … which accounts for more than 44 percent of the mobile market
• 25 million iPads were sold in the device’s 14 months of availability
• 15 billion songs have been sold from the iTunes store …
• … making Apple the #1 music retailer in the world
• 130 million books have been downloaded from iBooks
• There are 425,000 apps in the app store
• 90,000 of them are designed specifically for the iPad
• 14 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store in less than 3 years
• Apple has paid some $2.5 billion to developers building apps for the app store
• There are 225 million iTunes Store accounts, all of them with associated credit cards and 1-click purchasing
• There are 50 million Game Center users. XBox Live, which has been around for a lot longer, only has about 30 million
• IOS users send more than 1 billion Tweets a week
• To date, about 100 billion push notifications have been sent to iOS devices
• The iPhone 4′s camera is the second most used camera on Flickr
• OS X Lion boasts 250+ new features and 3,000 APIs
• iOS 5 has 200+ new features and 1,500 APIs

• Apple to Launch iOS 4.4 or 5 and Mac OS X Lion at WWDC 2011 – March 28, 2011
• Apple to Hold WWDC 2011 from June 5 to 9 at Moscone Center convention hall in San Francisco – February 8, 2011
• Watch Video of Steve Jobs Keynote from WWDC 2011: iCloud, iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion – June 6, 2011
• Watch WWDC 2011 Steve Jobs Keynote Live – June 6, 2011
• Mac OS X Lion Gets Big Update for Developers: Download Now – March 31, 2011

WWDC 2011 By Numbers originally appeared on: Crenk
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• Give Away Of The Day gives you free software everyday – May 5, 2011
• XbList is a Desktop Xbox 360 Friends List – May 8, 2011
• Synergy Lets You Use One Mouse and Keyboard with Two or More Computers – May 22, 2011
• Nerrot: The Simplest Bittorrent Site Yet – May 5, 2011
• Play Need for Speed for Free – September 26, 2010

Raptr Is the Ultimate Gaming Service: Connects PSN, Xbox and More originally appeared on: Crenk
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• Give Away Of The Day gives you free software everyday – May 5, 2011
• Raptr Is the Ultimate Gaming Service: Connects PSN, Xbox and More – May 16, 2011
• Synergy Lets You Use One Mouse and Keyboard with Two or More Computers – May 22, 2011
• ClipCube is the Best Clipboard History Tool – May 8, 2011
• Nerrot: The Simplest Bittorrent Site Yet – May 5, 2011

XbList is a Desktop Xbox 360 Friends List originally appeared on: Crenk
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• Raptr Is the Ultimate Gaming Service: Connects PSN, Xbox and More – May 16, 2011
• XbList is a Desktop Xbox 360 Friends List – May 8, 2011
• Synergy Lets You Use One Mouse and Keyboard with Two or More Computers – May 22, 2011
• Fences Organzies Your Desktop – June 27, 2011
• ClipCube is the Best Clipboard History Tool – May 8, 2011

Give Away Of The Day gives you free software everyday originally appeared on: Crenk
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• Raptr Is the Ultimate Gaming Service: Connects PSN, Xbox and More – May 16, 2011
• XbList is a Desktop Xbox 360 Friends List – May 8, 2011
• Give Away Of The Day gives you free software everyday – May 5, 2011
• BitLet Downloads Torrents For You Without any Torrent Clients – May 4, 2011
• 26 New And Awesome Web Apps You Probably Don’t Know About – March 3, 2009

Nerrot: The Simplest Bittorrent Site Yet originally appeared on: Crenk
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BitLet is an online torrent client that downloads the torrents for you without any torrent client. BitLet  runs in java so there is no extra installing needed.This is also good if you don’t want to install a torrent client on your computer. Also it supports video streaming so you can download a torrent that is a video and have it stream. They also support streaming for music too.BitLet supports changing the port and even the upload rate.They also have a bookmarklet for Firefox and IE that allows you to download the torrent without having to go to the BitLet page. BitLet also has cool features like resume downloading, using a local or online torrent,and allows you to download more than one torrent at a time. They also show you your upload and download speed and even how many seeders and leachers. Most of the time the torrents will work but not always. I would recommend this to users who rarely download torrents and also to people who need to download a torrent but don’t have the time or want to install a client.. If you download  torrents often then i would stick with whatever client you have.

• Nerrot: The Simplest Bittorrent Site Yet – May 5, 2011
• Raptr Is the Ultimate Gaming Service: Connects PSN, Xbox and More – May 16, 2011
• XbList is a Desktop Xbox 360 Friends List – May 8, 2011
• Give Away Of The Day gives you free software everyday – May 5, 2011
• 26 New And Awesome Web Apps You Probably Don’t Know About – March 3, 2009

BitLet Downloads Torrents For You Without any Torrent Clients originally appeared on: Crenk
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Microsoft has just released some official Windows Phone 7 stats. The stats look very impressive and it seems they are gaining on a lot of other platforms.

Numbers:

• 11,500 applications
• 7,500 paid applications
• 36,000 developers
• 1,200 new developers being registered every week

Windows Phone 7 has shown some great growth, but the are still a long way behind iOS with 300,000 applications and Android with 100,000 applications.

“We recognize the importance of getting great apps on our platform and not artificially inflating the number of actual apps available to customer by listing “wallpapers” as a category, or perhaps allowing competitor’s apps to run on the platform to increase “tonnage.” We also don’t believe in the practice of counting “lite” apps as unique quality content. (…) Finally, we don’t double and triple count apps which are submitted in multiple languages.,” he explains in the blog post.

[Windows Phone Developer Blog]

• How to Download Spotify App Clients for Windows and Mac – December 2, 2011
• Nokia’s Windows Phone 7 Mobile Phones Coming Next Week – October 24, 2011
• Infographic: Smartphone Apps – June 15, 2011
• Samsung Rumoured to be Acquiring Nokia – June 8, 2011
• Windows Phone 7 Theme for Your WordPress Blog – May 31, 2011

Windows Phone 7 Numbers: Over 11,500 Apps with 36,000 Developers originally appeared on: Crenk
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Using this approach we send very small changes over an already established connection, we can very quickly synchronize state from one client to the other or the server can get updates from an external data source, modify the model on the server and those changes would immediately be sent to the connected clients. Best of all – it’s fast.

Click here for the full article.

• How to Download Spotify App Clients for Windows and Mac – December 2, 2011
• Infographic: Smartphone Apps – June 15, 2011
• Windows Phone 7 Numbers: Over 11,500 Apps with 36,000 Developers – March 31, 2011
• Make your Applications Portable with Cameyo – September 11, 2010
• Portable Linux Apps – July 23, 2010

How to Build Real-time Apps with Backbone.js Models, Node.js and Socket.io originally appeared on: Crenk
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The Google OS for mobile devices is the most used operating system in smart phones… yes, even more than iPhone OS. And the market share estimated for the next few years says that this tendency won’t change; so if you were thinking about mobile apps design you better start with Android.

DroidDraw also offers free tutorials to understand this free tool and some nice guidelines and tips.

• Steve Jobs’ Last Project Was The iPhone 5 – October 16, 2011
• AutoCAD for iPad, iPhone and Mac OS – September 27, 2010
• App Inventor for Android – July 12, 2010
• Nokia Deny Android Plans – July 7, 2009
• Phone Apps for Your Next Road Trip – January 11, 2012

Design Android Apps with DroidDraw originally appeared on: Crenk
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CAD software is well-known in the professional life for designers, architects and engineers since it provides almost anything they need for a proper 2D or 3D design. AutoDesk in their 18 years existence has been avoiding, surprisingly for some, the Mac world; but fortunately for those professional or just geek AutoCAD lovers, they have new possibilities.

AutoCAD WS, as for Windows, the Mac version will be paid; but for iPad or iPhone users the application will be available for free, with some limitations of course.

Here are some of the features:

• Open your DWG drawings for viewing, markup and editing.
• AutoCAD WS mobile application supports Xrefs and image underlays, with Multi-Touch™ zoom and pan.
• Tap objects to select, then move, rotate, and scale objects.
• All edits are captured and stored in your online workspace, so your drawings are always up to date.
• Share drawings with others through your iPad, iPhone, or iPod device. If other people are editing a drawing simultaneously with you, you’ll see their edits in real time.

• TeamViewer 6 Available for Android – November 28, 2010
• XbList is a Desktop Xbox 360 Friends List – May 8, 2011
• Give Away Of The Day gives you free software everyday – May 5, 2011
• Create a Screencast and Share it in Twitter – November 7, 2010
• How to Evaluate and Test your Sites for Mobile – October 24, 2010

AutoCAD for iPad, iPhone and Mac OS originally appeared on: Crenk
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Windows desktops are indeed one of the most common places where we feel very comfortable, the simplicity and the fact that it did not have significant changes through the years are one of the reasons. But also, among the years, other possibilities appeared with other operating systems, making some interesting tweaks in user’s desktops.

Aximion makes our desktop look really cool, but it could take us a while to get used to it. One of the disadvantages is that the “Start” button is not available, so we must find our applications browsing around.

Requirements to use it:

• Windows XP 32/64 bit, Home/Pro, Service Pack 1/2/3
• DirectX 9.0 installed
• A video card that supports: •DirectX 9.0

o   Vertex Shaders 1.4 and Pixel Shaders 2.0

o   At least 128 Mb of on-board video memory

Direct download from here.

• Fences Organzies Your Desktop – June 27, 2011
• Give Away Of The Day gives you free software everyday – May 5, 2011
• Phone Apps for Your Next Road Trip – January 11, 2012
• Old Windows XP – September 5, 2011
• Raptr Is the Ultimate Gaming Service: Connects PSN, Xbox and More – May 16, 2011

How to Create 3D Desktops in Windows originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

Tweet.li, developed in Adobe AIR, comes as an idea to replace TinyChat and other similar web apps which you can use in your browser but easily share the chat rooms to your Twitter timeline and invite followers; including also the possibility to login using your Twitter account name.

But even though the idea sounds great there are a few cons so far: To use it with your followers, they must use Tweet.li as well, no other option available; also the application stability and performance are not actually the best, since it takes a few moments for the timeline to update.

Even though I enjoy saying “Twitter is not a chat room”, there are some exceptions and there are even more number of users who actually use it for chatting.

• Give Away Of The Day gives you free software everyday – May 5, 2011
• Generate your Twitter-like Logo for Free – December 5, 2010
• Background Template for New Twitter – October 16, 2010
• How to Handle Several Twitter Accounts – September 19, 2010
• Measure your Influence Level in Twitter – September 12, 2010

Chat with Your Followers with Twee.li originally appeared on: Crenk
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This capturing process is actually known as “application virtualization”; which can be found in several other technologies from Microsoft, Symantec and VMWare. All of them are paid technologies.

Here’s a video showing how Cameyo works, using a nice example of Opera + Flash + Java, all in one portable package:

Cameyo is not only free, but also offers a SDK (Software Development Kit) which developers can use to complement with Cameyo’s virtualization technology and also provides other nice features like automation features.

• Portable Linux Apps – July 23, 2010
• How to Download Spotify App Clients for Windows and Mac – December 2, 2011
• Infographic: Smartphone Apps – June 15, 2011
• XbList is a Desktop Xbox 360 Friends List – May 8, 2011
• Give Away Of The Day gives you free software everyday – May 5, 2011

Make your Applications Portable with Cameyo originally appeared on: Crenk
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I’m always looking for unique ways to manage my systems. Task apps, to-do lists, I’ve seen them all before and few offer anything unique enough to make me change the way I’m doing things right now. The status quo was changed when I came across Diacarta. Not expecting fresh approach to scheduling and seeing my list of appointments, I was quickly caught up in exploring the display, how information is shared, and the interface. It’s a beautiful app no doubt and it does offer some unique approaches to the way we organize ourselves.

Rather than seeing your day in a line item list of text, you get to create a picture of your day. The premise of the entire app is associating image icons with things that need to get done during the day. This association creates your day and plans out by the hour what your agenda will look like visually. You still type in all the necessary details for your event or task, but it only shows up if you allow your finger to linger on the icon, it disappears when you move your finger.

Diacarta is an interesting way to visualize your day to day, but is it enough to integrate into your systems? Take a look at the video below and let us know.

• Mobile App Developer Ousted by Apple – December 10, 2009
• Kick Productivity Into High Gear with ActionMethod – June 22, 2009
• Why Mobile Apps Need Cloud Support – June 29, 2011
• App Inventor for Android – July 12, 2010
• Square Announces iPad Apps and Future Releases – May 30, 2010

Diacarta Offers Unique Scheduling Mobile App originally appeared on: Crenk
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The complete list you can find it in the home page of PortableLinuxApps.org, but here’s a quick list of the most important ones:

• Opera 10.
• Filezilla.
• Firefox.
• aMule.
• Wireshark.
• TeamViewer.

One of the teams supporting this portal is another big reference in the open source area: Source Forge. So we should not surprise if we find PortableLinuxApps.org growing potentially.

• Make your Applications Portable with Cameyo – September 11, 2010
• XbList is a Desktop Xbox 360 Friends List – May 8, 2011
• Give Away Of The Day gives you free software everyday – May 5, 2011
• AutoCAD for iPad, iPhone and Mac OS – September 27, 2010
• News Feed Reader for Linux – September 27, 2010

Portable Linux Apps originally appeared on: Crenk
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Jolicloud, the operating system developed originally from Ubuntu OS especially for netbooks, will reach the final 1.0 version by the end of this week, as was announced in Jolicloud blog.

The open source community as well as the non-open source really loves this operating system, mainly for the simplicity which is offered and the small footprint making very suitable for netbooks (maybe for tablets later?).

The name already says it, this operating system will be “cloud-friendly”. Here are some of the specs:

• Built in HTML5.
• Over 700 apps available for download. Including the most important ones for Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Chrome, Skype, etc.
• Applications are installed with one click.
• Applications updates are simplified.
• Install Jolicloud on as many devices as you’d like, and they will always be automatically synchronized. Any app you download, delete, or move around will be the same on all other machines with no extra work on your part.

The download will be available from here.

• Jolicloud – The Netbook OS – July 21, 2009
• A Sneak Peak At New Netbook Operating System – January 23, 2009
• Ubuntu Screenshots of 11.10 – September 26, 2011
• HTC Looking to Buy a Mobile Operating System – September 13, 2011
• Why Mobile Apps Need Cloud Support – June 29, 2011

Jolicloud Reaching Final Version this Week originally appeared on: Crenk
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Remote Desktop for most power and/or IT users represents the way of accessing a remote’s computer desktop by reaching it using an IP address; but is more than that. Using Remote Desktop protocol, users can access their applications, installed on a remote computer, without actually installing them locally.

This functionality, without an official announcement by Google, appeared in a Google forum; made by software designer inside the developing of Chrome: “We’re adding new capabilities all the time,” wrote Kačmarčík. “With this functionality (unofficially named ‘chromoting’), Chrome OS will not only be [a] great platform for running modern Web apps, but will also enable you to access legacy PC applications right within the browser.”

For me, almost anything representing legacy or an interoperability support sounds like a good idea; especially in today’s market when some are thinking that by being more restrictive they will win.

What do you think?

• Android Market Now Has Over 250,000 Apps: Grown by 100,000 in Last 30 Days.. Really! – March 21, 2011
• Google Flattens Their Chrome Logo – March 16, 2011
• Who Wants an iPad when you can get an iPed? – May 29, 2010
• Google Chrome 4.1 Beta with Auto Translate – March 3, 2010
• Google Chrome OS Arriving this Month? – October 4, 2009

Google Chrome OS Supporting PC Apps? originally appeared on: Crenk
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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.

• 26 New And Awesome Web Apps You Probably Don’t Know About – March 3, 2009
• iPhone App Reviews for Social Media News – March 2, 2009
• How to Download Spotify App Clients for Windows and Mac – December 2, 2011
• Fences Organzies Your Desktop – June 27, 2011
• Infographic: Smartphone Apps – June 15, 2011

20 Apps You Probably Never Heard Of originally appeared on: Crenk
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So why did Apple decide sex apps had no place in the app store?

“It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see”

So for the issue of parental control and to not offend the iPhone’s female users, they decided to remove the applications from the store. I personally find this a little odd on two fronts.

Firstly, if women find these kinds of apps offensive then that’s fine. But they don;t have to download them. It’s not like Apple ever advertised them on the homepage. They were there in the background if anyone wanted them, that’s all. There are bigger fish to fry on that font rather than a few relatively soft-core apps.

Secondly, on the issue of parental control, I genuinely don’t see what good removing apps from the store is going to do. If a kid wants porn or anything of the sort couldn’t he or she just open up the Safari browser?

I fear this move is little more than Apple wanting to wash their hands of any objectionable material. It’s not that they’re against it.

Apple, have left in a few apps from big companies such as Playboy though, which seems to contradict the above. Wouldn’t they want to eliminate the big players? Or is the revenue loss just too much to swallow?

“The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format,”

I don’t get it either.

• Apple Banning Sex Apps – February 22, 2010
• AutoCAD for iPad, iPhone and Mac OS – September 27, 2010
• Bing Search Coming to iPhone – January 20, 2010
• iTouch Acting as Gateway Drug to iPhone – December 8, 2009
• iPhone App Reviews for Social Media News – March 2, 2009

Sex Apps Removed for Parental Control, say Apple originally appeared on: Crenk
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