Month: June 2007

Sometimes software applications can be of great help even in situations where you wouldn’t expect them to be useful at all. A good example is managing a household, which involves many different issues such as controlling expenses, tracking the family’s diet, taking care of your pet or dealing with children’s colds. Believe it or not, software can help you take care of all of them! Just take a look at the list below and see for yourself.

• Money Manager helps you track home expenses, bank accounts and credit cards
• Cars keeps records of all repairing and maintenance work done to the family’s car
• Pet Health manages visits to the vet and other issues related to your best friend
• Envisioneer Express can help you designing a new design for any room at home before actually starting to move any furniture
• HeyDoc! allows you to control all issues relating to the family’s health! Visits to the doctor, vaccine shots, medical prescriptions and more
• Recipe4Win includes a collection of thousands of recipes so that you never run out of ideas when preparing family meals
• Food Additives displays all available information about most additives found nowadays in food.
• Fitness Assistant helps you manage the whole family’s sport routines. Mens sana in corpore sano!
• WinCatalog Standard enables you to create a catalog with all your books and movies, organizing your collection and tracking loans
• Agelong Tree brings your family background back to life by enabling you to build own family tree

It seems you’re just not cool in the tech world nowadays if you don’t add an ‘i’ before the name of your products. Not to be left behind, Google has also recently jumped on the bandwagon with ‘iGoogle‘. If you’ve got a personalised Google homepage, then you might have noticed the subtle change at the top of the page.

Although this is partly just a simple re-branding exercise (the ‘i’ referring to you, not some Apple spin-off!) it does herald a few interesting new features. One of the freshest additions is a new Gadget Maker that allows you to create and customise your own gadgets for your homepage. So maybe you want to create a photo gadget which links to your family collection? With the Framed Photo gadget, all you have to do is fill in a few fields of information with the album details, select a photo for the front cover, and click ‘add’ to your homepage. There are several other gadget makers too including to make your own You Tube channel, a ‘Daily Me‘ gadget where people can keep track of your fluctuating moods, and a Personal List gadget where you can share you’re top ten favourite songs, films etc.

And of course, they’ve added the obligatory tabs meaning your homepage can now spread to several pages if you can’t fit all the gadgets you want to use on just one. You’ll see the ‘Add Tab’ option just below the bottom of the iGoogle header image. iGoogle is also supposed to be more sensitive to where you are in the world when you make iGoogle searches although I only noticed very subtle minor differences in search results.

The new features are definitely a plus although there are worrying signs that Google is spending more time worrying about branding that it needs to. The change of Google Personalised Homepage to iGoogle has barely gone noticed but it follows the change of Google Maps to Google Local which was eventually changed back to Google Maps. It’s enough to make the mind boggle (or Google).

A year ago, Michael Arrington of Techcrunch claimed that Allpeers, would be the “killer app” that would “take the world by storm”. The response to the file sharing Firefox extension has not been as loud as expected, which is surprising if you take a closer look at Allpeers. This application allows you to share files and folders with your friends thanks to P2P technology. You can drag and drop elements from your desktop into your Allpeers page in your browser and you can write a message to accompany your shared file.

The big reason that Allpeers didn’t take off is probably that you had to convince people to install it to be able to use it with them. Allpeers have just released version 0.60, that aims to solve this issue. The new version imports your contacts automatically from big mail services like Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail. It can also keep the hierarchy of your shared folders and automatically backs up your database before updating. The real innovation though is that you can now get a version of Firefox with Allpeers bundled into it. As the Allpeers blog puts it:

So when you share by email with unenlightened folks who don’t even have Firefox yet (the humanity!) they can get it together with AllPeers in a single convenient download.

With the next version of Firefox expected to have even more extensions built into it, this is probably the opportunity for Allpeers to make its place in the sun. The real question though is if the “normal user” will get around to using Allpeers, or if he’ll stick with sending files by email as usual. With services like Gmail offering bigger attachment sizes, my guess is Allpeers is going to have a hard time.

Recording broadcasts from the radio can be useful for a number of reasons. Maybe you don’t have time to listen to a program and want to hear it later. Or maybe it’s a show you really like and want to share with friends. Either way, there have always been several programs on Softonic that allow you to record your favourite radio broadcasts and now with Web 2.0 taking off, your options just got better.

One of the best programs out there is StepVoice Recorder which can’t be beaten simply for its flexibility. It can record not only radio but absolutely anything that goes through your soundcard. Even better, it records everything in Mp3 format meaning you don’t have to mess around converting it later. If you want to record in WAV format on the other hand, try Mp3myMp3. For something tailored specifically for radio recording, Replay AV does the job and looks good too. One of the best features of this program is that you can schedule it to record programs when you are away from your computer. In fact, it can record just about any streaming media including TV broadcasts – great for posting footage on YouTube.

However, nowadays you’re not just limited to software. Online Music Recorder is a Web 2.0 application that automatically records music tracks from radio stations. What’s more, all of the music recorded by users is shared so that you gain access to a huge database of songs when you sign-up. The best thing is that, unlike some P2P file sharing networks, Online Music Recorder is legal because the developers have a licensing agreement which allows them to record a limited number of tracks. All of the songs are stored online although you need to download a decoder to listen to them. So tune-in today!

FlySketch is one of the most imaginative Mac applications I’ve found recently. This bite size program lets you scribble and draw over any page on your desktop and keep a snapshot of it. FlySketch lets you set the color, stroke and position and you can draw a number of shapes. I’ve already used it to scribble and write down notes on a few web page designs I like but I believe it can also be used on photos or when creating your own application.

Bring your photos to life with Sqirlz Water Reflections! This tool enables you to add some nice rippling effects to your pictures and obtain eye-catching results, specially in pictures with water. Configuration options allow you to select the type of wave as well as its size and perspective. It’s so easy to use that you’ll be creating your own animated photos in no time!

One of the less well-remembered aspects of the society created by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four is the way in which popular entertainment is manufactured in that dark, dystopian world. Orwell imagined machines which could easily churn out cheap, trashy films and pop music which had been programmed to fit the simple, undeveloped tastes of the masses. While there are probably some people who’d argue that we already live in such a world, it would be pretty hard to claim that we’re not – at the very least – heading towards a world where music is increasingly manufactured using computers.

Recent months have seen a fair bit of talk about Music Xray, a piece of software designed to ‘allow music professionals to see their music and their market in ways that were impossible until now’. According to the Platinum Blue Music Intelligence website:

Research has shown strong evidence that most hit songs conform to a limited number of mathematical patterns… Now, we are able to point to the mathematical properties of the song as a strong indicator of potential success.

A less well known, but arguably more interesting, piece of software has been developed here in Barcelona. PolyphonicHMI is marketing a music intelligence application for use in recording studios. Designed to guide musicians, record producers and label executives even during the creative stages, the software can spot if there are mathematical problems with a new song before it’s even complete.

While this is obviously good news for record companies, it remains to be seen just what effect it will have on the record-buying public. In a world where music is already nearly completely mechanised, is this just one small step closer to a time when most popular music is literally manufactured by a computer? If the public are already happy enough with such entertainment, perhaps it’s just producers with their special talent for creating hits who stand to lose out. Then again, it’s been noted many times that the music which is remembered and revered most after a few decades have passed isn’t necessarily what topped the charts at the time… perhaps we’d better hold on to those human record producers for a little bit longer.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) communications are an excellent, inexpensive way of staying in touch with friends, family and contacts via the Net. There are a huge number of applications and accessories out there to connect to VoIP services, but many of them offer limited (or a complete lack of) support for Mac users.

The guys at VoIP Now have put together a mammoth guide to the very best VoIP tools for Macs, plus some pretty useful security advice, considering how much hacking is going on these days.

If you’re fed up with staring at the fields and sky of the classic XP desktop background then why not expand your horizons and view the whole panet? EarthView is a popular app that allows you to check out amazing views of the Earth. You can opt to look at the world from a number of different angles and pick between a range of views including day and night, atomospheric conditions, urban areas and cloud cover.