Month: November 2007

If you feel overwhelmed by pending tasks, appointments, meetings and so on, try Task Coach. This free task organizer will help you to manage work in a much more optimized way, improving your productivity and enabling you to make the most of your time. Save it to your USB memory stick and take it with you anywhere!

Get ready for some action in a mysterious lost island that has been invaded by aliens. As a member of the most highly qualified team in the US army, you’ll be entrusted a series of dangerous missions that will put to test your extraordinary abilities and your capacity to interact with the environment. It’s time for a frantic adventure in a hostile territory. It’s time for Crysis.

Mind mapping is one of the most effective ways to increase productivity and come up with new ideas. It’s ideal for those working in teams or conducting meetings where they require the input of a team. In the old days, it used to involve a pen and paper and lots of bubbles and lines until what you had resembled a bloated tarantula. In the office, it usually involves a huge whiteboard or lots of big marker pens but I’ve found that using software such as MindManager can make it considerably more structured and easier.

MindManager is designed for brainstorming sessions, strategic thinking, and creating business blueprints for action. The aim of the program is to enable teams and organizations to work in a faster and more coordinated manner and make your brainstorming sessions more legible and meaningful at the end. The interface is simple but functional giving you options for various mapping categories such as task priorities, resources, completed tasks etc. The biggest bonus is that you can link documents, images and websites to the mind-map to give it greater meaning and depth. In addition, MindManager provides a myriad of other graphical enhancement to make sure your mind mapping sessions make more sense the day after.

If you want to give your photos an extra special touch, impress your friends or just spice-up an old collection then there are several special effects packages to help you. Adding special effects to photos can involve anything from making a simple collage to adding filter effects and even animating them. Be aware however that the processing involved in adding effects to photos can sometimes reduce the image quality of your photos although not enough to make a huge difference. Here’s a selection of 5 top packages:

• iFoxSoft Photo Collage – Create photo collages, desktop wallpapers and DVD covers

• ArcSoft PhotoStudio – Suitable for advanced users seeking high-end special effects

• Paint.NET – Advanced version of MS paint with 3D zoom and tilting effects

• Dreamy Photo – Add vibrant and translucent effects to your photos

• NeoPaint – User friendly app for adding artist style effects to photos

If you want to be like Van Halen, you’ll need a decent guitar tuner. Normally, I use an external electronic tuner but the problem is the batteries keep dying so I sometimes use my PC to tune it instead. You can download tuners that work simply by providing the right key for which you can match your guitar strings or those that go one step further and analyse how out of tune your guitar is. Whether you use the former or the latter depends on how tone deaf you are. Here are 5 top tuners to keep you rockin’ all over the world.

• Guitar Pro – The undisputed leader in tuning and teaching you to play

• MiniTuner – No frills tuner which detects the tone through your mic

• D’Accord Personal Guitarist – Includes tutorials and tuning for bass and even banjos

• Guitar Solo Toolbar – Toolbar which allows you to tune directly from IE

• Free Guitar Tuner – Pluck each string with the mouse and match it on your guitar

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If you’re a bit of a speed freak when it comes to your mobile device then get a load of Pocket Hack Master. The application allows you to tinker around with lots of hidden settings in order to turbo-charge your Pocket PC. There’s even a handy benchmarking utility for checking performance.

Spark is an attractive Jabber client especially designed for private networks. Among its main features you’ll find a complete personal profile, a built-in screen capture tool, support for chat rooms and customizable status messages. Fast and secure, it’s the perfect alternative to other unreliable public IM networks.

Following our previous post about easy apps to fix pictures, we’ve come across the definitive tool for a quick photo retouch. It’s called B/Works and enables you to add beautiful color and light effects to your photos, achieving amazing results in just a couple of clicks. Simply load your photo, choose the right filter and create a unique image!

Normally, when it comes to decompressing image files, you don’t really know what you are going to get until it’s done. However, with Zipeg, you can see exactly what’s inside a compressed file before you even start the compression process. Zipeg displays images in thumbnail format so there’s no need for you to wait ages for the decompression process is finished to know what you are going to get. Best of all, it’s totally free.

Of course, it unzips non-image files also and can do everything that WinZip and WinRAR can. It supports a huge variety of archive formats including ZIP, RAR, ARJ, LHA/LZH, 7z, TAR, GZ and WAR and EAR. It supports dragging and dropping so you can extract or unzip items simply by dragging them into the interface which is well presented, elegant and simple to use. If you’ve got a huge batch of files to unzip, you can leave it decompressing in the background whilst you work. The only downside is that sometimes, the thumbnail previews take a few moments to appear although it’s still much quicker than unzipping an archive to see whats inside.

Of all the farmyard beasts, I’ve always found the cow to be the most graceful and serene. While the chickens are running around clucking and causing a fuss and the pigs are making a complete mess of themselves, the humble heifer simply stands and chews. If you’re a big fan of cows then I’ve got news moos for you – there’s actually a whole bunch of PC programs dedicated to the elegant bovines:

• Bone – The Great Cow Race – How will you fare in the running of the cows?
• Cash Cow – Help Buck the Cow save the farm by collecting coins
• Happy Farm – 3D cows on your desktop. What more could anyone want?
• Wild West Ransom – Pacman dressed up as a cowboy busting ghostly varmints
• Animal Gestation Calculator – Work out how long your cow will be pregnant for