Month: May 2008

Windows: A hat, a whip, a rhythmic trumpet melody sounding in the background… need more clues? Yes, Indy is back! The fourth movie is only a week away but meanwhile you can have fun with LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures, a fun 3D platform game that includes the most famous scenes in all three previous movies, all recreated with Lego blocks.

Mac: Want to make a comic strip out of your holidays pictures? Comic Life Magiq is what you need. This highly intuitive app makes great use of Leopard technology and offers loads of templates and original text bubbles. The effects you can add to your photos are really impressive. Plus it’s very easy to use: drag and drop your images, add in text and you’re done!

Smartphone: All too many of us know how annoying it is when your phone gets stolen, but thanks to RobLock you can now minimize the damage if thieves strike. The program sends an alert to a predefined number (a friend’s phone, for instance), when your phone is stolen, providing you with details of the robber’s SIM.

Sex and the City has been recently in the news for the world premier in London of the cinematic follow-up to the successful TV series. According to the film’s marketing team, they are creating smallish premieres in Europe, the next one will be in Berlin, in order to create enough suspense for the New York premier which will be ‘enormous’ and will happen just before the film opens worldwide, which is set for May the 30th.

For all the millions of fans of this fantastic series, I’ve found a great screen saver which will bring to your desktop all the allure of the four stylish women and that feeling of friendship, love and disillusion-illusion, that so appealed to so many of us.

Although the screensaver should allow you also to save the images as wallpaper, this function didn’t work when I tried it, so I though of making your life simpler by taking screenshot and zip them in this Sex and the City wallpaper collection, which I’m sure you’ll love.

If you really are a fan of the series, try this Trivia Game at HBO to find out where you rank on the Sex and the City scale. It will be also funny to test yourself to see with which character you have most affinity with: whether you are more like the high maintenance Charlotte, the pragmatic Miranda, the sexy Samantha, the all-in-one Carrie or a mix of them.

If you are a man, it’s still interesting to know which kind of woman you would be if you were one. I’m something in between Carrie and Charlotte. I just don’t live in Manhattan and would have some problems in buying a pair of Manolo Blahnik a week; but that’s just a matter of perspective, isn’t it?

If you’re a Twitter fan then you’ll know that it’s not particularly well integrated with your desktop. However, there are two very simple solutions which can transform the way you use twitter – Twhirl and TwitterFox. Thanks to Adobe Air, you can now integrate twitter with your desktop much more easily courtesy of twhirl? By doing so, you can keep your status constantly updated quicker, improve your communication options and even change the look of twitter. In particular, it makes adding new friends much quicker and easier than in Twitter’s standalone version. In addition, this is a cross platform Twitter extension that works on both Windows and Mac and connects to multiple twitter and Friendfeed accounts. It provides instant desktop notification of new tweets and even allows you to post images to TwitPic. Also useful is the fact that if you’ve been pestered or bothered by either spam twitters or just someone really annoying, the most recent version also allows you to block other users. The tricky part is configuring it though – if it’s not done correctly, you run the risk of being stuck with old tweets every time you log in and being frozen out of twhirl occasionally although there is a very good user forum to seek help in. Keep track of the latest releases and developments on the twhirl blog.

However, the big downside of twhirl is that it requires installation of Adobe Air. In my opinion, it’s worth doing this although if you’re working a low spec machine, then it may be wise to avoid it. If this is your case, then you’d be much better seeking a lightweight solution in the form of TwitterFox. TwitterFox allows you to enjoy similar advantages to twhirl but the difference is that it simply plugs into Firefox. TwitterFox sits on your Firefox status bar for instant access to your friends and status changes. However, you can’t block contacts or post images like you can with twhirl although on the upside, it requires virtually no configuration whatsoever. One other minor criticism is that as you type, TwitterFox counts up to 140 characters rather than counting down which would be much more helpful because you always have to remember not to go over the 140 twitter character limit.

In summary, there’s probably little doubt that twhirl offers you more functionality than TwitterFox. However, it also requires more configuration and you’ll probably experience quite a few teething problems setting it up. If you’re just looking for a little better integration with your desktop and are working on a slow machine, go for TwitterFox. If you’re a serious twitter user, then you should definitely give twhirl a whirl.

If you only use your iPod to listen to music, you’re missing out on loads of extra things you can do with it. There are many utilities out there to help you convert and transform your iPod into an array of tools such as a video player, storage device, news reader and note taker. Of course, if you’re going to fill it with movies then you’ll need to delete all those albums that are hogging space on your iPod’s hard drive but it’s worth doing, considering you can get all of this out of it:

iPod Video Converter For Free – No ads or fees – just convert films to watch on your iPod

PodPlus – Allows you to transfer everything from e-mails to RSS feeds to your iPod

MojoPac – Transform your iPod into a secure USB storage device

todoPod – Use your iPod to compile lists and store your thoughts on the move

iPodifier – Grab TV streams on your PC and watch them later on your iPod

If you haven’t upgraded to Office 2008 yet, then you’ll still be stuck with the templates offered by Office 2007 for your letterheads, envelopes and business cards. However, Microsoft have just released 6 free new professional looking templates for Office 2007 that can spruce up your presentations and business materials. If you haven’t even got Office 2007 yet, the template download page offers a free sample.

Once you’ve downloaded the templates there’s a slightly different installtion procedure depending on which Office application you want to use them in. In Powerpoint, simply click on the “Design” menu and in the Themes group, click the “More” button. From there, you’ve got an option to add custom templates. In Word or Excel you’ll need to use the Page Layout tab and in the Themes group, click Themes and browse to the themes you’ve just downloaded. Note that you may receive the error message “The template cannot correctly be downloaded” when you try to install the templates. This is actually a bug and you’ll find that the templates have installed and are ready for use but Microsoft claim this is a download error that they’re currently working on to resolve.

Widgets are all the rage now enabling users to drag and drop their favourite applications and functions onto their desktop for easy access. However, until now, the widget phenomenon hadn’t caught up with video players (except arguably Joost) but new open source player Chameleo enables users to watch and create visually-rich video applications with interactive widgets.

Chameleo is based on GStreamer and supports just about every codec out there so there are virtually no playback problems. What makes it interesting however is that it offers a variety of widgets which enable you to perform a variety of tasks from taking instant screenshots to blogging about what you are watching. Even more exciting, you can create your own widgets because it takes it’s plug-in architecture from Eclipse to make it easy to extend with a minimum of programming experience. One warming however – it is extremely resource hogging so make sure you’ve got plenty of RAM! You can see Chameleo in action below and follow the latest developments here.