Month: November 2009

Windows: If you need more space but can’t be bothered to buy another external hard drive, try online storage. With SkyDrive Explorer you’ll be able to access your Live SkyDrive free storage from Windows Explorer, just as it it was one more local drive on your computer. All you need is a Windows Live ID, and 25 GB of online free space will be yours for free!

iPhone: If you’re a interested in space exploration, this NASA app for iPhone is a must. This app basically allows you to follow all of NASA’s missions. The main screen lists the missions you can follow, and touching any of them takes you to a description of the mission with a counter for the time elapsed since the mission started.

Mac: Renaming files can be an absolute nightmare if you’re faced with a batch of wrongly-named ones, or recovered files which have had their IDs corrupted. A Better Finder Rename (now updated to version 8.37) is a comprehensive file renaming solution for Mac and can rename huge numbers of files in seconds. A Better Finder Rename allows you to do just about everything you need to rename files.

Lets leave the ‘why would you read a book on your PC?’ question to one side for a moment, and take a look at Amazon’s new free eBook reader:

What you can see is everything Kindle for PC can do. You can insert bookmarks, but not annotations or highlights (like you can on the Kindle device). The library system is basic, although clear and there’s an amazon button that takes you to the shop via your browser. The presentation of text – the important bit – is minimal. You can’t alter font, but can change size and the width of pages. There’s no option to mess around with color or background at all. I was pretty unimpressed with the text, as there are tiny apps like Gargoyle (unfortunately not an ebook reader) that present text in a much more readable form. This just looks like text in MS Word! You can use out-of-copyright eBooks from the Gutenberg project, though, which is good.

Dedicated desktop readers aren’t very common, but there are other options. Check them out after the break – I’ll start at the bottom!

Continue reading “The Kindle eBook reader comes to your PC, but is it your best option?”

It’s not everyday you get six free Mac applications for free but the team at MacHeist is offering software worth a total of $154 for absolutely nothing over the next 3 days. The applications on offer are ShoveBox, WriteRoom, Twitterific, TinyGrab, Hordes of Orcs and Mariner Write. Note that Mariner Write will only be unlocked once 500,000 users have taken up this special offer so the more that sign-up, the better it is for everyone.

The MacHeist team have become famous for their giveaways. Here’s a quick look at the current offer:

• ShoveBox A clever application for remembering all the things that you don’t have time for while you’re application whether it’s web pages to visit later, PDF’s for later reading or a To-Do list of your daily activities.

• WriteRoom Miss the good old days of typewriters? WriteRoom provides a distraction free writing environment that ensures you focus more on your writing and less on distractions such as Facebook, IM clients and YouTube.

• Twitterific Possibly the pick of the bunch on offer. If I didn’t use Tweetie than I’d definitely consider switching to this slick and well crafted Twitter client which stands out for it’s high level of customization.

• TinyGrab A super quick way of sharing screenshots or funny images you’ve just found on the net. Just select the portion of the screen you want to share, drag it to your menu bar and you instantly receive a URL for sharing it.

• Hordes of Orcs A challenging Tower Defense game where the aim is to defend your village from starving Orcs. If more than 20 make it through your defenses, the Orcs will be having you for breakfast.

• MarinerWrite Mariner Write is a comprehensive Word Processing package that´s simple to use and can even open and edit documents in Word format. If you don’t have Word, it’s a great alternative.

You can see a video of some of the apps in action here. Get yours now before it’s too late!

As you may have read elsewhere, today marks the 5th anniversary of the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0. The browser, intended as a direct attack on the market dominance (and abysmal build quality) of Internet Explorer, has gone from strength to strength in those five years, proving that the software we use to view the web can be as important as the content we’re viewing.

But this story didn’t really begin on November 9th, 2004. Firefox had already been around for a couple of years, under the name of Phoenix (and, briefly, Firebird). That was when many internet users, including myself, first had a chance to get to grips with what was to become a revolutionary piece of software. I was still using a 56k dialup connection when I first used Phoenix, so load times really mattered!

You can still download Phoenix 0.5 (from 2002) and, apart from gaping security holes it’s riddled with, the program itself is eminently usable and very reminiscent of Firefox 3.5.5. Some page elements display incorrectly on newer websites, but the most notable difference is how much faster ‘bloated’ Firefox 3.5.5 is. Also, Firefox uses a heck of a lot more memory than Phoenix ever did, but that seems OK because computers have so much more memory available.

Many of the keyboard shortcuts and features in Firefox were already available in Phoenix. Tabbed browsing, for example, works well in the older browser, though you couldn’t carry out advanced tab operations like dragging tabs to reorder them. Phoenix 0.5 also fails the Acid3 browser test, with a score of 39/100 – still strikingly better than ‘standards be damned’ Internet Explorer 7 (12/100).

Taking another look at Phoenix 0.5 today has brought back a lot of memories… like how the default theme was ugly but the favorites manager was streets ahead of IE’s offering (which it still is). Phoenix was an important piece of software that restored hope to web users like me who’d grown up with Netscape, only to see it die from lack of development. So yes, today is Firefox’s birthday. But I’m remembering Phoenix.

During the summer, Gmail increased its maximum attachment size to 25MB, up 5MB on its previous limit. Great news, I hear you cry – now you can squeeze a few more photos into that email or send an album in 2 parts rather than 3!

Well yes, you can, but does that mean you should?

One thing you have to remember about email is that it’s old. Really old. Although it mightn’t feel it, email has been around for more than 30 years and, unlike other technologies, it hasn’t been updated much. This doesn’t have much of an impact on our day-to-day use, but like they say over at the Google Operating System blog, “…sending a large attachment via email is relocating using the U.S. Postal Service as your moving company. It is painful, limited, and expensive.” It will get the job done, but it’s not the most efficient way.

So what’s the alternative? Well, if you are in physical contact with your recipient, you could just put the file on a memory stick. Once you follow the basic security principles, it’s a very simple way of transferring data. Obviously, this only works if you are geographically close to the recipient. In fact, email’s ability to overcome this problem is one of the reasons it became so popular. Just because it’s popular, though, doesn’t make it the best, so have a think about using free web hosting services instead. Don’t worry if it sounds complicated – you’ll get the hang of it quickly.

Go to a free hosting site – Mediafire and Hotshare are two well-known ones – and upload the file in question, just like you would attach it to an email. With 200MB of space usually available, it has a significant advantage over the now elderly email. Once it is uploaded, the service will give you a link, which you email to your friend. Your friend clicks on the link, and downloads the file that you uploaded. If it sounds complicated, it’s only because I have detailed every step – do it once or twice and it will become second nature.

Even though it’s not the most efficient way, you might still have your reasons for wanting to send larger files by email. If you do, you’ll need to make them smaller, and there’s two ways of doing this. You can compress (or ‘zip’) them, or divide them into smaller files. Either way, you’ll need a tool to do this, and the recipient will need a similar tool to decompress or re-join. IZArc and 7-Zip are two reliable – and free – file compression and decompression utilities. Likewise, in the area of file splitting, you’ve got plenty of choice. Even though they’re not pretty (and show little imagination in the name stakes), HJSplit and Gsplit are both fuss-free methods of chopping those unwieldy files down to size.

Exploration is a standard attraction in many games, and Small Worlds makes it a central feature. I don’t want to say too much, as playing it for the first time is genuinely surprising. It’s a platform game – you control the red figure above, using the cursor keys. It’s completely simple to play and not difficult, but really addictive and extremely pretty. Just play it!

[Via: ByteJacker]

Windows: Do you need to convert any audio or video file? Oxelon Media Converter is the perfect tool for the task. This simple app can convert multiple media files simultaneously, and it works surprisingly fast! Oxelon Media Converter supports dozens of formats and is perfectly embedded with Windows Explorer, which enables you to convert files with one click.

iPhone: Halloween is upon us once again, but if you haven’t got the money or the inclination to go trick or treating this year then check out Spooky Photo Free. This app allows you to make scary scenes out of your photographs. For example, you could put a zombie into a wedding picture, make bats appear in the sky above your house, or add a menacing pumpkin head onto an image of your dog.

Mac: Keychain on Mac does a pretty good job of managing passwords but once you’ve tried 1Password you’ll probably never look back. If you’re tired of making up passwords to access sites or worried that your passwords are not secure enough, it really is invaluable. 1Password creates strong, unique passwords for you, then remembers and restores them all within your web browser.