Feedly for Android– RSS Reader that Rocks…

Mmmm RSS feeds.. who doesn’t love the ability to subscribe to feeds from various websites and being able to read through the articles at ones leisure.

Now, when I had my iPad as my primary tablet, I used Flipboard ALL the time. It was amazing and one of the premiere products out there that supported subscribing to various topics as well as twitter accounts. That was one of the major reasons why I bought the iPad funnily enough. It looked so damn cool going through my Facebook and Twitter listings like a magazine.

Come forward to the Asus Transformer, there was no Flipboard, and I almost panicked when I found there would be no android version of this application.

The major difference between Feedly and Flipboard is that Feedly is a RSS Reader that integrates seamlessly with your Google Reader subscriptions. Flipboard on the other hand does funky stuff with your twitter and Facebook feeds.

Anyway, enough about Flipboard.. all about Feedly from here.

Feedly is first and foremost a news aggregator based on RSS feeds. Its optimised for Honeycomb and while it comes pre-configured with lots of fantastic content, its even better when personalised with Google Reader integration. Presenting your RSS feeds in a clean magazine like format, Feedly looks and behaves beautifully. Feedly comes with customised layouts for different types of devices (including mobile, tablet and web) and looks great in landscape more on my Transformer.

The developers have taken the user experience seriously and designed the interface to be intuitive and familiar. The panels transition to and from the background seamlessly with very little lag, and the rendering engine that sets up and displays the content is almost on par with Flipboard.

Integration with products such as Instapaper and Read It Later is excellent as well as the ability to discover and add additional feeds directly from within the application.

While Feedly is available on both Chrome and Firefox, I’ve never really used the PC equivalent. Frankly, it was easier to subscribe to the RSS feeds I needed via Outlook than to go through Feedly. However, on the tablet, this application has made reading the RSS feeds a new experience and one that comes with my highest recommendations.

Combined with the fact that its free from the Android and Amazon market, its one of those applications that can only get better with time.

Bring on Twitter and Facebook integration, and I’m happy to leave the iPad to the wife!

You can get Feedly for Android here:

• Amazon Market Link (US Only)
• Google Market Link

Capture Screens and Screencasts Easily With Jing

A while ago, I looked at a screen capture tool that I used for quite some time called Cropper. I’ve recently been introduced to an alternative that has replaced all my screen capture requirements and is now my primary tool for capturing screenshots and screen casts.

Having been around for a few years, TechSmith has improved Jing’s capabilities as a viable screen capture application and has resulted in a user-friendly and robust application.

This is one of the few applications where I do not feel the need to write extensively about the product due to its excellent website. I would advise my readers to go there for more information as it is quite comprehensive in explaining how to use Jing.

The only thing I would suggest here is that Jing by default has a set of buttons so when you have finished capturing a screen, it can “save to disk”, “capture to clipboard” or “upload to screencast.com”. I personally do not like the “upload to screencast.com” button as its too easy to hit and I’m frequently capturing screens that are commercially sensitive…

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How to Copy Your iPod/iPhone Music To Your PC with SharePod

While ITunes as an application makes it easy to move music from your computer to your iPod or iPhone, Apple has made it intentionally difficult to move the other way back.

There are many reasons why you may wish to copy the contents of your iPhone across to your PC. I recently installed Windows 7 on my main machine and am now facing the possibility of having my music collection wiped and restarting from fresh. This is a daunting task as I always keep my music library as tidy as possible so that I can locate and play my music quickly and easily.

Thankfully, there are many third party products out there that can back up your music collection straight from your iPod/iPhone to your PC. I ended up using SharePod because it was simple to use, uncomplicated and best of all FREE.

In order to back up all or selected songs, follow the steps below:

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2 Web Based Applications To Manage Multiple Twitter Accounts

It is quite common to build up a huge list of people/accounts that you follow on Twitter. So much so, that tweets can be flying in faster than you can read them. While using tools like TweetDeck can give you better control over your tweets, ultimately it doesn’t stop the amount of scrolling you have to do to sift through all the information.

Even worse when you have a single account that subscribes to work as well as personal interests. Many people have resorted to creating multiple twitter accounts to manage their subscriptions. This is a good alternative, but then it can get painful sending a tweet across more than one account.

While I started with two accounts (one for personal and one for newbtech), I’m now favoring separating my @newbtech account further into areas of interest (such as Photoshop, Linux, collaboration, storage, etc). This way, each account can have its own followers (and follows). I needed an application that can support easy reading of these accounts as well as the ability to send a tweet out across multiple accounts…

My requirements are for a web based client rather than a downloaded/installed one simply because I tend to use these across multiple machines/operating systems…

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Live SkyDrive – How To Set Up As Network Drive via Gladinet

This post has now been superceded with an updated one. Please go below to see the new post:

Updated Article – Setting up Live SkyDrive with Gladinet 2.1

Recently I talked about Windows Live SkyDrive, a facility that allows you up to 25gigs of storage space for free. The storage space is available anywhere and while its an excellent facility, it can get cumbersome dealing with uploading files and working through the web based interface.

Ideally, you want to have a folder structure set up on your computer so that you can just navigate through your SkyDrive just like you do any of your other hard drives. Gladinet is a cloud based service that does just that.  It brings online applications and storage to your local machine. Read below for more information on it.

Gladinet is a fully featured service that allows for (amongst others):

• Drive “mounting” (act of setting up an online storage like SkyDrive or Picasa or Google Docs as local hard drives)
• A Cloud based desktop that enables users to use online applications to work on local files.
• Task schedulers to cater for scheduled transfers of data (eg as backup)
• Smart file transfers that allows for encryption, compression and reliability.
• It allows you to upload images without resizing!! (If you use the web interface to upload images, they get resized automatically – this way it treats image files as data, so SkyDrive doesn’t resize or constrain the image in any way).

What we will do today is use Gladinet to “mount” our SkyDrive so that it is available on My Computer.

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Stardock Fences and BumpTop – Keep Your Desktop Organized

A typical user rarely re-installs Windows on his/her machine regularly, and over time, the desktop becomes cluttered with shortcuts to installed applications, documents that one needs saved quickly and within reach and quick downloads and extracts. I used to be one of these people though over the years, I’ve taught myself to become better at managing the number of desktop icons I have. Nowadays, I rarely save many documents on my desktop simply because that saves it to my c: drive which is the first thing to go if I have to do a reformat/reinstall. And I don’t really want to lose those documents if I forget to back them up (which unfortunately I have done in the past).

While Windows offers many ways to put quick links to your documents, such as the quick launch bar beside your Start button or the pinned Start menu items, etc, the desktop is usually the most convenient place to put important shortcuts (application or documents/folders).

Today I’ll look into two of these applications, Stardock Fences and BumpTop…

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Meebo – An Integrated Web Based Instant Messenger

Admit it.. practically everyone is on either MSN, Yahoo, or the million other IM clients out there. Every IM demands that you install their full clients to make best use of their capabilities. Having to juggle all these applications can become painful quickly especially if you have many contacts spread over these applications.

There are also clients out there that try and integrate different clients into one package (a la Pidgin and Trillian). Meebo is another one of them integrated instant messenger applications, but its main feature is its web based and so you don’t need to install yet another application just to make use of its features.

Meebo offers the following features on its website:

• As an IM Client, it allows the user to connect to MSN, Yahoo!, MySpace, AIM, Facebook, Gtalk, ICQ, Jabber, Flixster and more. That’s a whole lot of clients :)
• It provides a “meeting room” type functionality a la chat rooms
• It enables integrated live communications on any websites that incorporate Meebo Rooms and IM.
• It’s web based, so no application downloads or installation is required.
• It does offer notification services to allow messages to pop up without going through a browser as well as mobile chatting facilities.

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Vixy.net – Download Videos From YouTube Easily

Vixy.net has been around for a number of years now and has been an excellent way to download youtube videos for offline viewing (or for viewing on portable devices such as your iPods).

It has a simple user interface and in a few simple steps, the user can grab a video, convert it to a number of formats and download onto their computer.

It supports conversions to the following formats:

• AVI (Divx)
• MOV
• MP4 (for iPods and Sony PSP’s)
• 3GP (for Mobiles)

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Zoho Mail – How to add a new mail account to Zoho Mail

Welcome to Part II of my Zoho articles. (Part I here). This drills down further into one of the Zoho applications (namely Zoho Mail) and gives you some guidance around setting up Zoho Mail as your primary mail application.

Zoho Mail by default gives you a @zoho email address (yes, yet another email address), which I’m not too keen on as i have many already. Instead I wanted to add my Newbtech and Gmail mail accounts so that i can access them via Zoho Mail.

Most broadband providers have an online offering in terms of allowing you to access and create mail from the web without having to use large windows/linux based clients such as Microsoft Outlook. However, if you’re anything like me, you may most likely have quite a few of these accounts and Zoho mail allows the user to maintain all these accounts within one application.

Zoho Mail is a fully featured mail application with facilities to attach documents from your local drive through to Google Docs. It supports folders, labels and other functionality commonly found in Microsoft Outlook for instance.

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Zoho Personal – Online Office Suite. An Overview

For many years, the only way to work with a full suite of productivity tools was to purchase/download and install Microsoft Office or Open Office onto your machines. Documents were created and stored locally and shared via Email or Shared folders, etc.

With the Internet fast becoming the medium of choice for storage and collaboration, there has been many products being developed and trying to take a share of this market. I’ve recently test driven applications such as GBridge for desktop sharing and collaboration and Adobe Buzzword for document authoring and collaboration. These are specialized in doing one thing well. And they do.

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