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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I don’t know about you, but I find the mouse over ad’s on Windows Live Messenger extremely annoying. Every time I accidently move the mouse over the ad, it keeps popping up forcing me to move my mouse all the way to the top to close it.

As you can see on the left, it can get quite annoying and almost made me stop using Windows Live Messenger. To top it off, the ad’s appear OVER other applications if they are on top of (and overlap) Messenger.

While I don’t condone removing advertising from free products, this was one exception I had to make simply to save bandwidth as well as stop me from uninstalling an otherwise excellent application.

In order to remove the ads follow the steps below:

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From time to time, all bloggers like to tune their blog via a new theme or style sheet etc. Windows Live Writer has an excellent functionality to allow a blogger to preview what their post will look like before they publish their article. This is done by clicking on the Preview tab in Windows Live Writer.

When a blog is set up first in Windows Live Writer, the theme and style sheet is automatically downloaded from the blog to provide this preview functionality.

If the theme or style sheet is changed, you will need to manually refresh in Windows Live Writer to get the latest version to ensure that the preview remains accurate. Its a few simple steps to do this…

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Windows Live Writer is currently one of the most popular applications for blogging. It is an easy to use application that allows anyone to quickly post articles to their blogs in a WYSIWYG fashion. With live previews, its possible to see exactly how your post will look like before you publish the article.

This article will show you how to configure Windows Live Writer to work with your WordPress blog.

Prerequisites

The requirements before you start is that you have downloaded Windows Liver Writer and have it installed on your machine and also that you have a hosted WordPress installation somewhere. It doesn’t matter if the blog is a self-hosted one or one that is hosted on wordpress.com, the steps are the same…

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If you try and install iTunes 8.2 or above on Windows Server 2003, you will most likely get an issue during the install where it complains during installation of one of the components (namely, Apple Mobile Device Support). The error looks like “Apple mobile device support requires that your computer is running Windows XP SP2 or newer”.

iTunes will complete its install, but when you plug in your iPhone or iPod, it will not get recognized and as such, won’t allow you to synch.

If you are having difficulty getting your IPhone or IPod recognized by Windows Server 2003, try the following:

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I use both Google Chrome and Firefox for my main personal browsing. I love both browsers and think each of them does some things better than the other, so I tend to switch between the two depending on my requirements.

I love the development add-on’s that I can get for Firefox so most of my design type browsing is performed on there. However, there is one thing that I would love to have seen on Firefox that Chrome does really well. The New Tab functionality in Chrome results in a webpage dashboard that lays out my most common websites, recent book marks and recently closed web pages all in an easy to read manner. I miss that the most in Firefox.

Well, obviously someone else did too, and there is now an experimental add-on called JumpStart for Firefox that does exactly that!

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Recently I created a post (turned out to be one of the most popular on this site) to show how to install Live SkyDrive as a Network Drive using Gladinet.

At that time, Gladinet was still a Beta Program. Recently, they released Version 1 and there has been some significant changes to the instructions. I’ve now updated the post to properly reflect these changes.

I’m now using the free edition of Gladinet to connect to my SkyDrive, Google Apps and Google Picasa albums all via My Computer

You can find the article here: Set Up Live SkyDrive as a Network Drive via Gladinet

Hope this helps everyone!

Web designers are always on the lookout for resources that speeds up delivery of projects, sites and design work. Icons and brush sets are always an easy and effective way to quickly get a consistent set of graphics that can add to the look and feel of the site.

Icon Finder is a service which at the date of this post has already nearly 60,000 icons ready to be searched and used. With a new version of Icon Finder launched in April, it offers a Google like interface for easy and efficient searching. With a quick and intuitive user interface, it may become an excellent resource tool in every designers toolkit…

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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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Sites such as Twitter and Facebook make it easy for everyday people to quickly get an online presence and start networking. The newest case is Twitter where practically everybody is micro-blogging.

Your profile page is like a shop window to others viewing you and people can spend hours perfecting their profile pages. Twitter, while having a nice set of clean templates built in already, also gives you the opportunity to personalize it.

There are a number of sites that has additional pre-made templates, but the fun of personalizing is giving you the choice to design your very own.

Online Designers

http://www.freetwitterdesigner.com

One of the best flash based Twitter background designers I’ve found so far. It has a limited selection of backgrounds templates, but that shouldn’t stop you from creating your own.

Supports adding shapes, images and texts and as each item is an “object”, these can be edited further to rotate and resize. It even has image filters to allow you to blend your images into your background easily.

Once the background is created, its a simple process to save the image and upload into Twitter. I love the preview feature and the ease of creating your own professional looking Twitter backgrounds.

http://www.twitbacks.com/

Similar to FreeTwitterDesigner, Twitbacks allows you to choose from a wide range of pre-made backgrounds and apply your own personalization on them.

Twitbacks has a wizard type approach that asks you some questions to help fill out the profile area in the background. This is preferred by people who cannot work with a blank canvas.

The only gripe I had when playing with this site was the fact that you need to create an “account” where your backgrounds will be saved to.

Offline Designers

Spoon Graphics

For the more graphically skilled in us, I would recommend Chris Spooner’s blog which has (amongst some excellent Photoshop tutorials) how to make you very own Twitter background using Adobe Photoshop.

This post also has some excellent design practices that you can follow when creating your own Twitter background.

Chris includes a PSD document that you can open in Photoshop as a starting point and offers step by step instructions on how he created his own Twitter background. As always, his tutorials are excellent and easily followed. It certainly gave me a lot of ideas on how to structure our designs so that they stand out from others.

Conclusion

I haven’t had a chance to design my Twitter page (http://www.twitter.com/newbtech) yet, but it will be on my list of things to do :) Feel free to link your twitter pages as comments so i can view your efforts!