SkyDrive Explorer integrates SkyDrive As A Network Drive

In my previous articles, I’ve listed of ways to get the best use out of Windows Live SkyDrive. This has consistently been one of the most read posts on my blog especially around using Gladinet to set up Live SkyDrive as a network drive on your computer.

Recently, a new product has come into Beta, that allows for the same level of functionality and allows the user to set up their SkyDrive account as a network drive without going through extended configuration steps that Gladinet takes us through.

In all fairness, connecting via Gladinet offers many more options such as connecting to other types of cloud storage at the same time (for example,  Google Picasa, Amazon S3 and Google Docs). SkyDrive Explorer only connects you to Live SkyDrive.

SkyDrive Explorer is a free product and is easy to use. It requires little to no configuration and allows the user to use their SkyDrive just like any other folder on their computer….

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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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How to Prevent Ads on Windows Live Messenger

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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Windows Live Writer Tips: How to Refresh Your Theme

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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How To Configure Windows Live Writer for WordPress Blogs

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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How To Get IPhone/IPod Working With Windows Server 2003

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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How to Add Chrome like New Tab and Home Page to Firefox

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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How to Install SkyDrive as a Network Drive via Gladinet (updated)

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!

How To Search for Icons easily using Icon Finder

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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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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