Cool Apps
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…
Microsoft Offers Free Online Translation Services
Microsoft Translator is a free translation service to allow you as the user to get the most out of on the fly translation of web pages and excerpts and provides tools to users and webmasters alike to deliver these types of services to the web user.
It is API based and there are several applications that use this API that would be useful to both webmasters as well as developers in addition to IE8 users.
Today, we’ll look at 4 ways to use Microsoft Translation services:
1. Translation Accelerator for Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0
2. Translation Bot for Windows Live Messenger
3. Windows Live Toolbar Translator Button
4. Webmaster uses for Microsoft Translator (via Widgets)
6 Free Mind Mapping Applications for Brainstorming
Mind Mapping is a technique that allows users to create relationships out of pieces of information. It is extremely useful when a group of people are brainstorming a particular issue or idea and can be used to open up to ideas that you may not have normally thought of. It is a creative way to think around an topic and allows people to visualize thoughts and relationships in a meaningful way.
Historically, mind mapping (loosely related to concept mapping) started off with a group of people in a room standing around a blackboard/whiteboard and throwing ideas around. These ideas can then be joined to other ideas and spawn off sub-ideas, etc etc. A mind map application brings that level of interactivity and creativity onto your desktop computers. Mind mapping has a use both in the work space as well as at home.
ScreenToaster News and Updates
Recently I test drove a free screencast application called ScreenToaster (a free application that can record your screen and upload to YouTube!).
You can check it out here: ScreenToaster Article
One of the major gripes I had with the application is the lack of online help support in the form of a Forum. A forum for any product is important as that builds the community and is one of the first places to look in terms of help and support. Additionally, its a place where others can showcase their ideas, tutorials and suggest ways to use the application well beyond what the original developers have intended for the application.
Live SkyDrive – How To Set Up As Network Drive via Gladinet
Updated: 3rd June 2009 – to cater for Gladinet moving out of Beta and changed instructions to use the free version with updated screenshots and instructions.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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)
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.
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.
Recent Posts
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- Windows Live Writer Tips: How to Refresh Your Theme
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- How to Install SkyDrive as a Network Drive via Gladinet (updated)
- How To Search for Icons easily using Icon Finder
- Twitter Theme Finally Updated
- Microsoft Offers Free Online Translation Services
- On A Personal Note…
- 2 Web Based Applications To Manage Multiple Twitter Accounts
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