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…

To use the site, simply navigate to their website at http://www.iconfinder.net.

The interface is simple and clean and you can either search for a specific item/tag or browse through the icon sets.

For example, if i was to search for Twitter (because I seriously am in need of a twitter and RSS icon set!), simply type “Twitter” in the search box and hit search.

At this point, the power of this clean system becomes apparent. The set of buttons on the top allows you to dictate how many icons you want to see on the page, the background color of the icon can be changed to show you an immediate preview of the button as well as the size of the icon.

Even more impressive in terms of user friendliness, clicking on a particular icon will take you to the set the icon came from, so you can quickly scan through and pick out other icons you may wish to grab.

Each icon/set comes with licensing information and most of free for commercial use (provided you link to the package) and you can download in either PNG or ICO format.

Browsing Icon Sets are just as easy. Simply click on Browse Icon Sets in the top right menu and you can browse through the entire collection:

Clicking on any of the tags in the tag cloud gives you a nicely filtered list for that Tag:

Icon Finder recently put up a forum on their site and it encourages users to add additional icon sets and/or tags to existing icons to help with the indexing. Its a pretty impressive site and features are being added to cater for user feedback. Seems like they care about their site and have worked hard to provide a simple interface that allows users to focus on creativity and ease of search rather than make the user go through many hoops and advertising just to get what they are looking for.

The collection is already impressive at nearly 60,000 icons and seems to be growing regularly. This may become an extremely popular site if it continues to index these icons. I found this site to be fast, intuitive and easily accessible. Its not crowded with advertising and encourages user interactions.

Relevant Links for Icon Finder:

• Home Page: http://www.iconfinder.net/
• Twitter Page: http://www.twitter.com/iconfinder
• Forum: http://www.iconfinder.net/forum/

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)

1. Translation Accelerator for IE8

With the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0, there is a built in accelerator to translate languages on the fly. First brought out with IE8.0 Beta 2, it allows the user to highlight any selected text and translate to various languages immediately.

It is as easy as highlighting a section of text in IE8, and clicking on the little blue arrow that brings up a context window. At this point you have two options:

1. If you hover your mouse over “Translate with Live Search”, another window will pop up with choices to translate from and to different languages.

2. Clicking on the “Translate with Live Search” will actually take you to the microsofttranslator.com site (opens in a new window) with the text pasted in and ready for you to translate.

That’s excellent for translating quick blocks of text on the fly (rather than the whole page).

2. Translation Bot for Windows Live Messenger

If you add mtbot@hotmail.com to your Windows Live Messenger contacts, you can call the translation service on the fly via your messenger client. This is a robot translator that you can converse with and you can type “Tbot ?” to get a list of commands that it understands.

The first thing to do is to set up your language preferences. To do this type “TBot Change”. You will be led through a couple of menu choices to choose your source and target languages. Once set up, feel free to converse with the bot as if you are talking to another human, and everything you say will be translated and returned accordingly.

Really easy to use once you get used to the interface and an excellent use of the translator API’s. You can go to the Bot’s Live Space in the Relevant Links below for additional information.

Hint: You can add this user to any chat client that can understand MSN contacts (such as Pidgin for Linux!)

3. Windows Live Toolbar Translator Button

If you use the Windows Live Toolbar, you can easily incorporate online translation by adding the Translation Button to the toolbar. This is achieved by clicking the “+” icon in the toolbar and following the menu to add the Translator button.

You will be taken to the Live Gallery where you can Download and install the button.

Clicking on the Add button will download and add the button to your toolbar automatically. Now, whenever you are at a webpage that you need translating, simply hit the button on the toolbar and a new window will appear with the original and translated text.

When you mouse over any sentence in the original webpage, it even highlights the translated sentence in the translated page view. This is excellent for pinpointing which sentences go where.

If you don’t like the side by side view, you can click on the various view options on the top left to change to a top/bottom or a hover type navigation (where you can be on the original or translated page and hovering over the sentences shows a tooltip with the appropriate translation in it.

4. For Webmasters

Microsoft Translator Services have two services for Webmasters. You can add a Microsoft Translator easily into your website by including a quick line of code in your website code

This puts a small drop down into your page and allows the users to quickly select a language and translating the page. Hitting the arrow will take the user to a similar full page translation as above.

In addition, there is now a Widget available that allows on the fly translation without having to go through to a separate page. This increases user experience significantly. To get the widget code, you will need to get an invite from here: (http://www.microsofttranslator.com/Widget/)

I’m in the process of getting that widget installed on newbtech.

In Conclusion

Microsoft Translation services are good and easy to use. They provide value to both users as well as website authors and provide a better user experience overall. The Microsoft Team behind Translation Services have done a splendid job in expanding our capabilities to view information on the web that may have been otherwise hidden behind a language we may not understand.

Relevant Links

• Microsoft Translator Official Team Blog
• Microsoft Translator Forums
• Microsoft Translation Bot Space
• Webmasters and Blog Authors: Adding a Translator to your webpage

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.

There are a number of free Mind Mapping tools out there that you can use in your browser or as downloadable applications. I’ll try and list a few of them here.

1. FreeMind (Home Page)

This is currently my favorite mind mapping tool and one that I have used often in the past. Written in Java and it needs to be downloaded and installed on your machine. It can run across Windows as well as Linux and is easy to use and understand.

You can create sub trees easily and navigation is well thought out as well as the user interface.

The user can export into a variety of formats and can search amongst the map nodes. FreeMind maps can be imported/imbedded across a variety of Wiki’s and content management systems (CMS).

FreeMind is currently one of the most popular free tools for mind mapping or brainstorming.

2. XMind (Home Page)

XMind comes in both a free and “Pro” version, and is frequently compared to FreeMind as an excellent mind mapping tool. Downloadable and installed on your machine, its a Java based application that can be used to easily create mind maps (amongst others) and shared on the web on XMind’s website. This encourages collaboration amongst the web users and creating mind maps is easy and intuitive.

XMind supports external attachments and image imbedding and once created, the user can export to a variety of formats. Sharing is done via XMind’s website however, private sharing is only available on the pro version.

3. Bubbl.Us (Home Page)

A simple web based application that allows the user to create mind maps online. This is a free application that allows the user, once registered, to create mind maps and share, email, download or imbed their mind maps on their blogs/websites.

There is nothing to download and install as its all web based. It has an extremely intuitive user interface and the bottom right corner of the screen has contextual help so mousing over any element will provide you with an immediate help section.

You don’t need to register to play with the application, so by all means have a look at bubbl.us as an option. Have a look at their blog for more details.

4. Mind42.Com (Home Page)

Another web based mind mapping tool that doesn’t require any downloading or installing. It allows for easy creation of mind maps and collaboration/sharing of these maps to promote brainstorming.

Featuring abilities to import and export maps, an extensive help section and an intuitive user interface, Mind42 is an excellent web based alternative to create your mind maps.

5. Compendium (Home Page)

Significantly more complex than FreeMind but packed with features, Compendium provides a visual environment for users to map and manage their ideas collaboratively. It provides for a richer user interface including stencils and custom graphics that goes well above and beyond simple shapes that FreeMind may have.

A fully matured application having been around since for over a dozen years, it may be well above most casual users requirements. However, if you are a small firm that wants more than what FreeMind may offer, this is a recommended (albeit complex) application that you can base your mind mapping off.

Again, written in Java and able to run across platforms.

6. Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) (Home Page)

Another Java based application allowing for use across platforms, VUE was created for the purposes of creating mind maps around digital resources. It has a rich user interface and supports plug ins to add value to the generic shapes that is included in most concept mapping software. It is possible to include a variety of media types as elements on your mind maps in VUE including integration with Flickr, Twitter, Yahoo, etc.

The team is currently working on the next version of VUE and the “upcoming features” list looks rich with improvements.

Conclusion

There are many mind mapping and brainstorming applications available on the internet. The above are just some of the free ones available currently. Let us know what your mind map tool of choice is :)

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.

I’m pleased to say that recently we got an email from Rudy that ScreenToaster has now put in a forum on their site!! This is excellent news and while its still new and relatively unpopulated, with the wide range of follower that ScreenToaster has, I see the forum growing significantly over time.

In addition to that, the latest version of ScreenToaster includes:

• Uploading videos to YouTube can now be done in High Definition format. So you don’t have to stick with hosting your videos on ScreenToaster if you want HD.
• Downloading in .mov format is released so that you can now do some offline editing of the screencast using your favourite video editor
• There is now an API available for developers to use to publish your screencasts directly into your websites/blog/forums.
• More tweaks to make the application even easier to use.

So along with the forums, I can see some really positive directions ScreenToaster is taking. I know its not going to be as fully featured as a commercial product such as Camtasia, but its an excellent free alternative which doesn’t require an application to be installed (apart from Java) and can screencast from any desktop with access to the internet.

Related Links:

• ScreenToaster Forums
• ScreenToaster Home Page
• ScreenToaster Press page (where yes! we’re mentioned too!)
• NewbTech Test Drive of ScreenToaster

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.

Prerequisites

you have an existing SkyDrive account. Easy enough to do if you follow my earlier guide: Microsoft SkyDrive – 25 gigs of space for free!

Step 1

The first step would be to download Gladinet onto your machine and install it. There are two versions available on the website (http://www.gladinet.com): a Free Starter one and a Professional Edition. The Professional Edition is on a limited introductory offer, but as it costs money, I will use the free version You can download either of them on the following page: Gladinet Editions Download Page. There is a version for both 32bit and 64bit operating systems (sadly no Linux).

Step 2

Once downloaded, complete the installation process. Select all the defaults (you may wish to change the install location, but apart from that, all else should be as normal).

When you launch the application for the first time, you’ll have an initial “Run Once Initial Settings” for the Cloud desktop.

Here, choose a drive letter that you want to assign to Gladinet and hit OK. In my case I chose “R” as my drive. Leave everything else as is and hit OK.

Important!

If you are running a server operating system (or one which has IIS running), you may get a message that states that Port 80 is being used already. It will ask to install a virtual adapter. Click Yes.

At this point, the Gladinet Virtual Driver will be installed.

If you continue to have an issue installing the virtual adapter, there is a troubleshooting guide in the install folder\WosHome called “GladinetTroubleShoot.pdf”. It may help resolve issues around Gladinet behaving with applications that also use Port 80 (such as Skype or IIS).

In my case, I changed my unassigned port on my local web server to port 81 and it worked fine. There are ways to preserve port 80 and have Gladinet coexist with your web server. Its detailed in the Troubleshooting guide.

Step 3

Assuming you have any possible conflict resolved, Gladinet will start. You can tell from a taskbar mini icon it will place on your start bar and it should show you an initial menu screen.

Click on “Mount Disk Storage or Web Storage As Virtual Directory”

Step 4

This will open up the Virtual Directory Manager.

As we’re adding SkyDrive, select “Windows Live SkyDrive” as the Service Provider.

The dialog box will change slightly to collect your SkyDrive credentials:

At this point you can create a “safe card” (refer to Gladinet for details) or just type in your SkyDrive credentials and click on Add.

Your username is your Windows Live Id (usually same as your MSN Messenger or Hotmail Id)

It will take a while to create the virtual directory and progress will be shown at the bottom of the screen. You may get a “Loading Online Storage Plugin” agreement dialog box. Hit Yes to this.

Step 5

Once its finished, a new Windows Explorer window will open up and show you the contents of your SkyDrive!

At this point you can navigate through the folders just like any other folder on your computer. If you happen to close your Windows Explorer, opening up My Computer later will show you the drive under Network Location (Vista) or Network Drives (Windows 2003).

You can also open up your drives by right clicking the Gladinet mini icon and selecting your drive

Via the same method, I managed to add Google Picasa as well as Google Docs to Gladinet as well.

When you drag a file into your SkyDrive, (if you chose the professional edition), you will be asked if you want to upload immediately or schedule it for later. Additionally, right-clicking on an “office” type document will display and option to read it in an appropriate viewer.

Conclusions

As a simple drag and drop access to your online storage, it does what’s asked of it. It gave me a network drive that allowed me to access my online data stores and i can easily upload and download documents to and from my drives.

Currently, its one of the best ways to really make use of SkyDrive without having to go through a web explorer.

You can continue to explore Gladinet on your own by right clicking its mini-icon and checking out the various options.

You may also wish to read our guide on other storage and collaboration solutions. Click the following post to have a look (opens in a new window):
11 Free Services for Online Storage, Sharing and Collaboration

Relevant Links

• Introduction to Live SkyDrive – how to log on and use SkyDrive
• Gladinet Home Page
• Gladinet Blog
• Gladinet Edition Comparisons – between Starter, Professional and Premium editions.

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…

Stardock Fences

Stardock Fences is not a revolutionary new way of organizing your desktop (a la  Bumptop). Rather, it provides a variety of dock-like structures called containers that enable you to quickly organize and layout your shortcuts and icons on your desktop to keep it as tidy and accessible as possible.

Made by the same folks who made ObjectDock, its a free (for personal) product that can help a lot of folks at home. Creating the containers is quite simple and you can move your documents between containers (or out of them) using simple drag and drop. New containers can be created quickly and named for convenience. These containers can also be resized and provides scrolling if there are many items in the container.

Fences is not a desktop replacement. Rather its an add-on that compliments your desktop and user experience.

Fences requires Microsoft .Net version 2.0 to run and can be downloaded from here:

http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/downloads.asp

The version that is currently available for download is a beta one and will expire around August 2009. There is a Pro version scheduled to come out in the future. Stardock’s site generally is an easy to read and has a comprehensive sections on its features and an active forums section (though I must admit, i didn’t see a section specifically for Fences).

In addition to Fences, Stardock has many other applications centered around the area of desktop organization, look & feel and completely changing your user experience. They do have an integrated version which has most of their applications packaged into one called Object Desktop, that is a commercial application, so you need to pay for it. But by all means, please do go check out some of Stardocks offerings. The eye candy certainly did catch my eye :)

BumpTop

BumpTop, takes things a lot further than Fences whereby it tries to simulate a real desk environment complete with walls to pin up items, ability to group items (called “piles”), shuffle through  these and integration into social network sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

It is touch screen friendly and allows dynamic icon resizing for important files as well as thumbnail previews.

It try’s to revolutionize the way we use our desktops by making it simpler and quicker to get things done. BumpTop makes use of grouping and gestures all in a “3D” environment that looks pleasing to the eye.

BumpTop is using similar technology to what we have seen in Microsoft Surface but I have a  feeling that these types of desktops will become more popular once touch screen technology replaces the keyboard and mouse as the primary means of user input. Additionally, unlike the desk in the video below, my real desk is like my computer desktop, minimalistic and clear of objects as possible. For someone like me, it will take quite a bit of re-learning to get into the habits of “throwing” icons everywhere :)

BumpTop does a free and pro version but the free version has some essential features missing. You can download BumpTop from here:

http://bumptop.com/download.php

Below is a video of BumpTop in action.

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.

To start, you need (yes, you guessed it) an account on Meebo.

Step 1 – Open up your favourite web browser and navigate to http://www.meebo.com. The left box will ask you for your Meebo user name and password. As this is your first time, there is a link called “Sign up now!” that you need to click. When clicked it opens up a small window that you can fill in to complete your user registration.

On the third screen of the registration wizard, you’ll be offered an opportunity to enter your MSN, Yahoo!, AIM or GTalk account details. You can skip this step as we will add our accounts in a later step. So Click on SKIP and Meebo will now continue and create your user account for you.

Step 2 – Once you have logged in, you’ll see the following screen. This is the main dashboard of Meebo. You can see your username, status and profile picture on the left. On the right is your current buddy list and at the bottom is some advertising.

Lets sign onto some accounts now. So click on “+Sign onto more accounts…” link button.

Step 3 – A small window will pop up with some basic questions. See the screenshot on the left. Basically, choose which IM network you want to connect to and enter the login credentials for that IM network. Note: This is different from your Meebo account details.

Signing onto some of the IM networks may require more than one step (eg Facebook has about 3 or 4 in its wizard).

Step 4 – Once you have added the service, it will appear in your dashboard.

If you have chosen to untick the “Connect at startup” option, you’ll have to manually sign on to the services. You do this by clicking on your name against the chosen IM network and it should expand down one line with a “Sign on” link. Click on this link to actually log on. This way you can selectively log onto just the services you want.

It can take a bit of getting used to the web based Dashboard, so I would suggest trying with a couple of your IM networks first and once you get used to it, then continue to add more.

The Buddy List is in integrated one, so you get to see all your contacts from all your signed on IM networks in one place. From this point on, chatting with someone is as simple as double clicking their name to open a chat window and chatting as usual.

There are many things you can do with Meebo, and I’ve merely scratched the surface to get you started. You have the usual webcam, group chat and online game functionality similar to what’s provided on the individual clients.

Additionally, you can click on the Meebo Rooms link on the top of the screen to create a group chat or join an existing one. Though I must admit, the content in some of these rooms can get quite immature :)

In conclusion, Meebo is a well rounded integrated product that allows you to access your IM networks without having to install IM Clients. This is particularly good where you may not be allowed to install the various IM applications. Meebo also offers notification services that you can install on your desktop to allow you to use its functionalities outside of the browser. It even has a service called repeater to allow for Meebo use where IM access may be restricted.

The website has excellent descriptions of its various services, so I suggest you go to the Meebo website and explore the various products. One of the more fascinating pages I went to while exploring their blog was their “map” page. It showed all the IM conversations happening in the last 15 minutes. Always good to pop onto that page at various times of the day to see where the hotspots are :)

 
Having been around since 2005, Meebo has matured to a range of products and services and can be safely used without significant risk to user security.

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)

To use it, firstly you need to get the URL of your video. This is simply the web address that you see in your address bar when viewing the video on youtube. As an example, I’m using http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pXfHLUlZf4 as my video to download. Easiest way to do this is to go to youtube, to your video and select the address bar and copy it to your clipboard.

Step 1 – Open up your favourite web browser and go to http://www.vixy.net. Paste your copied URL into the URL box, and select which format you want vixy to convert the video to.

Step 2 – Hit Start when you are ready. At this point, vixy will connect to youtube and start doing the conversion on their servers. There is a progress bar that shows how far along they are as well as expected size.

Step 3 - When finished, the application should show you a file save dialog box. This is where you’ll actually be downloading the converted video to your computer. If a dialog box doesn’t show, there is a link in the resulting window that you can click to download the video.

Converting and downloading can take some time with longer videos. And I’ve found the vixy servers to be a little on the slow side.

Once the video is downloaded onto your computer, you can then view it in your favourite media player or transfer to your mobile/iPod devices for viewing on the move.

I find vixy.net to be extremely easy to use and excellent for downloading shorter videos (ie, less than 10 minutes viewing). However its not perfect. There are occasions where the video comes through but the audio doesn’t or vice versa as well as conversions failing due to load on their servers. You just may have to try again or at worst, look for a similar video. I’m not too sure on HD videos though. Someone may need to try them out and see if both audio and video comes through.

There is also now a desktop version of this application. However, it is still in Beta and while its free (currently), the application does feature advertisements. I did not install the application on my machine for this review.

Vixy.net is one of many online transcoders out there (Orbit, Ares Tube as examples) and its being continuously improved so expect the developers to put in some increased stability and performance across the board.

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.

It’s interface is familiar and clean and makes checking your mail from multiple accounts a cinch. It has a good Address book functionality though I couldn’t see an “Import Contacts” function anywhere.

Step 1 – start by logging onto Zoho (http://www.zoho.com) and clicking on Zoho Mail. (Alternatively, you can always go to http://mail.zoho.com). Zoho Mail interface should be familiar to anyone who’s use email applications before (similar to Outlook or Outlook Express).

Your folders, labels and views are listed on the left toolbar, with additional navigation on the top of the screen. The bulk of the screen shows you a list of your emails with a preview pane at the bottom.

Step 2 – Click on the Settings link on the top navigation bar. In the resulting window, click on Mail Accounts on the top. This will take you to the list of mail accounts you have registered with Zoho Mail. Initially, this will be your @zoho.com email address.

What we want to do here is to add a new POP3 email account. POP3 is your basic standard email account settings. Most people registered with any broadband provider has a pop3 email address.

For now, we want to add our Gmail account to Zoho so that we have a central place to check our mail. Click on “Add Mail Account” on the top.

Step 3 – In the form that appears, enter the fields in as per the screenshot. If you are trying to add an email address other than Gmail, you will need to get the POP3 settings from your provider. They will normally have that on their website somewhere, so do a search for it.

Hit Save when you finished entering the form in.

If you have entered everything successfully, the list of your email accounts will show up under Mail Accounts:

To see the contents of that email account, above the Folders on the left side of the screen, your username should now be a drop down. Click on the drop down and you should see your other account there. Click it to go to that accounts Inbox. If you have many emails on that account, it might take a while for Zoho to fetch all the mail.

Step 4 – Repeat the same for any other POP3 email account you may have.

The default server settings when adding a new email account is to leave the mail on the original server. This is excellent as you may have multiple clients (as I do) and want the mail to be available on all the clients. However, if you do wish to change this, you can do so by clicking on the “Personalize” tab and going to the Server Settings page. This is also where you can set up your signature and folder structures for that email account.

On the Mail Accounts page, you can select any of your email accounts and make it the Default or edit them further if you wish.

In order to send an email using any of your accounts, ensure that you have selected that user first and then click on Compose to create and send a new email. You can switch the “Sending user” easily by adding your other email addresses in “My Preferences”. If you add additional addresses here, you can switch the email address you want to send as when composing new emails.

One last thing to note: Microsoft Outlook has something called Rules which are events that trigger something. For example, if a new mail arrives and meets a certain criteria (eg, subject contains “Comment”), then you can flag or move that email. Google Mail has similar functionality called Filters. Zoho Mail has the same functionality and you can get to it once again from the Personalize tab.

Thats pretty much it. The application is quite self explanatory otherwise and if you have used any email clients in the past, you should be comfortable using Zoho Mail.

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.

Meet Zoho. Zoho is a full suite of applications built to cater for all your productivity needs. It comes with a wide range of applications designed specifically with flexibility and full functionality in mind.

Many of us are currently using Microsoft Office or Open Office as our main suite of office applications. These cater for most of our everyday needs. However, for those of us on the move or just wanting an online option, Zoho presents an extremely viable alternative.

Main Features

• Free for personal users
• Wide range of applications
• Reduces costs by doing things online instead of purchasing software
• Secure storage and back ups
• There is a mobile (iPhone) version available for some of the applications
• Supports multiple languages
• Supports Sharing and collaboration.

Zoho is built to be relatively compatible with your current office suite and are targeting to become a viable replacement option to these suites.

Step 1

Open up your web browser and navigate to http://www.zoho.com. In order to use Zoho, you’ll need to sign in via a simple registration. You also have the option to sign in using your Gmail or Yahoo email account. As most of my applications go via gmail, I thought I may as well continue using that option.

Step 2

Once logged in, you can either go directly to an application by clicking the relevant "Try Now" link. Or alternatively in the top box, you have a link to go to personal.zoho.com that takes you to your dashboard. If you use the dashboard feature, you can switch applications using a menu on the left bar. Otherwise, there is a drop down menu on the top that allows the switching.

One thing to note, the first column of applications are all free to use for individual use. The second column (called Business Apps) do have some restrictions on them (listed in light gray next to the application name). To use them fully, you’ll need to upgrade. Suffice to say, most of us newbs will limit ourselves to the left column only :)

Secondly, by default Zoho will create you a mail account (yes, yet another one!) called username@zoho.com but you can add your existing email addresses there as well.

Lastly, be aware that when you first go to Zoho using Google Chrome, you do get a warning message that it works best in Internet Explorer and Firefox. However, they do allow you to close this warning and continue in Chrome. I’m currently doing all my work in Zoho via Chrome and it hasn’t misbehaved at all.

With so many applications available, the most commonly used ones will be Mail, Writer, Sheet and Show. I will go into more detail with some of the applications and do a compare against Microsoft Office and Open Office in later articles. Until then feel free to play around with these.

If there is any particular application that you need me to drill down into, leave me a comment and I’ll focus on that! Until then, I’ll work through some of the lesser known applications in the new few posts.

Read Part II here – Adding a new email account to your Zoho Mail