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…

1. HootSuite

 HootSuite is a web based application, that can allow you:

- Send tweets to multiple accounts at once.
- Schedule the sending of tweets so that they get sent at a later date
- Check multiple accounts at once
- Provides click stats (if you are using the ow.ly shortening service) to track how many people clicked on your provided URL’s.

Additionally, it provides a powerful multiple editor functionality. This allows you to specify another user to add tweets to your twitter account. Handy for corporate twitter accounts which may have more than one person entering in tweets.

In order to use HootSuite, you must first go to their website and register. This will be the user that will access all your twitter accounts. Once registered, you can add as many twitter accounts as you want.

HootSuite does provide for a nice and friendly wizard when going through the registration process if you need to add accounts during registration. Adding additional accounts afterwards is a simple process started by clicking “Add Twitter Profile” button on the top left of the screen.

The user interface is simple yet powerful and HootSuite has a comprehensive FAQ section to lead you through its common functions. You can quickly jump between profiles and send tweets to multiple accounts.

Lastly, it even has a “Hootlet” that sits on your browser bar and allows you to quickly tweet a site that you may wish to share with others.

2. Splitweet

Splitweet is similar to HootSuite where its a web based interface to allow you to manage multiple twitter accounts at once. Again, similarly, you need to register at the Splitweet site to manage all your accounts.

It has a simpler interface than HootSuite with less functionality but it can allow you to tweet to multiple accounts, filter accounts as required and has a section on the home page to follow “brands” (search items).

Using color tags to visually separate the tweets, it allows you to hide or add accounts so that you can quickly go through your accounts and quickly scan your relevant subject areas.

Designed and managed by three developers, its an excellent alternative for people who like a quick tool to check all their accounts at once. Splitweet is fast and simple to use. It is very casual friendly and provides a user interface that is intuitive and easy to learn. 

In closing..

Separating your twitter account into several smaller ones is a good idea when you are following a broad range of subjects. This also gives your “followers” an option to follow only the areas they would be interested in and not having to subscribe to all your comments.

Using these applications, you can manage your tweets via a web interface instead of downloading and installing an application. There are other applications out there that will do the same things, but these are currently my applications of choice for web-based twittering.

Relevant Links:

• HootSuite Home Page: http://www.hootsuite.com
• Splitweet Home Page: http://www.splitweet.com
• Newbtech’s Twitter Page: http://www.twitter.com/newbtech

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.

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

Well in this case, we’ll have a look at an application that allows us to create such videos. Now, I’m NOT going to do the monotone voice thing.. however, I will endeavor to get some form of recording going to show you how its done.

The application is called ScreenToaster and it meets my criteria of being free and functional! ScreenToaster is a web-based screen recorder designed to capture your screencasts, do some minimal post-recording activities (such as adding sub-titles, audio etc) and then either stream them directly from their site or download as a video file.

So lets start shall we?

Step 1 – Open up your favorite web browser and go to http://www.screentoaster.com. Here you will have to do the obligatory "registration" by following the Register link on the top menu. Fairly standard stuff.

Couple of things to note:

When I completed the registration, a pop up appeared that stated that a confirmation email was sent out (good), but there was a "Record" button at the bottom!.. I had to click on the "Close" button on the top right of the dialog box to get off that screen and back into the main page. Not a biggie, but may surprise newbies..

Because we want to create and host a video, we have to register. If all you want to do is to watch videos (made by others of course), then you don’t have to register.

Step 2 – Right.. registration done. Confirm your registration by checking your email and clicking on the verify email.. Again, fairly standard here.

Step 3 – The first thing I tried to do once registered is of course to hit the "Start Recording" button to see if anything fancy comes up. Well something did.. I use Chrome for my home browsing and I immediately got a plug-in install request. ScreenToaster requires the latest version of Java to be installed, so if you don’t have that, then you’ll need to download and install that first before you can do anything else. Which is fair enough, so I went ahead and installed it by following the prompts (in Chrome, you get a fancy little bar on the top that says that a plug-in is required.. then you just follow the steps, or alternatively, go here to download and install for Chrome.

Step 4 – If you had to install Java, you’ll need to restart your browser for the install to complete successfully. I did that and finally hit the Start Recording button.

The first time you run this application, you may get some warnings pop up by the Java engine asking for permission to allow ScreenToaster to run. Click on Run to allow it.

Once the applet has loaded, you’ll see this screen. ScreenToaster is hotkey driven (default being alt-S). You can choose whether to capture the whole desktop or a slice as well as microphone and webcam settings.

Its at this point in time where you’ll need to experiment a little :) If you are capturing part of a screen, a black box will appear that you can resize using the corners or move using the top right corner button. It will take some time to get used to the interface. Also, hitting the record button gives you a 5 second grace to get what you really want to capture in front and ready to go :). Hitting Alt-S while recording will naturally pause the recording.

Step 5 – Once you have finished recording, you can hit the Stop Recording button and the following window will pop up.

Here you can preview your video and add subtitles and voice if you like. Adding subtitles can be done by simply pausing the video where you want your subtitle to be, and hitting the subtitle button and entering your text in.. resume.. pause.. enter text in.. resume.. and so forth. Again, it takes a bit of practice. I didn’t play with the mic option. There is even a handy button to change the "preview" image (ie, the first image that pops up when first going to the video or seeing its thumbnails.

Step 6 – Up until now, that video is local… So in order to "Save" it, you will need to upload the video somewhere. Currently you can upload the video to YouTube or to ScreenToaster themselves. Or alternatively, you can "download" it as a flash or movie file.

If you use ScreenToaster to host your video, it will get saved in High Quality. Means it looks better, but takes longer to load, so be aware of your "audience".

As an experiment, I uploaded a video of my uber FreeCell skillz (not!) to ScreenToaster. The resulting page (Click here :)) showed me a screen very similar to youtube :) It also had embed and url links that i can use to share the video. As i have done below..

Your videos can be marked "private" and you can delete them from ScreenToasters servers.

Conclusions

ScreenToaster is a good application.. however, you really need to get used to the interface. The thing that really got to me was that once i uploaded a video to screentoaster, it gave me no way of going back to my video to then upload it to youtube or download it as a flash file… that meant that i had to do the same video all over again.. They are currently working on a way to edit published videos… but not sure when that would be available.

Other things that struck out was the amount of buffering it had to do when playing the HQ videos in ScreenToaster. It was not the fastest shall we say.. But i’m hoping it will get better in the future. This is dependent on your ADSL speed of course, but I get a lot faster responses in YouTube then ScreenToaster.

Lastly, I had a bit of a problem actually getting the recording going on Chrome, so I tried in IE and it worked, and then worked magically in Chrome too.. *shrug*

ScreenToaster has a good FAQ section that does give some general guides and the application’s interface, once gotten used to, is actually quite simple to use.

It has a blog, twitter and rss support, though i didn’t seem to see any forums. That would have been of immense use to give support to this product. I did see in their Twitter page that they are looking into this too.

All in all, a fairly good set of functionality, a little rough around the edges, but excellent idea and once again, free cannot be sneezed at :)

I believe this application will only get better with time and I look forward to actually using this for future articles :) Excellent potential. Good luck chaps and lets see them forums and post-publish functionalities working!

UPDATE: 19th April, 2009 – Updated news on ScreenToaster and forums etc here: http://www.newbtech.com/2009/04/screentoaster-news-and-updates.html

Related Links:

• http://www.screentoaster.com – Home Page
• http://twitter.com/screentoaster – ScreenToaster Twitter

Written by Brian Scott and available for both Windows 32bit and 64bit operating system, it offers an easy, intuitive and configurable means to capture ones desktop.

Lets go through its main features first before we take it for a test drive….

For anyone with NO screen capture utility, the usual method to capture a screen is to:

1. Hit the PrtScn button on your keyboard to store the desktop in your clipboard
2. Open up Paint
3. Paste the captured image into Paint
4. Use the crop tool to select just what you want. Cut it out and go to File..New to open up new window
5. Paste your cropped image into this window
6. Finally save the image.

Now try doing that a dozen times for your report or documents…

Features

• Cropper is built using Microsoft .Net framework
• Its Open Source and FREE!!
• It can capture the active window, a predefined area, the whole screen and more.
• It supports multiple formats to output the image including the clipboard (so you can simply crop a part of a screen and say, paste directly into Word.
• It can capture transparent windows (used by Vista quite a bit).
• It offers Plug-in support to allow a wide variety of plug-ins to be developed and used to supplement the application functionality

To Install

To install and run Cropper, use the following steps:

Step 1

Go to http://cropper.codeplex.com/ to get to the main download page of Cropper. Click on the Download button to download the application. Installing the application is simply unzipping the contents into a temporary folder and starting up the Setup application. Follow the prompts all the way through to complete the install.

Step 2

The application doesn’t auto-start, so you’ll have to start it yourself. If you had selected the defaults, it will be found in your Start..All Programs.. Fusign&Design.. Cropper folder. To make it start automatically with Windows, simply copy the Cropper shortcut (not folder) into your Startup Menu. Starting the application won’t show anything visible (ie, it doesn’t magically open a window). Instead, you’ll now see a wee icon on your taskbar that looks like a crosshair in a square.

Right clicking on the window will bring up a context menu which you can explore to see the various options and choices. As an example, the Output menu drops down to allow you to choose whether to store the image in a file or the clipboard.

Step 3

In order to choose the default folder of where the screenshots will be stored, right click on the Cropper icon and select Options. The first thing I normally do (because I like to store my data in a drive other than my c: drive) is to choose a new location to store all my screenshots. This is in the Output tab of options. I’ve taken a shot of all the tabs (attached below) to give you an idea of the various options that may be available.

 

 

Apart from changing the default folder location, I normally don’t do anything else on these screens. I do however select Jpg as my preferred output by rightclicking on the cropper icon and going to the Output menu and selecting Jpg with quality of 100%.

Step 4

Right, by now you must be asking when we are actually going to capture anything! Well to capture anything is easy! Simply left click on the icon and a magic blue box will appear.

 

This box is the area which will be captured. It displays the size coordinates on the top left plus you get a context menu if you right click anywhere in it. You can also resize the box by dragging on the corners. Once you are happy with your selection, simply doubleclick in the blue window to take a screenshot of the area.

Now, here are some quick rules:

1. To take a screenshot of the entire screen, hit PrtScn on your keyboard and Cropper will take a snapshot of the entire screen and save the screen in your output folder.
2. To take a screenshot of the currently active application, hit Alt + PrtScn on your keyboard.
3. To take a screenshot of the blue area, simply double click anywhere in the blue area.

Thats all there is to it! If you had selected anything other than Clipboard, Cropper would capture the screen area and save it in the output folder.

 

In order to hide the blue box, simply right click in it and select Hide from the context menu.

 

Conclusion

 

In the end, a free product that does a lot of things that most commercially available products do is nothing to sneeze at. Combined with the fact that Cropper has support for Plug-Ins and the source is freely available, its not hard to see why this is a very popular application.

In the end, I have Microsoft Office One Note which supports a similar way of capturing parts of the screen and I would most likely continue using that. But for people who don’t have One Note, this would be a very nice alternative.

Again, as this is a test drive, I’ve only scratched the surface and haven’t gone into Plug-ins etc. The application is quite simple to learn and use and once you’ve gotten used to it, you’ll wonder how you lived without it.

Relevant links

• http://cropper.codeplex.com/ – source download page
• http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/default.aspx – Brian Scotts (the author) blog.
• http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/articles/Cropper.aspx – Cropper page on Brians blog

Main Features

• Its an online word processor
• It allows you to store and access your documents from anywhere (internet access permitting)
• Its got an excellent collaboration functionality – allows multiple authors to make changes to the same document
• Key to any collaboration tool is tracking changes, versioning and reviewing edits. It comes with an tools to do all these things.
• Ability to add comments to the document inline as well as controlling access to documents/functions through roles.
• It supports image imbedding and formatting words around these images.

Right.. so lets take this for a quick test drive…

Prerequisites

In order to start using Buzzwords, you’ll first need (yes you guessed it), a username and password. Buzzwords uses Adobe Id to define its users. So, before we go on, lets create a username for us to use.

Step 1

Open up your favourite web browser and go to http://www.adobe.com/acom/buzzword/ . You’ll see a "Sign Up Now" button on the top right hand corner. Click it to be taken to their login/sign up page.

Click on Sign Up! at the bottom of the login box.

Fill in the form that pops up in screen to complete the registration process and it will sign you in automatically.

Note: Google Chrome users may get an Unsupported Browser warning. It suggests running Buzzword on IE, Firefox or Safari.. strange! It did have a link to tell me to try anyway in case i’m feeling adventurous :)

If you have just registered, you’ll need to verify your email. So feel free to do that via your Inbox and then navigate to https://buzzword.acrobat.com to sign in.

Step 2

Once logged in, you’ll see the main working screen of Buzzword.

You can import a document here or create a new one by clicking on the Document Menu.

Feel free to mouse over all the various buttons and seeing what they do. The user interface looks sleek but takes some getting used to. Its Macromedia driven, so has all the usual swishes and sliding menus..

Step 3

I created a new document and started putting some text in. Again, the user interface is slightly different to popular word processors (such as Microsoft Word) but once i got used to it, using the word processor was actually quick and painless.

Again, the menu bar expands and rolls to show you your current choices as well as available options. I got used to the icons really quickly.

Adding images was quick and painless as was adding comments and doing spell checks.

Once you have finished with the document, you can print it out or save it using the Document menu. Closing the document takes you back to the main menu.

Closing thoughts

With features such as sharing and history/versioning and the ability to import documents from a variety of sources, i can see a future for Buzzword as a quick online editor and document manager. It will be useful in particular to students who would like the word count facility as well as the ability to access ones document from anywhere.

The Document Organiser (ie, main screen) can get cluttered and i haven’t found a way to create folders yet..

I liked the image upload and formatting options. The texts flows around the image appropriately and resizing an image was as simple as clicking on a corner and dragging.

It could do with more Fonts though and sometimes, dragging an image to the right of a paragraph can get problematic with it dropping everywhere but at the end.

Will it be a viable replacement for Google Docs? I actually think there is a space in the market for a product that specialises in word processing and gets very good at document collaboration and authoring. Google Docs tries to bring all manner of document authoring to the front. Adobe Buzzword just sticks to one of those products and they have shown that not every word processor out there has to mimic Microsoft Word to be useful.

If you need more information or help when using Buzzword, the first document that is available on your dashboard is "Welcome to Buzzword" – this is a good read for more information on the features available to you.

I’ve intentionally kept this article open-ended as I want to encourage the readers to play around for themselves and make their own mind up. Its not a product that will replace your desktop/laptop word processor, but with moves towards lighter applications and cloud computing, this may just be what the future looks likes a few years from now…

Relevant Links:

• https://buzzword.acrobat.com – Main page for Buzzword
• http://www.adobe.com/acom/buzzword/ – Adobe Information Page for Buzzword

Microsoft has done it one better with their latest offering called Microsoft Skydrive. Similar in concept, it’s one of the services provided by Windows Live that gives you your very own online drive where you can store just about anything.

More impressively, the space you are allowed to store is a mind boggling 25gigs! Thats a whole lot of space :)

So what would you store in these 25 gigs? Here is an idea.. practically everyone out there now has a digital camera of their own (my four year old has her very own.. in pink). And how many people out there keep back ups of their photos? I bet a lot of folks out there have no back up strategy and dump all their photos on their local hard drive only to lose it in the next boom-event (ie, virus, hard drive failure, accidentally formatting your hard drive while trying to install Linux on a separate drive – yeah.. that happens too ;) ).

So how do you get access to this free space and use it as an alternative to Google Docs and other sharing systems (such as Picasa and/or Flickr, etc)?

Right.. lets start shall we? 

Pre-requisites

We have to have a Windows Live account. If you use MSN Messenger or Hotmail, its likely you already have a live account. If you don’t use MSN Messenger, or you know you don’t have a live account, don’t fret.. we’ll create one on the way. (not really a prerequisite aye?)

Step 1

Open up your favourite web browser and go to http://skydrive.live.com

At this point, one of two windows may pop up. If you have already used live.com before and have marked yourself as always log on, then you’ll go straight to your home screen. If you haven’t yet (and i’m assuming you haven’t), then you get the following window pop up (left)

If you don’t have a Live id, then here is the time to create one. Its free and easy to follow through. Simply hit the Sign Up button on the left and follow through the wizard to get your live id.

You can also associate your live id with your current email address so are not creating yet another email address just to use Windows Live.

Once you have got it, return back to Step 1 and go back to the login page and log in with your Live Id.

Step 2

Right, we got the login page and our live user id. Simply log on by filling in your username and live password on the right hand side of the screen. You can use your own judgement if you want the user to be remembered on your computer or not. Ideally, if you are in a public or friends place, i would suggest not ticking the tickboxes :)

Click on Sign In when you’ve entered your information.

You will be taken to your Skydrive. The main parts of the screen are:

• Your Recent Folders (as well as any new folders you may create here)
• Amount of space free (at the top right corner)
• And anything new in your network (note: you get a whole bunch of options similar to facebook that you can play with by clicking on the "Profile" menu on the top of the screen. I’ll let you play with those).

Step 3

Lets create a folder to hold some photos. Click on "Create Folder" (a link just on top of Recent Folders). A small wizard will appear to ask for the name you want to give your folder as well as sharing options.

You can make this folder Public (ie open to all) or limit it to people you trust or just yourself.

Hitting next then shows you an upload page. You can upload documents in one of two ways, either using the "browse…" button and locating a file, or installing the upload tool. You’ll get a link on the top of the browse boxes if you haven’t installed the upload tool yet.

I would recommend installing it as it offers a nice drag and drop functionality. Simple enough to install. Email me or leave a comment if you need specific instructions.

Step 4

Lets upload some things into our new folder. If you have installed the load tool, you’ll see see a large box on your screen with "Drop files here" instructions. Open up My Computer and navigate to the document you want to upload and simply drag it into this box.

It should upload and appear in your new folder :)

The "Drag here" box will drop down and the photo will appear on the top window. If you want to add more files, simply drag more into the Drag box.

Step 5

Once you have finished adding the files you wish to upload, simply hit the Upload button. At this point all the documents you have selected will now be uploaded into your folder. It may take a while if you have chosen large files or large number of them. Once they are all done, a successful message will appear and you’ll be taken to the gallery.

And thats about it :)

Clicking on an individual photo will open it up in its own page. You even have facilities to add captions and if you share with people, they will be able to add comments against your photos too.

As an exercise, i created a Public folder to hold Windows 7 Wallpaper that someone released around the net :) You are welcome to browse my public folder by clicking on the gallery picture below:

I have only shown Image type files being uploaded here. Its also possible to upload other types of files and share them if required. I haven’t gone through all the features of Skydrive, so feel free to play around and leave a comment here to tell us if you like it or not :)

Above all, its 25gigs of space that you can put to use.. and for free.. and you can’t beat that.

Relevant links:

• Exploring Windows Live SkyDrive
• Wikipedia for SkyDrive
• Windows Live SkyDrive Team Blog (on live spaces)