Keeping up with the changing weather conditions can be quite a chore, but if you're using a Mac you can have the current conditions as well as a 9-day forecast just a click away. Meteorologist is a free Mac app that provides a compact weather display from the Mac Menu Bar.

We've covered numerous file renaming utilities here on the site, and many of them have their own strengths and weaknesses. What I've found with a lot of them is that most tend to be difficult to use, but I found one called Rename Master that is both easy and powerful.

Starting in Windows 7 Microsoft introduced a new feature they called libraries. The libraries are designed to give multiple folders a single unified view that can be used to manage your media and documents. This is especially useful for anyone with files spread out across multiple hard drives and network locations because it will all appear as a single folder on your machine.

A few years ago we wrote an article that offered up a solution for quickly accessing an FTP site from Windows Explorer, but things got a lot more complicated if you were trying to work with an SSH/SFTP site. A couple of weeks ago a commenter, Shawn, mentioned a new application that recently came to fruition which lets you assign a SFTP connection to a drive letter in Windows Explorer.

I'm a pretty big fan of the Pinboard bookmarking service, and even though it is a one-time fee of about $10 I'd say it's well worth it. I originally jumped over to Pinboard after being unhappy with the privacy settings in Delicious about two years ago, and haven't looked back since. There isn't an official Pinboard app for Android, but the free PinDroid does just about everything I could ask for.

If you use Twitter a lot you probably already have a repertoire of apps at your disposal for accessing and managing your tweets. Chrome users have another one that they can add to the list called Silver Bird, which simply installs as an extension in the browser.

There is no shortage of services that want to help you store and share files, and many of them all have the same clunky feel. When I came across Droplr, however, it immediately felt a lot more polished than other services I've used.

Over the years I've come to rely on Google Maps quite a bit, and I'm always looking for ways I can quickly access everything it has to offer. That's why I was pretty excited when I came across the slick Mini Maps extension for Google Chrome. The extension is designed to put a lot of the data offered by Google Maps just a click away in your browser.

One of the nice things about Android is that you can get access to the filesystem if you want to, which is something a lot of geeks like myself tend to want to do. If you are using a non-rooted phone, however, the files you have access to will be quite limited, but users who take the extra step to root their devices will gain unrestricted access to all of the files on the device.

When you're using the desktop view in Windows 8 things won't feel all that much different than they do in Windows 7. Something I thought Microsoft might change in Windows 8 was the size of the thumbnails displayed when you hover over running apps in the Taskbar, but unfortunately they are just as small as they always were.

I know a lot of people have migrated away from using RSS feeds to keep up with their favorite sites, but for me using services like Twitter to follow news on hundreds of my favorite sites just doesn't seem efficient. If you're in the same boat as me and are a Mac user there is a free app called Vienna that you might like.

On Android I've never felt that there is a great way to watch for specific apps that drop their price, or a way to watch for app updates for apps that you don't have installed on your device. I wish that the new Google Play Wishlist feature could also provide notifications, but it isn't good for much more than bookmarking apps you don't want to forget about.

I've been using Windows 8 regularly ever since the pre-release versions were offered up to the public early this year. Initially I wasn't a huge fan of the new tile interface, Charms Bar, and other areas in Windows 8 that altered my experience so much that it hurt my productivity for a little while. [...]

For some people the new tab page in Google Chrome isn't necessarily the most useful thing. I tend not to click on the thumbnails for my most visited sites because they all appear in the bookmarks toolbar that I have visible at all times.

I think at this point most of our readers have heard of the excellent CCleaner app that will remove a lot of the temporary files and other junk sprawled out across your PC. It's always worth keeping an eye on what some similar apps are capable of doing since you may find one that fits your needs even better. For that reason I want to point out System Ninja.

There are various ways on a Mac that you can keep track of your system's CPU, disk, memory, and network usage. One of the popular options is the iStat Menus which displays some pretty graphs and stats in your Mac menu bar.

A few months ago I wrote about a grep utility for Windows called AstroGrep that provided an interface for using the popular grep search command on a Windows machine. Fred left a comment on that post letting us know of an excellent alternative called grepWin that I've been enjoying even more than AstroGrep.

As much as I hate having to use Java there are still some things I need it for, which means most of my machines still have Java installed on them.

I fondly remember the moments as a kid that I spent playing with Microsoft Paint. I mean how could you not love the simulated spray can? Plus Microsoft Paint even received a nice UI overhaul in Windows 7 complete with an Office-style ribbon interface.

If you want to create your own website one of the first things you'll need to learn is how to write CSS code. You'll also need to know the HTML side of the coding, but once you've got that figured out Simple CSS is a great app to help you pick up on writing the CSS. It provides an intuitive interface for accessing most of the different CSS properties that are available for you to configure.