Having bought my first Mac about a year and a half ago one app that I quickly started to love was Growl. It brought a universal notification system to the operating system that any application could make use of, and the cross-program uniformity made the OS experience that much better.

I always find myself using regular expressions (a.k.a. regex) in my programming because they are often the best way to parse out bits and pieces from blocks of text. Ever since I discovered the online RegExr that has been my tool of choice, but sometimes it's nice to have a dedicated application. Programs like RegexBuddy are awesome, but aren't free.

Sometimes, Apple sneaks in new features into their software without ever making a big deal out of it. When iTunes 9 was released, they made it possible to add files to iTunes without even launching the app. The secret to this trick not as far-fetched as you might think...

I love the fact that Microsoft gives users a free 25GB of storage for files through SkyDrive, but I think they're able to do that because they don't provide an easy way for people to upload things. That way most people will never come close to hitting their 25GB limit, but that may change with the free SkyDrive Explorer app.

You may not know this if you haven't used Windows XP (or earlier) in a while, but all Windows versions have a killer feature that lets you launch applications quickly without having to install memory-eating launcher apps.

Is your desktop the digital equivalent of a gigantic stack of unsorted stuff? Perhaps it's time then to cut through the clutter once and for all and get everything cleaned up. In this article, we'll help you make it look organized again step by step and advise you on how to keep it that way.

One of the new features in Windows 7 is Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) 7, and Microsoft decided to also offer the most of the same functionality to Windows XP and Vista users. Many of you will probably shrug this off as a pointless update, but it has something that is really useful to me. What is it?

I received a tip from Mark over the weekend that NeoSmart had posted their Windows 7 recovery disc ISO images just like they did when Vista was released. These discs are extremely handy to have especially if you didn't receive any installation media with your new computer, which is a common occurrence when purchasing from a majority of manufacturers including Dell and HP.

Coming across some free software is nice, but what's even nicer is finding an app that you typically have to pay for that's available at no cost for a limited time. Do you like the sound of that? If so you may want to check out the currently free (until the end of October) WinX DVD Ripper Platinum that is being given away compliments of Techweenies.

A few weeks ago a lot of sites were writing about a web developer program from Microsoft that provided web-related software at no upfront cost. When you end your membership you will, however, have to pay a $100 fee.