I know that some of you have been patiently awaiting for a Windows version of the Slife computer usage analyzer. Back in June we wrote up a quick review of the Mac version, and at the time a Windows version was in the works.
Keeping up with everything that you need to do can be a rather exhausting task. An open source project called Chandler is looking to ease the burden by giving you an intuitive way to leave notes, manage tasks, and organize your calendar all from one central location.
Finding a good alarm clock to help get you up in the wee hours of the morning can be tough. I have a tendency of placing the clock out of arms reach so that I have to get out of bed in order to turn it off. What I use as an alarm varies from things like my cellphone or TV all the way to my computer.
It's always surprised me that Google has a few desktop applications (Picasa, Google Desktop Search, Google Talk, etc...), but for one reason or another they don't have any programs that leverage some of their other big services. Having a program for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and several others would all make a lot of sense in my book.
One of the things that's always nice to know is what you can remove from your hard drive to quickly regain hard drive space. Maybe there are some enormous games on your computer that you don't play anymore, or files you've downloaded that have never gotten deleted? By using hard drive visualization tools you'll be able to pinpoint exactly what is eating up your hard drive storage.
The weekend is here, and I'm sure you're wondering how you can burn through hours and hours of your precious time by doing productive. Like always, we've got you covered. Go download the free Phun program, and let your imagination run wild.
Panoramic photos seem to be becoming more common these days as people carry cameras with them wherever they go. In the past we've shown you tools like AutoStitch and Windows Live Photo Gallery that make assembling panoramic photos effortless, but the free Hugin program is much more customizable.
A few months ago we wrote about a free application that was able to track stolen computers, and today we've got an open source alternative for you. It's called Adeona, and it's interesting how it works. After setting it up you'll be given a file that is used to identify your computer in the event it gets stolen or lost.
Whenever I do programming I tend to use some form of text editor, and so far my favorite app for that is Notepad++. Ever since they added in the code auto-completion it has been a great tool for the projects that I've worked on.
One of the things that I really like being able to do on my MacBook Pro is monitor the temperature of various parts of my laptop, and also control the speed of the fans. Using the iStat Pro widget (review) I'm able to read the temperature of my hard drive, CPU, GPU, heatsinks, wireless card, and more. If you want you can take it a step further and even control the speed of your fans.
It's nice that with Apple computers you can now run the Windows operating system using Boot Camp, but they don't tell you how to do things like right-click. For the longest time I didn't notice any problems because I often have my MacBook Pro hooked up to an external mouse and keyboard, and the mouse has two-buttons just like most standard computer mice.
The Mac OS X Dock provides a quick way to launch your favorite applications, but one thing I don't think Apple has thought about is how people use different apps depending on the task they're trying to complete. Spaces, Leopard's virtual desktop manager, makes it easy to create one desktop for work, another for fun, and so on.
AOL has retired the older version of their radio application for the Mac OS X operating system in favor of the new AOL Radio 2.0. The application is powered by CBS Radio, and includes over 200 radio stations including 150+ CBS Radio stations that are spread out across the United States.
It's hard to believe that it has already been one year since TechSmith released their free Jing screencast and screenshot software. The project has been amazingly successful, and I can't say that I'm really surprised by that. Jing is simple to use, free, and more often than not it offers everything people need... including free hosting!
Flickr is a photo sharing service that has around for over four years, and in that time it has grown at an astounding pace. Thousands of images are uploaded to Flickr every minute, and it was just last year that they had over two billion photos uploaded to their site. The good news is that with the increase in popularity also comes an increase in the number of free tools available.
VLC is one of the most well-known media players out there, and it's been almost 4 years since they've released a major new version. VLC 0.9.0 is on the horizon, and it packs in 2 years of development... so you can expect some great things. There's just one gotcha: Windows 98/ME and Mac OS X 10.3.9 are no longer supported operating systems.
Back in the beginning of June at WWDC, Apple announced that they would be replacing their .Mac service with a new service called MobileMe. They described it as "Exchange for the rest of us" and said users would have push email, contacts and calendars.
When it comes to managing dual monitors I would say that there are some things that the Mac does better than Windows, while Windows does some things better than the Mac. I've used an external monitor with my laptop for years, but in my book neither operating system gets it exactly right.
The next 24 hours is going to be pure chaos for Apple fans, and the madness started early this morning when Apple released iTunes 7.7. That was then followed by the App Store launch, then a "leaked" iPhone 2.0 firmware, and more. It's madness I tell you.
One of the first things that I did when I got my new (and first) Mac is I started customizing different aspects of the Dock. There's actually a decent number of things that you can customize with the Dock by default, and it didn't take long for me to start finding out some tricks here and there.
