Used to be desktop applications were essential to getting the job done, whatever the job may have been, large or small. Now, with all the nimble web apps to choose from, the idea of firing up a huge application for a small task seems almost, well, unproductive and wasteful.
Yeah, sure, no one is suggesting you do away with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Illustrator, Photoshop, Quickbooks and other heavy hitters. However, there are excellent tools on the web where less, in many ways, is actually more. Here are 10 of my favorites.
1. ScribeFire - essential Firefox add-on for bloggers. Allows you to to easily drag and drop formatted text from the Web into your blog(s), post entries, take notes, and optimize ad inventory, directly through the Firefox browser.
2. Firefox - great web browser whose charm lies in all those irresistible add ons that make the whole interwebs experience that much sweeter. Once you pimp out your Firefox, it seriously is difficult to function on anything else. Yes, there are the crashes and other peccadillos, but they're easy enough to overlook especially if you are truly in love.
3. Skitch - this is the best, quick image editor and photo sharing web app that is dead simple to use. For quick screenshots and sharing photos, you cannot beat it. For Mac only though. Sorry.
4. Gmail - I've done away with Outlook and Mail and rely on Gmail for several reasons: free, 7090 MB capacity, integration with Google calendar, Gtalk, great search functionality, and the portability is sweet.
5. Google Reader - free, powerful feed reader which allows you to share items with your friends and slog through all your news feeds as fast as your bleary eyes will let you. Bonus - I'm playing with Feedly (Firefox extension) which provides a magazine like start page of your feeds with complete Google Reader integration and Twitter and FriendFeed and more. So far I like, but Google Reader is still number one for now.
We're big fans of FriendFeed, the social network aggregator that helps you keep track of your friends' activities across different platforms like Twitter, LastFM, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and about 1,000 36 others. If you're a fan or if you're just getting started, below are 10 tools to help you experience it just the way you like, after the jump.
"Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter" is a message most feared while booting up a computer. It could mean a number of things from a loose cable to something as serious as your partition being deleted. A loose cable is a simple fix but if your hard drive's partition is lost you just may have to call in the big boys who specialize in data recovery.
But before you pick up that phone you might want to try your hand at recovering the data yourself using widely available programs like Partition Find and Mount.
Partition Find and Mount searches your hard drive for lost or deleted partitions using 3 different scanning methods: Fast, Normal and Thorough. Each scan has their merits and should be tried in the order listed to recovery your partition. Once Partition Find and Mount locates the partition it will assign it a drive letter and mount the drive in read-only mode preventing further damage to the data. From there you can access the drive in Windows Explorer to recover your data.
Of course you will need a bootable computer to use the software. So if your only hard drive on your only computer has failed you'll need to give a friend a call to borrow their computer.
Partition Find and Mount comes in 2 varieties: Free and Pro. Both versions are nearly identical with the difference being that the free version is limited to data transfers of 512 KBytes/s while the Pro version has no speed limit imposed. Because DIY data recovery has many variables you may just want to see if the free version works for you.
Contrary to marketing hype, Macs do crash and when they do you'll need to do some basic troubleshooting to determine the reason why.
If it appears to be a hardware problem, one thing you may want to remember is, well, Rember.
Rember is a front end GUI for Memtest and while you can certainly run Memtest in Terminal, Rember's GUI version makes it much easier to use.
The interface is broken up into 3 main parts:
How much memory you want tested
The number of times you want to run the test
Preferences
Once you decided on the amount of ram and the number of loops let Rember do the rest. Once completed, review the logs to determine if your RAM is the reason why your Mac is crashing.
Keep in mind that Rember is a GUI app that runs on top of your OS so some of your RAM will be in use and will not be available for testing. Think of it has a small trade off for not having to deal with the Memtest switches.
Do you have trouble finding like-minded people to follow on Twitter? Not sure how your favorite Twitter celebrities pick the people they follow? Now you can follow the same folks as your Twitter idol -- it's Merlin Mann, just admit it -- by using a tool appropriately called Twannabe.
Twannabe takes your username and your idol's username and tells you who they follow that you don't. We think Twannabe is a useful service that doesn't do itself any favors by framing things in terms of idols and hangers-on. If you just want to follow a bunch of people your best friend knows, it works just as well.
Poll Authority is an easy poll-creation service that generates nice tidy multiple-choice polls you can paste into your website or blog. A lot of blogging services and social networks have their own polling systems, but as far as the platform-neutral free poll generators go, Poll Authority looks pretty decent.
With the free version, you get unlimited polls and a bit of customization in terms of appearance. Upgrading to the $5 or $8 monthly plans doesn't actually seem to do much, other than adding a bit of professionalism by replacing the Poll Authority link on each poll with a customized one. The Gold plan gets you a breakdown of your results by geographic area. Bottom line: if you're looking for a fast, easy way to make a poll, and you don't want it to cost you anything, Poll Authority is a good bet.
You've just downloaded that must have program only to realize that Windows has no idea what to do with it. After an hour of Google searching, forum posting, and being called n00b, you finally figure it out.
If only there was a guide that showed you how to get all those needed programs. We at Download Squad feel your pain and have put together a list of 10 free programs that will take care of those pesky "Windows cannot open this file" messages once and for all.
Note: See a blatant omission or oversight? Please add it to the comments. With your help, we hope to re-post a more complete list the future.
File Types: DivX, XviD, AVI, Mpeg 1-4, AC3, AAC, FLAC, WAV, FLV, OGG, VOB, and tons you've never heard of.
Description: Why there are 85,000,000 different audio and video types we have no idea. What we do know is trying to install codecs one at a time generally ends in a reformat.
Thankfully, the good people from K-Lite (Koors Lite?) have bundled all the software and codecs you need into one executable. Cheers!
Description: Before the days of Youtube, the Real Player and QuickTime were kings of Internet multimedia. Sure you had to deal with popups, reminders, updates, and bloatware, but that 1" video was so worth it.
Fortunately, the Real and Quicktime Alternatives removed the real in Real Player and restored the quick to QuickTime. Enjoy your 1" video!
Springnote is a powerful browser based note taking system. You can forget about the standard text only inputs that many online note tools offer, this application has the ability to drop in images, attach files and organize layout at will. Its wiki style note taking system allows pages of content like todo's, monthly calendars and plans to be created with Word like functionality and tools with tags, change history, folder hierarchy and page bookmarks for more important content. Springnote's can also be shared between friends for reading or collaboration.
Perhaps the most important feature of Springnote is the ability to import and export notes. Downloading options include HTML, XHTML and Send to a Blog or use anywhere else. Importing can be done using MS-word docs, .txt, HTML or OpenDocument .odt formats. Springnote has an open API and unlimited storage of text files with 2GB file storage available. There are tons of Springnote mashups that you can utilize to expand the functionality of your account, including IM, Flickr, and Firefox toolbar integration.
School is in session. Your website is the pupil, and Website Grader is the teacher, its time to let this seo tool measure your online marketing successes or failures.
Website Grader is a search engine optimization tool that analyzes websites to see if they are up to scratch with search terms, and ensures online marketing effectiveness. Website Grader takes into account traffic, social ranking, Technorati ranks, Google Page Rank, Alexa ranks, inbound links, delicious bookmarks and pages indexed in Google to provide a comprehensive look at what websites have been up to. The system analyzes meta keywords, page descriptions, domain registration information, headings, images, the last time it was crawled by Google, and how many RSS subscriptions in Bloglines and grades it accordingly out of 100.
Website Grader is a great tool to check in with what websites have been up to, (or as a competition review) but take this information with a grain of salt, as some areas like Google Page Rank were showing up as 0 for Download Squad.
In keeping the school theme we have been running with, a newer educational tool to enter the market is Edu 2.0. This web based education website that holds features for teachers, student and parents that aid in learning wherever the user is connected.
There are four main sections to the site. A teaching section where teachers can host a class using a specially designed learning management system. The learning section where students can participate in classes at their own pace. A resource section where contributed resources complete with quizzes, experiments, projects and self paced course can be followed and taken. Then there is the community section. This allows for collaboration between members, sharing and collaborating on educational interests.
Edu 2.0 is free to sign up to, and provides a wide range of topics including art, computers, english, foreign languages, health, math, science, and physical education.
If Firefox is your main squeeze, and you blog like it's going out of style, perhaps you're in need of some new tools. Mashable rounds up 40+ Firefox Add-Ons for High Speed Blogging, and depending on what blog service you use, there's most likely something in the pile for you.
The list isn't just click to blog tools either. Other important pieces of the puzzle are covered such as image posting, SEO, and even quick research tools like a browser based whois lookup. If you're serious about blogging, it's worth a look see.
Got a fetish for free? Datamation published a list of 100 open-source downloads that is sure to make your day (and your pocketbook) a little better.
Spanning the spectrum from 3d modeling apps to desktop productivity, there's almost certainly something on this list you've not seen but would scratch your itch.
Collaborating with a team in an online space has its challenges, Mindquarry wants to make it as simple as possible, yet keeps the productive functionality.
Mindquarry is an online space that allows for the sharing of documents, management of products, and collaboration with team members wherever they might be located. Its four main collaboration tools consist of Teams, Files, Wiki, and Tasks and it works totally in a browser window.
Teams and team members can be analyzed and managed.
Files can be shared and stored online, with a history of change record.
Wiki's can be used to share information or creative ideas, think of it as a blackboard.
Tasks can be assigned to team members, and to-do lists can be checked.
The rich text editing environment provides a space where users can work both online and offline, syncing documents when complete or back online. There are two parts to this application, the online Server, and the Client application. The Server is the collaboration hub that ties everything together and gives a strategic overview of everything that is happening. While the Client is the tool that team members use to connect them to the Server and sync up files and tasks when complete and online.
The free downloadable Mindquarry Go software is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX users. It is available in beta only for now. For a more in depth look at the software, take a look at the User Guide, or this quick video demonstration.
You can never cram enough stuff onto your USB pen drive, right? These guys gave it their best shot, compiling a list of 55 applications that the mobile geek shouldn't be without.
You won't need everything on the list -- there are quite a few duplications of functionality -- but if you've always wanted to build the ultimate geek toolbox on a stick, it's a pretty good resource from which to get ideas.
Getting your website or blog ready for AdSense isn't always a picnic, and trying to peg the right keywords to generate the best ads for your audience can often prove to be a cryptic game of whack-a-mole. Sure, Google offers their own basic sandbox for building your ad units, but they don't really help you with either of the aforementioned tasks.
Thankfully, Amit Agarwal has stepped up to the plate and offered the Adsense Sandbox, a simple tool that allows you to quickly see 20 text ads, as well as Adlinks and Rich Text Ad results (images and videos) for a particular URL or keyword(s). As a particularly nice touch, Amit even included the ability to change your country to ensure the most accurate URL and keyword results for your neck of the woods.
