Archive for the 'Freeware' Category

Microsoft Photo Info is a tool for adding metadata to your photos. Released in January 2007, this is a free tool for Windows XP SP2 or Vista (32-bit versions) that will help you update batches or individual photos with titles, keywords, descriptions, locations and other information. I’ve been using Photo Info to add metadata to photos I’ve shared on Flickr for 2 days, and it has worked better than any of the other Windows solutions I’ve tried thus far.

After Thomas Hawk’s (heavy user of Flickr and CEO of Zooomr) recommendation of jUploadr over the supported Flickr Uploadr, I was curious to try it and see if it would save me time. jUploadr is written in Java, which means you can run it on Windows, Mac or Linux, where you have a Java runtime environment installed. The Flickr Uploadr tool is Windows and Mac only at this time (I have never used it in OS X).

Google Video Player lets you download and watch videos in full high-resolution quality instead of the low quality streamed video available at video.google.com. Videos that contain detailed visual information (like application demos or code samples) must be viewed in their native resolution to discern fine details. This player combined with downloaded video solves the problem of “fuzzy” (but fast) streamed video available online. Google makes a downloadable player for Windows and Mac (though I didn’t test this).

Finding free music on the internet is a difficult process. Between the commercials, quality, selection, and features, it may seem that nothing will suit your needs. This article will review three of the most popular internet music providers: Pandora, Last.fm, and Yahoo! Music.

Note: After the first draft of this article, Last.fm has significantly changed the UI of their player, their website, and some of the player’s features. Any update to an outdated section will be prefaced with an “UPDATE:” tag.

In all the years I’ve used Gmail, I don’t think I’ve ever “accidently” hit a button that I didn’t want to. This is because Gmail seems to have intentionally made certain buttons wider than others.

Gmail users know that Google has included some of the best usability features into it’s email software. This brief article discusses an overlooked usability feature of Gmail. When composing a message in Gmail, you’ll notice three buttons along the top - one for “Send,” “Save Now,” and “Discard.” Notice how they’re placed directly next to each other.

Google Calendar allows you to use SMS, to remotely interact with your calendar.

This is extremely handy for when you are away from the computer, and/or an internet connection, and you need to either check your events for the day, or add future events for another day.

If you use text messages a lot on your mobile phone, you can easily interact with you calendar:

• Check today’s events.
• Check tomorrow’s events.

Google Notebook is a very versatile organizational tool. Combine that with an amazingly smooth interface, and you have an application that’s very fun to use. Notebooks’ ability to quickly gather your ideas, thoughts, or notes is what makes it useful. However, the interface is what makes it the best.

So what can Notebook do?

I’ve found that Notebook is useful for two main things:

CoverFlow is a beautiful application that lets you browse your music collection by album cover. The interface is intentionally kept simple, allowing users to simply scroll through albums and make selections (that’s it). So what makes CoverFlow so great?

Meebo is a web service that allows you to sign-in to your instant message account through the web browser, rather than launching the chat application from your operating system. Various chat applications are AIM, iChat, or Trillian (to name a few).

The nice thing about Meebo is that you can combine all of your chat accounts in one place. This is very useful.

The story surrounding this router is an interesting one. The WRT54G is a consumer level router with a wireless access point that has been selling “literally hundreds of thousands per month” according to an article at Linux Devices. The router has been through several versions (around 6 major versions) as Linksys has tweaked the hardware and software. Recently Linksys has decreased the hardware performance of the WRT54G while leaving the product name unchanged, confusing and arguably, cheating consumers.