Automatically change your wallpaper

I am a big fan of wallpapers as I have a cool 17 inces wide screen Lenovo laptop. Whenever I want to chill out, I will start searching for cool photos, wall papers for my Windows Vista desktop. But I found it very tedious to maintain these cool collections and change wallpapers when I get some time (only). I wanted a program to change wallpapers automatically with out giving me any side effects.

I found this cool tool called Desktoptopia (beta) doing a great job on selecting a right desktop wallpaper from awesome collections. It’s tiny, nifty and cool. It can change my wallpapers at given intervals, or allows manual change as well. You can find loads of wallpaper collection which are configurable with your tiny tray utility.

 

Download Desktoptopia

PicLense – Browse the Web like a 3D Presentation Show (Firefox Only)

PicLense is a highly creative and performant Add-on for Firefox which can give you a decent experience for any website with lots of pictures on it. You can literally turn the website in to a showcase of pictures with an interactive zoom in, zoom out, drag feature set. Download PicLense

 

Try the following page once you are done with PicLense Installation.

How to be Idle anytime on Google Talk (GTalk)

GTalk is simple. And sometime simplicity sucks you know. It doesn’t have any options on privacy. Many times you might wanted to be Idle on your  GTalk, but felt helpless. Google doesn’t seems to be updating the updated client very soon too.

Here you go for a little tool that adds a very cool option to GTalk menu “Always Idle”. gAlwaysIdle adds a menu option to your IM client so that you get your privacy back.

Download gAlwaysIdle

Personal Email Analytics, People and Attachment Management

This is one such tool, every business user would dream to have in thier Outlook. It fills most of the gaps which could be found by any serious Outlook user.

Xobni Insight is a tool/addon for Microsoft Outlook which makes it atleast 10 times productive. It does a faster email search (Can I uninstall Windows Desktop Search?), Builds a relational database on your contacts, the files and conversations. More to add…It is probably the first “Social” software built on Outlook (I don’t consider Plaxo as one :-))

Download Xobni Today to Power your Outlook

Windows Vista Codecs for more than 355 movie and Music formats (Free)

This is a gold mine of Codecs for Audio and Video. More than 355 formats are supported in one single installation of Codec pack. This is a good news for all Windows Media Player users on Vista for sure.

Storm CD Perfect Edition 3.0 does the above magic for you.

Go Get It

Carry your Browsing Experience to anywhere with Google Toolbar now.

I must say “Hats Off” to Google for this. Google Toolbar 5 Beta has been released with very cool features today. One of the best features is “Sync up Toolbar” feature. I have posted recently on a Google Addin for Firefox which can sync up your favourites to any computer using Google credentials. I have search for a similar add-ons for IE but failed to find one. Now this toolbar solves my problem with IE bookmark sync 🙂

Install Google Toolbar 5 Beta

One the toolbar is installed, you will be prompted something like this. If you enable this, You are ready to carry all the stuff you do on your computer to anywhere.

With new Google Bookmarks integration, Google has almost challenged del.icio.us bookmarking system seriously. If Google could make it’s toolbar users addictive to their bookmarking system, I am sure everything else will be done automatically.

Yahoo Messenger for Windows Vista is Ready !

Yahoo has released a beta version of their messenger exclusively for Windows Vista with few native look & feel features today.

My first impression is "Cool". But It seriously lacks many features which are expected. It is no where near to the quality of Windows Live Messenger for sure. For some reason Yahoo could not deliver the full featured version in this build. Are they building this messenger right from the scratch?

I did a quick walk-through on UI…and Here it goes…

Startup : Looks a bit decent, but takes a while to start. Could be because of built in instrumentation reporting on Beta software.

 

Login Windows : Made sleek and smaller than non-vista version. Shows cool animation for logon process. Yahoo may replace that animation with classic smiley face expressions in future. (my wild guess :-))

Chat Windows : Not very impressive. This is not a fully powered chat windows (at least in this build). Very simple interface. Buzz option was added as a part of smilies collection (very confusing)

Coloured Windows : This is cool. A limited set of color tiles will be displayed to you in a carousal style. Grass is one of them and it’s odd.

Smiley Window: No new smilies for you. The only addition is "Buzz" smiley which has no UI but some action attached to it (looks Odd).

 

Adding a contact :  Very Simple compared to the classic messenger. Very neat.

Display List: Mimics Vista’s explorer list style.

Preferences window has very few features…

Bottom Line…I am impressed but not excited.

Batch Photo Uploader for Flickr

A batch photo uploader is available for best testing from Flickr Team. The UI is very neat and simple where you can define tags, safety levels and permissions on one place.

 

You can try this Beta version of Flickr Uploadr by downloading the setup from following location…

Flickr Uploadr Beta 2 Download

Screen Snapper – Free Screen Capture Tool (Windows Vista)

Windows Vista comes with a free screen snapshot program called “Snipping Tool“. You can find this tool under accessories of your Windows Vista start menu. Though it comes bundled with the OS, very few chances are there to know about this tool and use it. A tool which can sit right in your sidebar can be more handy that this. Screen Snapper is a solution for this requirement. It’s a very simple Windows Vista Side Bar Gadget, allows you to capture the screen in Desktop, Window, Region modes. And it’s absolutely FREE of cost.

You can download Screen Scaper from WIndows Live Gallery Page

Upload images to Flickr Automatically from a Folder

Everyone loves Flickr. But unfortunately there is no simple uploading utility available for this sweet photo sharing website. Flickr does provides some utilities, but all of these tools require manual intervention to do upload.

How about a tool which can upload photos to Flickr as soon as you save a picture to your local folder? Cool ..Isn’t it ?

Foldr Monitr is a little program that sits in your system tray and does that job for you. This tool will be very useful for bloggers who want to use lot of images in their posts but lazy to upload them to flickr. I recommend this tool to be used along with a great addin called Flickr4Writer for Windows Live Writer.

Steps to configure a better photo upload and blog mechanism

01. Install Foldr Monitr and configure it for a local folder.

02. Install Flickr4Writer (You should have Windows Live Writer installed)

03. Drop all photos in to your folder…start blogging…

04. By the time you finish blogging, your pics should be ready on Flickr.

05. Use Flickr4Writer and pull all of them from Flickr and place’em in your post.

Life is now beautiful…Thanks to better software 🙂

Create a new folder with Single key stroke (Windows Only)

Think about this…You are about to create 50 new folders and copy files in to

all those folders. How would you do it?

01. Open the windows Explorer

02. RIght Click somewhere in the space

03. Select New menu

04. Select Folder menu…

05. Ooofff…name it.

What a pathetic way of doing  simple things …right? 🙂

But here is a good news…we have a cool nifty shell addin to remove the head ache stated above.

Baxbex provides a cool new folder shortcut for windows explorer shell. Once you install this, all you need to do is to hit F12 and Name your folder.

This addin works for Windows 98, ME, NT, 2K, XP and Vista too. in Windows XP, you can even see an icon for create new folder on top command bar of the explorer.

Download Baxbex’s bxNewFolder (links to an executable)

Copy files faster than ever in your PC (Windows Only)

Everyone must have gone through atleast once through this pain. "Copying large volumes of files". Nothing can test our patience than doing this tedious task and waiting for long hours and late nights to do backups. The default copy program in windows is bit slower because of the buffer usage algorithm doesn’t care about the volume of the files or the size. It just copies the files in a single thread and pre-defined buffer for any scenario.

TeraCopy is a nifty small copy handler for Windows XP/Vista, which does a smart job of making the copy jobs much more faster and reliable.

A Free copy for Home users can be downloaded from HERE

Lets look at the cool features at a glance…

• It uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times in file copy operations. It also does asynchronous copy between two different hard disks to make it more faster.
• Pause and Resume file copy process anytime
• Does not terminate the whole copy job for any error in reading files
• Tracks the failed copy transactions
• Completely integrates with Windows Shell and replaces the original boring copy dialog.

Sounds cool huh ?  🙂

Play Safe with any EULA

EULA is probably the most commonly used piece of software products in this world. It is also the least visited, read, or used part of any software release. If this sounds like greek to you, you better know few things about EULA.

Any legal software in this world will bound to a legal software license agreement called EULA. This is nothing but End User License Agreement. This agreement is shown typically at the time of installation or first use of the software in web or desktop systems. Once the end user agrees to EULA of any software, it is assumed that he/she is well aware of the software’s behavior or side effects. So it is very important for us to read and understand the so-called EULAs. Since EULAs are made off with legal terminology, nobody really cares to read at all.

But now you can analyze any EULA quickly with EULAlyzer which will make sure there are no hidden agreements for malwares or other weird access agreements to your system.

Download EULAlyzer from Download.com

EULAlyzer comes with the following features…

Discover potentially hidden behavior about the software you’re going to install

Pick up on things you missed when reading license agreements

Keep a saved database of the license agreements you view

Instant results – super-fast analysis in just a second

Create any type of chart online absolutely for FREE

I always dreamed of having Visio as a web based tool rather than a desktop tool. Now with the power that comes with Web 2.0, we have got many options to create charts, diagrams and plans completely online with no software foot print of the desktop computer. One such web software is Best4c. I agree with you that the name is weird :-), But as of now it looks like a winner application to me. Go create charts, plans, and diagrams for free @ http://www.best4c.com/

Zip your files online (No Software is required)

Think about this situation…

You are in an Internet cafe and working on a computer with no zipping software installed nor the installation privileges given to install any software. How do you manage to send large sized files to your friends who may not want bigger attachments in their small inboxes?

GoGoZip.com provides a solution for this. You can upload a set of 3 files (2 MB is the limit per file). You can upload the files to this site and get your zip archive created on the fly and even can mail it to a friend from there…

There are lot of variants available for the same program. Some of them provides you the ability to zip up to 5 files too..

• http://www.mailmyzip.com/
• http://www.filezipper.net/
• http://www.onlinezip.info/

Shameless Skype Software Horror (SSSH….)

16th August : Skype is down…and everyone are panic. The world of communication is not fallen or AT & T, Virgin did not lost their satellites..but skype has got crashed data servers and the world is panic.

16th August : As a usual routine, the major OS vendor, Microsoft has issued critical security patches to their operating systems Windows XP and Windows Vista worldwide. These patches are available as part of Windows Update (which can be configured not to download updates automatically by any user) worldwide. The criticality of these patches also demands a safe restart of the operating system to make sure it is secured from any malicious attacks. Every machine in this world which has been updated using windows update was restarted….

What happend to skype?

Now the funniest thing that could ever happened to a software which was made with no idea of disaster scenarios comes in to picture. The massive restart of windows machines all over the world has apparently brought down skype servers and caused a big disaster. To my understanding , Skype does closes the connections and commits the calls in shutdown process. Massive start of windows machines (skype is not sure how many ….), it has got massive log-in  requests which are enough to give their servers a sleeping pill.

Who is the culprit ?

My vote goes to Skype. Hats-off to their product engineering which has never taken such a scenario of disaster. I am wondering what the hell their testing team doing with load testing? Do they test skype servers with a 500 simultaneous login transactions? How could anyone blame someone with so much of irresponsibility at their own house? This is funnier than fun.

Windows update restarted many machines and all the other IM networks survived including AIM, MSN, Yahoo and Google and why not skype? Does skype is going to disable the auto sign-in feature in future? 🙂 are the questions now…

Read more on this..

The 100 Best Products of 2007

PC World has published the World’s 100 best products for 2007 today. They have ranked software, hardware, web sites, media technologies and services which are rising and falling in the current timeline and in future.

The Top 10 list goes like this…(via pcworld.com)

Google Apps Premier Edition Review

Intel Core 2 Duo Review

Nintendo Wii Review

Verizon FiOS Vendor Site

RIM Blackberry 8800 Review

Parallels Desktop Review

Pioneer Elite 1080p PRO-FHD1

Infrant Technologies ReadyNAS NV

Apple Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” Review

Adobe Premiere Elements 3 Review

The full list is available here.

Yahoo’s Inbox goes Unlimited

Yahoo started rolling out “The Unlimited” storage for Yahoo inbox worldwide. Just wait and watch your inbox. When the feature is enabled for your account, the storage meter will disappear, which means there is no storage limit.

Read more here

Technorati tags: yahoo, unlimited, mail

World’s Top 500 fonts

Via Life Hacker…

I love fonts very much, because I just can’t stick to those boring Verdana, Times New Roman etc. If you are the one who like to use cool fonts for cool stuff, you don’t have to do search all those black colored font web sites.

fonts500.com brings you the best 500 fonts from the web based on the download count from famous websites. Download them here.

 

Important Note : Download the above fonts and save them in a seperate folder for future use. DO NOT download them to your system’s fonts folder. Copying too many fonts in to fonts folder may decrease your system’s performance a lot !.

Microsoft unveiled so called "The Flash Killer"

Today, Microsoft has unveiled the much awaited, so called “The Flash Killer”. It was named as “Microsoft Silverlight”. Sliverlight was famous for it’s old name “WPF/E” which means Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere. WPF is one of the key elements in Microsoft’s new initiatives around managed API for Windows. It is a part of .NET 3.0 (formerly WinFX) now. Silverlight is Cross platform, Cross browser compatible system. That means one can develop applications using Silverlight independent of any OS or browser.

 

 

Silverlight uses .NET 3.0 runtime and works with major browsers just like any flash based applications. The big deal with Silverlight would be the powerful environment support from various languages that are supporting .NET and WPF. Using WPF’s powerful graphics and video features, developers can now develop high end media rich internet applications like this…Album Browser

 

Read the The Top 10 features of Microsoft’s Silverlight (infact only 9 :-))

01. With a couple of lines of code,it supports wmv playback both on windows and mac seamlessly. Supports glitch-less transition between full-screen (720p) and window mode for any video.

02. Separation of mark-up (XAML) from code. This enables both web developers and designers work in a familiar web metaphor.

03. Silverlight mark-up (XAML) is HTML integrate seamlessly. Developers can treat XAML just like any HTML tag using JavaScript.

04. XAML can be used directly with in HTML with out having to add any opaque binary content.

05. Full runtime support for Silverlight XAML.

06. Just a 1 MB download for any PC.

07. It is fast. You can view multiple videos simultaneously with out having dropped frames from videos.

08. It is server or client agnostic. You don’t need any special microsoft software needs to be installed on server. This means one can deliver Silverlight experience right from a linux server.

09. Though Silverlight uses a light-weight WPF, it is almost 100% upward compatible with WPF. This means developers can use Silverlight code right away in WPF with out any modifications at all.

10. This was not revealed yet :-)…Watch it in Mix’07

 

Future : Microsoft is planning to introduce these technologies as part of IIS 7 media pack plug-in future upcoming server technologies according to PCWorld. There will be releases of lot of integration and developer support for Microsoft Silverlight for web application developers such as IDEs and 3rd party integration software.