Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
Monday, March 22nd, 2010 |
The computers had really evolved in the last decades and today they had become a part of our lives. But the computers weren’t so popular and so used by so many people today if it wasn’t for the internet. The internet is a huge network, that is spread all over the world, and which is used by billions of people each day. Some are using it for fun, others for work but most of the people are using it for both of these activities. There are so many things to do online, and one of them is to search for all sort of information you want. And we really mean it when we say “any information you want”, because you can find everything on the internet, in any domain you might think of. And the most popular place for searching is google.com. This is the best search engine in the world, and so many people are using it as their homepage.
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So the engineers at Google decided to make the google page more fun and interesting so they added all sorts of gadgets to it. To use this feature just go to the “iGoogle” link that is found on the upper right side of the screen, and there you will be able to customize your homepage exactly as you want. There are hundreds of fun gadgets to add and you can also arrange them exactly as you want in the page. There are all sorts of gadgets that can be very useful to you at work (to do list, calendar, currency converter), at school (translation tool, calculator, Wikipedia) or just for having fun (games, blogs, news etc). So you can add them to your iGoogle page, but also to your desktop if you install the “Google desktop” application.
One of the gadgets you can add is the “
Google translation gadget” which is a simple but cool application that allows you to translate words or phrases from one language to another. And there are quite a lot of languages that you can choose from, so this is a really useful gadget if you want to translate a text.
And now let’s discuss about some more gadgets which you can use on your iGoogle page. A really fun one which can help you relax after a long day at work is the “Drummer hero”. With this gadget you will have a set of drums in front of you, and all you have to do is move the cursor over each drum to play its specific sound. You can just move the mouse randomly on the screen and beat the drums like a crazy, or you can make a song and beat them in a specific way. Another funny gadget is the “Eyes”. This one will add a pair of eyes on your page (one red and one yellow) and each eye will have a small black circle inside. And these 2 circles will follow the exact moves of your mouse. So you can place the mouse between the 2 eyes and make them look crosswords or you can put it anywhere you want and see how the eyes react.
A simple but useful gadget is the “Google calendar”, which of course puts a calendar on your page. The “A joke a day” application will show you a new joke each day. Or you can add the “Quotes of the day”, and see a quote each day. The gadget called “Turtle” will add 2 small turtles on your screen, and you can feed them by clicking on their tank. Whenever you click you will place a small yellow thing, which the turtles will eat. So just place a lot of food on the screen, and then relax by watching the turtles swimming after the food. You can feed them as much as you want because they will never get full.
Some other useful gadgets that you can add are the “Weather” application (which will give the weather for your city) and the Gmail, which will allow you to check your email address right from your homepage. You can also add the “Countdown” gadget, which will allow you to set a specific event, and see how many days, hours, minutes and seconds are left until that time. If you like watching videos on youtube you can add the “Youtube” gadget on your iGoogle page, which will allow you to watch videos directly from here, without even having to go on youtube.
Some other gadgets that you can add are: daily horoscopes, IBN top headlines, famous optical illusions, clouds, hangman word game, Yo mamma joke of the day, the current moon phase, the BBC sport, the Google map search, Australian weather radar, Facts (did you know that…?), currency converter, Super flash Mario Bros game and many many others. If you tried some other gadgets that you liked, please tell us all about them. Have a nice day!
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Friday, March 19th, 2010 |
Windows Vista is a famous operating system produced by the Microsoft company to be used on desktop computers, laptops, tablet PC-s or media center PC-s. It initially had the name “Longhorn” but until its official release the name was changed into Vista. It was officially released for the whole world in January 2007, but it was available for hardware and software manufacturers three months earlier, in November 2006. It came after five years from the release of its predecessor – Windows XP, and after 2 more years, in 2009 was launched the next operating system from Microsoft – Windows 7.
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The Windows Vista operating system came with many new changes and features compared to the Windows XP. And of these new features is the “windows sidebar”. This is a transparent panel anchored to the side of the screen, and where the used can add desktop gadgets. These are small applications designed for a specific purpose (to display the weather, sports score, the time and so on). You can add many gadgets to your desktop, and you can move them anywhere on the desktop, not just on the sidebar.
So now we’ll discuss about some of these cool Vista sidebar gadgets . If you will visit this link: http://www.thoosje.com/vista-sidebar-gadgets-gallery.html you will see that there are 9 categories of gadgets. And these are: fun & games, IM & spaces, lifestyle, mail & contacts, music, movies & TV, news & feeds, safety & security, search tools, techy, geeky & cool, and tools & utilities.
There are quite a lot of gadgets in each category, and today we’ll discuss about some of them. In the “fun & games” category you can find many cool gadgets such as: Asteroids (which is a clone of Atari’s Asteroids game), Digi Watch (which shows a simple but cool LED watch), Feed the snake (which is a version of the famous “snake” game), Greeter gadget (a cool feature that greets the user who is logging in with the sound of a voice), Blackjack (which of course is the Blackjack cards game), Blockade (which is a version of the famous Tetris game), Bricks (which is also another classic and fun game) and many more others.
Now let’s move on to another gadgets category, for example “Lifestyle”. Here you can find some cool gadgets such as: the Daily Motivation (which will show you a different word or inspirational message each day, to keep you positive and motivated), the eBay auction watch (which displays auctions from your eBay account. So whenever you are selling a product on eBay, you can use this gadget to always know the bide prices for that product), the Moon Phases gadget (which shows an image of the current Moon phase, the name of the phase and the percentage of full), the eBook world (which shows a top 10 of eBooks). Some other gadgets from this category are: the Feng Shui gadget (which allows you to bring this concept to your desktop), the Tablet PC inknotes gadget (which allows you to jot down handwritten notes, just like you were writing on a small piece of paper with a pen) or the Impact daily Bible passage (which will show you a passage from the Bible each day). This were about all the gadgets from this category, and now let’s move on to another one.
In the “music, movies & TV” category you can find gadgets like: Fresh FM (which will allow you to listen to this internet radio station), Album Art (which shows the album art for the song that you are currently playing), Billboard Top 10 music (a gadget that shows you the latest top 10 music ranked by Billboard), iSee (which allows you to watch videos from Youtube right on your desktop) and more others. There are also many other gadgets with radio stations such as: Hindi Radio, AI’s Rock Radio, iClassical Radio, Bay Radio, BBC Radio and more.
In the “feeds & news” category you can find gadgets like: the Daft.ie Realtime (which gives you the latest updates on the Daft.ie site – the largest property website in Ireland), the AccuWeather.com® Forecast and Radar Gadget (which shows you the weather forecast), the Australian Bushfire Danger (that displays the danger of any bushfires in New South Wales and the Australian Capital territory), the Eye on the web (a gadget that keeps an eye on any webpage you choose), the BBC gadget (which gives you the top 8 BBC headlines), CBC Radio Feeds (that gives you the latest feeds from the CBC radio station), the Globes gadget (that gives you the latest news in business and technology from Israel) and others.
And finally let’s discuss about some fun gadgets from the “Techy, Geeky & cool” category. Here you can find gadgets like: the AlerCon (which shows the current AlertCon status at the Internet Security Systems site), the ping gadget (which shows your internet ping), the Countdown timer (which allows you to enter any day from the future and the gadget will show you the countdown until that moment in days, hours, minutes and seconds), the PlayStation 3 European launch countdown gadget (which gives a countdown until the moment of release for the most anticipated games for the Sony Playstation 3 console) or the Twadget (which allows you to keep up with your friends statuses on Twitter, and also post your own statuses).
So as you can see, there are so many cool gadgets that you can add on your Windows Vista operating system. Just search for them, and whenever you find one that is really cool , tell us all about it!
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Thursday, March 4th, 2010 |
The coolest software has to be free, because if it isn’t not many of us could enjoy the features and the applications it has to offer. So, in the next lines we are going to present the coolest free software you can find online. Let’s star with Inkscape which is an open source vector graphics editor.
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If you can’t afford to purchase CorelDraw or Illustrator, this free software is a good replacement and supports features like alpha blending, clones, markers and more. The software is so good that in the Los Altos School District located in California, students are using Inkscape to about graphics software and vector graphics. You will find it free to download in the Inkscape.org website.
Foxit Reader is a cool and also free PDF reader which comes with a lot of great features. This software has over 90 million users world wide and you have the possibility to convert the PDF document into a text file and you can also add comments to the PDF document and print the document with the comments. This
cool software also allows its users to type text on a PDF document, to highlight the text or to draw graphics. You can download it for free from the Foxit Software.com
Open Office looks like Microsoft Office, but is free. Is a great software used for databases, graphics, presentations, spreadsheets and word processing. If you are used with Microsoft Office, this software will be very easy to learn. Open Office is under LGPL license which mean that is can be downloaded and used for any purpose like public administration, educational (for schools or universities), commercial or domestic.
The best thing about it is the fact that is stores and saves the file in a international open standard format, so you can open the files, read them or change them from any other office software (for example, Microsoft Office). Download it for free from Open Office.org. Firefox and Opera are great web browser that can be downloaded for free. They are secure, customizable and very popular. Opera is the most secure free Internet browser followed by Firefox.
If you are a Photoshop fan, but you can’t afford to purchase it, you can try the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Don’t expect it to be exactly like Photoshop because it doesn’t have as many features and quite the same functionality, but this is perfect if you want a free image editing software. This
cool software supports a lot of file formats including: PSD, PNG, GIF, TIFF and JPEG. It works on Mac, Windows and also Linux. More information about it you will find on their website Gimp.org. Other cool and also free software are: Notepad ++, Amaya (a web editor that helps you to create documents on the Internet), VLC Media Player (a multimedia player which supports many video and audio formats), Winamp and more.
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