GmailDrive | A useful web tool for using Gmail as your hard disk

Most of us use Gmail, the robust, secure mail service from the big 'G' Google.. which gives us more than 2.5 GM worth of space. But most of this space is remain unutilized as emails generally consume very little space unless heavy files are attached to them.

Have you ever thought of utilizing this space for some productive use.

Gmail Drive, is a useful web tool, which allows you to use this space virtually as if it was available on your hard disk. You can save files, add folders, rename files, search files and delete them through Windows Explorer just like any other file on your computer. And the best part is that, these files are available to you from any other computer, which is connected to the Internet.

GMail Drive actually creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google GMail account.It actually creates a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder.

Caution: But GMail Drive is still an experimental tool and is developed by third party.

WebHuddle | A nice open source application for web conferencing

With the increasing competition in every marketplace, cost cutting is the only option for the companies for increasing their profitability. For this purpose, they employ different approaches and carefully scan every hole, which drains their revenue.

One of the important head of expense in today's organizations is the traveling costs of their employees, which can easily be reduced considerably by employing modern tools of voice and video communication.

WebHuddle is one such application, which just requires a web enabled PC to start your web conferencing session. It overcomes many of the hiccups like high-price to entry, compromised network security, large client downloads, and unreliability, which are usually associated with such online conferencing tools.

The best part is that it is an open source application. It offers you desktop sharing and voice-over-IP which may be useful for larger meetings, where a facilitator has control over the virtual microphone. You can easily record the proceedings of the meeting for record and play them back as per your convenience.

It is currently in beta testing and during this period it is free.

14 great web tools for taking screenshots (Part II)

[This is the second part of this series. You can find part I here.]

In the earlier post, we had introduced, eight web tools for taking screenshots. Here we take a look at six more tools, which you can use for capturing screen images to be used in your blogs or online articles.

Browser Add-ons

Snissa: Simplicity is the key here. Ideal for taking screenshots of the entire webpage.

Screengrab: Creates an icon in your status bar, simple to use. You can select an area on your screen or an entire window for screenshot.

Standalone programs

PrintKey: A sophisticated version for your printscreen function. Resides in your system tray and gets activated with the press of PrintScreen key. Then you can save the image and edit it as well.

I4X Screencatcher: Allows you to take screenshots of the active window, your whole screen, an area you select or a selector box.

InstantShot: An advanced screenshot tool for OS X, supports JPG/TIF/PNG selection and timer functionality. Options include capturing a region, hotkeys, several output formats, image scaling and many others.

Web based

Thumbalizr: Just enter the target-URL and press the "thumb it"-button. Wait a moment and a screenshot of the desired page will be taken.

14 great web tools for taking screenshots (Part I)

If you are a blogger or a journalist, you would understand the need of a good and handy web tool for taking screenshots of a website. There are many of them, some are web based, some are standalone executable programs and some are just browser add-ons. Still more, some are free and some require you to purchase them. My personal favourite being SnagIt.

In this two part series, we take a closer look at some of the most common screenshot web tools.

Browser Add-on's

Save as image: A neat firefox add-on. Takes screenshot of all of the contents of your current page, even if it above or below what you currently are seeing. After takinga capture, it prompts you to save avoiding hassles of opening your image editor and pasting the image there. You can also crop the image before pasting.

Pearl Crescent Page Saver: Another Mozilla Firefox add-on. It also gives you an option to capture the entire page or just the visible portion. Lets you save the image either in pNG or JPG. Also allows you to save the image either in full size or scaled down. The pro version, costing around $15, gives some more features.

Picnik for Firefox: Very easy interface, nice tools, and you can add text caption to your images. Launching a new premium subscription service today. At a price of $24.95 a year, you get of access to host of advanced effects and fonts.

Standalone programs

SnagIt: The king of all screenshot capturing programs. It is a powerful image, text, video, and Web image capture program with many features and options. Here is nice guide for using SnagIt. It costs you $ 39.95, and there is also a trial version for free. Torrent version is available here.

FastStone Capture : A powerful, flexible and intuitive screen-capture utility. It allows you to capture anything on the screen including windows, objects, full screen, rectangle regions, freehand-selected regions and scrolling windows/web pages. It also has innovative features such as a floating Capture Panel, hotkeys, resizing, cropping, text annotation, printing, e-mailing, screen magnifier, screen ruler and many more.

WebShot: Freeware and allows you to take screenshots of a web pages or the entire websites. The main advantage is its powerful command line utility which enables you to automate the process of taking screenshots.

Paparazzi!: For Mac OS X, allows you to take screenshot of the entire webpage in contrast to the built in feature of Mac, which allows you to capture only the visible portion.

Web based

WebShotsPro: Now downloads, no purchasing, no installation. Just visit this website adn enter the URL of the page for which screenshot is to be taken. But you may have to wait a bit, because there is a queue.

[Part II of this series coming soon.]

Yuuguu | Share your screen with this great remote desktop sharing web tool

Yuuguu is the latest cross platform collaboration tool, which everyone to share their computer screens with each other. This latest remote desktop sharing utility requires a small software on both (all) the computers and invitation are sent from one computer to the other. One screens are shared, you can use chat feature to explore the collaborative possibilities. Voice chat is also available for your convenience, but at a small cost.

Yuuguu is different from other such services as it combines the IM features with remote desktop sharing. Here you can make a buddy list, invite them to share your screen when they are online, show them what you are looking at on your computer, let them move your mouse and use your keyboard as though they were sat right next to you, and easily start a conference call together.

Yuuguu, derives its name from a Japanese word , which means fusion. It supports any device with browsing capabilities, meaning that you can also use it through mobile phones.

Yuuguu is similar in use to utilities like GoToMeeting but I find it much simpler to control and use.

It's founder Anish Kapoor says, "Yuuguu takes Web collaboration to a new level by integrating community, messaging and collaboration in a whole new and natural way."

I wish, if they had incorporated some sort of video interaction between the participants, it would have been a complete package. But still, a great utility.

del.icio.us tags: Yuuguu, Desktop sharing, Desktop, remote sharing, screen sharing, collaboration

Save energy and environment with LocalCooling

I just didn't know that more than 30 billion kilowatt-hours of energy is wasted because many of us simply forget to shut down our computers when we're not using them. Ooh, that's a huge figure.

But this happen, just because you forget to implement the various power saving options available to you. Now there is an automatic solution to this problem. You can download a 100% Free power management tool from Uniblue Labs, which allows users to optimize their energy savings in minutes and as a result reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions.

What does it do

It ...

• Cuts your power bills by saving energy
• Thus it reduces the emitted CO2 resulting in reduction in Greenhouse effect.
• Provides you total control on your power settings.
• Shows you in detail how much you have saved since installing the software.

del.icio.us tags: power saving, energy conservation, environment, greenhouse, CO2 emission

Speed up loading of Acrobat Reader witht his free webtool

If you are one of those frustrated with the long long time taken by the Acrobat Reader to load, then use following trick.

Download Adobe Reader SpeedUp from Softpedia, install it and you are through.

It actually speeds up Adobe Reader's launch time by disabling the majority of plugins that are completely useless for most users. It's completely free from any malicious scripts.

Or, alternatively, if you don't want to use any third party program on your machine, follow these steps.

1. Go to the installation folder of acrobat reader (eg. C:\program files\adobe\acrobat\reader\.. ).
2. Move all the files and folders from the “plugins” directory to the “Optional” directory.

It will prevent Acrobat Reader to open the (mostly) useless plugins and load the Reader faster.

A simple way to keep your files secured

If you work on a shared computer, then there is always a threat of loosing important personal information on your computer to others.

Windows XP has a very simple built-in secured tool to encrypt your important files, which will be not available to other users of your computer. Here is how?

• For encryption: Right click on file name > Properties > General Tab > Advanced button > Check the option "Encrypt content to secure data". Multiple files / folders can be encrypted in one go.

• For giving permission to any other user to access an encrypted file: Right click on file name > Properties > General Tab > Advanced button > Details > Add (whichever user you like).

• To stand-out the excrypted files: Open Explorer > Tools Menu > Folder Options > View Tab > Advanced setting box > Select "Show encrypted or compressed NTFS files in color". This will change the color of the name of all the encrypted files so as to enable you to recognize them easily.
  

For more advanced encryption: You can Download True Crypt from PC World, which is a free, open-source encryption program that lets you place files and folders in "safes" of any size.

Download Joost: A new webtool to watch TV online

I have just received my invitation to download Joost and didn't raise any time to grab it.

In an effort to increase the awareness, Joost has now raised the limit and now virtually I can invite as many people to download Joost as I wish. Earlier Joost allowed only 5 invitations.

For those who have heard Joost for the first time, it is free internet TV software which consists of over 150 TV channels and other TV shows available on-demand.

"Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping."

If you also wanna have an invitation, just drop a comment. If you have a website or blog, I would appreciate if you can link to this post.

Fasterfox: Mozilla add-on to speed up for Firefox

Firefox is beleved to be a faster browsing experience than IE. But would you want to speed up Firefox also. There is another post on this blog just for that.

Still not satisfied, try Fasterfox, the built-n Mozilla Firefox add-on.

The Mozilla website says

"Fasterfox allows you to tweak many network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay."

In short, Fasterfox allows you to,

• Suppress popups opened via Flash plugins
• Provide HTTP Pipelining for very noticeable speed increase
• And many other features

For those, who are not much familier with pipelines, DNS, load times etc., they have simplified life by providing a few preset settings for optimum performance. You can choose any preset condition like Default, Courteous, Optimized or Turbo-charged (the fastest one).

I really find it speeding up my system and worth giving a try.

Use Internet Explorer within Firefox

Every serious blogger, at one time or other, has to tweak with his template and whenever you do so, it is suggested that you should check it in all available and prevalent browsers, especially Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Now a die-hard fan like me finds it very irritating to open IE, just for this purpose. Then this convenient Fire-fox add-on (IE Tab) comes to my rescue. It is a superb attempt by Mozilla to be one-up against the competition.
The First screenshot shows the area around my system tray. A left-click on the IE icon changes the currently open tab into Firefox (and then this IE icon changes to Firefox icon). To open it into IE, now I have to left-click at the same spot (where now a Firefox icon is available). i.e. it acts like a toggle switch.
The second screen shot is of the open tabs, where an IE icon confirms that the tab, although open in Firefox, but actually is currently using IE platform.
The third shot is of the download site, where you can download the IE Tab add-on.
It is a highly recommended add-on for all Firefox lovers, who are forced to live with IE. Thums-up Firefox.

How to determine the RGB / hex color code of a pixel

I have just stumbled upon the latest article from Nirmal about a detailed procedure for finding the hex colour code of background. The procedure is a real elaborated effort on his part. But this can easily be done with the help of a small utility "Colour Cop" [Download here].
The screen cap shows two tools; eyedropper and a lens, which can be dragged to any part of your screen. A zoomed image of the area around that tool can be viewed in the bottom square (preview pane) of color cop. The color of the central pixel of that preview pane is shown in the upper square along with the RGB as well as the hex code.
If you want to change the hex code into RGB or vice-versa, simply type the value in the corresponding place. Isn't it simple. It is.

Irfanview 4.00: A fast and sleek webtool for image management

IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista.

The official website of IrfanView claims that Irfanview is trying to create new and/or interesting features in its own way, unlike some other graphic viewers, whose whole "creativity" is based on feature cloning, stealing of ideas and whole dialogs from ACDSee and/or IrfanView! (for example: XnView has been stealing/cloning features and whole dialogs from IrfanView, for 7+ years).

IrfanView has the ability to convert images between most of the supported formats. IrfanView can also perform some basic image editing and processing functions, including cut, crop, resize, resample, change the color depth, adjust brightness, and adjust contrast.

A new version Irfanview 4.00 has just been released. You can check out the new features at versiontracker and download it from there. Alternatively you can directly download the new vresions from this link.

New version of Picasa (from Google) Released

Picasa, the complete image management software from Google, helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Whenever you open Picasa, it, by itself, searches all pictures in your computer and files them into neatly organized albums. The smooth drag and drop feature gives working with picasa a real good experiance.

What's more, with Picasa, you can easily edit your photographs - try changing hues, contrast, brightness or use the unique single click editing for many effects at once. You can make fascinating albums and share through emails, make gift CDs or sent them to your blog at blogger.

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Download (Latest version, 2.7) Size: 5.12MB, (Freeware)
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