myPod Apps

myPod Apps offers a few, very useful freeware utilities if you happen to own an iPod or iPhone…

Pod to PC is a freeware utility that lets you copy and recover music, videos and playlists from any iPod, iPhone or iPod touch to a Windows PC and iTunes.

Use it to…

• copy any music or video files from any iPod onto your computer.
• recover your music into iTunes after a computer crash,.
• preview music and movies on any iPod before transferring into your iTunes library.
• easily copy a whole or partial playlist from any iPod into iTunes.

Comes with an Automatic Transfer button to instantly select, then transfer all songs on an iPod that are not already in your iTunes Music Library and you can prevent duplicate transfers as tracks already in iTunes are indicated with a blue check.

Pod to Mac is a freeware utility that lets you copy and recover music, videos and playlists from any iPod, iPhone or iPod touch to an Apple Macintosh and iTunes.

See Pod to PC above for a list of capabilities.







Pod Photo Transfer is a freeware utility that lets you transfer photos from an iPod photo or iPod video to a Windows PC.

I suspect that it's been superceded by the two utilities above as both can transfer photos and videos from any iPod that supports them.

Related Posts: DiskAid - Disk Enable Your iPhone And iPod Touch, iPod -> Folder, Access Your iPod!

iPaper, A Mulit-platform Web Document Viewer

iPaper is a rich document format built for the web. Built with Adobe Flash, iPaper will display documents in the same way regardless of whether you're using Windows, MacOS, or Linux. Your readers no longer have to download files or extra software to view your documents.

You can convert just about any major document format into iPaper, including Word docs, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs,OpenOffice documents, and PostScript files. Supported formats include:

• Adobe PDF (.pdf)
• Adobe PostScript (.ps)
• Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps, .pptx)
• Microsoft Excel (.xls, xlsx)
• OpenOffice Text Document (.odt, .sxw)
• OpenOffice Presentation Document (.odp, .sxi)
• OpenOffice Spreadsheet (.ods, .sxc)
• All OpenDocument formats
• Plain text (.txt)
• Rich text format (.rtf)

Once you've uploaded your documents and converted them to iPaper, you can publish them to Scribd, a huge online library of user-generated documents. Scribd documents are indexed by major search engines, so you can broaden your audience and share your creative works with the world.

Scribd's iPaper document viewer is embeddable in any website or blog. Whether you have a few documents or a million, Scribd has tools to help you convert, publish and manage them better than ever before.

You can even send documents as attachements to Scribd via email and have them deliver links to the converted files to your recipients via iPaper@Scribd. That way, the recipients can view the documents in their browser without downloading the file. Of course, they can opt to download the original if they want to as well.

All of this is very nice but the limitaton of having to use the Scribd servers to convert and host your documents will limit the spread of iPaper as a web-wide tool. Fine for personal and small website use but corporates and goverment sites won't look at it until they can utilise the technology inside their own networks.

Picasa For Mac Looking Closer

The Googling Google blog is touting some news that should have most Mac fans sit up - "Google to launch Picasa Mac at Macworld 2009?"

Sure it's only another rumour in a long line of rumours about Picasa for Macintosh but we're ever hopeful that one of these will eventually bear fruit. Not that Apple's iPhoto is bad, it's actually pretty good, but it isn't free like Picasa. You have to pay for upgrades to iLife and frankly that sucks if, like me, it's the only application in that suite you use.

So, maybe very soon now, we'll be able to compare iPhoto and Picasa directly on the Mac!

More Book Stuff

Having already posted an article of what to do with books other than read them,
Books And What To Do With Them!, I thought that it was time to add a few more options for book-lovers to that list…

Book Suggestions

Several sites have emerged that attempt to offer the avid reader suggestions for what to read next, based on various formulae. Whether they're any good at doing it or are just trying to push books they can sell you will depend on trying them out. Here are a few worth checking out…

Whichbook - This site presents the reader with a list of paired criteria like happy or sad, funny or serious, safe or disturbing, short or long, etc. You can then use a slider to choose the level between each pair that suits what kind of book you want to read next. If that scenario doesn't suit, then you can try choosing the character, plot and setting. For example, you get to choose your main character's race, age, sexuality and gender and you can even make him or her an alien. There are seven plot types to pick from and you can choose to set the story anywhere in the world.

What Should I Read Next - This uses a much simpler system in that you enter a book you like and the site will analyse its favourites database of over 47,000 books to suggest what you could read next. It produces the recommendations based purely on collective taste of its registered readers. When books are entered into the same favourites list, they become associated with each other and the more often particular books appear on different lists, the stronger that association becomes. Over time the recommendations should get better and better as the database grows.

BookLamp - This site suggests books through an analysis of writing styles similar to the way that Pandora.com matches its listeners to new music. BookLamp allows you to find books with a similar level of tone, tense, perspective, action, description, and dialog - while at the same time allowing you to specify details like… half the length. It’s supposedly impervious to outside influences, like advertising, that impact most socially driven recommendation systems, and isn’t reliant on a large user base to work. It's still in private beta but looks promising (and my name's down).

More Cataloguing

BookHuddle is another free book cataloguing site but with a more social networking slant to help you discover, organize, and share book information. It also includes reviews, discussion forums and you can even set up or join book clubs in there.

Shelfari titles itself as a free social network for book lovers. It lets you create a virtual shelf to show off your books. You can then see what your friends are reading and discover new books or at least that's the general idea. It also has groups that you can join to keep the social aspect going.

If you want to catalogue more than just books, then there are more general collection list sites like Listology and iTrackmine.

More Swapping

BookHopper - a free, swap-by-post book service. It is international but only allows swapping within your own national boundaries to keep postage costs down. Like similar services, you can request a book when you meet certain criteria. Here you need to offer at least 10 books and leave up-to-date feedback. There are also limits on how many books you can request in a given time period.

WhatsOnMyBookShelf - a book trading community that allows members to exchange their books using a simple credit system. Users maintain their own profile page with friends, book inventory and wishlists. For every 5 books registered you will receive one credit as a promotion and each book registered is designated a credit value based upon its new book price. Users request a book by redeeming some of their credits to order the book from the current holder, who then gets those credits.

Well, that's enough on books for the moment. I was going to add a bit on book price comparison engines but maybe later.

Related Posts: Books And What To Do With Them!

XMind - Mind Mapping And Brainstorming For Free

XMind, a provider of visual thinking and collaborative software solutions and services for brainstorming, idea capture, content sharing, and project management, has released an open-source version of their award-winning mind-mapping application.


With the goal of making XMind more accessible to a broader audience and more powerful for professional users, XMind is making available both a royalty-free open source edition, XMind 3, and a subscription-based professional edition, XMind Pro 3. Both editions are enabled for online sharing and collaboration via Share.XMind.Net, a new web service that allows XMind users to share their mind maps and other visual thinking content with a Web 2.0 style online community.

XMind is available for Windows, Mac OS X and also has a Java-based, portable version that can run under both of those and Linux. There is a alos a Pro version XMind Pro subscribers have full access to all updates, online support, all pro features including privately sharing, inline presentation, exporting to PDF/Word/Powerpoint, Gantt charts with task topics and more.

Related Posts: PersonalBrain MindMapping, Online Mind-Mapping

Clocking IT - Free, Web-based Project Management

Long have I searched for a free, web-based project management solution that offers no limits and team collaboration facilities but, up till now, that search has been fruitless. Yes I've checked out activeColab but it isn't really free and then there's Project2Manage but I didn't find it rich enough in features.


Clocking IT does all of the above and for free as well. It offers unlimited online project storage and with it you can plan your projects, see your schedule, know if you're slipping behind and why and it can send out notifications via email, RSS & iCal. It also includes time tracking and extensive reports to help you show your clients exactly what you've done and for how long.

The main iterface is the dashboard, which is fully customizable for whatever information you need and it automatically updates. You can even add Google Gadgets to it as well. You can visualize your project plans with intercative GANTT chart too.

It's available in English, French, Spanish, Basque, Italian, German, Dutch, Polish, Hebrew, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish.

OCR Terminal - Free, Online OCR Scanning

Thanks to blogger Sarab who commented on my erroneous article for Qipit, we now know that there is a true, online OCR scanning service available…


OCR Terminal is a free online Optical Character Recognition (OCR) service that allows you to convert scanned images and PDF documents into editable and searchable text documents. It accurately preserves formatting and layout of documents. It was built to provide the user with a free and easy way of performing OCR without having to install new software or having to pay for it. Automatic layout extraction and segmentation of image areas ensure that the page layout and formatting of the document is preserved accurately.

OCR Terminal supports all popular document image formats including PDF and multi-page TIFF captured as scanned images, photographs, or even screenshots. Extracted text can be downloaded in TXT, DOC, XML or RTF formats or directly e-mailed with a thumbnail of the uploaded image.

The site currently allows for text extraction only from English language documents, but they are working on extending this functionality across other languages as well. They are also currently working on a desktop client that will allow users to upload the document by dragging and dropping all the TIFF and PDF files into the client and get back perfectly formatted Word files.

Microsoft Image Composite Editor

Microsoft Research are usually worth keeping an eye on as they're known for producing some very nifty bits of Windows software and this time their Interactive Visual Media Group has rolled out the Image Composite Editor or ICE to shorten the name a bit. ICE is an advanced panoramic image stitcher and, like most of the amazingly cool stuff that emerges from Microsoft Research, it's free.


Okay, you can already create panoramic images for free in Windows Live Photo Gallery, and it's very good at it too, but if you're looking for that bit more functionality and control and don't really want to have to shell out for a commercial panorama tool or delve into the free but complex Hugin, then ICE is looking very nice indeed.

ICE has state-of-the-art stitching and exposure blending algorithms and allows advanced camera orientation adjustment. It can also output to more formats and with more control over compression levels than Windows Live Photo Gallery but it's still so easy to use.

All you need to do is drop in a set of overlapping photographs of a scene from a single location and ICE creates a high-resolution panorama, incorporating all of your images at full resolution. You can choose from several algorithms for camera motion or let it choose automatically. Once the images have been stitched, you can automatically crop off the uneven edges or do it manually to suit your own image preferences.

Once you're happy with the stitch and crop, then you can then save your panorama in a wide variety of formats, from common ones like JPEG, PNG, Windows BMP and TIFF to the new-ish HD Photo format and multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom. You can even choose to scale the exported image if you want to.

Versions of ICE are available for both x86 and x64 Windows systems with .NET 2.0 or above.

Windows Live Lives

When Microsoft released their free Windows Live suite of applications and services, I was in there pretty quickly and started writing this blog post but it never got done as other stuff cropped up that kept my focus off of it.

Still, it's definitely worth a mention now that they've released a set of beta updates for new versions of most of the suite, which provides a single sign-in access to the following web services…

• Hotmail: Stay connected anywhere with your web-based e-mail account.
• Spaces: Share your world online on your own web space.
• SkyDrive: 1Gb of free storage to host or share your files online.
  
• Events: Plan your event. Send invitations. Share photos.

…and on top of that they give you the following suite of applications…

• Mail: Access your multiple e-mail accounts in one place.
• Messenger: Connect, share, and chat online.
• Toolbar: Easy access to Windows Live services from any web page.
• Photo Gallery: Get creative and share your photos and videos.
• Writer: Easily publish pictures, videos, and other rich content to your blog.

One more thing on offer is Windows Live OneCare, an all-in-one PC security and support suite to provide protection against viruses, spyware, intrusions, hackers, etc., optimize your system and hard drive and provide scheduled backup facilities. However, it isn't free but you can try it for 90 days before they'll want some wonga. It costs £37.99 a year to support up to three PCs on OneCare.

A few of the services like Hotmail and Messenger are already well known but what drew my attention was the new stuff like Photo Gallery and Writer…

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Windows Live Photo Gallery is essentially Microsoft's answer to Google's Picasa and, having had a play with it, I'm pretty impressed so far. Like Picasa, you can use it to organize and store your photos as well as adjust settings like exposure, brightness, shadows, redeye, colour, detail and crop the image, etc. Not a lot different here but I actually found the shadow and highlight adjustments more flexible than in Picasa. You can also publish your images to your Spaces photos and Flickr or e-mail images in a choice of sizes or burn images to CD/DVD directly.

What really got my interest in this application was the fact that I'd read a while back that Microsoft would be including the capability of creating panoramic images. So, they have indeed and all you do is select the source images and choose a menu command. Nothing else is required as the application analyses the images and builds the panorama with no further input from you; no selecting matching anchor points or anything like that; it just works. The following panorama was made from three images taken hand held from our hotel balcony in Portugal last year…


The only complaint I have about it is the fact that there's no option to adjust the default JPEG file save compression settings and those must be set at about 50% as any edited file seems to be much smaller than the original. The workaround here is to save the panorama as a TIFF and then use something else to convert it to JPEG if desired.

Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easy to publish rich content to your blog. It can publish to most major blog services including Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, Wordpress, Blogger and many others. Even if you don't yet have a blog (where have you been?), Writer can help you set one up.

With Writer, you can easily create a compelling blog post and insert photos and videos, maps, tags and lots of other cool content. I comes with powerful editing features including tables, spell checker, and quick hyperlinks. You can even compose your posts offline and publish them later once you get connected again.


Some of the above services and applications are still in development so I expect that the feature set may grow a bit and some of the inconsistencies will be ironed out. One other thing to mention is the fact that you don't need to sign up for a Hotmail account to get access to the rest of the stuff. I quite easily got signed up using my own, non-Microsoft mail account.

The latest set of betas has updates for Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Writer, Toolbar and Family Safety and now includes Movie Maker, which lets you create and share movies with just a few clicks of your mouse. You can arrange photos and video clips by dragging and dropping, add a soundtrack and preview your changes instantly before publishing to any of several popular video sharing sites.

Can You Run It?

Can You Run It? is a that site provides a simple solution for PC video game fans that looks at your computer hardware and software to determine whether or not your current system can run a particular Windows PC game. So, if you fancy playing newly released games like Mercenaries 2 or Spore, then it might be very useful to try this before shelling out for the games.

Each of your computer's components is evaluated to see how well it meets the minimum and recommended requirements against a database of specific games. If you can run it, then whoop-dee-doo, Instant happiness If not, then recommendations are made on how to update or upgrade each component that doesn't meet the listed requirements. Sometimes all you need is a simple, free software download to sort things out.

The service works with Windows 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, 2003, Media Center and Vista and either Internet Explorer 4.xx and higher or a Mozilla based browser (Firefox, Netscape, etc.) with Java 1.3.1 and higher. At the moment the database contains only games but there's no reason why they couldn't expand that to include other software packages. Might need a bit of redesign on the site to accommodate that though as all you get to select from is one, very long menu.