Even though Windows Vista has a lot of flaws in terms of functions and features, the graphics are undoubtedly a sight to behold. If you have a very powerful processor, you’ll be able to experience the Microsoft’s “Aero” enabled interface. Among the simple yet stunning changes in Vista is the desktop experience of a thumbnail view of the tabbed function that is running in your computer.

But you don’t have to switch to Vista just to experience that cool thumbnail view. Visual ToolTip is a free application developed by Chris’n’Soft that could be easily installed in your computer. Basically, this provides thumbnail previews of the running application. This application is lightweight but it does provide a Vista-like experience in your desktop or more specifically, in your taskbar. Once installed, the settings will pop-up which will give you the chance the change the preview settings.

Since XP doesn’t have the configurations of Vista, the application does have limitations. Visual ToolTip will not show the status of the application in real time. Instead it will create a snap shot of the current state of the application every time your pointer runs through it.

Aside from the thumbnail preview, Visual ToolTip also has a program launcher which could change your standard windows program launcher.

Check it out http://www.chrisnsoft.com/visual-tooltip/

We used to have USB flash drives for portable file storage only. Today, our flash drives could be installed with a bunch of portable applications that could be launched right from the flash drives. These applications offer security and customization so that you don’t need to scrutinize other persons desktop. All of these could be done from a lightweight application…until we found Tiny USB Office.

Tiny USB Office is a set of office productivity applications that could be launched right out of the USB flash drives. Sure you already have that but get this: the whole office suite will only take up to 2.4MB in storage. That’s smaller than the 3-minute song released in MP3.

At 2.4MB, don’t expect it would have the same whoopla with MS Office applications or OpenOffice.org set of office applications, but still offers a good set of productivity applications. The closest thing that you could create to an office document is the application called Kpad wherein .rtf files are created and the Spread32 is a small application that’s fully compatible with MS Excel. Along with these useful applications, Tiny USB Office has an MSN Messenger clone (PixaMSN), PDF creator (PDF Producer), FTP client (FTP Wanderer) and other useful applications. All of these applications could be launched from Qsel program launcher which is also part of the office suite.

So don’t throw away your 128MB USB Flash Drives yet, this free office suite will really help the traveler in you.

Check it out here – http://www.xtort.net/office-and-productivity/floppy-office/

If you regularly listen to music on your computer, check out this neat little player. AIMP is an audio player, similar to other players such as Winamp, etc. It packs a lot of power though for a relatively small program, while still being low in its resource usage, always a good thing.

It provides support for a large amount of sound formats, including MP3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, WAV, WMA, and CDA, and a whole bunch of lesser known formats such as MP1, MP2, MPC, MP+, AC3, APE, WavPack, Speex, S3M, XM, MOD, IT, MO3, MTM, UMX and can also use M3U, PLC and PLS playlists. It also works with internet radio (it has bookmarking) and it has a Mass Tag Editor, Audio Grabber, Audio Converter and external plugin support as well.

If you like a bit of eye candy, you can customize it with skins and icon packs too. All in all, this player is worth checking out if you’re looking for a fully functional audio player with a small footprint, so it wont slow up your computer.

For more details on features and to try it out for yourself, visit the homepage here. Oh, and its freeware!

Yahoo! has partnered with McAfee to integrated the security firm’s SiteAdvisor technology in Yahoo! search results. That means Yahoo! will remove some of the most dangerous sites from search results altogether, and will include highly visible warning messages on search listings that force downloads, include browser exploits, or sites that send unsolicited emails.

Google offers a similar service, through a partnership with Stop Badware. But Google doesn’t check for web sites that initiated automatic downloads when you load them, or sites that include links to harmful web pages. Yahoo!’s new SearchScan feature does.

SearchScan will be turned on by default for Yahoo! users in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and Spain. You can turn it off by visiting the SearchScan settings page. Read the rest of this entry »

Phishing today has become one of the biggest threats spawned by the Internet. Today everyone wants to protect their data and personal information while working online and hence there is the perennial search for the perfect anti phising solution. Well now you can put a rest to your search and try out the XMicro AntiPhishing 1.2.4.0 that checks for phishing attacks and online frauds. Try using and it you would find it easy to save your critical data like bank account details, passwords, etc from un authorized access. It also ensures safety of your PC as you can restrict access to various sites. It keeps a database of the sites that contains malwares, site relating online frauds and those who have objectionable material.

XMicro AntiPhishing shows the interface and the features that allows you start the working conveniently. The program does not require much of configurations to be done and works with different internet connections automatically. The software shows various options on the toolbar such as AntiSpyware, Firewall, AntiSpam, PassManager, and AntiPhishing. You can simply select the desired configurations to have the program work accordingly. You can change the Connection settings for the program to work; enable Direct Server Connection or Use Internet Explorer itself to query. It may happen that when you are away from your PC somebody else is using it and opening the pornographic sites. By settings the configurations or eve you can let they be at default the program denies access to such sites. It contains the list of blocked keywords mentioning names and URLs. These if found with the site the program seizes the site opening operation and prompts the user about the threats. You can make the changes and even have the sites blocked manually.

XMicro AntiPhishing 1.2.4.0 presents easy to use functions that prevent the users from opening any such site that may cause loss of personal information like passwords, account details, etc and frauds.

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It may happen that often you lose data from your drives or CD, etc accidentally because of a system crash or deletion. The situation becomes more chaotic when you find that you have lost the data that was quite important and was urgently required by you. Now you can either enter all the data again which invariably takes up a lot of your time or you start a search for an application that could recover that deleted files. One such software that you can use is Back2Life 2.6. It searches and recovers the files that had been deleted from your system Drive or any removable media. With this utility you can easily have the files selected and stored back at your system. It is also equally capable of recovering the folders that contain other subfolders without breaking a sweat.

Back2Life 2.6 does not contain a cluttered set of features making it hassle free for a user to operate it. When you open the program then on the very left of the screen you get to see the drives that are present with the PC. From there you can make the selection of the drive from which you wish to recover the files. You can change the preferences for the scanning by changing settings for the Scan Filter. Click on Find and the program start the process of searching. It shows the recovered folders on the left side and the containing files on the right. While the scanning process goes on the progress is also shown on the screen. For the confirmation of the required files you can have the HEX preview of them. When you have made the selection of the files then you just need to click ‘Recover’ for restoring the file to the respective folder or any specific folder. Change the Properties to make any changes in the program’s functioning.

Back2Life 2.6 supports recovering the data from local hard disks, CD-R and CD-RW, removable disks, USB Sticks, memory flash cards of digital camera and much more. The supported file system types are NTFS FAT, and CDFS.

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Video and image morphing has never been so easy. Now you can do it without any complex operation and features with VidMorph PRO 1.1. With this program you can create amazing image animations and that too without having any technical skills. You can easily create video effects from the images, movies, or home videos in quick time. The software is capable of saving the output videos in different formats like AVI, Flash, ipod mp4 video, WMV, Animated GIF, 3gp mobile video, and many others. The software is a pleasure to use and you will feel the fun when you can merge different video and images into one movie in one go.

VidMorph PRO 1.1 on launch displays a neat interface that has features well set for the convenience of the user. Open the new project which can be for a video or an image. The program shows the middle screen divided into two parts. The first part is for the selecting the video or image, that would be the starting view. The second part is for the selecting the video or image that the starting one would morph into. You are given the points on the both the selection that you can change for deciding the movement while one image or video morphs into another. The multiple images or videos that are selected are shown in sequence at the bottom of the screen. You can zoom in/out and even have the video, image or the area cropped. You can specify the duration of the one content morphing into other. Have the preview of the morph before you start the process getting the final output. The software supports working with different file formats like EMF, BMP, RLE, GIF, JPG, ICO, TIFF, AVI, ASF, MP4, MOV, MPEG, WMV and different others. To make the output more fun and wonderful you can add sound track to it.

VidMorph PRO 1.1 features uncomplicated options and easygoing functions.

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Its definitely hard to remember the usernames and passwords for all the websites that we visit daily. The benefit of using a smart browser like Firefox is that it saves the login credentials within the Firefox password manager and retrieves them automatically when you visit a particular website thus allowing you to access it.

But what if you want to print out that login credentials list for future reference or want to save it as a document list somewhere within your operating system. Password Export, a Firefox addon, is there to help you in this regard.

This Firefox addon will let you export a CSV/XML formatted list of all the login credentials stored within the Firefox password manager. This list will have the usernames, passwords, emails and URLs of all the sites that you have ever logged into through Firefox.

Not only can you export the list but you can also import it on another PC or operating system (e.g. Ubuntu) so that you don’t have to enter your login credentials again and again when you visit known websites daily. Read the rest of this entry »

TweetWheel is a web-based Twitter visualization tool that shows you how your friends and contacts are connected with one another. All you have to do is enter your Twitter username (no password needed) and TweetWheel will go to work digging up all of your contacts, and then probing their contact lists.

The process isn’t quick, it can easily take a couple of minutes if you have a large number of contacts. But in the end, what you get is a pretty picture showing all of your contacts sitting around in a circle, with an enormous number of lines showing which of your contacts follow one another on Twitter as well. The results would be pretty much impossible to decipher, if not for the fact that you can scroll over any Twitter user’s name to get a close up look at their connection lines. Read the rest of this entry »

If you have lots of images on your computer but are bored of watching them in the same style then there are chances that you would be looking for a change. To change the look of the pictures and make them look brand new all you need to do is get hold of Decoration 1.0. With its filter option you can select and make the changes to the images as you desire. Make changes to the color border, round corners, gradient frame and apply different effects to the images like drop shadow, mosaic, blur, mirror, tint, etc. You can even perform the functions like rotate, crop, zoom and so on, and adding watermarks to the images. It is even helpful in generating buttons for your website.

The Decoration 1.0 is uncomplicated in usage and does not require any special skill to make the required selections. Easily Load the files from your system or Webpage and you can load multiple files as the software supports batch processing also. You’re also provided with the preview option that makes it easy for you to confirm the selection of the images. Make the selection of the set of filters or create a new set and save it for further use. Make the selections of the changes that you want to be applied to the images like to change the brightness, gamma, glow, and have the image sharpen or use any other one. You can even have the filter parameters changed to suit your requirement like level of color, effect, etc. You can even have the image overwrite or save the output image with another name and select the level of quality for the image. In the same way you can have the button icons changed and edited.

Decoration 1.0 supports batch processing and its simple user interface is good for novice users to work with. It provides various effects that user can play with to modify their images and have fun.

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