SlideBoom is a new launched Web 2.0 service which let users share their Power Point presentation online. Two more similar service are Scribd and SlideShare.
You can upload and share their presentation files without registration. But, these files will be removed from the server within one week, unless you create an account, which is free also. The maximum file size is limited to 30MB and currently they only support .ppt and .pps format (Power Point 2000, XP, and 2003).
Unfortunately, pdf format is not supported, which is the main disadvantage compare to other similar services such as Scribd and SlideShare.
However, SlideBoom provides an interesting feature for its users, which allow you to convert the presentation offline before upload. The conversion is done by a free software called iSpring Free.
Note: SlideBoom not support Open Office document (.odp). So, make sure you create your presentation slide in Microsoft Office format before upload.
For a limited time, SitePoint is giving free copy of Photoshop ebook called “The Photoshop Anthology”. This book will cover different web design techniques by using Photoshop.
What you need to do is just provide your email address, and they will send you the download link. There are two format of ebook (high resolution and low resolution). I suggest that you download the high resolution version, although it may take longer time. But it is worth as you get higher quality of graphics and images.
I had use my yahoo mail in the email form, but unfortunately it take few hours before i can get the download link. You can direct download the ebook from sitepoint without register (Thanks labnol for sharing the link).
There were some companies/countries which try to block access to certain websites. I had cover a tip to bypass them. But unfortunately some people complain that it doesn’t work. Today i had go through this issue and found an interesting article which extend this topic and provide 2 more solutions.
1. GhostFox - GhostFox is based on Firefox and it provide a list of proxy for users to choose. Users can try different proxy until they successfully enter the site.
2. Use Google cache - Enter the URL of the site in Google and search. After that, visit the cache copy of the website. You can found the cache link beside the results’ URL:
Update Scanner is a Firefox plugin which will automatically scan and inform users about changes and update of a website. Users can add any websites to the monitor lists.
There are some websites which don’t provide RSS subscription, or you want to get update about the comment on article, but the author didn’t install “Subscribe To Comment” plugin. So, how are you going to get informed when there are changes on those website? View them everyday? Sure this is not a smart way.
Update Scanner can help users on this, by add a option to Firefox context menu. When you want to monitor changes on certain website, simply right click and choose “Scan page for updates” and you can set the scan frequency and threshold, so that you won’t get update too often.
If you would like to manually scan all websites in your list, you can go to Tools -> Update Scanner. A sidebar will appear and show you the list of websites that you monitor.
Tips: I would suggest that you set the Autoscan to a larger value, so that you can save your bandwidth for other usage.
ReadAir is a desktop application which let Google Reader users read their feed on desktop. It is built with Adobe AIR, which means it is compatible with Windows, Linux, or Mac machine.
Google Reader is one of the best feed reader, but one thing is that you can’t bring it to your desktop. Thanks to the ReadAir team, they had successfully bring Google Reader to the desktop.
These are the features of ReadAir:
Mac themed scrollbars and form elements
Full synchronization with Google Reader Account
Add/Remove/Manage tags
Subscribe/Unsubscribe from feeds
Search your feeds
User preferences
Resizable viewing pane
Auto software update
Auto login
Currently, ReadAir has Mac interface, but they will implement Windows XP/Vista themes in the future release.
Note: You need to install Adobe AIR before use this application.
Piky Basket is a handy tool which will help us in copying/moving files in Windows. It is created to save our time when working with copying/moving files in Windows.
Piky Basket allow you to select files/folders and then place them into a “basket”, then proceed to select different files/folders. After you had finish selecting, you can then copy/move them all at once in the target location. If you want to place them individually to different locations, you can use the “Select” feature to manually select files/folders which you wan to drop.
Lets see how this application works.
Step 1
Right-click on any document and select Piky Basket -> Drop into the Basket. Repeat this action for few times with different documents.
Step 2
Go to different folder, right-click and choose Piky-Basket -> Copy All.
Step 3
Now, you had all documents being copied to your destination folder.
There are some other usage of Piky Basket, but i am not going to cover here. Download and try it yourself if you interested (it is a freeware!).
InfoTag Magic is a freeware which provide quick preview of data for audio files such as MP3, WMA, Ogg, and text files such as TXT, LOG, INI, and etc.
InfoTag Magic will installed as a shell extension, which will display the preview when mouse pointer is hover over the files in Windows Explorer. Without InfoTag Magic, you have to right-click the files and choose the Properties to read the file information.
This application works well with different audio format and text files. The supported audio formats are MP3, WMA, Monkey’s Audio, and Ogg Vorbis while the text files supported are TXT, INI, LOG, BAT, DIZ, BAK and QUE.
When you mouse over the text files, the first five lines of that file will be displayed as a tooltip message next to the mouse pointer. Below is the screenshots taken for both audio and text files:
The follow steps will teach you how to get yourself a free license key for Kaspersky Internet Security. Please grab it as fast as possible, because we don’t know when they are going to end the promotion.
Unhider is a freeware which can hide or show any window on your desktop, which is very useful especially when you want to hide something from your boss.
You can run this application immediately after download, no installation required. By using unhider, you can
Unhide any windows which is minimized and hidden after system crashed.
View all windows that hidden from you.
Hide any windows that can’t be hidden by standard method.
Hide any web page/games from your boss in office.
One thing that this application lack is shortcut keys. It would be a great application if we can define our own shortcut keys to hide/show any windows when necessary.
Microsoft had released a free application which can tune the ClearType font so that it looks nicer under Windows XP (for LCD user).
With Windows XP, ClearType delivers improved font display quality over traditional forms of font smoothing or anti-aliasing. ClearType improves readability on color LCD displays with a digital interface, such as those in laptops and high-quality flat panel displays. Readability on CRT screens can also be somewhat improved.
You can compare the display before turn on ClearType tuning and after turn on ClearType tuning here:
As you can see, after turn on the ClearType tuning, the font look nicer and smoother than before. To tune your ClearType font, you can either download ClearType Tuner from microsoft, or use the online Tuner.
I haven’t try the online tuner, but the desktop version of ClearType Tuner is pretty easy to use. After install the application, you can then proceed to choose the best display that suit you. After you make changes, you will come to a final page which show you the results of different ClearType font on your system. Press finish and you will start enjoying the new settings.
For a limited time, PC Tools File Recovery is giving away free license key for everyone. So, grab your free license key before it expired!
PC Tools File Recovery is able to “undelete” your files. It is designed to restore deleted files from local hard drives, floppy, and other type of fixed media such as USB sticks or memory cards. Although the price is affordable ($29.95), but i believe everyone like free things, right?
So, follow the below steps to get yourself a free license key.
1. Visit this page and enter your name and email address.
2. Go to your mailbox and you will see an email from sales@@pctools.com. Open the mail and you will get your license key.
3. Download and install PC Tools Free Recovery software.
4. Launch the application, and click the “Register” button. Use the name and license key provided in the mail. Thats all, you can now have your full copy of PC Tools File Recovery.
Hellotxt is an aggregated messaging system which will let user compose and send message to all registered micro-blogging services at one time.
If you use more than one micro-blogging services, you may lazy to update them one by one. With the help of Hellotxt, you can update all micro-blogs at the same time, without sending one-by-one.
Currently, Hellotxt supports Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo. You need to provide your micro-blogs’ username and password when you select to update them.
SocialScan let webmaster check a link popularity among well known social sites.
It is important for every webmasters/bloggers to check their sites’ popularity among well known social sites. If your score is high, that means you will get a lot of traffic everyday.
To use SocialScan, simply enter your URL and hit enter. The system will automatically get the ranking from social sites and return results for you.
Note: If your scores is low, don’t give up. You may still get good traffic from search engine even you don;t score high ranking in social sites.
Searchme is a visual search engine which use Cover Flow to flip through the search result.
When you type a keyword to search, Searchme will try to search and return the result in a visual format. The results are displayed like browsing through iTunes album.
Before you start searching, you can categorize your search, so that it only return the relative results. If you didn’t specify any category, Searchme will try to arrange for you. It will place the categories it thinks most important on top.
mooColorFinder can search through the CSS files for any color used in that website, as long as a website specifies its CSS styles W3C conform.
Simply type in the website address and hit enter. After that you will get a screenshot of the website, including all colors used and its color code.
The above screenshot show the result of colors used in this page. mooColorFinder also provide an API for users to display the color cloud on their page.
Contactify is a service which will generate an URL for your email address. You can then paste this URL in your public profile and others can contact you by visit it.
To use Contactify, you need to signup an account and activate through email. After that, you will be given an URL. When others visit the URL, they will get a contact form, but they will never know your real email address.
Contactify use CAPTCHA for the senders to reduce spam. This is a great idea as no one will know your real email address. Below is the form that others will get if they click the URL:
Kyolo is a web service which provide the most easiest way to add bubbles on your photos.
I had cover a web service which can add comments on photo. Kyolo is similar with it, with the advantage of support other language such as Chinese.
With Kyolo, you can add bubbles with different shapes, and you are able to change the font size and rotate the bubbles.
Once you register, you are able to save the image and create public and private albums to share with your friends. Unfortunately, Kyolo doesn’t support upload image using URL. You must download image into your local drive and then upload to begin edit.
dnScoop is an useful domain and site value tool which let users check the details on a website. For example, you can get the whois and pagerank details.
You can get a lot of information about a website, including:
Whois details.
domain age
pagerank
inbound links
traffic rank
Text-Link-Ads value
Site value report
The site value report is calculated based on Alexa ranking, domain age, and popularity of the domain. dnScoop also has a marketplace which let users to buy or sell their domain. You can use the site value report as a refer when you want to trade a domain name.
If you found that your Firefox prompts too many warning messages, you can try to change the security settings and Firefox will know that you are aware of those issues.
These warning messages prompted especially when we try to leave an encryption page or try to submit information which not encrypt. If we already aware of it, the messages are really annoying. So, i had decide to switch off all warning messages.
First, go to Firefox -> Tools and choose Options. Choose the Security tab and then press the Settings button. After that, you will see a list of check boxes as shown on the snapshot above.
You can then uncheck all so that no warning messages prompt while browsing the web.
Firefox Password Manager is a good tool to help us keep our username and password for email, forum, or any other online service. But, sometimes we may forgot the password and we may want to retrieve them from the Password Manager.
It is not advisable to let Firefox remember your password if your computer is used by more than 1 people. But if you had chosen to remember your passwords and want to retrieve them, you may follow the steps below.
First, go to your Firefox, choose Tools -> Options. Switch to the Security tab and press the Show Passwords button. After that, you may see a popup window which listed out all site that you choose to remember your passwords.
Press the Hide Passwords/Show Passwords button will hide/show the password for that particular website. Again, it is not advisable to let Firefox remember your passwords, unless you are too lazy to remember it.
Jedi Window Dock let user to dock any numbers of windows inside a tabbed window, so that these windows don’t take up your taskbar space.
Almost all modern browsers will have tab feature, so that user can open different website at one time. But, what happen if you want your windows applications open in different tabs?
Jedi Window Dock is a handy application which will help you on this. This is a portable application, and you can create different dock windows for different group of applications. For example, you can create a dock window for your IM conversations and another dock windows for your Word documents.
After you launch the application, you can start add any opened windows to the tabs. Remember to press the Refresh Window List after you open new program/window so that the application can get the latest opened windows.
You can switch to other tab by press Ctrl + tab button. This application doesn’t consume much memory and works fine with most of the applications.
Note: You need .NET Framework 2.0 to run this application.
There are a lot of temporary email provider which let user to generate a fake email address. Here are some examples which may help you.
SpamBox - Create your temporary email account which will expire from 30 minutes to 1 year (depends on your choice). All the mails received will redirect to your email account.
10 Minute Mail - The temporary email address will expire after 10 minutes. Any mails send to this address will automatically show up.
MailZilla - Once you open or refresh the page, you will be given a new temporary email address. The generated email address is automatically saved to your clipboard.
MailCatch - They provide 2 interesting features :- Access your temporary email by using subdomain name (yourinbox.mailcatch.com) and RSS feed.
GuerrillaMail - This website provides you with disposable e-mail addresses which expire after 15 Minutes. You can read or reply email using this temporary email address.
MintEmail - It will generate a four hour temporary email address. Their robot will automatically click the verification email sent to this address.
Dodgit - Let user choose their desired temporary email address and also provide access to inbox via RSS.
Spamify - Disposable temporary email address which expire after 60 minutes and user is able to set the email address.
MailNull - Required registration, but user can create different email accounts to differentiate emails that come from different websites. All email will be forwarded to user’s original email account.
FakedEmail - Every user that enter FakedEmail will be given a temporary email account which can automatically show new email message.
Skype just announced new unlimited calling plans to overseas phones for just $9.95 per month. With the new packages, you can get unlimited calls to the 34 countries over the world.
Skype introduce 3 different packages for users in different region. The screenshot below show the differences between 3 different packages:
Countries that are included in Unlimited World are Chile, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Malaysia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe countries. You can view the full list of supported countries here.
In some countries such as Singapore and China, you even can call the mobile for free!
If you open more than 1 window and want to align them so that you can see all the windows at one time, you may try allSnap, which will help you to align windows (like what happen in Winamp or Photoshop).
After you install the application, all windows will snap to each other while you moving/resizing them. If you want to temporary turn off the snapping, you can press and hold the toggle key while you moving/resizing the windows (default :Alt key).
This program will not work if your application has its own custom moving/resize behavior. Below is a demonstration on how to use allSnap.
Codepad is an online service which allow user to check codes online, without install any compiler.
Copy and paste your code in the text area provided and then choose your programming language. After that, hit the Paste and Run button and Codepad will try to compile and run your code.
You will get a short link which point to your code (your link will exists for 24 hours). If you want your link to exists permanently, you need to register an account.
Titlebar Tweaks is a Firefox plugin which let user change the title bar for different format. For example, you can set the title to “My browser”.
User can change the title to any text they want, or they can change the format of the title bar. For example, the default format is “Webpage title - Browser Name”. But, user can change the title format to display either webpage title only or browser name only, or display both, with different order.
After download the plugin, go to your Firefox->Tools->Add-ons and choose Titlebar Tweaks. After that, you can start changing your Firefox titlebar.
Install this plugin in your office computer. You can then change the title of Firefox so that your boss/friends don’t know the page title. But, if your office computer comes with any logging aplications, your admin still can find out your internet activities.
Dr.Web antivirus link checker is a plugin for internet browser so that you can check any files or link for virus before download/open it.
Normally, we like to download free applications/files from the internet and try using them. But, we need to scan them before we install/open these files. If you would like to scan them before downloading them, what should you do? You can try Dr.Web link checker, which is a browser plugin that add a button to your right-click context menu.
Before you download a file or open a link, right-click it and choose “Scan with Dr.Web”. Dr.Web link checker is available for IE, Firefox, and Opera.
I am not advise you to uninstall your anti-virus. Basically, you can use Dr.Web link checker to filter dangerous file from being downloaded to your computer. After you download the file, you better scan it with your own anti-virus.
AttentionMaker is a free service which can compare website traffic from different sources. User can compare up to 5 different websites at the same time.
AttentionMaker will compare traffic details from Compete, Quantcast, Alexa, and Technorati. Simply provide website address and hit enter. Users are allowed to provide maximum 5 websites to compare.
Users can compare the websites popularity from different sources. It is because different sources will give different results.
For Compete result, user can get the embedded code for their website. Furthermore, AttentionMaker provide a bookmarklet button so that users can compare the details immediately from their browser.
