Net Snippets – Virtual Scissors for Web Pages

Imagine if you will, a newspaper.  You want to be able to cut snippets of the newspaper out for later reading or keeping a record of some information you are interested in.  Now fast forward to today and you are on the Internet wanting to do the same thing you did back in the old days.  To serve those of us who wants a snippet of the web is Net Snippets.  It does what it sounds like.  It helps you document and take snippets of websites and store them on your hard drive.  It’s a great researching tool that I use on a constant basis when doing a paper.  The program retain the snippet of information you wanted.  Some information even gets populated automatically.  For example, you browse to a site and decide to take a snippet of a particular page.  Net Snippets will pull down all the text, the URL that you were at, and the date that the page was last updated.

[UPDATE 2007-04-16] As of March 2007, Net Snippets have been discontinued.  I had a comment that said Kee<p>oint is a much better product than Net Snippets.  Unfortunately I can’t argue with that considering Net Snippets is no longer around.  I will try to download the free version and try it out in the near future.  Look for a new post on the review of Kee<p>oint.  If you are curious and want to try it out.  You can check it out here: http://www.keepoint.com/

Platform: Windows
Price: Free for Free Edition (go figure)
Website: http://www.netsnippets.com/

Firefox Portable

Police Officers carry they badge whereever they go, shopaholics carry their credit cards, well, I carry my thumbdrive. I guess it’s like a badge for techies. With the sizes of thumbdrive shrinking while the disk space enlarging, it is possible to carry incredible amount of information and data with you where ever you may go. Sometimes, I just wish I have all my bookmarks and Firefox settings whatever PC I happen to be on. Firefox Portable helps me do just that. It’s all the program in a self contain folder that runs as long as you have access to a USB port on the PC that you are currently on. Plug in the thumbdrive and run the startup program and Firefox fires up with all your settings just like when you were at home.

Platform: Windows
Price: Free
Website: http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

SoftAwareness – Ep. 02 – Windows XP Tweaks

Overview of Windows Tweak UI

Link: SoftAwareness Ep. 02 – MP4
Duration: 10:53

Kirby Alarm

Windows comes with a program for scheduling tasks called Tasks Scheduler or Scheduled Tasks.  At least they named it right but the usefulness of the program is somewhat lacking.  Kirby Alarm takes the job of scheduling tasks a step further by allowing you to set up reminders and more.  So if you wanted to remind yourself or run a specific program, then you can use Kirby Alarm to set up when you want the program to run.

Platform: Windows
Price: Free (Donations)
Website: http://www.kirbyfooty.com/

Maxthon – Tab Browsing Without IE7

Before Internet Explorer 7, to have tabs for your browser you must use Firefox and such.  Firefox is great but since I am a web developer, I still have to embrace the IE world and be able to view and test with IE.  However, I yearn for the ability to be able to have tabs for my IE browser.  Maxthon formerly known as MyIE2 was a great help.  Maxthon is essentially a skin for IE.  I am able to use the Maxthon browser and be able to view multiple websites without cluttering up my desktop or taskbar.  It also adds extra features like mouse gestures, popup blocker, middle clicks to open links to new tabs, and customizable quick web search.

Platform: Windows
Price: Free (Donations)
Website: http://www.maxthon.com/

SoftAwareness – Ep. 01 – Review of CastBlaster

Link: SoftAwareness – Ep. 01 – Review of CastBlaster
Duration: 06:54

PureText – Simple But Pure Genius

As a web developer, I’m amazed I didn’t try to find this before now.  Now that I have it, I sure I won’t be able to live without it during my working hours.  There’s many times that I would copy text from a Word document and try to paste it into my HTML editor and getting a whole bunch of garbage asscociated with text formating.  I would then open up NotePad, paste into it to clean the formating out, then copy it to paste it into the HTML editor.  Let’s just say it’s a big hassle when you do this as many times a day as I do.  PureText makes it much less complicated.  PureText is a simple program that constantly runs and lives in the Window Tray.  It just sits there waiting for you to cut or copy text.  Once you copy a set of text, you activate the text cleanup process by hitting the Window Key & V Key.  It will then clean up the formating and paste your text into the current application you are using.

Check out Steve Miller’s website at the following URL: http://stevemiller.net/puretext/

Sony SonicStage

Sony MD Walkman is a pain to use especially to transfer audio that was recorded into it through one of its input. Well, as of SonicStage version 3.4, they have lax some restrictions on the software and enables users to pull audio from the Hi-MD into a WAV file. The current version as of this blog is version 4.  The site also call it SonicStage CP.

Go to http://www.connect.com to download this Windows application.

To read more about SonicStage go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SonicStage

Control Your Startup Apps with Startup Control Panel

If you haven’t noticed, I go out of my way to find and use different applications and utilities that I hope to improve my productivity. But as things may have it, it also have the potential to slow down my computer. Now I find myself closing a few applications that insist on starting up when Windows start. Not really wanting to uninstall these apps but rather would like control over when to actually start the application. Wouldn’t you know it, others have the same problems that I do. An individual by the name of Mike Lin create a utility called Startup Control Panel that helps you take back control of your startup programs. It doesn’t look that good visually but it does its job well. You can find the application at the following location: http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml

ObjectDock – Mac Taskbar for Windows

Let’s face it, even though I like Windows and regularly use it, Mac does have very nifty look and feel.  I keep asking myself, why can’t Windows do what a Mac does.  Overlooking the nice look of a Mac computer case and hardware, it all comes down to the software that runs it after all.  I was very happy to find an answer.  Windows can do nifty things too if there’s a program for it.  ObjectDock by StarDock.com does the imitation of the Mac Taskbar very well.  Actually, it looks so similar, I’m amazed Apple didn’t sue them.  Now I can drag and drop shortcuts and folders into this nice taskbar and feel almost like I am using a Mac without actually owning one.  There’s a free and a pay version of the software.  Link is below.

http://www.stardock.com/products/objectdock/index.asp