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A Super Bowl of Freeware Apps!

David Murphy — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:00:00 -0600

Are you ready for some f... reeware? It's Super Bowl weekend at Maximum PC, and we're doing all we can to find you the best, quick-hit freeware applications that will make a profound difference in your computing life. It's hard to manage the grill and install freeware, so we're giving you a mix this week: Tiny applications that don't require much of your input at all to interact with, as well as a pretty big application or two that should easily distract you if football-watching isn't your thing. We're covering a lot of field this week with our applications. Be prepared to check out everything from efficient file unzippers, to 3D designing programs, to pretty desktop RSS feed readers.

So what are you waiting for? Put on your helmet and get into the freeware huddle, champ! John Madden not included.

PeaZip

What it does: This handy little file archiving utility comes in 32- and 64-bit versions. With it, you can create a decent number of compressed archives, including support for ZIP, TAR, and 7Z archives. You can also use the program to unpack a larger number of file archives. We appreciate PeaZip's simplicity, including its ability to populate your right-click context menu with archiving options, as well as the installable and portable versions of the application. Slap this on a USB key and you'll be set for all your archiving needs!

Download it here!

Macrium Reflect FREE Edition

What it does: Tired of mucking around with boot CDs of Linux environments just to get your backup/restore open-source apps to function correctly? That's where Macrium Reflect comes into play. Unlike applications like DriveImage XML, which require you to boot into a BartPE environment just to operate the clone and restoration features, Macrium Reflect creates a Linux-based rescue disc for you. It's an elegant solution for running a backup process analogous to Norton Ghost without, you know, having to purchase Norton Ghost.

Download it here!

DAZ Studio

What it does: Nothing says "I hate football" than teaching yourself to use a 3D modeling application. You don't need to spend big bucks for expensive suites if you're trying to teach yourself how to get started in this unique field. DAZ Studio is a fully-functional modeling application that comes with quite few tutorials to get you started. Give it a whirl, and you'll be recreating your favorite World of Warcraft cutscenes before you know it.

Download it here!

Amarok

What it does: This application gives the big middle finger to iTunes, as it combines contextual information like lyrics and album art into an easy-to-use media player application. We like the player's ability to integrate a variety of Internet services into the player itself, like Last.fm music or random, cool Internet radio streams. You can further customize this media player by adding applets to appear in the application's various menus. Sure beats iTunes, which you can... not really customize at all.

Download it here!

Snackr

What it does: This elegant RSS reader pulls in the information of the various feeds you've described to. It outputs the data on a scrollable desktop bar that looks like the lovechild of a cable news ticker and the Windows Sidebar. And that's it! It's a perfect way to visualize the data that would otherwise just float into a boring ol' folder in your favorite e-mail client, or bookmark on your Web browser of choice, et cetera.

Download it here!

Google Reader gets how-to Videos

Justin Kerr — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 20:42:44 -0600

If you’re in to RSS feeds to help capture your news, then you’re more than likely already using Google Reader. Alternatives to the popular RSS aggregator exist, but as one of the best cloud based solutions out there it enjoys one of the largest and most robust user bases. Since it appears as though RSS has peaked as a technology, the creative minds at Google are hoping to bring in fresh blood by offering video tutorials to help get new users over the learning curve. These videos attempt to teach everything from the basics, to the more advanced features. They are no doubt hoping this will help push up adoption rate.

Unofficial how to clips have been around on You Tube for awhile now. In fact, last year’s help video challenge spawned a great many of them. This however, is the first official series offered by the company and even covers off some of the newest features that were just added during December’s redesign. As an avid user of Google reader I can defiantly recommend the advanced tutorials. You are almost guaranteed to pick up something you didn’t know. Want to try out Google Reader with some of the Maximum PC RSS feeds? Look no further.

Do you use Google's Reader? If not what is your RSS reader of choice?

How To: Streamline Your Surfing with Email Alerts

Alex Castle — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 12:00:00 -0600

If you spend a lot of time on the internet (and let’s be frank, if you’re reading maximumpc.com, you do) you’ve probably become intimately familiar with Google search. After all, the web’s a big place, and finding what you need can be pretty damn tough without the help of a search engine.

But you don’t need to be Googling as much as you are. A host of new web-based tools are becoming available which do the searching for you. They can keep track of subjects that interest you, as well as housing and job listings, product pricing and availability, and more. Best of all, you can have updates sent right to your email inbox, as often as you want. In this guide we’ll show you the best tools for keeping track of the changing web, and give you examples of how they can be effectively used.

Google Alerts

Sure, it may not have the pizzazz of Google Docs, the raw flashiness of Google Earth, or even the tongue-in-cheek asininity of Gmail’s new Mail Goggles feature, but Google Alerts is still one of the most powerful and versatile features the company offers. With Google Alerts, you can tell Google to send you an email any time the top results of a certain search change. In other words, whenever a new page about a subject you’re interested in (say, oil immersion cooling) hits the top 20 on the Google search results page, you’ll get an email letting you know.

If you don’t need to know the instant a new page hits the top 20, or you’re worried about your inbox being flooded with too much information, you can elect to have Google alerts keep track of changes and send you an aggregate email every day or every week. Also, you can use Google Alerts with different types of searches, like news, blog, video and group searches.
Sounds pretty useful, right? Sure it does. Here are some sample ways that you can use Google Alerts.

Stroke Your Ego

If you’re like us (and we feel very sorry for you if you are) then there’s nothing you like better than to have your name mentioned on the internet. By setting up a Google Blog Alert (or a Google News Alert, for the truly noteworthy) for your name, you can be notified whenever somebody writes something about you.

And it’s not just about vanity; there are plenty of reasons it’s important to know when your name echoes around the internet. If somebody’s slandering you in their blog, you can hop on over and give them a piece of your mind. And if somebody says something nice about you, you don’t want to miss the opportunity to bask in the sickly glow of internet recognition. Ok, maybe that second one is vanity, but who’s keeping track?

Stroke Somebody Else’s Ego

Maybe you’ve got competitors you need to keep a tab on, or maybe you want to stay current on articles by your favorite columnist, or hell, maybe internet search is the only way you can observe your ex-girlfriend without breaking a court mandate. In any case, there’re plenty of reasons to set up Google Alerts for other people’s names. Just remember, if you’re setting up an alert, include any variations of the name that might occur, separated by the OR operator, as in “Alex Castle” OR “Castle, Alex.”

Power Your Blog

If you run a blog, you know that nothing’s more important than breaking stories before the competition. Set up some Google News alerts about topics germane to your blog and watch your inbox fill up with scoops.

You can also keep track of who’s linking to your site by setting up a Google Alert using Google’s “link:” keyword, as in the following picture:

Yotify

Sometimes you just want to monitor a single website, and not the entire web. When that’s the case, you should consider Yotify, a newly launched content monitoring service.

With a free Yotify account, you can send out “scouts” which function mostly like Google Alerts, except that they monitor searches within specific websites, rather than within the entire web. Because they’re more limited in scope, they can return a more specific set of results—for instance you can set up a scout that will alert you whenever tickets to a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert in San Francisco become available for less than $100 on eBay Tickets.

You can keep track of your scouts from your Yotify user page, and you can also see a preview of what results the scout will return as you set it up. This allows you to forgo a lot of the trial-and-error alert-crafting necessary to get the most out of Google Alerts.

Yotify’s single-site focus is also a limitation, though, as it prevents you from easily setting up scouts that search more than one site, or scouts for sites which aren’t monitored by Yotify (which is to say most sites). Fortunately, the list of sites that Yotify supports includes some pretty big guns; we’ll highlight two of our favorites below.

Craigslist

Craigslist is one of the most useful sites out there for finding local housing, jobs, and bargains, but it can be a chore to keep up with. Especially in big cities, Craigslist classifieds move fast, and good bargains can get snatched up even faster. Yotify allows you to set up scouts which spare you all the page-refreshes, sending ads which match your criteria straight to your inbox.

For instance, you can set it up so that Yotify emails you whenever a new two-bedroom in the Mission district hits the market, whenever someone posts that they’re looking to hire an accountant in Seattle, or whenever somebody offers a couch for less than 80 bucks in Boston.

Shopping.com

Yotify also monitors shopping.com, a price-comparison site which indexes pretty much all the major online retailers. You can set up scouts to tell you whenever a certain product—a copy of Fallout 3, for instance—falls below a certain price.

RSS FWD

So, suppose you want to receive email alerts about new updates on a certain site, but it’s not on Yotify. What are you to do? Some sites offer email update services of their own, but most don’t. However, most regularly updated sites will have an RSS feed, and with the help of rssfwd.com, you can turn that into Google alerts-style email notifications.

For example, suppose you want to receive an email whenever a new deal goes up on Woot. First, you’ll enter the address of the RSS feed you want to receive alerts about into RSS FWDs homepage. If you don’t know the address of the feed, you can enter a site’s URL and RSS FWD will find the default RSS feed.

Next, you’ll see a preview of what an alert will look like and be prompted to enter an email address and (optionally) create a password. After the first time, you can have the site remember your email address so you can skip this stage and go straight to the next step, where it asks you about whether you’d like to receive daily, weekly or real-time email updates, à la Google Alerts and Yotify. Hit submit, and you’re all done. You can manage your alerts at any time from the RSS FWD site.

So get out there and set up some alerts, already. It can take a little effort to get just the right amount of information flowing into your inbox, but once you get it set up, you’ll be surfing with a whole new level of efficiency.

Has RSS Reached Its Peak With Only 11% User Adoption?

Alex Castle — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:48:00 -0500

If you’re a news junkie, chances are you use RSS feeds. According to a new study about the technology, that puts you decidedly in the minority, and it looks like that’s not going to change any time soon. The report found that only 11% of those surveyed used RSS feeds, and that that percentage is unlikely to see a large increase in the future, unless changes are made in how RSS is promoted.

The study found that of those people who don’t use RSS, 81% aren’t interested in using it in the future, seriously limiting the technology’s potential for growth. In the report, analysts explained the problem as follows:

“Unless marketers make a move to hook them—and to try to convert their apathetic counterparts—RSS will never be more than a niche technology.”

It’s not all bad news for RSS, though. The report mentions that feed usage has risen from 2% to 11% in the last three years, and that about half of marketers have added feeds to their websites.

Do you think RSS is doomed to be a tool only for the technological top tenth? Let us know after the jump.

Eye-Fi Gets Twittering, RSSing with New Manager Update

Mark Edward Soper — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:40:30 -0500

The Eye-Fi line of Wi-Fi enabled SD cards just keeps getting more social. The October update of the Eye-Fi Manager, in addition to adding à la carte support for geotagging, webshare, and hotspot access service updates, also adds support Twitter and RSS integration. You can use Twitter to tell your contacts when you have new photos posted on line, and RSS support enables you to publish pictures in real-time to your preferred RSS aggregator.

Eye-Fi now offers cards through its online store as well as at an ever-growing list of retailers.

RSS logo courtesy Variawa.co.za.

Opera 9.6 Launches with Cool Magazine-Style RSS

Paul Lilly — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:05:41 -0500

We'd venture to guess that most Maximum PC readers use Firefox as their primary browser, but when it comes to alternative browsers (those not developed by Microsoft or Mozilla), Opera remains a popular choice due to its feature-set and speed. For fans of the Opera browser, the good gets even better with the latest release, version 9.6.

Among the changes, the new magazine-style RSS feeds are sure to be a hit. The new feature converts any RSS feed into a magazine-like page with the articles laid out in columns, making them more accessible for casual readers to view content before subscribing or bookmarking it.

Other changes include speed enhancements for faster page load times, optimized Opera Mail with a 'low bandwidth mode' to retrieve emails faster when bandwidth is limited, and expansions to Opera Link which now include custom search engines and typed history.

Grab the new download here, hit the jump, and let us know what you think.