The Windows task bar has been sitting at the bottom of our screens, relatively untouched for the last 12 years. You open a window. It displays a new tab. You click on the tab to view the window. Simple. When you have a couple of windows open there really is no issue. Everything is laid out perfectly in front of you - window titles displayed clearly. But when was the last time you sat in front of your computer with only a few windows open? Web browsers, word docs, Outlook, etc… I’m lucky if I make it through the first 20 minutes of my work day without opening 5 different applications, each parenting at least a few windows. By the end of the day, the number of open windows usually hovers around 10 to 15 and along with it comes the inevitable task bar squish. Tiny tabs, grasping tiny icons that are but shells of their former selves.

Thankfully, Microsoft has always allowed us to expand the task bar vertically, which permits multiple rows of tabs to be displayed, giving them a little more space to breathe. I’m a two row kind of guy but I’ve seen some developers push it up to as many as four rows to accommodate their multitasking kung-fu. If you’ve got the screen real estate, this is by far the easiest solution. Just right click on the task bar, select “Unblock the task bar” and drag the top edge of the task bar upwards.

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Chalk another one up for web based applications. If you’re already familiar with this type of application and its potential benefits, then go ahead and bookmark this nifty little site right now. Speed reading programs are designed to take a body of text, such as this blog post, and display a few words of it at a time in exactly the same spot on your screen. Most of them have the ability adjust the rate at which these sentence snippets are displayed along with various other features. The idea is that you should be able to progressively increase the number of words displayed each minute, thus reading more text in less time.

Spreeder is certainly not ground breaking but it does illustrate the unmistakable shift from desktop based applications towards web based apps. Here are some of the benefits of a web based world:

• Nothing to download or install
• Doesn’t take up hard drive space when it’s not being used
• Accessible from any computer with a browser
• Updates are painless and immediate
• Usually has fewer options which can make it easier to use
• The default price is free

Granted some feature-heavy programs like Photoshop will not be appearing in a browser near you any time soon, but there is already basic movie editing “software” available online at Jumpcut, for example. From Microsoft Office to Google Docs and browser bookmarks to Del.icio.us, the speed and convenience of the online world is most certainly on its way.

It looks as though the venerable British comedy troop, Monty Python, had it right all along. In the ongoing saga of inundated inboxes, an article on CNN reports that going into this holiday season, “9 out of 10 emails are spam”. While this doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has recently abandoned yet another email address, what did catch our attention is what they state as the real source of the spam problem: us.

Dave Rand, of Internet security firm Trend Micro states “It will only end when people stop buying diet pills, herbal highs and sexual performance enhancers”. Of course, how silly of us. We just need to stop buying things and then the good upstanding net citizens identified in the article as “200 illegal spam gangs” will stop sending us emails. Unfortunately, we have enough trouble getting legitimate companies to stop sending us unsolicited emails no matter how many times we tell them we don’t want their products.

Spam hillarity ensues after the break.

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This past week it was nearly impossible to miss the announcement of Apple’s array of new iPod products. Along with all the reworked, shiny gadgets came the latest version of its slick media management software, iTunes. Over the course of the last six versions, iTunes has been progressively gaining hefty features to match the meteoric rise of the iPod. Music, photos, podcasts, album art, song lyrics, TV shows and now finally movies have all ambushed camp iTunes, and it seems that in version 7, feature creep has finally breached its walls.

After the initial elation died down, several reports surfaced about slow performance, iPods not being recognized and horror of horrors - at least for a music player - a “scratchy” sound during music playback! Granted that these problems are usually amplified by a vocal few and that most issues will be fixed in the inevitable patch, it does however raise the question of “When do you stop adding new features so as to maintain the original simplicity of a program?”

To be certain, this is a careful dance between the status quo and selling more iPods but when basic features such sound quality start to take a dive, perhaps it’s time to take a break.

It seems somewhat ironic that Internet Explorer’s reign should be undermined by Firefox. After all, this is a browser that rose from the ashes of the team that developed Netscape Navigator, a program which IE ousted to claim the monopoly on the web.

It’s somewhat bizarre that a non-for-profit developer should be in a position to strike fear into world’s biggest software producer, especially while still in the 1.x stage of development of its product. Yet, as many predicted, this eagerly-anticipated release represents a real threat to Microsoft’s dominance of the browser market, with the Mozilla team pumping plenty more into the program and thus upping the bar for IE7.

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We recently covered one of the most successful free VoIP applications, Skype, that has revolutionized the long distance industry. As more and more users connect to through broadband, not only can voice be effectively transmitted with acceptable quality, but now video is also quickly following suite.

PPLive is one of the first applications to test the tepid waters of free, on-demand television over the Internet. The Net, and computing in general, has always depended on these intrepid explorers who push the technical and legal boundaries in order to clear the way for more robust, mainstream applications.

As we approach the summer season, those of us living in the bigger cities of the world are preparing for the arrival of the hot weather tourist crunch. Inevitably with every tourist, there is a camcorder. And with every camcorder taken on vacation, there is a pile of video that ends up sitting in an obscure folder on a computer.

One of the major issues that most people have with digital home movies is that the footage never leaves their computer! Certainly it deserves a wider audience and one of the easiest ways to go from forgotten folder to front row in your living room is to get your movies onto a DVD. This makes it easy to pass it along to friends and family who will appreciate being able to watch it at their leisure.

So get out there and shoot some video! Your audience awaits…

“We live in wonderful times” a wise man once said, and these days are no exception. Communicating with friends, family and business associated from around the world has always been important, but it has certainly not always been cheap. Competition and technological advancements have driven the traditional per-minute charge to acceptable levels, but we must still be mindful of the invisible meter ticking away as Aunt Betty goes over her pie recipe one more time.

That meter is - at least for the time being - broken! This message is for the people who are not one of the - as I glance at my Skype window - 5,158,648 users currently online right this instant. So what are you waiting for? It’s simple, it’s fast and most importantly it’s oh so free!