A few months ago I asked the question whether Google Gears is one of those rare Google apps that has actually been a flop. One of the biggest problems I noted was that even a year after its initial release, Google Gears still only supported a handful of applications. However, it seems like Google have finally got their act together and have announced that Google Gears will soon work with two of their most successful applications - Gmail and Google Calendar. With this in mind, here are 5 reasons why should start using Google Gears.

Google Reader - Google Reader is my favourite way of keeping track of blogs, website updates and RSS feeds. Using it with Google Gears means that I can download everything I want to read before disconnecting my laptop from the net and going on the road.

Gmail - Gmail is my e-mail client of choice and I’m looking forward to being able to being able to check my mail offline. Rather than have to rush through all my mail while using a dodgy internet connection or Wifi spot, I can download all pending mails and read them at my leisure. It’s also a great way to backup mail.

Google Calendar - No need to rely on having an internet connection to check what appointments, meetings and events I have coming up. Soon I’ll be able to check Google Calendar as if it were a desktop tool that’s always at my disposal.

Google Docs - Now that it’s supported by Google Gears, I can now envisage the day when I won’t need Microsoft Office anymore - or any office suite for that matter. I can do all my word processing and spreadsheets (but not presentations yet unfortunately) whether I’m on or offline.

Zoho - If Google Docs doesn’t offer all I need in an office suite then Zoho does. Zoho allows me to create absolutely anything from spreadsheets to invoices and even databases. Since it was one of the first apps to support Google Gears, I can work on all of them on or offline.

Having full access to your bookmarks wherever you are is now something that most users take for granted. Not so long ago, the only way to really ensure you had your bookmarks with you was to crudely send them to your e-mail account and access them from there. Nowadays, you’re almost spoiled for choice meaning it’s easy than ever to work on the move or check your favorite RSS feeds during a spare moment away from the home or office. And having a way to access your bookmarks from any location is a great way to avoid disaster if your hard drive fails and you lose everything. For desktop PC users, here are 5 of the best:

Foxmarks - The undisputed king for Firefox users - works seamlessly 24/7

Bookmarks Unifier - Export bookmarks to hard copy for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera

Mozmarks - An early predecessor to Foxmarks but with less synchronisation

Chipmark - Browser bookmarks plugin for both Internet Explorer and Firefox

Blinklist - Gives you access anywhere and reminds you of sites that you meant to visit

In this, the social networking age, it seems that many of us are unable to go outside. We’re far too busy accepting friend requests, sharing photos, exchanging music or watching each others’ videos to be able to  go and do anything in ‘real life’. Actually, this isn’t true, because there are now a number of applications that let you take part in social networks on your mobile, so you need never be away from your online pals. Here are some of the more popular ones out there.

• Whrrl - This location-based social tool will help you decide what to do tonight by tapping into the knowledge of people from your area, or the area your visiting. Organising everything you and your friends know about a place, Whrrl displays information on the hottest spots to visit on its maps.
• Kyte - Kyte’s Mobile Producer software , now available for the iPhone, allows you to instantly broadcast pictures as you take them, or create and share slideshows from your picture gallery. You can even use the Kyte service to chat with your audience in real time.
• ZYB - As I mentioned in my recent post on mobile data backup, ZYB has a social networking element that lets you keep your contacts updated with what you’re doing. You can add photos and data from your phone and instantly share them with your buddies, automatically notifying them via SMS as soon as you add something.
• Last.fm Mobile - One of the grand-daddys of the social networking world, Last.fm has now gone mobile with this client for Windows Mobile devices. The app replicates some of the functionality of the online radio app, such as ’scrobbling’, allowing you to tune into the kind of music you enjoy wherever you go.
• iMobicue - This Symbian mobile application allows you to open up your phone to the rest of the World. You can use it to share text, videos and photos via your cellphone, as well as chatting through MSN and Yahoo! using text or voice messaging. Perfect for staying in touch wherever you are!

Imagine if you could locate your local town on a Google Maps style interface and then find out what kind of videos users in your local neighbourhood had uploaded. Imagine - you could find out things about your local area you had no idea about, get in touch with like minded video makers and of course, become your local area’s number one uploader.

That’s exactly what YouTube will soon offer according to NewTeeVee when they add their new “Geosearch” function to the world’s most popular video sharing site. Users have been offered the chance to geographically tag their videos when they upload them but as yet, there was no particular advantage in doing this. Now it seems the logic is that YouTube will embrace Google’s mapping technology to produce a much more personlised service.

At the current time, geotagged videos are available on Google Earth and but only a small selection. Presumably when the full YouTube Geosearch tool is rolled out, it will eventually be able to locate all clips. Of course, the plans do throw-up a few questions. Firstly, there’s issues of personal privacy. Should users really have to give their precise geographical location when uploading videos? If someone has managed to catch something particularly sensitive on camera, they are unlikely to want to reveal too much about their identity. Secondly, are people going to accurately geotag their videos or not? If they just select any old location in a rush to upload the videos, the whole service will become useless.

Let’s hope that YouTube offer users the choice of whether they want to geographically tag their data and if so, at least use your IP address to bring up your location quickly rather than having to select it from a map of the world.

Tabs are one of the best things to happen to internet browsing in a long time but they do run the risk of allowing you to go tab crazy until you have no idea what you’ve got open anymore. Sometimes, I’ll find myself with up to 20 tabs open and then I’ll desperately scroll through them trying to find the page I want before Firefox does an Elvis and collapses under the weight of its own content.

Firefox Showcase is a simple plugin which allows you to go hig crazy on tabs but without losing track of what you’ve got open. It allows you to display your open tabs as thumbnails in a single window, tab or sidebar allowing you see at a glance, what you’ve got open. So rather than just scrolling through tabs (particularly fruitless if you’ve got multiple tabs open and can’t read the tab headings anymore) it offer a much more useful “visual” way of keeping track of your browsing.

The plugin includes a search bar that filters the thumbnails according to topic. So if you’ve got 5 tabs open on football, search for “football” and it will reveal instantly which tabs relate to that topic. However, the most useful aspect is probably the sidebar - rather than having tabs open, you can have each window open in a small thumbnail down the side of your screen which makes it much easier to see what you’ve got open. The slight problem with this is that by displaying every page that you’ve got open, even as thumbnails, it does tend to vastly increase the load Firefox puts on your RAM so you may experience some instability issues. However to decrease this risk, you can run the plugin in “local” mode which only displays the thumbnails for your current Firefox window as oppose to “global” which displays thumbnails for all those open Firefox windows.

Firefox Showcase is a radical new alternative to relying on tabs that makes it considerably easier to see what you’ve got open in Firefox.

I use Gmail so much now that in many ways, I prefer it to even using Outlook. However, integration with Windows is nowhere near as good as Microsoft Outlook for obvious reasons.

gAttach! bridges that gap somewhat by allowing you to attach files directly to Gmail or Google Apps Mail directly from Windows. In other words, just right-click on a file, select “Send To” and “Mail recipient” and the plugin will automatically open your Gmail client with the file already attached. It not only attaches files directly from Windows Explorer - it also opens up a whole new world of attachment possibilities from Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

There’s not much to it than that but you’ll find it’s a much quicker and convenient alternative than always having to open your Gmail client when you want to attach and send a file. However, it’s worth noting that you may experience some glitches. If you are sending a file attachment whose filename is in a different alphabet to the one you use normally (e.g. your computer uses English but you’re sending a Spanish named attachment), it may not recognise or attach the file. If you’re logged into your Gmail, it won’t prompt you for your details but if you are not, then it does ask you for your username and password which you may or may not feel comfortable submitting.

You can download gAttach directly here.

The Tour de France, one of the most important cycling competitions in the world, started its 2008 edition last weekend ago in Brest, to the North-West of France. This was just the first stage of a 22-day race in which cyclists will cover more than 3,500 kilometers along the plains, valleys and hills of the country, supported by hundreds of fans, and closely followed by television cameras, news photographers and radio sports commentators.

But traditional media is not the only one to follow the Tour 2008. As explained on Google’s blog, you can also keep track of the Tour de France in Google Maps, making use of its Street View function.

The complete Tour de France 2008 route has been photographed and embedded into Google Maps so that we can experience the race as if we were standing right on the side of the road. Simply click on any of the locations included in the route and zoom in to see more detail.

I haven’t been able to see a single cyclist (I guess the pictures were taken before the Tour actually started) but on the upside I’ve been able to enjoy beautiful French landscapes and important monuments during my virtual trip.

So the 2008 Olympic Games are little more than a month away now and whether or not you approve of the Chinese stance on Tibet and various other human rights issues, it looks like it’s going ahead.

If you don’t have access to a TV over the summer months or can only see it via pay-per-view channels, then you can watch it online for free courtesy of TVTonic. No, it’s nothing to do with Softonic but it’s a P2P TV app with access to hundreds of international channels worldwide. They’ve done a deal with US broadcaster NBC which allows you to download Olympic events for free. The catch is that they’re only available 12 hours after the events finish although because of the time difference between China and the rest of Europe and the US, that won’t actually be as annoying as it sounds.

Apart from the Olympics TVTonic has quite a few other interesting broadcasts you might like to check out. It’s obviously been designed with software fans in mind because it features a prominent section in it’s broadcasting schedule called “TechTonic” in which it highlights you can watch programs such as “Diggnation” and “The GigaOm Show”. Plus it has tons of channels devoted to video game reviews and interviews, music videos, movie trailers, breaking news. For instance, you can see what’s on offer Movie wise here and at the time of writing, 1st pick on the list is “Gonzo: The Life & Work of Hunter S. Thompson”. Plus you can subscribe to over 350 channels available in the guide or any RSS 2.0 feed with video enclosures.

You’ll need to download the TVTonic installer to get going but note that it only works with Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer… you can’t have everything!

Creating presentations in PowerPoint or Google Docs is great for getting your point across in meetings or conferences. But what happens if you want to reach a wider community? Sharing presentations online used to be a rather painstaking process and would involve using all manner of conversion applications, server-side scripting and embedding tools. These days though, it’s a breeze thanks to the rise of presentation sites.

The Daddy of them all is SlideShare, which has been described as the YouTube of the presentation world. The site lets you spread the word about your ideas, business propositions and plans with the minimum of hassle. The design is very YouTube-esque with Spotlights, Featured presentations and Most downloaded sections. There’s also a Groups area where you can hook up with people or companies with common interests. Besides just uploading your PowerPoint files or PDFs to the site there’s plenty more you can do with SlideShare, such as embedding slideshows into your blog or web site, syncing audio to your shows, and creating events from your presentations.

Myplick is another popular presentation-sharing tool. The free service supports a range of formats, including Powerpoint, PDF, OpenOffice, and, like SlideShare, Myplick lets you add audio too. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support PowerPoint animations at present though. One of the great things about the service is that you can choose who you want to share with, either by making your screencast public, or inviting specific friends to view it. This can be very useful for getting your presentation out to your whole company if you’re spread across different offices.

An alternative to these portal-like presentation sharing sites is to use an all-in-one creation and sharing too, such as Zoho Show or 280 Slides. These online apps contain the tools you need to build presentations using the various pre-built themes, clipart and shapes, in a dummy-friendly drag-and-drop interface. Once you’re done you can upload the finished show to a sharing space, or embed it into your own site or blog using a wizard-based tool. These kind of services only have very basic public sharing spaces though, so if you’re looking to reach a wider audience it’s best to go with the more widely-viewed SlideShare or Myplick.

If you’ve got a lot of big files such as video clips that you want to access anywhere you’ve got three options. You either transfer it to an external device and carry it around with you which is cumbersome. You can upload it to a server but that will cost you. Or, you can upload it to a free storage site such as Humyo who are offering 30GB of space absolutely free.

There’s one catch though - 25GB of the 30GB must be music and video files although for most people, this is exactly what they’ll need it for anyway so it’s no major drawback. You’ll first need to download the Desktop Client which allows you to use Humyo like any other virtual hard drive attached to your computer. Humyo then automatically reads meta tags so it neatly organises your files into video, music and even photos. Note that the Desktop Client works across both Mac and Windows platforms.

Now I know what you are thinking. “Hang on, this sounds a bit dodgy - why would they want me to just upload my media and audio files. So they can send round the MPAA/RIAA to sue my ass?” Well, there’s no guarantee that Humyo is not just a front for some kind of copyright sting but it’s unlikely. One theory is that they’ve used this policy to stop businesses hogging it rather than home users. However, the most likely reason is that Humyo wants to create a video, music and photo file sharing community because one of the other catches is that your uploaded photos are “branded” with a small Humyo logo on them. Similarly, audio and video is only shareable by playing it in Humyo’s own audiovisual player.

That said, it’s still a great backup solution if you have no other way of saving or taking video, photo and music files with you on the move.

It was always on the cards that a software giant like Adobe would eventually launch themselves into the world of online Desktop Publishing, especially in view of their pioneering development of Web 2.0 in for form of Adobe Air.

Acrobat.com is a new set of office applications recently launched by Adobe to get a foothold in this rapidly expanding software field currently dominated by the likes of Google Docs and Windows Office Live (Incidentally, why do Microsoft now have to tag anything new they come up with as “Live”? Can they not be a bit more creative in the naming of their online office apps?).

When you enter the site, it’s clear that Adobe have decided to base their suite on Flash which as we all know, can be very cumbersome and slow sometimes but it certainly looks slick. You are presented with a collection of online apps including Buzzword (for word processing), Adobe Share (for file sharing) and Adobe ConnectNow which allows you to share your screen with anyone. In fact, ConnectNow is a brilliant online conferencing app that assigns a room for all users to log on. On the downside, there doesn’t seem to be any presentation or spreadsheet tools such as PowerPoint and Excel and so it’s safe to say that Acrobat.com seems to be aiming more at helping people share and collaborate on projects rather than produce original pieces of work.

There are some definite reasons to be impressed by Acrobat.com. Buzzword gives you a generous 5GB of space for sharing documents and PDF conversions are so quick and easy that I’d never use a third party app for that again. The PDF converter can convert up to 5 files of 200MB each at the same time and it’s lightning fast. If they do choose to add a presentation and spreadsheet application, Google and Microsoft may well find themselves with a major player to contend with.

So Firefox 3 is now officially released but hang on, Firefox isn’t the only one that’s gone through a major overhaul recently. This week has also seen the beta release of Flock 2, a browser that I recommended to readers last year.

If Firefox ever does go down the wrong road or starts to decline, I’m certain that Flock will be one of the main contenders to take its place mainly because it’s based on the same engine but with a greater focus on social networking integration. Most of the improvements relate to security, performance and the interface basically taking in all the same enhancements to the Gecko engine that Firefox 3 now enjoys. In fact, many of the enhancements are identical to Firefox 3 such as the enhanced Add-Ons window which now shows the plugins you have installed in the browser and allows you to disable those that might be causing issues. Similarly, when you close the browser and have multiple tabs open, Firefox 3 and Flock 2 now both ask you if you want to save the current collection of tabs for next time.

One of the biggest individual improvements as far as I can see is that Flock’s Feed Reader is now much easier to update. In the old version, you’d have to wait hours for it to update itself but now you can just manually refresh it at your leisure. This includes individual feeds, a collection of feeds or all of your feeds. It also now tells you when you last updated each separate feed which is useful. Read the rest of this entry »

Mind maps - also known as concept maps - are visual diagrams used to represent ideas and tasks relating to a given topic. They come in especially handy when you need to generate and manage ideas for a work project, because having a visual representation of all available concepts helps you organize the necessary workflow in a more optimized way.

There are several ways to create mind maps, being the most traditional one a notebook and a pencil. White boards are also quite popular, mainly in companies and other working environments. But in a software-ruled world like ours, we prefer to pay attention to software and web tools that can help you create and handle those mind maps in a comfortable, practical way. Check out this list with the best mind mapping software apps out there.

• MindManager - capture ideas from several sources and create mind maps with them
• MindGenius - easy, intuitive mindmapping tool for everyone
• FreeMind - a mind map tool based on Java
• MindPad - create colorful, complete mind maps
• Visual Mind - mind map tool with a flexible graphic interface
• NovaMind - conduct brainstorming sessions and create mindmaps with their outcome
• CMapTools - free mindmapping tool with exporting capabilities
• Cayra - an open-source mind map program with basic functionalities
• ConceptDrawMindmap - professional tool to create concept maps
• Mindomo - online mind map tool in two flavors: Basic (free) and Premium ($6/month)

As if we didn’t have enough with Twitter, Tumblr, Pownce and other micro-blogging, time-consuming services, here comes the latest state-of-the-art social community tool to keep us badly hooked on for now on. Its name is Plurk and this is what it looks like:

The top-down design we’re all used to see in blog and microblogs has now been replaced by a horizontal timeline you can scroll with your mouse. Like in Twitter, you can customize your profile’s colors, add a personal avatar and embed a Plurk widget on your website. So is there any difference with the micro-blogging pioneer? Well, in Plurk followers are “fans”, there’s support for colorful emoticons, you can share videos and images that are displayed right on the Plurk interface… oh and there’s also karma.

Karma is a nicer way to say user ranking. You earn points by taking an active part in the Plurk community (using instant messaging, uploading your avatar, sharing videos and pictures) and of course also by inviting friends to join Plurk. The higher karma you have the more tools and features you can access. Read the rest of this entry »

So you thought that add-ons were just a matter for Firefox, eh? Well actually you were partially right as there are many more extensions, themes and functions you can install to Mozilla’s popular browser. Nevertheless, IE also has some free applications you can install and play with, to enjoy a richer experience while web surfing. I have looked at what is on offer and have chosen what I believe to be the most interesting tools you can try… enjoy!

• Me.dium - a social-browsing add-on that lets you surf with your friends like never before. In the real world, doing things alone feels, well, lonely. So why do we do everything alone when were online? Start navigating the web with the people you care about. Bump into your friends and interact with the crowds, wherever they are - just like in the real world.
• StumbleUpon - discovers web sites based on your interests, learns what you like and brings you more. With StumbleUpon you can also connect with friends and share your discoveries, meet people who have similar interests, and check out what other people are discovering.
• PicLens - instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for viewing images on the Web. Photos and videos will come to life via a cinematic presentation that goes well beyond the confines of the traditional browser window. With PicLens, browsing and viewing media on the Web will never be the same again.
• Browse3D - Why browse the Web one page at a time? Browse3D works like a tabbed browser but the open Web pages are easier to find and use since their image is always visible on one of the 3 walls. Advanced search and anti pop-up features are integrated with XP SP2. Pre-load Web pages and eliminate the wait. The center wall is the main browser, the left wall is for history pages and the right wall is for other open and saved page groups.
• Rip Clip - Need to save Web articles? Focused more on article extraction as opposed to Web site extraction, Rip Clip has specific features for this task that make it superior to other offline browsing tools. Features include the ability to get information about the structure of your Web article to easily determine whether you’re missing any pages; the ability to control precisely which pages you want; and a simplistic interface for collecting Web pages while you surf. This ensures you download only the pages you want, without missing the pages you need; saving on download time and disk space. Read the rest of this entry »